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Copenhagen Shootings: Police Kill Suspected Gunman Behind Two Deadly Attacks

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Copenhagen Shootings: Police Kill Suspected Gunman Behind Two Deadly Attacks

Taking Gold Pill Aphrodisiacs in Cali, Colombia

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Photo via Flickr user Mario Carvajal

I meet Guillermo at a pizza parlor in San Antonio, the colonial part of Cali, Colombia, popular with young gringos and Europeans. As we get to talking, it turns out Guillermo lived in NYC for four years, he's into heavy metal, and he's a dealer. After finishing our pizza we walk over a few blocks to his apartment in El Centro where we enter through a small dry goods store. While he opens up drawers and pulls out different-sized plastic envelopes containing acid, ecstasy, cocaine, pot, and opium, Guillermo's mother walks back and forth, attending to customers who've come to buy sugar, chocolate milk, beer, and cigarettes.

I buy a gram of near-pure coke for $5 dollars, though it's mostly out of politeness. The fact is, I'm after another drug that's a lot harder to come by, and Guillermo is one of the only dealers in Cali who stocks it.

After Guillermo packs up the recreational drugs, he reaches over, grabs a knapsack and starts pulling out dozens of exotic little pillboxes. He gives me the lowdown on the effects of each of them and in the end I choose a black bottle (for $20 dollars) with its brand name written in Chinese, Korean, Arabic, and Russian and illustrated with silhouettes of two golden kangaroos. Inside, there are ten golden pills in the shape of Australian boomerangs. The instruction pamphlet in the box explains that these pills "...trigger love fire through expanding and comfortable swelling...."

It's not that I need "love fire" in a pill (I'm still a hard-working man with plenty of piss and vinegar in me), but I'm up to giving it a run with my local lady friend just for kicks. According to Guillermo, when he first started selling sex stimulants there was a stigma attached to the pills that only sexually inadequate men needed them, but now men of all ages and sexual preferences are popping pills in front of their lovers as part of a normal, healthy sex life.

It's hard to generalize about cities and cultures, but there are several reasons why caleños might very well enjoy more, better sex than people in most cities around the world. The fact that Cali enjoys intense year-round tropical heat, allowing locals to strut around in their skimpiest clothes; that even strangers call each other papi, mami, and amor; that most everyone learned to dance salsa when they were children and are thus great movers and shakers; that the cocaine produced here is pure and cheap; the fact that prostitution is legal and there are dozens of whore houses for all wallets; and that there are affordable, extravagant love motels all over the city, surely ups the level of sexual activity in this town.

In addition to the traditional places where people make love, sex in and around the city is so common that there is a name, desnucadero, for the myriad places, such as abandoned buildings, construction sites, dark alleys, etc, where people sneak in for a quick hump; a local term for quickies in public places, bluyinear, which means fucking with your blue jeans on; and a new trend called dogging, where young people agree on the internet to meet in local parks for sex.

These natural sex pills are mostly made in Asia, but they also work wonders for the racially diverse men in this tropical, sexually-saturated city. Caleños have long consumed their own local aphrodisiacs including natural products such as bananas, coconut, a fruit named borojol, and the homemade sugarcane alcohol named viche (one variety of which is called tumba catres, bed-breakers). In addition, local markets sell magic products, such as powders, sprays, lotions, and candles (one in the shape of a large black dick with balls) designed to help both men and women dominate their lovers and give them superpowers in bed.

Nonetheless, these days, global corporations peddling pharmaceuticals engineered to increase blood circulation in male genitals have penetrated sexual activity across the globe, including way down here in the southwestern corner of Colombia. Men in Cali increasingly look to modern corporate chemistry to give their sex life a lift.

Although men in the West seek help from pharmaceuticals, in the East there are hundreds of products that claim to be composed of natural ingredients that traditional healers have been prescribing for thousands of years to keep men and women happy, healthy, and sexed-up. China's ancient herbal and animal aphrodisiacs repackaged in modern pill form have recently become a huge export industry, and in the last decade sales of natural sexual enhancers have tripled.

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Photo via Flickr user Julian Fong

Nearly every drugstore in Cali sells Viagra and half a dozen cheaper generic varieties over the counter. While local sex shops in the city sell some alternative Viagra, few sell natural sex products from Asia, leaving Guillermo a window of opportunity. In the 90s, inside an upscale mall, Guillermo tells me he ran one of the city's only sex shops in Cali, selling inflatable dolls, handcuffs, and remote controlled vaginas (there are sex shops all around town servicing the city's population of two million). Although he no longer has a sex shop, Guillermo still sells a long line of lubricants, delayers, dilators, and dildos, as well as more than a dozen varieties of Asian sex stimulants he says are smuggled in from Hong Kong through the coastal town of Buenaventura.

Asian sex pills claim to be made from natural products that include a wide variety of plants, such as wolfberry and saffron, though ginseng, which often grows in exotic seductive shapes that resemble curvaceous women and worth their weight in gold, tends to be listed as the main ingredient. My gold pills, however, announce that they contain not only plants but also powder derived from some very sensitive parts of some very exotic animals, including "testicle of yak, sea horse penis, sea dog penis, snow deer penis, tiger penis, snake penis, Tibetan mastiff penis, Tibetan goat penis, and Tibetan donkey penis."

It's hard to know what these pills really contain since there is no industry oversight of herbal treatments. Many of them start working their magic in under half an hour, basically the same as Viagra and other pharmaceutical stimulants. Pfizer, the manufacturer of Viagra, has long accused Asian natural sex stimulants of being laced with sildenafil, their wonder pill's main ingredient, and the powerful pharmaceutical lobby applauds when the FDA bans or recalls "herbal" pills containing active substances found in patented sex products.

According to NBC, a study by Pfizer estimated that 69% of more than the 3,000 Asian sex pills they tested were laced with patented lab compounds, but it's hard to swallow such statistics knowing that pharmaceutical corporations will go to great lengths to crack down on competition, especially natural, lower-priced alternatives.

Even when they are not adulterated, laboratory-produced chemical compounds that enhance the functioning of the male sexual organ are known to produce such side effects as headaches, flushed faces, nasal congestion, nausea, irregular heartbeat, tremors, changes in blood pressure, visual disturbances (such as difficulty distinguishing between green and blue), chest pain, and can lead to more serious complications when used in conjunction with other pharmaceuticals or stimulants.

With so much uncertainty surrounding the ingredients of both over-the-counter and under-the-radar pills, and with so many cultural, social, and economic concerns, what's a man to do? Obviously, go for the cheapest ones in the coolest bottles designed with the most potent images (one box has an image of Godzilla and Mothra going head to head in battle), accompanied by the most evocative results ("to quicken blood flow to cells in male cavernous body").

In the end, despite possible health risks and risks to endangered species, for me it boils down to whether these pills work. The golden pill I pop has me up and ready in about 20 minutes, and keeps my member standing at attention for hours of great sex. It's exciting to achieve the much announced "bigger, stronger, harder, longer," though I'm quite aware that a big boner doth not a great lover make. Although I've probably just consumed some form and quantity of pharmaceutical substance along with other ingredients of unknown origin, I am grateful that by merely swallowing a miniature golden boomerang from a bottle decorated with kangaroos and beautiful Chinese characters I was able to achieve what my pills' instructional and poetical pamphlet guaranteed in five different languages, the "infinite tremendous."

Follow Kurt Hollander on Twitter.

A Massive Drone Circus Is Coming to Amsterdam

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A Massive Drone Circus Is Coming to Amsterdam

Comics: Francis the Coffee Boy

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For more work by Gregory Mackay, check out his website and Tumblr.

Hillbilly Bone: Looking for the Heart of Country in New Nashville

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Illustrations by Nick Gazin

The horse trainer wanted to see the country star. Seeing him was her thing. She'd wait at country festivals and awards ceremonies, wave to him, sing him lines from one of his songs. By this point, he recognized her. He knew her two friends too, a nanny and a nurse's aid, who were standing with her in the Nashville cold, next to the tent where they'd spent last night, zipped up to keep the drizzle out. They were close, but saw each other rarely. Tonight's Country Music Awards, which started at 7 at Bridgestone Arena across the street, were that kind of occasion.

"I've met Luke Bryan so many times," said Becca Harless. She's the nurse's aid. She lives in Pentwater, a town of about 900 in Michigan—a ten-hour drive without traffic, and traffic had been thick on 65.

"They'll come straight to you, if they know you well enough," said Curtis Clayton, the horse trainer. Clayton lives in Nashville, and at 30, she's the oldest of the three. "You kind of grow that friendship of, you know, 'I gotta go to the bathroom, can you watch my spot?'" she said.

"It rained last year and Keith Urban still came out and walked the whole red carpet with an umbrella," Harless said. "That just shows you what kind of guy he is."

Every genre has its hardcore fans, but country—the great American music of the domestic—may be special in the way it encourages the idea of fans and stars as family. The week before the CMAs, I'd been at the Gramercy Hotel for a press conference with Dierks Bentley, the CMA-nominated singer of "Drunk on a Plane." A promoter from Live Nation (full disclosure: VICE and Live Nation are set to launch a music site together later this year) sat to Dierks's left. "We are an inclusive community," he said, "country is, OK? We strive to be inclusive. By its very nature, rock and roll has always been exclusive. In country we have artists cheering for each other openly. Watch the awards show Wednesday night."

Since the purpose of the conference was to announce a new country festival in New York, all of the New York journalists in the Rose Bar were being stroked. When someone asked whether the New York country audience was large enough to support a festival, Dierks said, "The further north you go, the more hardcore country fans you get." You couldn't take a shred of it at face value. At the same time I felt convinced these men weren't lying. Dierks, genuinely or not, gave off a calm, modest aura in his flannel shirt and jeans. He is one of the biggest country stars in the world, but if he hadn't been sitting in front of us, it would have been easy to miss him in the crowd.

Still, there was something a little suspect about a bunch of coastal northerners being catered to by emissaries of the genre that gave us Merle Haggard's "Okie from Muskogee" and Blake Shelton's "Kiss My Country Ass." Even as an obsessive, longtime fan of pop country and its subgenres—I could tell you why the third verse was cut from Garth's version of "Thunder Rolls" and why it matters that Miranda gave Steve Earle a co-writing credit on "Kerosene"—I was nonetheless standing outside the Gramercy smoking ultra-lights and drinking Smartwater while trying to balance complimentary melon slices on a cocktail napkin. I was exactly the kind of person who should be kissing Blake Shelton's ass.

In "Hillbilly Bone," another Blake Shelton song, a man from New York visits Nashville on a business trip, does a little honky-tonking, and has a blast. Blake's conclusion is that

You ain't gotta be born out in the sticks
With an F-150 and a 30-06,
Or have a bubba in the family tree
To get on down with me...
We all got a hillbilly bone down deep inside.

Six days after the press conference, I flew south.

***

The CMAs used to broadcast from the Grand Ole Opry, but in 2006 they upgraded to the Bridgestone Arena. The change of venue coincided with the rise of the current generation of pop country stars: Miranda Lambert's first major-label album came out in 2005, Dierks went to #1 in 2006, and the following year Blake Shelton's Pure BS and Luke Bryan's debut both went to #2, while Brad Paisley went to #1. Since then, country's audience has grown at a steady 5% a year, while expanding demographically, becoming slightly more suburban, female, and affluent. In 2012, country surpassed rock in terms of self-described American fans.

On the crest of this wave is Taylor Swift. The most successful singer to come out of New Nashville, she has won Entertainer of the Year at the CMAs twice. Tonight she was up for female vocalist. But as Luke Bryan was tweeting photos of himself and his wife at the bar inside his tour bus, Swift was Instagramming autograph lines in Tokyo. It seemed premonitory: Nashville had finally made a star so huge she didn't need Nashville.

***

Leaving Clayton and her friends, I cut through the plaza toward Broadway, where I'd arranged to meet Lambert's pedal-steel guitarist, a young Brit named Spencer Cullum, at a honky-tonk. We took our beers upstairs to listen to the house band.

"It's a clusterfuck," Cullum said. "Steven Tyler's out there. The fuck's he doing? Something like the CMAs, I'm usually in the back, smoking my fake e-cigarette. Dierks Bentley? I mean that sort of music is almost like heavy metal. Everyone knows it. Either the majority of the public are really naive and will listen to anything publicized really well, or...I don't know. It's something like that."

The boom of pop country has put Cullum in an awkward spot. Playing for Miranda is an excellent gig, by almost any standards—good hotels, good music, good checks. But Miranda was one of the few artists who still used pedal steels, an instrument that sounded too "country" for much of the gooey, mid-tempo pop that New Nashville cranks out. If Miranda ever made like Taylor Swift, Cullum would be first out.

"Miranda's the golden goose," Cullum said. A pop country singer who could write real songs. "I feel sorry for her. She has to deal with so much crazy shit. They're just waiting for her to be pregnant." What kept her head on straight, he said, was that she'd spent her late teenage years playing bars and honky-tonks in Texas, before a lucky television appearance brought her to Nashville's attention. "She was on a [show], similar to an American Idol," Cullum said. "And she came in third."

***

Fifty feet away from the Bridgestone Arena, a dyed goat was preparing to audition for a talent contest. He had a blue snout and red ears, and he was lolling about the atrium of the Music City Center, his leash in the hand of a frosted blonde woman in her mid-40s. They were here to make it on America's Got Talent, whose top prize is a million dollars disbursed un-life-changingly over 40 years. Unlike American Idol, AGT hasn't produced winners you have heard of.

"[Winning America's Got Talent] would give me the opportunity to be a blessing to the kingdom of God," said a large man in red snakeskin boots and French cuffs. "To allow God to use me with the gift that he's given me, playing the soprano saxophone, to be a blessing to others around the world, spreading the gospel of Christ." When he asked where I worked, I said Harper's.

" Harper's—is that Oprah's?"

"Sorry?"

"You said Harpo's?"

" Harper's," I said.

"What city is that in?" he said.

"Does anyone in this room have a large can of hairspray?" someone said over the PA. "Large can of hairspray?"

Everyone at the AGT auditions was there to get seen, get signed. There were many ways to make it on TV without making it past the first round. An all-male a cappella group from Western Kentucky University sang for the cameras while waiting for their turn with the judge. Periodically someone in a blue staff t-shirt would ask everyone to scream.

"You want to be a country star when you grow up?" I asked a blond 16-year-old from Loudon, near Knoxville. His family sat next to him on a bench, his little sister shy and huge-eyed behind her mother. Kids at high school were telling him he'd never make it, he said. "I'd like to prove everybody wrong." Tonight he was rooting for Tim McGraw, but he also liked George Strait, Kenney Chesney, Jason Aldean.

A man who'd moved his family to Nashville and spent three weeks living in a tent told me to go to his website, where I could find a small portion of his song catalog. He was working on an original number called "This Flag Can't Be Bought."

"We're all separate acts," said two teenaged girls in white leotards, simultaneously. "I will dance. This one is our contortionist. Gracen will clog. Emma will do contemporary. And Hannah will do jazz." They liked Kenny Chesney and Luke Bryan and Keith Urban. "I want them all to win," said the contortionist. The mothers looked on expectantly.

A retired lawyer who'd driven 12 hours overnight from Kalamazoo, Michigan, planned to do a Frank Sinatra number; next to him in line was a 19-year-old with a lip piercing and a black beanie, who'd run away from home at 16 because his parents were abusing him. "All these talented people here are beautiful," he said. A woman holding a handwritten resume and last decade's headshot asked me to film her singing an original number, "I Wore Out My Cowgirl Boots Walking the Floors Over You." I turned on the camera on my iPhone. "Rolling," I said. When I turned to leave, she said, "Don't forget my name."

"We need everybody to take out their phones and take a selfie and tag it @NBCAgt," said a producer over the PA.

While I slipped among the contestants, other guys my age—also wearing Converse, also not from Nashville—filmed. Tomorrow they'd be in Richmond. I found a radio producer standing by the stairwell who told me his interns followed contestants from this first audition on. They were hoping someone here today would win it—then they'd air the whole story. Everyone loves a former underdog.

On my way out, I saw the woman with the goat.

"Nice goat," I said.

She took a second to see whether I was fucking with her or simply an idiot. "It's a poodle," she said.

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I was at the Music City Center rather than the Bridgestone because the CMA media department—in fact, most of the country industry—had denied VICE's request for access. Miranda Lambert's reps hadn't replied to an interview request. The young stars Kacey Musgraves, Thomas Rhett, and Brett Eldredge weren't inclined. Martina McBride's rep told me that unfortunately Martina had a busy week of family commitments. When I begged her to reconsider, she wrote back, "I'm on a call. ... It's a looooong call."

The genre that Hank Williams said could be "explained in just one word: sincerity," didn't need its portrait taken by a northerner writing for a New York magazine, no matter how sincere my love was for this music.

At 6 PM, one hour from show time, men and women in suits and dresses were streaming out the doors of the Hilton, the nearest hotel to the Bridgestone, on their way to the ceremony. I was streaming against them, weaving through into the lobby, which was nearly empty. I took a seat in the bar. Next to me, a man in his 60s, wearing hiking boots and jeans, polished off a glass of orange juice. We watched Brad Paisley and Carrie Underwood companionably, in silence.

During a commercial, he turned to me. "You know Little Richard lives here."

"Little Richard's dead," I said.

He flagged down a waiter. "When was the last time you saw Little Richard?"

"About two weeks ago," said the waiter.

The man shook his head in sadness. "They should have a fucking reception for him down here. But they won't. That's Nashville."

"I'm Jesse," I said.

"Dennis Morgan. I'm a songwriter."

Great, I thought. Another guy with a tent. The awards came back on, and I excused myself to piss and check my iPhone's Wikipedia app, which floored me: somehow I'd landed next to a hall-of-fame songwriter who'd had hits on serious people, almost all of whom I'd heard: Reba McEntire, George Strait, David Allan Coe, Garth Brooks. He was here watching the awards with his friend, a skinny guy in a cowboy hat, because by now the ceremony was so familiar it bored him.

When I came back, Loretta Lynn and Kacey Musgraves were duetting on "You're Lookin At Country."

"First CMA awards in years where they're playing some country," Morgan's friend offered.

"Hang on," said Morgan, "that'll end soon."

It did. Brad Paisley, the co-host, did a bit involving Laurence Fishburne's sitcom, whose timeslot the CMAs had infiltrated. "If any of you tuned into ABC tonight expecting to see the new show 'Blackish,' yeah, this ain't it." The camera showed white people laughing nervously. "In the meantime, I hope you're all enjoying 'Whitish,'" Paisley said. Country's dicey history with race was an odd enough place to begin an awards ceremony without a single black nominee. But by the time Ariana Grande was singing "Day Drinking" with the pop country quartet Little Big Town, all sense of congruity was gone.

"Day Drinking" is a glass-raiser with a marching-band backbeat, a bubbly summer song, but the band had employed twenty snare-drum players to stand between bars of red light and whack their drums with clear plastic sticks while someone played a Revolutionary-War melody on the flute. It was like a high-concept neo-fascist rally. Then Ariana Grande appeared in a tiny silver dress and silver heels.

"Haggard and Willie are starting a record this Sunday in Austin," Morgan said.

"That right?" said his friend.

"Yep... Austin," said Morgan.

Dierks took Video of the Year for "Drunk on a Plane." Luke won Entertainer, of course. Miranda took home trophy after trophy. This new crop of singers—the Luke Bryans and Dierks Bentleys—amused Morgan. "Chesney and Paisley have their own jets," he said. "I mean, the simple fact that we're saying that is funny. Country singers having jets."

The climax of the ceremony was the presentation of a lifetime achievement award to Vince Gill, a hit-maker and singer who'd hosted the CMAs for 12 years. Gill is Nashville royalty, so he was permitted to deliver his acceptance speech at length.

"I want to tell you all," he said, "I admire so much how you treat each other. Your generation of artistry, the camaraderie that you have—I really—I'm envious of it. I watch you all love each other and hi-five each other and hug each other. It's a beautiful thing to watch."

"Most cutthroat business in the world," said Morgan, smiling.

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Back outside in the drizzle, I texted Cullum and asked if he could sneak me into the after party. When he didn't reply, I went to find the only other fans in my position, dedicated and true but without access. Curtis Clayton was packing up her tent. The three friends seemed despondent. Their sweatshirts were wet, and it was now very cold. "How'd it go?" I said.

"Keith didn't come out. He usually comes out," said Harless.

"Most of our people didn't come out," said Clayton.

"Luke didn't come out," said Sayers.

A few blocks from us, guests were arriving at the Hall of Fame Building. Young women sat behind a long table, checking names, and you could hear music, very faintly, pulsing through the window glass. Warm lighting shone through the drizzle. On the sidewalk, young guys in blazers and jeans, managers or songwriters, crushed their cigarettes out on the damp pavement and clipped up the steps after women in sequined slip dresses. Etched into the side of the building was Merle Haggard's famous line: "Country music is the dreams of the working man."

That weekend, when the weather had cleared, I drove my rental pickup back to the airport. A song by Brad Paisley was playing on the radio:

To the world
You may be just another girl
But to me
Baby you are the world
You think you're one of millions
But you're one in a million to me

It reminded me of an incident at the America's Got Talent auditions. Writing in my notebook at a table by the windows, I'd been approached by a man in his late 30s, with thinning hair and a high, sweet voice, who'd asked if he could borrow my phone charger. While he used it, I took out my recorder and interviewed him. He was a driver for Domino's in West Monroe, Louisiana. I asked him how advancing to the next round would affect him. "It would change my life. Just if, being something—it would be something that would make me feel proud of myself, so much." We talked for five minutes before his phone turned back on.

"Can I hear it?" he said. At first I didn't understand. Then I pressed play and handed him the recorder, which he held against his ear, his other hand a fist against his mouth. We were quiet for the full five minutes. When it was over, he said, "That was a good interview." Then he walked back to the holding area, to wait his turn.

Follow Jesse Barron on Twitter.

Thumbnail image via Flickr user Mark Runyon

Being Gay is Beautiful in Philadelphia

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Based on the news cycle, you'd think LGBT people all lived in a sparkly version of hell. It's true that in many ways, being queer can suck, but besides dealing with a whole lot of crap, LGBT people are living beautiful, diverse lives in a variety of cities across the world. Our photo column "Being Gay Is Beautiful in..." explores this idea, showcasing photos of a different city's LGBT community every week to display how being queer is fucking awesome.

This week, we look at the lives of Matthew Krebs and Gian Paul Graziosi in the City of Brotherly Love. Both students at UPenn, which was this year named by Playboy #1 party school in America, these two have only lived in Philadelphia for a year. So, these are pictures of a couple finding out how being gay in Philly can be beautiful. So far, they've noticed a divide between the school's community and the city at large, and have discovered that urban agricultural projects are a huge draw for the queer community.

"As an individual, being gay in Philadelphia is pushing yourself out of your comfort zone in constructive and creative ways, coupled with a modern form of 'living off the land,'" Krebs, who works with UPenn's Urban Nutrition Initiative, told VICE. "The urban gardens, bike lanes and trails, parks, the rivers, free art galleries, museums, street fairs and festivals, and of course the summer pop-up parks are all a part of this, and are hugely trafficked by the LGBT community."

Matthew and Gian Paul decided to submit photos to this column after seeing an earlier installment on St. Louis. Their friend Bonnie Arbittier, a local photographer who also went to UPenn, took some photos of them for this article.

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VICE on HBO: Watch Our HBO Report on PTSD in American Veterans

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(We're putting the second season of our Emmy-winning HBO show online. Watch all the episodes that have gone up so far here.)

Three years after the Tohoku earthquake in Japan, citizens and the international community are left wondering if Japan really does have the situation in Fukushima under control. Then, Ryan Duffy talks with veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan who are struggling with mental illness, addiction, and PTSD—often overprescribed narcotics and other pharmaceuticals that bring their own sets of problems.

VICE Vs Video Games: ‘The Order: 1886’ Stands to Dramatically Divide the PlayStation Audience

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Three of the game's main characters, each a knight of The Order

One of the PlayStation 4's two big exclusives in the first quarter of 2015, beside the upcoming Dark Souls successor Bloodborne, The Order: 1886 needs to comprise a cornerstone release for the system, bringing newcomers to Sony's core console and rewarding earlier adopters who've hardly been treated to platform-specific essentials so far.

Exactly how it fares with reviewers remains to be seen: an embargo restricts that kind of coverage from running until the 19th of February, the day before the game's release. Adopting cinematic convention, where movies with no press screenings are usually best left unseen, this could imply that The Order: 1886 is going to blow – and holding reviews back until the last minute prevents a rush of pre-order cancellations. Its chances aren't helped, either, by lukewarm preview coverage in the gaming press.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/_7SbgvtBDCQ' width='560' height='315']

'The Order 1886', Conspiracy Trailer

Praise has come the way of developer, Californian studio Ready at Dawn, for the game's visuals. Its television advertising features quotes claiming it's the best-looking console game in history, and there's plenty of in-game support for the standpoint. I've played it from start to finish, and it consistently impresses with its attention to detail, the time and effort put into each and every environmental asset, not to mention the key characters and their array of weaponry.

But The Order: 1886 is a third-person shooter with fairly frequent quick-time-event (QTE) sequences and plenty of waist-high cover, a gameplay formula that can feel incredibly tired unless matched to more compelling elements of the experience – like, why am I shooting all these people? Hands-on advance sessions with the game didn't give much away about the story, set in an alternate-timeline Victorian London threatened by werewolf-like "half-breeds" and shaded with steampunk influences, so while the gunplay was adequate and the atmosphere inviting, the stunted narrative provided nothing of substance to chew over.

I can't tell you if the final story does enough to make the routine gameplay worthwhile, because of that embargo (though if this was a movie, Hugh Jackman and Kate Beckinsale would feel at home in leading roles). But I can confirm that Ready at Dawn know they've a divisive end product on their hands.

Ru Weerasuriya, CEO and co-founder of the studio, is creative director on The Order: 1886. We meet in London, exactly a week before those reviews will be published. He's accepted that some critics are going to delight in rounding on his new release.

"You take risks when you begin a game's development," he tells me. "When we started this game, in January of 2011, we had to look four years into the future. Can we tell then if our game is going to be successful? We just don't know. We just have to keep making the games we love. We didn't have an idea of what route the industry was going to take. I know people today are clamouring for very specific things, like connectivity and multiplayer, and that's great – but diversity is the number one thing that we need to make sure we keep alive in this industry."

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The half-breeds are powerful and fast-moving foes, but a relatively rare sight

What The Order: 1886 offers that many a big-budget, "triple-A" contemporary doesn't is a strictly single-player campaign. That's it: there's no alternate modes, no "horde"-style challenges, no multiplayer. As I'm waiting to meet Ru, I overhear someone describe the game as "classically old school".

"Well, that's kind of cool," remarks Ru when I tell him. "Honestly, there's a lot less of that out there, now, but we take a certain pride in knowing that there's still an audience for this kind of game. Those people have been supporting this industry for such a long time, and you do have to do justice to that audience."

While the gameplay is resolutely traditional, which will likely appeal to players and turn them off in even quantities – "We can't be liked by everyone," says Ru; "We would have to make an utterly unplayable game to satisfy everybody, equally" – the look of The Order: 1886 is striking in the extreme. You've never seen hoary, hirsute men rendered with such fantastically realistic facial furniture, enemy muscle so convincingly mangled, and when the game's not suffocating in darkness – much of it is set at night, in lights-out basements and within the bowels of a nascent London Underground – its really a marvel in motion.

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Grayson, aka you for the duration of the game

Point your character, Grayson (aka Sir Galahad – "the order" of the title is a militarised semi-secret service with Arthurian roots), at the first mirror you find and you'll be disappointed to not see his frame reflected, but that's a rare instance of the game dropping its uncommonly corporeal aesthetic. There are mood-breaking moments, including the discovery of a familiar sackcloth figure (there's crossover DLC available for LittleBigPlanet 3) and lazy, misdated references to a certain Whitechapel serial killer (I get the "alternate timeline" angle, but come on). But while games cannot be "cinematic" there's no doubt that Ru and his team have achieved what so few peers have delivered: truly next-generation graphics that intermittently come incredibly close to imitating film.

"We wanted to blend gaming with the cinema experience, and we have been discussing how great it would be to give people the opportunity to play this game in a massive theatre, perhaps even an IMAX. But we knew it couldn't just be a case of watching and pushing buttons when required. I know people were worried that it'd be all QTEs, but most of the game has nothing to do with those, at all. But the only way to convince people of that is to have them play it."

The Order: 1886 is a more rewarding "interactive drama" than anything David Cage's Quantic Dream has yet produced, cutscenes bleeding into gameplay with near-unprecedented smoothness. But how it's going to go down as a game – which it is, after all – is tough to call.

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Chapters of the game take place in Whitechapel, pictured here, as well as other recognisable London locations including Westminster Bridge and the Underground

Ru's ready for some unfavourable write-ups: "Even bad games in the past have spawned many good ideas," he says, as if accepting that while The Order: 1886 does innovate in areas, its more rudimentary qualities will hinder those high scores. Yet he could permit himself a little optimism. I can't go into the game's plus points in detail – again, embargo – but I know that players of a particular persuasion will find several appealing facets to the game's campaign.

I don't really do multiplayer, couldn't give a shit about pre-order bonus guns or deluxe-edition statues, and I love game worlds where the setting's so believable you're halfway towards wiping your screen before realising that's digital dirt. The Order: 1886 ticks a lot of my boxes, then, but it also misses just as many. "The big thing is expectations, as they're always hard to match," says Ru. "We're in a strange industry where people have expectations of a game as soon as they know its name, before you're shown anything."

That's true enough, and many of you reading this will have already made up your mind on The Order: 1886. But Ru's right when he says it has good ideas. It does push its hardware, and it's doing a lot of things right. But some of those things were being done just as well ten years ago and more. Gaming's moved on, leaving one question vital to this title's success: have you?

@MikeDiver

Previously:

Video Games Can Never be "Cinematic"

This Was the Week in Video Games

What Video Games Teach Us About Romance, Relationships and Rutting


British Prostitutes Are Helping Disabled People Have Sex

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(Photo by David Steinberg)

For many disabled people, sex is off the cards. While most needs are met through the provision of carers, or by parents, sex is often missed out entirely. But now a number of sex workers are looking to combat this, stepping into the breach to provide specialist services to help disabled people to fulfil their sexual desires.

It's easy for disabled people's sexuality to become obscured by a web of societal assumptions about what it is to be disabled. But of course, disabled people are just as horny as anybody else. "Sex is as essential as eating, but people look at it as a luxury for disabled people rather than a right. We pretend they don't need sex just as much as we do. I think I thought like that myself at one point too," says Pru, a sex worker who has specialised in working with disabled people for a number of years.

Pru had her eyes opened when she realised a regular commenter on her blog about her experiences as an escort was disabled. With her interest piqued, she started researching what it would take to work with disabled people.

"I decided to make a page on my website addressing disability and making it clear that I understood their needs, and was willing to be accommodating," she says. "The things people take for granted can be really difficult. When a horny builder storms in and has his shirt off and is stripped down in five seconds, they hardly consider that it can be a lot harder for people with disabilities. Sometimes I have to lift people out of a wheelchair, undress them before we can do anything, and then dress them and put them back in the wheelchair once we're done. It can be pretty difficult and tiring."

However, the work can be more rewarding than working with other clients, Pru says, offering a real sense of having helped someone realise something vital within them. She recounts one instance of working with a severely disabled man.

"As nervous as he was, I managed to get him erect, and I remember him asking if he was hard, as he couldn't really tell. So I took has hand and wrapped it around himself. He was so happy. He was in a hoist and I had to climb on top of him. It was a bit awkward but we managed it.

"And when we had finished and he realised what had happened – that he'd actually done it – he burst into tears. He had thought he was going to die a virgin. Part of him wanted me to leave then, but another part wanted to carry on. So he got it up again and we had a second go – amazing. I never heard from him again, but it was touching that he cried. I'll always remember that."

It's not just about a quick fuck, it's more of a learning experience.

But things don't always go as planned. On one occasion, Pru was with a man with cerebral palsy when he moved towards her nipples. "He bit down really hard – it was so painful. It was just because his coordination was a bit off. It had never happened before, but after that I was a bit afraid when he moved towards that area. It was like dangling your head in a crocodile's mouth."

For some people it is not just about one or two experiences. Instead they are looking to educate themselves about sex and particularly their own abilities. Johnny Wheels is in his 20s and has Cerebral Palsy. He also has a condition called CVI, which impairs his vision, and means he finds it difficult to recognise faces and read expressions, making the formation of a relationship a struggle. He decided to turn to the services of an escort at the age of 20, following his breakup with his childhood sweetheart.

"Her disability was ten times worse than mine, so any sexual activity was near enough impossible, or at least that's the way she saw it," he tells me. "I was becoming very sexually frustrated. I thought, 'why am I missing out on this?' I just really badly wanted a sexual experience at that point," he says.

So he went online to enlist an escort to help him explore his sexuality. "I've learnt so much from her. It's not just about a quick fuck, it's more of a learning experience. I've got to know her and trust her and build a kind of relationship," he says.

For his part, Johnny would like to enter into a long-term, loving relationship, and believes his sessions with his sex worker are a step in that direction, helping him to build the confidence and knowledge needed.

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A protest in London about the sexual rights of disabled people

And now it's easier for people like Johhny to find these kind of services. Tuppy Owens is a campaigner for disabled people's sexual and relationship rights, and is the driving force behind the TLC Trust, an online network that connects disabled people with appropriate sexual services.

She was motivated to help provide a bridge between clients and escorts by the idea that such contact could act as a first step towards the formation of non-paid relationships, although she does concede that some people "are just horny and want to have a good shag".

"Some people have given up on the chance of forming a relationship," she says. "They feel like they've had enough struggles and enough disappointment in life. They often find a sex worker they are happy with and are content to just continue with that. But generally I encourage them to look at it as an education, as a stepping stone towards forming proper relationships."

Moves to help disabled people connect with sex workers have, in some cases, met with resistance. Tuppy reckons that there is no need to change the law in the UK – under which prostitution is legal, but a lot of the activity around it is not – but a shift in attitudes is necessary.

The issue came to the notice of the public in 2013 when a care home in Eastbourne was dragged over the media coals for allowing escorts to visit residents. The media whirlwind that was whipped up as a result led to an investigation by the local council. "The reaction was totally overblown. Whenever the issue has been written about, the papers say prositution is illegal when that is not, and has never been, the case," says Tuppy.

It can already be hard enough – practically and emotionally – for parents or carers of disabled to arrange for them to meet with a sex worker. "There was one mother who had made the decision to help her son, but it was almost like signing away her home, she had such a look of gloom on her face," says Pru.

And for some, it is just too much of a taboo to take that leap. Pru tells me about a bedridden man's mother who was so deeply religious that she was unwilling to countenance the idea of her son being involved with a prostitute. "She would have keeled over and died if she had known he was paying for sex," she says. "We had to wait until she had gone out of the house to the hospital. It was a bit of a race to arrange it all, we had to get it all done before his mother returned.

Maybe we won't be able to get to the situation where it's delivered like meals on wheels, but we need to be more open to it at least.

"He was totally dependent on his carer, but thankfully she was in on the secret. When I arrived we gave each other this look that said we both knew what was going to happen. She had bathed him, taken great care to make sure he was clean, and she had to give me the money. Without her it wouldn't have happened for him."

All of the people I spoke to said they would like to see these services available on a wider basis. "The first thing we need is more escorts who can deal with the needs of people with disabilities," says Pru. "Maybe we won't be able to get to the situation where it's delivered like meals on wheels, but we need to be more open to it at least."

Tuppy is full of admiration for the women who are part of the TLC Trust. She feels that at least, they deserve more credit. "Sex workers, particularly those working with disabled people need to get respected as legitimate workers who do a great job. Think about what they do – would you go into a room on your own with someone, take your clothes off with no one there to support you, and show the person the time of their lives? They're so brave and yet they get just get slagged off."

More sex workers:

Inside the Wall Street Sex Trade

We Spoke to the Sex Workers Behind the Sex Workers Opera

I Marched Through Soho Last Night in Support of Britain's Sex Workers

Free Love Protesters in Delhi Spent Valentine’s Day Being Chucked in Police Vans

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All photos by Alice Carfrae

In India, Valentine's Day is an annual opportunity for fervent right-leaning religious groups to try to harangue young couples into marriage. Couples are often punished for kissing in public out-of-wedlock, or confronted with the threat of forced conversion ceremonies if they dare to start an inter-faith union.

This year, a far-right political party notorious for their crusades against "modern romance", the Hindu Mahasabha, announced they had big plans for the "Western holiday". Their intention was to ensure that the institution of marriage was at the forefront of the minds of these young debauchees, whose public displays of affection they interpret as a disregard for Indian tradition.

However, not intent on merely policing the streets, the Hindu Mahasabha's National President, Chandra Prakash Kaushik, told the Times of India, "anyone found displaying love on Facebook, Twitter or WhatsApp will be caught hold of. A total of eight teams have already been formed in Delhi to keep a check on social media."

Also speaking to the Times of India, a representative of the Hindu Mahasabha from Agra said that the organisation would, on this occasion, be happy to marry inter-faith couples, so long as the ceremony was preceded by a shuddhikaran, which can be understood as a purification process seeking to cleanse people of their non-Hindu religious beliefs.

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But some young Indians were determined not to take this lying down. In reaction to the Hindu Mahasabha's statements, they planned a protest outside the group's Delhi offices, aiming to celebrate the kinds of love that conservative India doesn't readily accept: same-sex marriages, inter-caste couples and inter-faith unions.

In the lead up to the event, one of the organisers, who would only speak to me pseudonymously as "Laxmi Bai", explained that the event was spearheaded by a group of activists and student groups. They wanted to show that they were not going to let the Hindu Mahasabha's threats go unchallenged and that they rejected the group's self-proclaimed status as guardians of Indian culture.

"The thing is, this protest is not about celebrating Valentine's Day," argued Laxmi. "No one thinks that is important. It is about a larger politics of fighting back against right-wing assertion. 'Westernisation' in particular is a bogus and vague term that they use in their arguments. What's the difference between these cultures [Western and Hindu] that have historically merged, anyway?"

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It greatly frustrates protesters like Laxmi that these declarations from religious groups are no longer reserved for Valentine's Day, but have become part of everyday life. "They come up with something new every day. 'Women should not wear jeans to college'; 'Women should have a certain number of babies...' And if you look in the papers you will see stories of lower caste girls or boys murdered just for loving a member of an upper caste. Sometimes these stories come from Delhi, and incidents from the fringes of the country won't even reach the media."

In other words, while the far-right religious love-haters might be real, their presence and power remains relatively unappreciated by many in what is a supposedly democratic nation. Not that the organisation is so powerful it's totally beyond ridicule. "There was already quite a humorous response on Facebook and Twitter to the Hindu Mahasabha's announcements," Laxmi explained, referring to the video below. "So we thought, 'Why not try and build on this energy?'"

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/DBJMrlwhUFE' width='500' height='281']

Further momentum has come from the "Kiss of Love" protest, a display of mass public kissing that started in Kerala last November before spreading to other parts of India. Ishan Anand, secretary of the Democratic Students Federation, maintains that the need for a resistance movement is serious: "Hindu Mahasabha might sound funny and ridiculous, but they are a political force and they do run political campaigns. They have a vision of India as a Hindu state."

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At Saturday's protest, groups of students arrived in wedding saris and colourful dress with homemade placards. Some chanted energetically and others played music in keeping with the "mass wedding" theme.

One by one, however, they were grabbed up by police and led straight into vans ready to take them to the local police station.

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Several witnesses testified that the way in which the police dispersed the protest was worryingly "systematic". Protesters who did not readily comply were grabbed by their limbs and hauled into the vans by force.

"Some had barely lifted their banners in the air and they were already being led off. It all happened in just a matter of seconds," one bystander explained.

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Rafioun, an English Literature student at the University of Delhi who attended the protest, was not impressed: "The government is always quick to throttle free speech. You have this flawed and bigoted notion of Indian culture [from the Hindu Mahasabha], and everything that they consider wrong is blamed on the West. Homosexuality is a Western import; this is what they believe. But they don't realise that for a long time within this culture we have had Kama Sutra and we still have Khajuraho temples that show man and man, and man and woman, and woman and woman making love to each other.

"This protest is not just about Hindu Mahasabha but challenging this whole idea of what love is," he continued.

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As Saturday's event drew to a close, many protesters complained that the demo had come under much more intense police pressure than previous protests held by the Hindu Mahasabha. As one man called out to a police officer at the scene, "When the Hindu groups are burning effigies, you're not this quick to react!"

The reply offered was simple: "I am not comparing anyone with anybody, I am doing my job."

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Later, through the bars of a police van, Rafioun called out, "We have been forcefully evicted! We are here to show we have a right to love everybody and anybody we want to love! This is a democratic country and we have a right to free speech."

Ishan from the DSF conceded that, while the actions of the Delhi police force were frustrating, they were not all that surprising. "Section 144, which prohibits an assembly, was imposed as soon as the protest began. The students were detained and taken to the police station. The police kept around 250 students in custody for about five hours."

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However, Ishan came away from the event in high spirits. "The right-wing forces have been polarising the country along religious lines and campaigning vociferously on issues like love-jihad, and against same-sex relationships, as well as indulging in moral policing. In this context, it was heartening to see students resisting the diktat of these forces and hitting the streets."

@roxyrezvany

More stuff like this:

Is India Finally Ready to Deal with Its Rape Problem?

In India's Mass Sterilisation Camps, Women Trade Fertility for Mobile Phones

Indonesia's War on Women

I Went to the South London Sex Cinema and Made Some Weird New Friends

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A guy who looks like a refugee from Guns N' Roses bursts in waving a sawn-off shotgun. With him are three groupies dressed like sci-fi vampires: leather jackets, ripped stockings, huge gold fake lashes, drugged-out eyes. They're knocking off a pharmacy. Bottles of prescription pills roll off metallic shelves and onto the tiled floor. The Guns N' Roses dude picks one up. OxyContin. He nods, impressed. Just then another bloke enters carrying a machine gun and starts spraying bullets everywhere. The girls scream and scatter – the Guns N' Roses guy falls dead to the floor.

The sound of gunfire upsets the customary mid-afternoon languor of Club 487, London's newest – and only – porn cinema, based in an outwardly unremarkable premises between Deptford and New Cross in the south of the city. The perpetual onanistic motions that normally animate the place, flicking in one's peripheral vision, cease momentarily. It's Sunday. The regulars, more accustomed to the gentle delights of Hannah Does Her Sisters and Night of the Giving Head, weren't expecting extreme violence. The club's decision to screen Nikita XXX at 3PM feels subversive, like when a DJ drops a particularly experimental track right in the middle of a crowd-pleasing upfront house set.

The movie is an unusual departure, but as it transitions into a more conventional girl-on-girl scene, things settle down. George, a Tunisian guy who's lived in London for over 20 years and is a regular here, sits and eats rice and peas from a Tupperware container at the quaintly formal table (complete with white cloth) in the entrance hall. Mervin, a greying lone Roy Orbison lookalike complete with shades and sideburns, chills out in one of the private cabins. A fat, probable World of Warcraft enthusiast in a curry-stained T-shirt sleeps in the front row. A man in a jockstrap stands in the hidden alcove just behind the main screening room waiting to see if anyone takes an interest. Two rotund blokes with their shirts unbuttoned sleep next to one another on a leather couch like a porn-addicted Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

A perception of so-called "sleazy" establishments is that they are merely centres for disreputable behaviour and nothing else. What is perhaps overlooked – largely because those who comment are poorly-informed – is that cinemas like Club 487 are in effect social clubs that members attend regularly, forming acquaintanceships and friendships over long periods of time.

George greets incoming punters like long-lost family members as he chows down. Like many who come here, he is a former member of Mr B's, the previous incarnation of the business based in Islington that was closed down by the council last year.

"It takes me over an hour to get here from North London," he says. "It's worth it, though. All the old regulars are starting to come down now that word's getting out. It's like a family reuniting at Christmas."

Certainly, this sense of the familial is present when I overhear two Scottish gentlemen in their seventies chatting in one of the alcoves. One has the soft face of a regional weather reporter; the other is tall and awkward in a wax jacket. He has a large collection of carrier bags with him.

"How long have you known about this place?"

"A couple of weeks. I read about it online. I was happy. I thought it was gone for good."

"Is Christine any better?"

"She's OK. Well, not so good, actually. She stays indoors a lot. Sometimes I just need to take a break, clear my head."

Given that porn cinemas have been a part of the capital's fabric for decades, it's likely that these men have been hanging out in them for many years. For all their supposed tawdriness, the cinemas offered a third space outside the pubs where men (and women) could sit and while away the time and socialise with like-minded folk outside the home. Their slow eradication, along with the demise of local boozers, is arguably a blow to a former element of urban life that had real value – to its participants, at least.

The punters in Club 487 are friendly – perhaps not surprising given that this is effectively a secret club. One guy, a youngish, well-dressed Italian, turns to chat after a particularly athletic scene involving a cute ingénue in Glad He Ate Her. He introduces himself as Paolo. He works in Canary Wharf for a well-known bank. He looks slightly wired.

"Hot, isn't she?"

"Yeah, not bad," I reply.

"Shame – I've got to go soon. I've got an escort booked for an hour's time."

"Okay."

"Viktoria from Adult Stunners. She's amazing. Wait."

He pulls out a Samsung smartphone and starts scrolling through pictures of lingerie-clad women on its generous screen.

"Here – look."

I observe Viktoria, a severe Eastern European blonde reclining on a brown leather couch, wearing a bright pink bra and crotchless panties.

"Very nice."

"It's a great agency. All the girls there are beautiful. Watch this."

Before I have a chance to protest, Paolo pulls up a video and clicks on it. The clip shows him butt-naked, shagging a girl from behind in what looks like a down-at-heel suburban bedroom.

"Cool."

I'm uncertain of the etiquette in this particular situation. When you're sitting in a porn cinema kicking up a fuss about an unsolicited glimpse of someone else's wank-bank is a tad churlish. At the same time it seems a bit TMI, but perhaps that's just my British reserve kicking in. Maybe that's why institutions like Club 487 still thrive in some cities on the continent while in London they are an endangered species.

Suddenly the DVD playing on-screen shudders to a halt. There is the sound of loud swearing from upstairs. Something's gone wrong on the technical side. A huge bloke in the front row who's fallen asleep fondling his own nipples stirs, wakes momentarily and then nods off again. There are moans of consternation from the rest of the audience: men drinking lager from cans in plastic bags at the back grumble. Then an FBI warning certificate about piracy flashes up on screen, heralding the start of Assablanca. There's a palpable release of tension. Now everyone can relax again.

This is Club 487 where the monkey-spank material – like the patrons – just keeps coming.

@johnlucas_esq

More from VICE:

An Entire Community of Clubbers Just Got Catfished en Masse

My Time Snorting Cocaine and Taking Beatings in a Turkish Prison

To Girl, From Boy, with Love

VICE Vs Video Games: They May Look Great, But Video Games Can Never be 'Cinematic'

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'Uncharted 4: A Thief's End', expected this year, is graphically incredible. But don't confuse that for being "cinematic".

Whenever I play video games, I'm reminded of films. I don't mean contemporary films – those are intelligent, well written and mature, everything games are not. I mean pre-1900s films, specifically the shorts cranked out at Thomas Edison's Black Maria studio.

Essentially a barn, built in the grounds of Edison's laboratory in New Jersey, the Black Maria was the filming location for hundreds of short pictures made between 1893 and 1901. Most of these were sold to nickelodeons – small novelty shops, often on seaside promenades, where customers could drop a coin in a machine to watch a 30-second-or-so clip of film. You can find a bunch of the Black Maria shorts on YouTube (the best, of course, is Dr Welton's Boxing Cats) and there's a nickelodeon still in operation at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.

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Dr Welton's Boxing Cats

If you go watch these films you'll likely – understandably – be tickled by how basic they are. They're essentially vaudeville or theatre performances recorded front-on in a single medium shot. There's no editing, no eyeline matches, none of the rules or language of cinema. And this is why they remind me of video games.

Edison, and other early filmmakers, essentially used their new technology to emulate an older medium. The motion picture camera, in its early days, wasn't used so much to "make" films as it was to merely record and repackage vaudeville and circus performances. Cinema, back then, was essentially theatre – to gain validation from audiences and the market, it copied its closest and most successful cultural cousin. Games, likewise, are ripping off movies. There's the unique titillation of interactivity – "now you control the action" – but the production values, and increasingly the ambitions of scriptwriters, are incredibly close to Hollywood. Blockbusters have been successful for decades and the gaming industry, like the movie industry when it first began, is copying the formula in a bid to reach the same cultural and financial apex.

But there's the contradiction, because like the Black Maria films, which looked like theatre but did nothing to capture the energy, atmosphere or sensation of live performance, games, despite trying to be like movies, have zero understanding of what cinema actually is.

I mentioned before the "language of cinema". Take a look at the short clip by Alfred Hitchcock, below, where he discusses something called the Kuleshov Effect. Lev Kuleshov was a Soviet filmmaker who proposed that the essence of cinema was in editing, i.e. the juxtaposition and contextualising of one image against another. Hitchcock talks about how if you show a shot of a baby, then cut to a shot of a man smiling, you tell your audience that this guy is kindly – that he has a paternal instinct towards children. But if you swap the image of the baby with a woman lying on a beach in a bikini, and use exactly the same image of the guy smiling, he now looks like a pervert – like he's eyeing this woman up. That's how editing works. You match one image to another, to another, to another to create a kind of visual sentence.

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Hitchcock's Pure Cinema – "The Kuleshov Effect"

But games don't do that. For all their pomp, bluster and action-film pretension, there's no editing, so none of the images mean anything.

I mean, think of the most "cinematic" game you can, the one with the most explosions, the best voice acting, the most affecting narrative beats. Got one? The Last of Us? Uncharted? Metal Gear Solid? Grand Theft Auto? All those games look like movies insofar as having glossy production values and some semblance of story, but they're all played – or filmed, if you like – in one continuous shot. There's no editing. The player can move the camera around to look anywhere, whenever she wants. Without any kind of control from a director over which images are shown and in what order, all the visuals in these games, no matter how lustrous, mean nothing. It's just empty spectacle.

The camera in video games is a tool given to players to better understand their environment from a mechanical point of view, like when you tilt it round to find where you're supposed to jump to in Tomb Raider. It isn't a pen – it isn't placed by a director, and the footage it captures isn't edited, so all the images are as valid as one another. That amazing sequence in Goodfellas, where you have Karen staring down at the bloodied revolver in her hand, realising for the first time what her husband is, can't exist in games, because the player will always be titting around with the camera looking for the next collectible or whatever.

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

The opening scene to 'The Last of Us' is dramatic and moving. But it's not "cinematic", as the introduction suggests. (Contains significant spoilers.)

The cinematic "language" can't exist in games, because there's no one deciding, specifically, what the camera should be writing. Games can peacock, and marketers can posture all they want about the "cinematic" quality of something like The Last of Us. But these games, rather than the essence of cinema Kuleshov outlined, are celebratory of the worst excesses of films – fanfare, distraction, meaningless pageantry. By their nature, games aren't films. You can chuck in a cutscene – a little video, rendered in the graphics engine, which plays like a short film – but that isn't the game because the interaction is removed. Games, strictly, cannot be cinematic, because there's nobody choosing the images.

And on top of that, the writing in mainstream games, even 40 years since Pong, is still shite. It's not the writer's fault per se – many are stuck pandering to an imaginary audience of teenagers, nursed on comic books and summer blockbusters – but game developers could at least watch some better films.

The Last of Us takes its cues from The Road. Uncharted is National Treasure. GTA is the myriad crime flicks of Brian De Palma, Quentin Tarantino and Michael Mann. None of these films are bad, but if they're the sum total of your research, inspiration or whatever euphemism you want to use for copying, that's not healthy. If you're going to steal, steal from the rich, the richest of all being D.W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein. These directors pioneered editing theory. Theirs were the first films to string together these visual clauses, showing, for example, a hand carrying a gun, the shocked face of a man, and then the gun again, to imply he'd been shot. This was film operating on its terms, using things unique to it as means to tell a story.

Film thrived from then on, and became what it is today. Games, by ditching the pretensions of a medium it fundamentally has nothing in common with, could do the same.

@mostsincerelyed

Previously:

This Was the Week in Video Games

Video Game Genre Names are Bullshit, so Let's Change Them

What Video Games Teach Us About Romance, Relationships and Rutting

Eckhaus Latta Is Infecting Fashion with Sublime Weirdness

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Photo by Conor Lamb

The scene backstage at fashion label Eckhaus Latta's September runway presentation was hectic. Before the show, one gorgeous girl wobbled by me as she tried to walk in white sneaker wedges that were mounted on top of baby shoes. Another model fit a playing card behind her ear while she adjusted her see-through, knitwear top. And nearby, a male model with his legs painted to look like tube socks paced back and forth, punctuating the room's controlled chaos.

This was the fashion house's fourth straight season at the Standard Hotel, a spot in the Meatpacking District that's known for its guests fucking on the windowsills and its hot tubs being breeding grounds for STIs. And even though the spring/summer collection was being presented as part of Made Fashion Week—the much cooler, downtown cousin to Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week—I wasn't sure how the prim WWD types would appreciate the brand's beautiful, yet strangely-presented garments.

From the knees up, the looks were delicate, even a bit sexy. But they were also incredibly eccentric. The designers had managed to imbibe every aspect of the show with clever little inside jokes—even the catwalk was strewn with big pieces lettuce.

But as off-kilter as the show was, it was a crowd-pleaser from the first look. Even though the hotel hall was filled with stuffy fashion folks who never smile, I saw countless grins in the crowd. The baby shoe as a heel, in particular, forced photographers to their knees to take detailed shots on their phones as other attendees watched them snap pics with jaws slightly ajar.

In retrospect, that spring/summer 2015 presentation was sort of a tipping point for Eckhaus Latta. Last fall, the line to get in was around the block and they had to run the entire show twice because so many people showed up—and there were still folks who didn't get to see it. So it makes perfect sense that the label's moved on to a bigger venue—the third floor of Artists Space in lower Manhattan—for its upcoming fall/winter 2015 show, which takes place this afternoon at 2 PM EST. Given Eckhaus's penchant for the unexpected and sensational, it's likely to be a show that everyone will be talking about long after the myriad of mundane collections at this season's New York Fashion Week fade from their memory.

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Images via Eckhaus Latta's website.

Eckhaus Latta's peculiar-yet-exciting designs are the outgrowth of its willful and weird creators, Zoe Latta and Mike Eckhaus. Zoe was raised in Santa Cruz, California, a hippie surf town a couple hours south of San Francisco. Growing up, she loved to thrift at a by-the-pound local store that received all junk Northern California Goodwills wouldn't take. "I related to fashion by digging through trash," she told me in the fall at the label's Chinatown studio. This process led her to think about clothing not in terms of cost, but in terms of what she thought was interesting.

Mike, on the other hand, grew up just north of New York City in Westchester County, and was "the kind of kid that discovers fashion." Unlike scores of Tri-State teens before him, the allure was not in the parties and lifestyle, but in the energy and creation. "Fashion was performative, sure, but it was also a nerdy scene," Mike explained. His encyclopedic knowledge of models from those formative years and his ability to name certain designers by seam work drive this point home. "The parties weren't on my radar, just the people, the crowds, the shows."

The two met at the Rhode Island School of Design, where neither of them were studying fashion design. "We both knew we were really interested in fashion, but didn't know we were going to start our own line. We knew we would have our own practices, but didn't know how it would manifest," said Zoe. This was at the tail end of school for the pair, and in 2010 Zoe moved to Williamsburg, soon followed by Mike. The two started living together and the label slowly began to gestate. But things really started to become serious once they moved south to a warehouse by the Navy Yard, a relatively inaccessible nook on Brooklyn's East River.

"The space was a world into itself," Zoe said. "Dozens of tree stumps, chickens... We had dogs for a while. The house was made to collapse into a party. We had shoots, videos, and castings there, but it was too distracting." "Thirty-five people woke up at our place one New Years Day," Mike chimed in. "We got a lot of wiggles out there."

Back in those early days, using off-kilter materials became their signature—transparent leather, carpet-like textures, digital prints, just to name a few. They were fueled by the hunt of strange materials. "One supplier won't have a thing, but they'll point you towards the next clue," Mike said. "It's always the people with no website who are the best. You have to go there physically, you have to look," Zoe emphasized.

Reviews of their earliest collections spent a lot of time remarking on their idiosyncratic sourcing with statements like "[garments] seemingly made out of rope"—they weren't seemingly made out of rope, they were actually made out of rope. However, these days, they claim they've moved away from that a little bit. "We're no longer obsessed with something like, 'How much stuff can we make in plastic?'" both designers noted with a tongue-in-cheek grin.

Outside the sensibility of Eckhaus Latta's fabric and textiles, their distinction within fashion's up-and-comers manifests in their humor. While it shines clearest at their fashion shows, compared to their videos and images on the web, their whole ethos goes beyond a wink to something that's gleeful, but still wry. Once, they sent burgeoning artist and noted male model Cohl Moore down the runway painted green. The season before that included an elaborate presentation involving performance art, treadmills, and more. Even their ads are deadpan. One Tumblr-favorite ad they ran featured a model huffing a bottle of poppers with the tagline "Liquid Cosmetics." The poppers were even made available for purchase in a package that contained a condom and a come rag, released in collaboration with artist Bjarne Melgaard. The collaboration also featured one off Eckhaus Latta pieces incorporated into Melgaard's art, which was shown at the notable Manhattan gallery Gavin Brown Enterprises.

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Images via Eckhaus Latta's website.

Their friend and sometimes-collaborator artist Alex Da Corte summed up this energy to me over email, explaining, "Eckhaus Latta are making a language that is hard to define in a moment when most things are 'like' another. They leave me tongue-tied and rubbernecking in the best way."

Though Zoe and Mike seem inseparable in person, they often work independently of one another. That's partly because Zoe moved to LA nearly a year ago to oversee the duo's West Coast production hub while Mike works out of their Chinatown studio. They talk constantly, but for their collection last September, the two designers did their own thing for three months before coming together and combining their ideas.

For the clothes that they may not agree on, they become each other's consultants, working and weaving their thoughts together into something fluid, as if two sides of one brain. "Major conflict pieces are the ones that oftentimes end up being the ones you most love," they said. "If you're uncomfortable with something on first sight, sit with it, let it come to you, and those are always the most exciting things."

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Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta. Photos by Kathy Lo.

Though an ever-growing favorite amongst the fashion heads, the designers are still a bit nervous about press. It's something that is pretty easy to understand considering they have such a funny and grotesque vision of fashion at a time when people are still obsessed with staid concepts of perfection. To ensure that their strange new ideas for fall/winter 2015 are revealed to the world in the purest form, the duo have decided to keep all the details of today's show under wraps.

"It's not that we get misquoted, it's just that..." Mike murmured to me a few months ago, taking a minute to gather his thoughts. "After [another] interview, I got a call from a close relative saying 'next time you do an interview don't mention rape, vomit, or menstrual blood.'"

Follow Jesse on Twitter.

VICE Premiere: Los Angeles Police Department's New Single Is Loving and Gentle

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Unlike the actual Los Angeles Police Department, songwriter Ryan Pollie's work is thoughtfully nuanced and slow, much of it about the fleeting security of love. It's intimate and introspective, which makes sense because LAPD is a one-man project. Pollie still manages a full-band sound, though—he plays and records everything himself. This track, "Water and Wine," is from a new 7-inch coming out on Fat Possum Records later this month. It's dreamy and ethereal, and compliments the shitty winter weather nicely. Give it a listen.

Preorder LAPD's new 7-inch via Fat Possum.

Anyone Can Join This Record Label for Just $250

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Photo courtesy of the Wiener Records clan

There was once a time when you had to sit or stand in a recording studio, carefully position expensive and fragile mics in front of amps and drum kits, then actually slice the finished recording onto slabs of vinyl so other people could hear it in the comfort of their homes. That time has passed. Now, any goon with an instrument, a dream, and a USB port on the laptop can toss off a Bandcamp masterpiece. And they do, for better or worse.

The democratization of music online has changed the demands on record labels, especially small, independent ones—if someone's going to sign with a label instead of just uploading your songs yourself, there better be a good reason. Wiener Records, an offshoot of popular garage rock label Burger Records, has hatched a scheme to change the entire dynamic of independent record labels.

It's a simple idea: Instead of putting together a roster of likeminded bands, Wiener lets anyone join the label—the artists just has to cover the cost of manufacturing cassette tapes. The packages range from 100 tapes to 500, and cost as little as $250. The label's motto is, "Everyone's a Wiener," and it's pretty much true—its business model allows musicians access a physical product they can distribute, as well as giving them a label family to be a part of, for less than a week's worth of wages. It seems like a pretty cool thing. But historically, record labels are tastemakers who curate a tight-knit community of excellent bands that the label can stand behind. What happens to that when anyone and everyone can buy their way onto Wiener? I called up the label's head guy, Danny Gonzales, to talk with him about it.

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VICE: Hey Danny. How did Wiener get started? Where'd the idea for an egalitarian label come from?
Danny Gonzales: It was mostly Burger Records founders Lee and Sean's idea. They had a full schedule and bands were still asking them to put their tapes out. There were some really good bands that they just didn't have the time or the resources to put their tapes out. So Lee and Sean had this idea that if the band paid for the pressings, they'd do everything else. They would provide the manpower, time, and hype. They'd be treated the same as a Burger band, but I would release it on Wiener Records.

I like the slogan "Everyone's a Wiener."
They'd always forward me demos being like, "This could be a Wiener!" We'll reach out to bands and say, "Here's what we can provide," but anyone who emails us can totally do it.

What's the deal with promotion? You release a lot more albums than a traditional label. Do you have to dilute your efforts to accommodate that many bands?
It's a big family. When a band pays for the pressing, we get all their files and art and promotional stuff—it's very in-house, especially when it comes to booking shows. We have a list of bands, their locations, and what type of music it is. If we have a tour going through town, we'll reach out to Wiener bands and offer them a spot. That's a benefit we try to emphasize—we can say to a Wiener band, "We're coming through your town with Pangea or Audacity and we want you on the bill." And if you're touring through Orange County, we want you to play our shows and festivals.

Do you find that most of the bands who approach Wiener are Burger-vibe garage rock bands? Or is there a more diverse group of musicians?
We have a crazy diverse array of bands. There's plenty of the garage rock/surf/mellow stuff because that's the usual Burger thing, but there are some weird noise projects and stuff coming from out of nowhere. We just put out a tape from this guy in San Diego named Solitary Debate—it's just him making weird dark ambient music. It's really spooky and rad.

One of the common criticisms of Burger is that it has so many similar-sounding garage bands. This seems like a great way around that, because it allows anyone who's willing to pay to take advantage of your audience and potentially expose them to something unusual.
That's the great thing, literally anyone can do it. You pay for the pressing and we do the rest. We have Solitary Debate in San Diego and also some guy in Argentina called Satanoise TV putting out a weird kraut rock-sounding album. It's all random. You'll get garage, but you'll also get stuff that Burger wouldn't necessarily put out.

These days, since you can make and release music for basically free, it means something when a musician has taken the financial risk to put out a tape or a record themselves. It shows a level of commitment that isn't necessarily hard to come by, but is certainly getting rarer.
Right, when people see a material item like a tape these days, it has a certain impact. There are thousands of URLs and Bandcamp pages. If you give someone a tape, it means more. They'll be more inclined to play it.

Would Wiener ever take on bands that you wanted but didn't pay for the pressing?
I've done that before. Wiener profits are very slim—everything the band pays goes to pressing, shipping, and promotions. Extra money goes to the website maintenance.

I put out one tape with my own money. It was by Mens' Club, a side project by the guys from TSOL. They made a synth-pop group in the 80s and their album was never released, so I paid to release it.

For a young musician in the middle of nowhere, Wiener seems like a great opportunity.
Some of the kids who are putting stuff out on Wiener are from places I've never heard of in the USA. There's also lots of stuff from out of the country. The most peculiar was a band from Israel, which was really cool. We're helping expose people who may otherwise be left unknown.

Imagine that there's a guy who is choosing between Wiener and a traditional independent label. How would you convince him to choose Wiener?
I'd just tell him the benefits. If he can shell out the bucks for the Wiener package, there are some real benefits and good exposure—we sell tapes at the Burger Store and pop-up shops around the world. Anyone should be able to put music out. There should be no one stopping them.


Stefano De Luigi's Shocking Photographs of Drought in Kenya

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Stefano De Luigi is a documentary photographer from Cologne. To say that his photos are jarring would be an understatement: They grab you by the neck. Stefano won three World Press Photo awards in different categories in 1998, 2008, and 2010 and has been published by magazines from the New Yorker to TIME.

In 2009 he shot a series of works based around the Kenyan drought, specifically within the Turkana region in northwest Kenya. "This tragedy, where animals and people were struggling to survive this terrible drought, was a sort of nightmare vision," says Stefano, who uses the drought as a lens through which to examine climate change more widely. "It's about a future which could be waiting for all of us if we don't deeply change our habits, if we don't reconsider our way to share the resources of our planet with more sense of responsibility. This is, I think, the message that these images of suffering carry with them. A warning to consider our way of life differently, out of respect for all kinds of life on earth."

VICE: What made you want to take photographs of the Kenyan drought?
Stefano De Luigi: During that time [2009] I was working on the subject of the "ghost country." These are countries that are not recognized by the international community. I was in Somaliland. The news on Al Jazeera coming from Kenya was getting increasingly dramatic, and the decision was taken quickly to get back on the plane to Ethiopia and from there, I arranged with a writer and journalist friend an itinerary that would take us to the areas most affected by drought. We have worked with several Kenyan NGOs, who have been fantastic in helping us and put us in a position to reach very isolated regions of the country.
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Did you expect it to have such an effect on you?
Although, as I said, the news was quite dramatic, I honestly did not expect to see what I saw. It was an apocalyptic vision, where people and animals were struggling to survive. A strong animal like an elephant could be reduced to the status of a dry fruit, completely emptied, which is an image that I carry inside forever.

Can you describe how the locals reacted to your presence?
The aid for the populations was centerd around the town of Lodwar in the northwest of the country near Lake Turkana. We were immediately helped by the local authorities, who allowed us to reach, after about 12 hours in the Jeep, isolated places, where drought was the most affecting. Months of drought had turned this part of the country into a desert of fire. Local people were exhausted and traveling with the heads of regional NGOs, carrying aid, which was like a "shelter" for them. With the locals we had some meetings in which their testimonials only accentuated the feeling of natural disaster that we saw before us.

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Did you speak to any of them about what was going on?
During the 15 days that we were there we talked to a lot of people. When we travelled across the country, we collected testimonies of pastors, women, foresters, agronomists and farmers. All without exception were overwhelmed by the situation. Some of them spoke of climate change, as the reason for that terrible drought, many despaired over the loss of entire herds, like those of the Samburu national park, in the center of the country—an impressive number of elephants, giraffes, buffalos, rhinos, and other animals for which Kenya is world famous. It was a humanitarian and ecological catastrophe.

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Did the experience change your perspective on climate change?
Yes, there was a before and an after. This experience, the apocalyptic visions that I carry inside since then, have influenced some of my later choices. I worked on the melting of ice in Antarctica, crossing the Northwest Passage, in 2011, and I'm working on a project that concerns the massive production of inalienable waste. In general since then, I am still much more sensitive, personally, to issues related to pollution, toxic waste, clean power, and to the overexploitation of resources. For a more responsible way of life, we need to try and be conscious of the heritage we leave to future generations. We cannot continue to live and consume as if we were the last men on earth.

Stefano De Luigi is shortlisted for The Syngenta Photography Award 2015, Open Competition. The Syngenta Photography Award exhibitionScarcity-Waste opens 11 March – 10 April at Somerset House in London.

More photos below.

Afghanistan’s Only Female Police Chief Takes on the Taliban

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Firoza, a police commander in the Helmand Province of Afghanistan, at home. All photos by the author

It was five in the morning. A cluster of mud houses stood in silhouette against the moonlit sky, breaking the monotony of Helmand's desert topography. They were surrounded by farms that seemed to have produced little over the years. The icy, early-morning silence was interrupted by hushed chatter and hurried footsteps, which stopped at the door of a small, dark home.

Knocks in the dark are usually not welcome in this war-torn country, where they can be from Taliban insurgents seeking food and shelter or from Afghan soldiers in hot pursuit of them. But this knock on a frigid December morning was greeted with warm smiles and hot cups of green tea.

The visitor was Firoza, a 53-year-old grandmother and a police commander in Sistani, a village in the remote Marjah district of Helmand. Like many Afghans, she goes only by her first name.

She was here to settle a domestic dispute. Fida Noorzai, a local, had complained about her husband Fazal's violent outbursts, which had, of late, become frequent. Firoza ordered five of her heavily armed soldiers to quickly gather Noorzai's extended family in the courtyard. "I have to get this dispute out of the way before I get on to my routine duties," she bluntly told the soldiers.

Firoza's routine duty is to command the Afghan Local Police in the area. The ALP, a 30,000-strong organization that stands separate from the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police—two huge forces with a checkered history—was built up with the help of coalition brass in the waning years of the NATO mission and was trained by US Special Operations Forces. In recent years it has moved to the front lines of the fight against the Taliban, bringing local expertise and connections to bear, and its members have had many successes and suffered heavy casualties. Covered from head to toe in a traditional black cloak and donning an automatic assault rifle on her broad shoulders, Firoza has been defending the people of Sistani for the past three years. Affectionately called Ajani, meaning "the one who overcomes," Firoza was earlier under the command of her husband, 60-year-old Ewaz Mohammad Khan. But three years ago, the authorities in the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah relieved Mohammad of his charge, citing lack of confidence in his leadership skills, and handed over the command to Firoza. Mohammad, who now reports to her along with 13 other soldiers, told me that Firoza quickly established herself as the leader of the unit. She is now the only female ALP commander in the country.

At the Noorzai compound, about a dozen people assembled in the small open space. In her steely voice, Firoza asked Noorzai to explain his irrational behavior. He gave an incoherent reply, which was summarily dismissed with the wave of a hand.

"Islam prohibits beating women," Firoza said as Noorzai nodded in agreement. "I expect you to be kind and compassionate to your wife." She then signaled one of her soldiers to hand over his thick leather belt. "If you defy me, you will have this printed all over you," she said, holding the belt high over her head for everyone to see.


Firoza in the remote Afghan village of Sistani with her grandchildren, who are trained fighters and don't attend school.

In Sistani, no one defies Firoza. "Earlier, there were frequent complaints of soldiers extorting money and food from villagers," said Mohammad. "When such a complaint was brought to me, I would scold the guilty soldier. But Firoza took a different route. When she got the first such complaint, she called the guilty soldier, took his belt, and thrashed him with it in full public view. The message immediately got across, to the unit and to the people, that Firoza would not tolerate any transgression." He said she does not spare anyone. "I was once badly beaten by her. She hit me with a belt. I had to see a doctor," he said, deflecting questions about what he did to draw Firoza's ire. "In Sistani, there is no doubt over who is in command."

Three years ago, Sistani was overrun by Taliban, who imposed and collected taxes and dispensed their version of justice. The authority of the Afghan government was confined to the district headquarters and the provincial capital. There was only a limited presence of US and NATO forces, and the strength and morale of the Afghan forces were low.

This changed after Firoza took charge. She initiated several bold and unconventional measures to instill confidence among the people and her soldiers, one of which was her decision to arm her family. When the Afghan authorities ignored Firoza's repeated requests to give her more soldiers, she handed over weapons to 40 of her family members, including a 12-year-old grandson. This raised the strength of her forces in Sistani to 55 from 15. "In one stroke, we outnumbered the Taliban," Firoza said. "They got scared. They knew that Ajani was armed, her daughters were armed, her daughters-in-law were armed."

The Taliban then changed its local leadership and asked Mullah Habash, a key commander in the area, to take charge of the fight against Firoza in Sistani. Firoza said the three police posts under her control soon came under heavy fire from the Taliban. At half a dozen other places, her soldiers were ambushed. One of Firoza's sons was killed.

"The Taliban thought that the death of her son would crush Firoza's spirit. They did not know the stuff she was made of," said Hazrat Bedal Khan, the police chief in Marjah. Khan, who has known Firoza for more than ten years, told me that the killing of her son strengthened Firoza's resolve to drive the Taliban out of Sistani.

"From being largely a defensive force, the ALP unit under her command took on a more offensive role," Khan said. "Firoza and her men began to preempt Taliban attacks. Mullah Habash was injured, several Taliban fighters were killed, and many others were taken prisoners."

Khan said that to ensure her soldiers would not buckle under attack, Firoza would often stand behind them with her gun, telling them that she would not hesitate to shoot them if they turned and ran.


FIROZA'S MANAGEMENT STYLE
When Firoza received a complaint about one of her soldiers, she took his belt and thrashed him with it in public.


The clashes took an unexpected toll on Firoza and her family, however. Months after she took charge, two of Firoza's sons were arrested by Afghan soldiers following a clash not far from Sistani. Details are murky, but the authorities say the two were involved in a dispute with their brother-in-law and killed him in front of their sister at her home, a charge Firoza strongly denies.

"My sons were accused of killing civilians," Firoza told me, disputing the claims. "It's been nearly three years, but they have not been sentenced because the prosecutor's office has no evidence against them. I don't have the money or the connections to fight for them."

But Mohammad Anwar, the military prosecutor for Helmand, said his office has all the evidence to secure conviction of Firoza's sons. "They claim they only shot Taliban, but the reality is that Ajani's sons killed their sister's husband, who was a civilian," Anwar told me. "Ajani's daughter herself filed the complaint against her brothers. She said that her brothers would have also killed her son had she not protected him." According to Anwar, the case against Ajani's sons is now final. "A death sentence has been issued against one son, while the other will be sentenced soon," he said.

Meanwhile, back in Sistani, Firoza's soldiers had intercepted a Taliban radio message. "They are plotting another attack on me," she said. "This time it's going to be a car bomb."

If it's true that all politics is local, then in the fractured geographic and security landscape of Afghanistan all politics is hyperlocal. The ALP has seen successes in areas where the national army and police have struggled, in part because the ALP is made up of fighters like Firoza, who, beyond being a trailblazer for female commanders, has proven to be exactly the sort of leader who can really bring the fight to the Taliban: She is connected, respected, often feared, and fights as much for her village, her family, and her personal honor as she does to defend her country. This is the complicated reality of how the war in Afghanistan must be carried out today.

In the past three years, Firoza has survived nearly a dozen assassination attempts. The last one was only a week before my visit, when a Taliban insurgent planted a roadside bomb on the route her car was supposed to take. "Just like the Taliban, we too have informers. We have our people in their ranks. They tell us what the Taliban is up to," Firoza said, adding that "the Taliban has done all within its power to kill me. But I am not afraid of death. Even if I die, the battle will go on."

As an unfazed Firoza began to give instructions to her soldiers for the night patrol, Marjah's police chief, Khan, interjected. He asked Firoza's husband to double her security cover. Turning to Firoza, Khan said, "We want you alive—because when we look at you, we fight better."

Will 2015 Be the Year People Actually Do Something About Income Inequality?

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If you needed further evidence that we live in a global dystopia where rich people dine like kings on caviar and champagne in compounds walled off from the destitute, huddled masses, allow me to direct your attention to No. 15 Renwick. A new high-end Manhattan real estate property marketed by developers as the city's first "steampunk luxury condos," the Renwick plays into the aristocratic fantasies of people who buy $7 million apartments, the pitch for the building focuses not on condos themselves, but on Victorian-esque "Characters" who are featured in the building's marketing materials lounging around in penthouses and Zen Gardens amid a tableau of minimalist furniture and faux 19 th-century home goods.

It's an absurd way of attracting attention to yet another gilded Manhattan development, sure, but also a cogent reminder of the erosion of the American experiment, and of the looming class war that could erupt at any point. The "Characters," according to the building's website, "embody the creative persona of today's Hudson Square resident and the insider nature of the single-block Renwick Street." All that's missing are towering cakes and peasants wielding pitchforks.

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IGI-USA

We've known since the 1970s that the gap between rich and poor is widening, but recently, it's just started to feel worse. The Renwick sales pitch is just another sign that rich people and their children live increasingly isolated, and fabulous, lives, counting their treasure in luxury colonies while the rest of us drown in student loan debt and hope this isn't the month you'll have to start selling our bodies on Task Rabbit.

At this point, nearly everyone agrees that this is a problem. Inequality—and the class envy that it engenders—has become the undercurrent running through our political and social debates, threatening to erode democratic systems and derail the fragile economic recovery. In its 2015 outlook, the World Economic Forum identified growing inequality as the No. 1 risk facing the global economy, noting that it threatens to undermine social stability and weaken political systems around the world.

It's not hard to see why. A Global Wealth Report published by Credit Suisse researchers this fall found that the bottom half of the global population now own less than 1 percent of total wealth; the richest 10 percent, meanwhile, control 87 percent of global assets, a full 48 percent of which are held by the richest 1 percent. An Oxfam study released last month confirmed those numbers, and projected that the 1 percent would hold more than 50 percent of global wealth by 2016, if trends continue.

"At the top end, executives and others are earning higher salaries than ever before and as they save and invest they will become steadily wealthier," said economist James Davies, who coauthored the Credit Suisse report. "In the middle and upper-middle, saving and investment should also continue strong as the population continues to age and people prepare for retirement. Young people and low-income people will have little room to save, but that has been true for a long time."

As Davies suggests, inequality feeds on itself, begetting higher concentrations of wealth at the top of the economic pyramid. In the US, where Democratic politicians, including President Obama, have relentlessly campaigned against the income gap, the problem goes far deeper when you look at overall wealth. According to a paper published this fall by Emmanuel Saez, an economist at UC Berkeley, and Gabriel Zucman of the London School of Economics, the wealth gap in the US is at its widest point in decades, as high incomes lead to further asset gains among top earners.

"Income inequality," Zucman and Saez write, "has a snowballing effect on the wealth distribution: top incomes are being saved at high rates, pushing wealth concentration up; in turn, rising wealth inequality leads to rising capital income concentration, which contributes to further increasing top income and wealth shares." At these levels, the authors noted in an accompanying blog post, the wealth gap now constitutes "a direct threat to the cherished American ideals of meritocracy and opportunity."

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Whatever class envy this has inspired is compounded by the fact as the wealthy get wealthier, their ranks are also expanding. According to last year's World Ultra Wealth Report, an annual survey of the global super-elite published by UBS and the private luxury research firm Wealth-X, the number of people with a net worth of more than $30 million grew by 6 percent in 2014, to 211,275—a group that, combined, controls more than $30 trillion in wealth, if you're counting, and they almost certainly are. That means that while the super-rich—or ultra-high-net-worth individuals as they prefer to be called—make up only 0.004 percent of the world's population, they control almost 13 percent of the planet's wealth.

The report's authors project that those numbers will continue to swell, noting cheerfully, "We expect the ultra affluent population to continue to dominate and influence the global economic landscape with their wealth, whether in total assets under management or luxury purchases, as they have much larger cash balances as well as a longer history of access to wealth."

"More and more people at a younger and younger age are going to reach a point where they have wealth that will exceed or far exceed what they need for their desired standard of living in the future," said Paul Schervish, director of the Center for Wealth and Philanthropy at Boston College. "More and more people are going to be solving or near to solving the economic problem in their lives—and that means that there will be a change in the moral code."

Already, a kind of tribalism has taken hold among the elite and their children, even in the US, where this sort of artificial aristocracy is supposed to be anathema. The UBS/Wealth-X survey estimates that, on average, ultra-high-net-worth individuals have seven ultra-high-net-worth friends (and if eight of them get together, that means at least $240 million is in the same room). Unbound by international borders—and, in many cases, laws—these elite groups are rapidly colonizing cities like London, New York, Vancouver, and Miami, driving up real estate prices with luxury developments that give emerging-market kleptocrats a place to quietly squirrel away their shady fortunes.

So while the rest of you poor suckers struggle with stagnant wages and median household income that's still well below what it was before the Great Recession, the super-rich are limited only by their imaginations, free to pursue their strangest, and most dystopian, fantasies. Urban rooftop llama farms? Done. Space travel?You got it. Eternal life? They're working on it.

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The Necker Nymph, an underwater aircraft designed by British billionaire Richard Branson. Image via Virgin

The Wealth Report, an annual update on the super-rich released by the British real estate firm Knight Frank, provides some useful insight into the dreams of the extraordinarily fortunate: "Expect more property demand, more development, more travel and, as a result, more people searching for really private escapes," the most recent edition reads. "Maybe it's time to invest in that South Pacific island you've had your eye on. Assuming it can accommodate a runway and a space port, a James Bond villain–esque hideaway will soon be convenient for, well, just about everyone." A section devoted to investments in space marvels at new opportunities in asteroid mining, noting that Knight Frank has published a list of "asteroids to watch" to confirm the value of "key space rocks that will be coming (relatively) close to Earth soon." Apparently without irony, the report cautions investors to lawyer up, though, because "existing property law is slightly vague about settling ownership disputes in space."

If 2014 was the year that income inequality saturated the public consciousness, 2015 could be the year that people actually did something about it.

"The real story is not the upper-middle class versus everyone else—it's the top .001 percent versus everyone else," said Cornell University economist Robert Frank. "It's a winner-take-all economy. [The wealthy] have techniques that enable them to serve the entire global market, so now there are no limits on how rich they can get." The effects of this are insidious, Frank argues, driving up prices and forcing the middle classes to spend money they don't have, or settle for less.

If 2014 was the year that income inequality saturated the public consciousness, 2015 could be the year that people actually did something about it. Across the world, the concentration of wealth—and the fabulous flaunting of it by the world's millionaires and billionaires—is fomenting populist outrage against a system that seems increasingly rigged.

In Europe, concerns about high unemployment and austerity policies, have lead to a rise in euroskeptic parties, culminating in this week's standoff between euro zone finance ministers and Greece's new far-left government over the terms of the country's bailout deal. Skyrocketing real estate prices driven by rich foreigners have led both Canada and Australia to put restrictions on wealthy immigrant investments, and protests over London's insane housing market could drive the UK to take similar measures. From Ferguson to Hong Kong, recent protest movements and general unrest hint at a looming class warfare that no one wants to talk about.

Even rich people know this inequality isn't like the inequality of yesterday. "The divisions could get wider," Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein said in an interview with CBS News last June in which he blamed inequality for those divisions. "If you can't legislate, you can't deal with problems. [If] you can't deal with problems, you can't drive growth and you can't drive the success of the country. It's a very big issue and something that has to be dealt with."

At the World Economic Forum in Davos last month, other Masters of the Universe seemed to agree, warning one another about the instability their wealth could wreck on the global economy. One economist told a panel that his nervous hedge funder friends are already planning escapes from the inevitable outbreak of class war. "I know hedge fund managers all over the world who are buying airstrips and farms in places like New Zealand because they think they need a getaway," he said, according to the Guardian. "People need to know there are possibilities for their children—that they will have the same opportunity as anyone else. There is a wicked feedback loop."

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A private jet traffic jam at Davos. Photo by zerohedge via Twitter

In the US, determining what will happen with income inequality "is as much political as it is economic speculation," said Chad Stone, the chief economist at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive Washington think tank. The simplest solution is for the government to raise taxes on the rich. President Obama proposed as much in his State of the Union this year, unveiling a so-called "Robin Hood" tax plan that would raise taxes on capital gains, ending tax breaks on inherited assets; impose new borrowing fees on the country's biggest banks; and prevent rich people from accumulating massive stores of cash in tax-preferred retirement accounts.

GOP leaders in Congress have already made it clear that these proposals aren't going to go anywhere. Although Republicans have started to acknowledge that income inequality is problem, the party's distaste for taxes and banking regulation are unlikely to check income growth at the highest level. "Republican policies would take us in the opposite direction," said Stone. How far they can go, he added, "depends on how much availability Republicans have to push their agenda.

"In the immediate future, I don't see any major restraints on the concentration [of wealth] at the top," he added. "Depending on whether wages pick up, we could see some improvement at the bottom. But if the stock market remains strong, levels at the bottom won't catch up to those at the top."

Already, the question of how the country will grapple with its gaping wealth gap has become a central issue of the nascent presidential campaign. A Gallup poll released in January found that two-thirds of Americans—including a majority of Republicans—are unhappy with the way income and wealth are distributed in the US. More surprisingly, a recent focus group found that the potential 2016 presidential candidate who elicited the most positive response from voters, regardless of party affiliation, was Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, whose populist, anti-corporate schtick has resonated with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

Recognizing the reality of these numbers, Republicans have started appropriating Democratic rhetoric on income inequality, moving away from Ayn Randian notions about the "morality of capitalism" and the ingratitude of the 47 percent. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton is also apparently grappling with how to address the inequality issue, eager to avoid a populist left turn that could derail her expected coronation as the party's presidential nominee. A New York Times story published this week reported that the former secretary of state has met with more than 200 economists to try to hammer out a plan around the idea of "inclusive capitalism," which contends Americans don't hate rich people, they just want to feel like they could join them. The challenge, according to the Times, is to address discontent over the wealth gap, without vilifying rich people like herself and the people who will bankroll her campaign.

Which, of course, underscores the real problem with inequality—in addition to undercutting when wealth concentrates so heavily at the top, it starts to infiltrate and corrode the political system, poisoning the democratic process and putting the levers of power in the hands of the very few. The reality is that rich people pay for campaigns. So regardless of what policies they propose to fix the wealth gap, candidates will always face pressure to protect the top of the pyramid.

Whether this will lead to a class revolt, though, depends on how we feel about our own economic circumstances. "Income inequality has already risen so much in the US that it is possible that it has hit its peak," said Davies. "If the economy continues to improve, as it has been doing in the last little while, that will help all income groups."

If wages pick up, and voters no longer feel like they are one broken arm away from financial destitution, the fact that rich people are getting richer may no longer seem like such a pressing injustice. "Whether income inequality fades, or remains in the public debate has a lot to do with consumer confidence," Stone explained. Because in America, voters don't care how rich you get as long as they don't feel like they'll be poor forever.

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Islamic State Threatens to 'Conquer Rome' in Gruesome Video That Shows 21 Beheadings

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Islamic State Threatens to 'Conquer Rome' in Gruesome Video That Shows 21 Beheadings

Comics: TB and Dingball Wish They Were Better People

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