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In January of 1992, my parents fled from the imminently collapsing Soviet Union to sunny, sexy Los Angeles, carrying a one-and-a-half-year-old baby boy—me. In our new home, the box of VHS tapes that would end up shaping my adult life was piled high with a cross-cultural mixture of Russian and American children's cartoons: Rugrats, Ну погоди, Talespin, Тайна третьей планеты, Winnie-the-Pooh, Винни-Пух, Darkwing Duck, Приключения капитана Врунгеля—you get the point.

Children's cartoons are an invaluable source of cultural analysis. Everything is simplified, distilled for the lowest common denominator. The messages therein represent the hopes and dreams of the previous generation. What do we expect from our children? Who do we want them to be? What is sociologically important?

The distinction between American and Russian cartoons is temporal as much as it is geographic. Soyuzmultfilm, the production studio responsible nearly all Soviet-era animation, was state sponsored, meaning that between 1936 and 1989, nobody else was making cartoons, and what comparatively little was being produced was immediately lionized and replayed for decades. I grew up on the same cartoons that my parent's generation watched as children on their sputtering 70s-era Zennith CRT TVs through an attached magnifying glass.

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One of my favorite cartoons of all time was Тайна третьей планеты, or Secret of the Third Planet. It spoke directly to the hopes and dreams of a future space-age generation. The show was sci-fi at its most optimistic, though it featured a ton of grotesque, disturbing characters that will haunt your dreams. The same director also made another beloved film, Чебурашка or Cheburashka, about a made-up monkey-like animal with huge ears and big eyes, based on an eponymous children's book from 1965. Cheburashka is a cherished household name, and the film was a great bit of detailed stop-motion. Plus there's a crocodile that smokes a pipe and works at a zoo. As a crocodile. It's silly.

Probably the most famous Russian cartoon ever made was Ну, погоди! which translates to roughly Well, Just You Wait! It is essentially a Tom and Jerry rip-off, but with a chain-smoking wolf and child-like rabbit instead of a cat and mouse. More importantly, the series drips with a heavy cultural subtext, none of which I ever understood.

At a recent dinner party my parents had thrown, I spoke to some older Russians about their memories of Soviet cartoons. One explained it thusly (and I'm translating pretty directly here): "In the context of a rather limited and generally featureless media space, Soviet cartoons had an indescribable brightness. Within the context of art and humor, maybe as a metaphor, what is attractive to children [in these cartoons] would also attract adults."

Another woman was more specific: "The difference between Tom and Jerry and Ну, погоди! can probably be best seen in the antagonist wolf. In the American cartoon, Tom chases Jerry around for a while. It is aggressive, it is fun, but it is meaningless. This is not a bad thing, but beyond a psychological examination of 'wants and needs,' Tom doesn't stand for anything, he does not represent anything cultural. The wolf, on the other hand, is a reflection of the rebellious Russian youth. He is a hooligan, quite literally. He smokes, wears bell-bottom jeans (very Western), is uneducated, and clever but stupid."

My mom explained it further: "On the other hand, the rabbit is a good boy. He eats his vegetables, he goes to school."

Another guest spoke up: "The wolf represents the working class, and the rabbit is supposed to be the intelligentsia."

My mother has always had strong political opinions. "Why do you think so?" she asked.

"Because the theme is: When the working class tries to outwit the intelligent, they'll get burned."

The other guests seemed to disagree with him. They explained that, in no uncertain terms, all of these cartoons were distinctly apolitical. The man who disagreed with my mom nodded his head, saying "Yes, everything was subject to censorship, so you learn to read between the lines." My mom nodded.

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Another cartoon was the Russian version of Winnie-the-Pooh. It took me until I was in my late teens, rifling through that old box of tapes, to realize that Winnie-the-Pooh and Винни-Пух were of the same source material. They could not be more dissimilar. Winnie-the-Pooh is a lackadaisical tale about a honey-hungry stuffed teddy bear and his companion, Christopher Robin. Винни-Пух is about a chronically depressed selfish bear, who can find neither happiness nor honey. When Winnie says "Oh bother!" it's funny. When Пух says it, it's soul-crushing.

A guest at the party directed me to a scene wherein Piglet shows up for dinner at Пух's house. Пух washes Piglet, dresses him, and then ties a napkin around his mouth, preventing him from speaking. Without anyone saying it out loud, the low-key comparison to nanny-state communism was impossible to ignore.

But these weren't just sideline glances for beleaguered parents forced to watch cartoons with their kids, like when Spongebob makes a prison rape joke, or Rocco works as a phone sex operator. Everything released by the Soviet Union went through multiple layers of state censorship, with no room at all for overt politics. Russians, in general, are masters of plausible deniability for this exact reason. When you can't talk about how bad things are, you get great at talking about how good things aren't. Russians are also, and for the same reason, painfully sarcastic.

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Maybe the best intersection of art, state funding, and folklore is a ten minute short widely considered to be the best animated film ever made, called "Ёжик в тумане" or Hedgehog in the Fog. The plot of this 1965 masterpiece, which Hayao Miyazaki called one of his favorite films, goes like this: A hedgehog is walking through the woods to his friend bear's house. Along the way, he gets lost in the thick fog, is stalked by a creepy owl, and runs into a white horse standing motionless and alone. After going through an uncomfortably realistic sequence of terrifying events, he falls into a river and resigns himself to his death. Then, an unidentified something politely asks what he is doing in the river, and pushes him to shore, where his friend bear finds him. The film ends with the hedgehog wondering if the white horse will die, all alone out there.

Remember, this is a children's cartoon about a woodland creature. It is easily the most existentially depressing, and softly uneasy ten-minute short I've ever seen. I voiced this to the dinner guests, and they looked at me like I was fucking stupid.

"Depressing?" my mom asked me incredulously. "It is uplifting! This is the very essence of Soviet culture. Our history is marked with a total lack of control, and very hard conditions. You couldn't buy food, no luxuries, constant fear of police, and everything was censored in line with state propaganda. [This cartoon] is about relying on friends and family, and strangers who would help you. It is a hallmark of all Russian books and films from our era. It is very uplifting, and very deeply beautiful. Everybody who survived the USSR did it through the help of their friends and loved ones. It's something you'll never understand."

The rest of the table silently nodded in agreement.

Follow Jules Suzdaltsev on Twitter.

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Benito Vasquez-Hernandez. Photo courtesy Washington County Sheriff's Office

In a baffling case that seems like it could only happen in some kind of horrifying police state, a man in Oregon has been held against his will for 900 days even though he's not being charged with a crime. Yes, this is a thing that can and does happen in the United States, and while there is an explanation, it's not a very satisfying one.

Benito Vasquez-Hernandez is a 58-year-old immigrant who, in September of 2012, was picked up on the street in Madera, California, and taken to Oregon. According to a feature published in the Oregonian, he and his son Moises were supposed to testify against his other son, Eloy Vasquez-Santiago, who was wanted for murder. While in custody, Benito and Moises reportedly incriminated Vasquez-Santiago, which transformed them from people with rights into crucial pieces of evidence.

Initially, the pair was charged with "hindering prosecution," but that charge was later dropped. Ever since then, Benito has been in the county lockup, receiving the same treatment as any other prisoner. For 900 days. To put that in perspective, he was picked up a couple weeks after the release of Taylor Swift's " We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" video, and he's still in jail just because he has information.

Federal law allows prosecutors to detain a witness "if it is shown that it may become impracticable to secure the presence of the person by subpoena," but some states have imposed limits on the practice to keep it from getting out of hand. For instance, in 2008 the Law Revision Commission of New Jersey looked at these situations and noted that a detained witness is often nothing more than "an innocent citizen whose right to the full enjoyment of liberty is threatened solely because of his potential usefulness as a witness for the government." Seeing as how that's insane and all, state legislators then decided that detentions in New Jersey can't take place in jail.

Oregon, meanwhile, gives prosecutors room to detain someone for as long as they want because they're often in gangs and don't want to squeal on fellow members. Jeff Lesowski, the Washington County prosecutor in charge of this case, told the Oregonian that officials "only ask for it in extraordinary situations."

Federal law suggests that if you can record someone's testimony in advance and let them go, you should do that, as long as "further detention is not necessary to prevent a failure of justice." That's what Oregon law enforcement eventually did with Benito's son Moises, albeit not before he developed a brutal case of schizophrenia behind bars.

What's not mentioned in the federal statute is at what point a person's detention becomes its own "failure of justice."

Justice, in this case, would mean successfully throwing the book at Eloy Vasquez-Santiago, who is being charged with the stabbing death of 55-year-old Maria Bolanos-Rivera in 2012. Said justice will theoretically help her six children, and I guess the rest of us, all sleep a little better at night. But why not just videotape that testimony, and then let poor Benito Vasquez-Hernandez go home?

Prosecutors say they tried that. Last September, he sat down in front of a judge, with a Spanish interpreter sitting next to him, and got a quick lecture about how if he testified against his son, he could go free. Apparently, he just freaked out and demanded to be set free right then and there—probably because he was a scared guy, locked away for years by a foreign justice system, being lectured by a judge. Without sorting everything out, the judge just got tired of listening to his pleas for freedom and yelled, "Get him out of here!"

The trial of Eloy Vasquez-Santiago begins tomorrow, March 17. It's not clear when exactly Benito Vasquez-Hernandez will be asked to testify against his offspring. At this point, it'll be incredibly frustrating for the prosecution if, somehow, his court testimony doesn't actually put his son away.

But at least after the father testifies they'll have to let him go, right? Maybe not. I'm not a lawyer, but it seems like in all likelihood, after testifying, this non-citizen is likely to go straight from county jail to immigration lockup. I tracked down Wes Oliver, Duquesne University Criminal Justice Program director and an expert in the laws regarding material witnesses, figuring he'd know better than anyone else what's about to happen to Vasquez-Hernandez.

VICE: In all likelihood, is this guy headed from county jail to immigration lockup?
Wes Oliver: Yeah, sounds right to me.

Is this the only way to get testimony from non-residents?
Well, once you've been ejected from the country, then you pretty much become unavailable for trial, because the subpoena power of the government can't really get you back.

But how can that possibly be justified?
We're not doing it just willy-nilly. We're doing it because they have evidence relevant to the prosecution, and because their presence at trial gives the defense a shot a cross-examination, so it aids in the fairness of the trial for the defense as well. That's how we justify it.

So it's a gesture of fairness for someone else. It's still got major problems, right?
Here's one huge problem with it: Before we even [discuss] how wrong it is for that particular witness, we don't have any kind of rules that regulate how material this testimony has to be... He doesn't even have to be the star witness.

He's supposedly one of two people who witnessed a confession [from his son]. That's pretty big, no?
His testimony's not gonna be terribly helpful for the prosecution. It'll be somewhat helpful, obviously. If you've already got someone else saying it, it has a cumulative effect, but he's not an eyewitness to the murder.

Could this happen to me?
It sure could. The reason it most likely won't is that you're not a flight risk. You have a stable job and we know how to find you. What's unique about the deportation context is that we know he's a flight risk because we're going to fly him out ourselves.

There's gotta be a better way...
The [law] in Pennsylvania makes a lot of sense, and it works like this: If you have reason to believe a person is a flight risk, you serve a subpoena on them. They have to then come to court and say, "Your honor, this is how you know I'll come to court." And if the judge doesn't believe the person, he can require them to post bond. Or he could hold the person without bail if he thinks they're that much of a risk.

That's still rough.
To me, there ought to be some mechanism if you really think a person's gonna skip out on you. But it ought not be that you can lock them up indefinitely... In the Al-Kidd case [a 2011 Supreme Court case that involved detaining someone so they could testify about 9/11], he was detained for two weeks and when he got to a judge they put him on electronic monitoring. They didn't hold him the entire time.... Still, the federal law that says you can be arrested because you're a flight risk? That to me is unconscionable.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

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Two CF-18 Hornets. Photo via Canadian Armed Forces

With one dead Special Forces operator killed in Iraqi Kurdistan, a burgeoning public debate over an increasingly unpopular anti-terror bill, and alleged homegrown radicals arrested almost weekly, the Canadian political landscape is dominated by the spectre of a terrorist organization that the Canadian Armed Forces is still busy bombing in Iraq.

As it stands, Canadian CF-18 Hornets have dropped a series of precision-guided munitions on Islamic State targets in over 412 sorties—military parlance for a plane attack or dispatch.

"On 9 March 2015, while taking part in coalition operations in support of Iraqi security forces, CF-188 Hornets successfully struck a series of ISIL staging areas and fighting positions west of Kirkuk using precision guided munitions," said the latest Department of National Defence update on Operation IMPACT—codename for the Canadian mission in Iraq.

The same Canadian fighters also struck two "ISIL ammunition caches southeast of Haditha" using smart bombs.

On March 7, the day after Sgt. Andrew Doiron was gunned down by the very Peshmerga forces he was training in a friendly fire incident, Canadian warplanes aided Iraqi ground forces during a coalition mission south of Kirkuk—near the invaluable northern Iraqi oil fields—in a wider campaign that's given birth to a major Kurdish rally against the Islamic State.

When asked if Special Forces trainers had since exchanged gunfire with ISIS operators while attached to Peshmerga units, an incident not altogether uncommon for those Canadian commandos, a spokesperson for National Defence was evasive.

"Operational security does not allow us to comment on specific operational tactics and procedures, planned or ongoing military operations," said the spokesperson.

The spokesperson did add that Canadian soldiers will remain in Iraq passed their current six month deployment if asked to do so: "(t)he CAF is prepared to meet the government's request should it decide to commit Canadian troops for a longer period."

Though the Canadian Special Forces training mission is set to come to an end by the end of March, Canada's contribution to the international coalition against ISIS will continue to consist of six CF-188 Hornet fighter jets, a CC-150T Polaris refueller, and two CP-140 Aurora surveillance planes, and hundreds of personnel stationed in Kuwait supporting air operations.

On the ground, Canadian Special Forces operators have engaged in gunfights with ISIS militants, which, opposition parties argue, is against the spirit of the mission the Conservative government originally outlined in October 2014. While not much is known about the shadowy movements of Canadian commandos in Iraq, their mission is bringing them near enemy frontlines.

Meanwhile, back home, thousands protested the increased policing powers provided to intelligence and law enforcement agencies in bill C-51—a piece of legislation largely enacted on the heels of high-profile terrorist attacks against Canadian servicemen last fall.

Follow Ben Makuch on Twitter.

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Conservative MP Larry Miller. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

With fresh national debates surrounding not only anti-terror legislation, but latent Islamophobia, the Tory government is promoting (if Liberal leader Justin Trudeau is to be believed), one Conservative Member of Parliament came out swinging against women who wear niqabs.

"Stay the hell where you came from," said Larry Miller, the Tory representative to parliament for Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound, on a local radio show amidst lines like "send 'em back" peppered in from another guest.

Miller's comments came during discussions about the latest niqab controversy. Tory legislation from 2011 required all would-be Canadian citizens taking the oath to show their faces while swearing their allegiance to Queen and country.

One Muslim woman who wears the face-covering niqab challenged that piece of legislation in the courts and won—an outcome apparently dumbfounding Miller.

"It just baffles me," says Miller on the broadcast before blaming our "justice people" for the blunder. "[T]hat isn't right and you know like frankly, if you, if you're not willing to show your face in a um, the ceremony, that you're joining the best country in the world."

Miller goes on to say that he believes most Canadians would agree with his analysis of the court ruling: "that's maybe saying it a little harshly, but it's the way I feel. I'm so sick and tired of, of people wanting to come here because they know it's a good country and then they want to change things before they even really officially become a Canadian."

Though brazen and confident on the airwaves, in a statement provided to VICE Canada this morning by Miller's assistant, the Owen Sound MP apologized for his behaviour on the radio show.

"Yesterday I made comments on a radio show that I recognize were inappropriate," he said, while refusing to retract his overall stance on the niqab debate. "I stand by my view that anyone being sworn in as a new citizen of our country must uncover their face. However, I apologize for and retract my comments that went beyond this."

The Conservatives slightly distanced themselves from the comment Tuesday, saying only that it was "inappropriate" and went beyond their "clear position" and Miller has apologized.

"We believe most Canadians, including new Canadians, would find it offensive that someone would cover their face at the very moment they want to join the Canadian family," Harper spokesperson Carl Vallee said in a statement.

Miller, a backbencher MP from a rural area, is the second Conservative parliamentarian in as many weeks to go off the party script and make inflammatory, racist comments in public.

Just last week John Williamson, who represents a New Brunswick riding and is the former communications director for Stephen Harper, said at a conference in Ottawa that it didn't make sense for companies to turn to foreign "brown people" for employment, while "whities" stay at home.

Miller is also no stranger to controversy. An outspoken pro-gun advocate, in a 2012 debate he likened the long gun registry to oppressive actions taken by Adolf Hitler in 1939. Miller was forced to backtrack on those comments days later.

Follow Ben Makuch on Twitter.

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No human bodies were composted to make this soil. Photo via Flickr user Mark

There are a million different ways to die, but only three ways to (legally) dispose of a body. You can be cremated, you can be buried, or you can donate your corpse to a medical school (the school will eventually cremate you, FYI).

With rare exceptions, those are the rules across Canada and the United States. But here on the West Coast, there's talk of a brand new (and, let's face it, totally granola) alternative. Katrina Spade is founder of a Seattle non-profit that wants to add human composting to the list of possibilities. Apparently the right combination of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and microbes can break down a dead person in about six weeks.

Spade's project aims to solve the waste problems associated with conventional burial, but she understands the idea freaks a lot of people out. "For some people it doesn't work, and that's OK," she told VICE. "I'm not trying to convince everybody in the world."

Is composting as gross as embalming, though? In traditional burial, bodies are drained of blood, injected with preservatives, encased in massive wood and metal coffins, then lowered six feet into concrete-lined graves where they ever-so-slowly putrefy. Spade's research shows 90,000 tonnes of steel, nine million metres of hardwood and 1.6 million tonnes of concrete get buried every year in the US alone. Cremation is better for the environment, she says, but it still puts a whole bunch of carbon into the atmosphere.

"To many people, conventional burial makes less and less sense," she tells me. In addition to generating "nutrient-rich" gardening soil, Spade's Urban Death Project also addresses an awkward space issue. Big cities aren't making new cemeteries, which drives up the cost of plots. Composting is as affordable as it gets.

Spade first started thinking about dying while in architecture school a few years ago. At the time, she had two young kids and no religious identity to speak of: "I realized, like everybody else, I was going to die someday," she recalls. "I started to wonder what they'd do with my body when I die."

Spade says she decided to confront what she sees as a societal fear of decay, researching ways to turn people into soil faster, not slower.

At first she looked into natural burial—a method that skips the formaldehyde, trades a coffin for a light biodegradable fabric, and places bodies at shallower depths to allow faster decomposition. This form of burial is allowed in a few states. "It's a beautiful idea, but more appropriate for a rural setting," Spade says.

Then she discovered the practice of composting dead livestock. "I didn't make up the idea of composting animals—luckily there's a lot of research on that," she explains. (Sure enough, you can find plenty of government literature on "livestock mortality management"). "We know we can technically compost a human—it's not a mystery whether it will work at all."

Spade is fine-tuning a three-storey compost design that puts six- to 12-foot layers of compost material between the dead. Ceremonies would allow families to "lay in" their loved ones and cover them with woodchips. The soil they get back weeks later could technically contain other people.

This multi-compost thing is a big red flag for Spade's critics. "From my perspective, personally, human remains are deserving of a pretty high degree of respect," says Stephen Olsen, director of Royal Oak cemetery in Victoria. BC laws only permit individual burial and cremation. "To do any form of collective disposition, I don't think the public would find it acceptable."

Spade disagrees. "I'm kind of forcing the collective issue. You don't get back just your person—you're going to get back a really beautiful material, something you can use to memorialize the person you miss," she says. "We're all part of a collective ecosystem anyway."

In 2014, Spade received an $80,000 grant from a New York–based philanthropic organization to make the Urban Death Project a reality. She's also launching a Kickstarter in a few weeks, which, depending on a few factors, could see a real-life human compost built by 2020. But before all that happens, Spade has to battle a few lawmakers. "It'll be state-by-state, a lot of small campaigns," she says of the work ahead. "It's about telling people this is an option that works."

Human compost is not likely to come to Canada anytime soon, but Olsen says there are a rare few places in Canada that do allow environment-friendly natural burials. "Canadian cemeteries have been a bit slow to react to the interest, but it's coming."

Follow Sarah Berman on Twitter.

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While it might not go far in assuaging Alison Bechdel's anxieties, the author's life is about to venture onto what could be its biggest stage yet. The graphic novel memoirist—who has recounted relationships with her friends in Dykes to Watch Out For, her father in Fun Home, and her mother in Are You My Mother?—is about to see her work performed on Broadway. Fun Home, the musical, opens in New York this month, transforming into song the tense exchanges and sexual epiphanies that have made up Alison's life.

Despite the fact Alison is already well known—not least for inventing the Bechdel Test, in which a movie must have two female characters talking to each other about something other than a man to pass—it will be unsurprising to those familiar with Bechdel's work that such acknowledgements do not sit easily with her. When you talk to her, she is endearingly self-deprecating.

While political and cultural contexts may have changed over the decades that she's been drawing, there are some aspects explored in Alison's work that stay the same. Such as: attempting to understand the parents who have led lives entirely hidden from you, and through this ultimately trying to understand yourself.

In advance of Fun Home's opening, I spoke to Alison about charting those early cultural touchstones, the urge to confess and what it's like to emerge from the queer countercultural ghetto.

VICE: In Fun Home there's a section when you're in the library, looking through all the lesbian lit. What were the popular cultural representations of lesbianism that you had growing up?
Alison Bechdel: There were zero popular culture representations. I can't think of anything I saw on television or in magazines. You had to go to the library and look it up. The first gay movie I saw was The Killing of Sister George, and it was in the context of a gay film festival that my college was having. I wouldn't have seen that on television. It's also a very disturbing movie to see for your first lesbian film. Before I entered that culture, there was nothing, no images of lesbians whatsoever.

Do you think cultural reflections of lesbian lives are accurate now, or do they need to be better?
It's interesting that there are now so many images of lesbians in the media. And so many images, period, of everyone. We live in this totally image-saturated culture in a way that we just didn't not very long ago.

I'm at a conference in rural Pennsylvania right now—near where I grew up. It's a gay conference, and yesterday I went to hear some older community members in their 70s talk about what it used to be like here. They had a few photos they were showing in a slideshow. Someone in the audience said, "It was great to see that picture, do you have more?" And they said no.

I mean, not only did we not carry a camera with us at all times in the 1970s, but gay people did not want their photos taken. It was dangerous—incriminating, even—to have a picture of yourself at or in a gay place or situation. All of this has changed so much and I'm still trying to adjust to it. But to answer your question, we always need more reflections—there are never enough.

Have there been any that you've connected with more recently?
I loved Orange Is the New Black. I think that's really incredible. The lesbian characters feel really human and endearing. I'm not a real stickler for everything being perfect, though—I watch many movies that don't pass the Bechdel test, for example.

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Beth Malone (as Alison) with Sydney Lucas (Small Alison) and Michael Cerveris (Bruce), in the Public Theatre production of Fun Home. Photo by Joan Marcus.

Do you think there's still a place for the Bechdel test? There's that chain of cinemas in Stockholm that are still using it.
That's really cool. I think it's clearly not a perfect test—you can have a movie that's quite feminist or has strong female characters that maybe only has one woman in it, and maybe she doesn't talk to anyone else—so it's not failsafe. I do, however, think it's a really interesting and funny metric that can give you a really good sense of whether this movie will have any relevance to you or not.

The whole thing is so bizarre to me—it was just a little feminist joke back in the 1980s, and it's sort of funny that it's been taken seriously now, 30 years later. But I think that's a nice indication of how the culture has changed. I think we have come to this place where the universal male protagonist has been de-centered enough that we can think about alternatives. That seems like a lot of progress.

Do you still keep a diary?
I do! It's on the computer now. I am compulsive about it. It's not a very interesting diary; it runs into a list of what I'm doing every day, or the last fight I had with my girlfriend. It's not a lot of philosophical musings. It's so boring, I can't even re-read.

Where does the urge to share such personal insights originate?
I guess it's sort of related to the diary-keeping instinct, this compulsion to confess things publicly. I'm really kind of a private person, in a way, yet I have this weird exhibitionistic side... it's horrifying to me, the intimate things that I've revealed, I don't quite understand it. I really enjoyed confession as a child. I love that idea of being forgiven and freed from my sins [laughs]. I haven't quite shaken that.

You missed the previous opening for your musical—will you make the Broadway opening?
Yes, I have it in my date book.

How are you feeling about it?
I feel very excited, and anxious. It's such a very strange experience, to see my childhood and my family recreated and re-enacted in this way. It's very hard to have a distance from it—it's really intense and personal. It's hard for me to even talk about it. I don't quite have language for it yet... I'm mostly really grateful; it's an amazing thing to see that so many people have put so much work into it.

Does being on such a mainstream stage affect how you feel about your own objectivity, in terms of your removal from a counterculture? If the counterculture is becoming the culture, where does that place you?
That is an excellent question, and one that I have been asking myself ever since Fun Home was published in 2006, and, shockingly, well received by a much broader audience than I'd had before.

I've been getting used to this idea of mainstream success, as opposed to my little counterculture ghetto where I was very happy. And it's been confusing. I did want to speak to a larger audience, but without losing my queer perspective or authenticity. And it's about getting older, too—I have different concerns. I feel like I'm trying to grow into it in a responsible way.

I do think, of course, that once you're inside this system you do inevitably lose some objectivity about how it all works because you have so much self-interest at stake in it. I guess it's just trying to be aware of that and trying to keep, in whatever work I'm doing, an honesty without worrying about who I'm trying to make happy.

If you were to talk to yourself at a younger age, what would you say?
I have this weird feeling that my future self was already in me, my future self was already saying: "This is all going to work out just fine." I feel like I somehow really knew that all along, if that's possible. If you can trust that voice, that's the trick.

You were awarded the MacArthur "Genius Grant"—do you feel very genius-like?
No, I don't. In fact, I have felt more idiotic since I received that fellowship than I did before. I'm still worried they're going to call me back and say they made a terrible mistake and revoke my award. But so far they haven't. As the months go on, I think I'm starting to get used to the idea. That feels like something I'm working on, accepting that.

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Homepage photo of Norman Mailer by Ron Galella, Ltd./WireImage. Artwork by Jason Gonzalez

"Wanna go for a drink?" I asked Norman Mailer, standing on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 14th Street, when I realized I'd fucked up. I'd been out all night at the Mudd Club with a skinny Jewish girl with large breasts, drinking, doing coke, and getting my dick sucked, when I suddenly remembered that I had a girlfriend...

"No," Norman huffed, pulling up the collar of his ski jacket. "Not now..."

I didn't want to show my disappointment, but I was so hungover that if I didn't get a drink or a valium soon, I was in for full-on delirium tremens. My nervous system was so shot even my synapses were hunchbacked. Norman was brooding about something, went to a pay phone to make a phone call, so I couldn't tell if he was annoyed at me for asking.

"Just one beer," I prayed, deluding myself again .

Norman got off the phone and came back over to where I was standing, ready to puke into a corner garbage can. He was wearing that impish grin of his that bathed you in all the warmth of his celebrity. "So Legs, how the hell are you?" "Bad," I answered, "really bad. I fucked up with Carol..."

Norman listened patiently and then said, "Well, it's like I wrote in The Naked and the Dead..."

Norman put his arm around me and walked me down 14th Street. I babbled how I'd been out all night with another woman and now thought it was all over between me and Carol. Norman listened patiently and then said, "Well, it's like I wrote in The Naked and the Dead..."

"I never read that one," I confessed sheepishly.

"You will, you will," Norman reassured me. "In it, there's two guys in a foxhole in the South Pacific, and Joe has just gotten a Dear John letter from his girlfriend. He's pissing and moaning about it and the other guy says to him, "Come on Joe, in a month you'll be the King of the Manila whorehouses..."

"And Joe says, "Yeah, I know—but what about tonight?"

It was pretty funny, and I knew exactly how Joe felt. Only Norman had the power to drag me out of my alcoholic self-obsessions. Even better, he then said the magic words, "Let's get that drink..."

I was so happy I could've kissed him. We walked into a dark bar on the corner of 14th Street and Sixth Avenue, taking refuge from the evil sunlight. I took a seat on a stool while Norman stood talking to me. I ordered a beer, Norman had a scotch. He was wearing his trademark brown Safari shirt and a ski jacket; I was in my standard black leather jacket, black jeans, pointy Beatle boots, and the sunglasses I had stolen from the girl from the Mudd Club. But I didn't need them. The bar was dark and seedy enough, just the way I liked it.

"When I put you in the play you're gonna be rich," Norman assured me as he sipped his drink and rubbed his belly. "You can get Carol back with all the money I'm gonna pay you—more money than you've ever seen..."

Norman was one of the most generous guys I'd ever met, but he was on some kick about producing a play based on his book Of Women and Their Elegance, his fictional biography of Marilyn Monroe. The play starred his daughter, Kate Mailer, who was just stunning as Marilyn Monroe. It was the best impersonation I'd ever seen—more like she was channeling Marilyn than imitating her. And Norman wanted me to play some sociopath who sweeps Marilyn off her feet and steals her away on his motorcycle—but I knew it would never happen.

Discussing the play was the official reason Norman let me hang out with him, but I think the real reason was because I made him laugh. Just this morning, when I saw him, I said, "Wow Norman, you've lost a lot of weight, you look great! Oh shit, you don't have cancer or anything, do ya?"

Norman thought that was the funniest thing he'd ever heard, and he kept repeating, "Oh shit, you don't have cancer or anything, do ya?" like it was a punch line. I finished the beer and ordered another one. Norman ordered another scotch and paid for the round. Like I said, he was generous. So generous, that I was feeling twinges of guilt about going to Provincetown last summer to fuck his ex-wife, Beverly Bentley—not that I did, but that had been my intention. I just hoped Norman never found out about it—and kept the beers coming...

See, before I hooked up with Carol, I had been living at the Boho Club (short for Bohemian Club), an old vaudeville rehearsal loft on 14th Street, with Tom Baker, an actor, writer, and all-around raconteur who was 20 years my senior. Tom was a handsome Irish guy with sharp cheekbones, a thick head of hair, and a hunky physique. And the ladies liked him, a lot.

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Tom had had a long association with Norman, having performed in Mailer's theatrical production of The Deer Park, based on his book of the same name. I'd met Tom at one of Norman's parties and afterwards put him to shame at One-Uni, Mickey Ruskin's hipster bar at One University Place. A whole bunch of us were sitting in a booth and Tom was reading the Village Voice review about his 1970 movie Bongo Wolf's Revenge, a documentary about some Hollywood weirdo who thought he was a werewolf, which for some reason was written up by Jack Newfield over a decade later. I grabbed the review out of his hands and started reading it out loud, making up shit as I went along:

"Tom Baker, that notorious pedophile, debuted his kiddie-porn film; Blinky Wolf's A-hole, about a notorious squirrel who sodomizes baby chipmunks at church picnics... Baker said, 'This important interspecies fuck-fest is a cinematic achievement on a par with Citizen Kane and Viva Las Vegas...'"

I had everyone in hysterics, including Tom, who didn't mind being the target of my drunken spiel. A month later I was living with him at the Boho Club, sleeping on the stage, next to an old black-and-white TV that all the touts from the OTB across the street would gather round on Saturday afternoon, when they'd televise the horserace from Belmont. "Louie the Book" and "Anne of a Thousand Bags" would gather with the rest of the losers from OTB to watch the last double on our tiny TV—and I'd inevitably hear Tom shouting, "Anne, leave my Wingo tickets alone, get your own goddamn copy of the Post!"

The Boho Club was owned by Bob Brady, an acting teacher at NYU who looked exactly like Mark Twain—and I was never sure if he liked me or not. Tom was a great friend though; he would buy me my Valium on 14th Street every morning, well, afternoon actually, since I couldn't keep down my "beer for breakfast" that Tom always drank to ward off the shakes. Baker would also buy me a coffee yogurt to go along with my morning "V" and spoon-feed me while I waited for the Benzodiazepine kick in.

"Come on Legs, ya gotta eat," Tom would say. "Open up, here comes the airplane flying into the hanger, vvvrrrrroooom, hurry, it's coming in for a landing..."

"Tell me about the time you were busted with Jim Morrison for hijacking an airplane?" I pleaded, never tired of hearing the story.

It was true. Tom had been good friends with Jim Morrison of the Doors; he'd even fucked Pamela, Jim's soulmate, before he met the rock star. Jim forgave Baker, much to the displeasure of the rest of the band and management, who blamed a lot of Morrison's drunken antics on Tom. Apparently the two of them egged each other on, to the point of utter chaos and destruction.

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The incident on the plane happened after Jim had been arrested at the Dinner Key Auditorium in Miami for allegedly exposing himself and was waiting to come to trial. Since he couldn't tour because of the arrest, Morrison decided to buy a bunch of Rolling Stones tickets and hand them out to the fans as they entered the Stones concert in Phoenix, Arizona. It was an innocent enough plan, but he took Tom with him to Phoenix. Of course they got drunk on the flight and caused such a scene that the FBI was there to arrest them for "interfering with a flight in progress," when they stumbled off the plane.

They never got to see the Stones.

Instead they went to jail, and later fucked the two stewardesses who testified against them during their "skyjacking" trial. That was my favorite part of the story, and by the time Tom got to telling it, the Valium was washing over my body, and I was back again, ready to face another night of endless possibilities.

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It was Baker's idea to go to Provincetown; he had hooked up with Joseph Bonanno, the heir to the Bumble Bee tuna fortune and worked out some scam involving Norman Mailer, who kept a summer home at the end of Cape Cod. I wasn't really sure why we were going, but before we left, I needed two things: more Valium and a woman.

The woman was the easy part: Samantha, another skinny Jewish girl, agreed to go with me. But the Valium was another story. I bought my drugs in 14th Street's Union Square Park, which at that time was a decrepit stretch of badlands where Broadway crossed Fifth Avenue, usually empty except for the drug dealers lurking in the shadows. Unfortunately the cops occasionally swept through the park and rounded up all the amateur pharmacists, and for a day or two afterwards, it was harder to cop.

I was in the park for an hour or so, searching for a dealer; and when I finally found one, he didn't have the yellow five milligram tablets with the V in the middle—just the blue 10 milligram ones, that were a bit more dangerous to mix with alcohol. I bought twenty pills, all I could afford, and then the four of us, Tom, Joseph, Samantha, and I drove to P-town.

I was reading A. E. Hotchner's Papa Hemingway on the drive to Cape Cod; I was deeply involved in Hemingway obsession that many young male writers of a certain age indulge in. As was my habit, instead of reading books by Hemingway, I was reading all the books about Hemingway, since I always preferred nonfiction to fiction. Still, Hemingway's Nick Adams stories, A Moveable Feast , and To Have and Have Not, were what originally hooked me. Hemingway wrote about beauty in such a profoundly simple way—you never felt like you were reading a Hallmark greeting card or anything like that. Ernie let you experience the beauty of simplicity.

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"Hey, there's a picture in here of Beverly Bentley with Hemingway," I said, finally pulling myself out of the book as the car crossed the border of Connecticut into Massachusetts.

"Wasn't she married to Norman?"

"Yeah, and apparently she's gonna turn up in his next novel," Tom cracked from behind the wheel. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of artists and writers, the real scoop on the artists who shaped our culture.

"I don't like novels," I mumbled. "Fiction blows..."

To me, modern fiction never held any weight, because the writer was basically lying. I felt, that with very few exceptions, there weren't any new Charles Dickenses or Joseph Conrads writing today. Besides, they wrote nonfiction disguised as fiction.

"Legs, you wanker," Tom sneered, starting a tirade on my literary education, before I quickly stopped him.

"Just shut up and tell me about Beverly..."

"In the new book she's a brunette," Tom explained, "and this guy says, 'I thought you were a blonde?' And she says, 'My pussy hair was bright gold in high school, until I went out and scorched it with the football team.' Ha, ha, ha!"

Samantha and Joseph were laughing, but I was too preoccupied with the picture of Beverly partying with Hemingway to join them. The realization that there was a living human being who was a direct link to Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer enthralled me. I'm sure Norman was well aware of the Hemingway connection when he hooked up with Beverly, and it made me wonder that if I could capture and possess her— have her—I might be the next big thing, too?

Of course, it was a ludicrous notion, since I was barely a writer and not exactly the macho type, but it became my mission on this trip to possess Beverly. Since I always opted for the easy way out, so did my fantasies, and what could be a faster way to becoming a famous writer than by fucking my way to the top? It worked for me, and it was an idea that lodged inside my brain as we crossed over the Sagamore Bridge onto Cape Cod. Twenty milligrams of Valium and a six-pack of Bud helped keep it there.

"If only I could fuck her..."

Beverley Bentley met Norman Mailer at P. J. Clarke's in 1963, and she became his fourth wife later that year. The problem with Beverly was alcoholism and a failed acting career, and Norman helped her out in both departments—they drank together, and he featured her in his plays that never made any money. Beverly was the only wife, out of the six he married, that Norman wouldn't talk to after they broke up. Theirs was a nasty run that wasn't truly over until 1980, when their divorce went through. She was being championed in People magazine as the woman who fought back against Norman. I didn't know anything about all that at the time; I only knew I wanted to fuck her.

As soon as we were settled in a hotel, we left Samantha and Joseph behind, while me and Tom visited Beverly at Norman's first Provincetown house on the far side of Commercial Street. Beverly was in her 40s and even more voluptuous in person than in People. She had the cocky swagger of a woman who held that "her cunt was her chariot," as Norman once described her—something that I was dying to find out if true. Luckily, before long we were all drunk and the talk turned to skinny-dipping.

The water was still and dark, except for gentle swells that rippled across the surface of the water and surged onto the beach. The waves broke with the constant shushing of a running faucet, lending a calming, white-noise echo to the Provincetown Bay. Even though the moon was full, shadows covered our bare bodies as we all sloshed into the water and started to swim.

I had a bottle of wine and corkscrew in one hand, and breast-stroked with the other, behind Beverly and Baker, trying to keep up. They'd just reached the floating dock when the bottle slipped out of my hand and sank to the bottom. It was about eight or nine feet deep, so I thought it would be no problem to dive in and retrieve it. Five tries later, I still came up empty-handed and I looked over at the dock to see Baker climb on top of Beverly and start to penetrate her desperately.

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"HEY, I DROPPED THE BOTTLE!" I called from the water, but there was no answer. I tread water, watching the two bodies writhe on the dock, under the full moon. I finally swam to shore, cursing Baker the whole way. I should have been cursing myself, as I already had one girl and wanted another—the story of my life. I was too greedy for that first rush of a new woman opening herself to me—representing all those delicious possibilities—so much so that some might say I suffered from pussy envy.

I don't remember the drive back to New York City, only that Samantha was crying a lot, so I was pissed and wanted to go on to the next woman before her tears dried. I hated when girls cried, though I never changed the things in myself that made them cry in the first place. It would mean a fundamental change in my entire being, so why bother?

When we returned to the Boho Club, we went to see Chet Baker, the famous junkie jazz singer and musician; we got drunk and melancholic and went back to the Boho Club, arm in arm, singing "My Buddy." A few nights later, Baker told me that the Boho Club was having a special guest that night and that I should be on my best behavior. Tom was uptight and nervous, an unusual condition for him, so I couldn't imagine who our special visitor could be...

Finally our guest appeared, but Tom took him first into the seedy kitchen off the hallway, and didn't come back for a long time. I was getting impatient, wondering what the hell was going on, when Tom emerged from the kitchen and said, "So, Legs, you wanna meet Chet Baker?"

Thrilled, I followed him into the kitchen—where Chet had his jeans and underwear bunched down around his knees, one hand cupped and lifting his scrotum, while the other held a syringe, as he looked for a healthy vein on his uppermost thighs.

"Ohhh Chet man, what are you doing?" Tom scolded him, "Come on man, this ain't cool!"

Chet looked up for a second, then quickly went back searching for a vein. Tom motioned for me to leave the kitchen, and I retired to the stage, where I watched bad TV, waiting for the all-clear signal that never came. Instead I heard the door slam shut; Tom locked the four locks, and then came back to me, saying, "Fucking Chet, he really knows how to add sand to the sandwich, doesn't he?"

I never liked heroin. Or junkies. Tom knew that. In fact, the reason I had moved with him into the Boho Club was because I'd found a set of works in the linen closet of Lori's apartment. She was the girl I was living with on 72nd Street, right next to the Dakota. I knew it was over the minute I saw the needle, because there's no arguing with heroin. Since I knew I was in for some really bad times ahead with Lori, I decided to skip that portion of the program and get on with my life.

It seemed, though, as if heroin was always following right behind me.

So when Tom suggested we go visit "Joe the Junkie," his dealer on Clinton Street, after he received some birthday money from his parents, I said, "Fuck that shit, you don't need it, let's go out and get drunk instead..."

"You're no fun, Legs," Tom bitched, but he could tell I was serious, so we went to the Lion's Head, a writers' bar in the West Village that was decorated with the book jacket covers of its famous clientele. The Lion's Head was right next to the famous Stonewall Inn, where Gay Liberation erupted in 1969 when the police hassled a bunch of drag queens and they went ballistic and kicked the cops' asses. In that historic corner of the West Village, Tom and I toasted one another, congratulated ourselves for surviving this long, and poured out our literary hopes and dreams. I thought that was the end of the heroin discussion, but a day later, Bob Brady called me with the news.

"Legs, Tom's dead," Bob told me over the phone. "I came home and found him lying on the floor of the stage..."

My world crashed and burned. I cracked like an egg.

The night after I saw him, the Tom had gone to see "Joe the Junkie" on Clinton Street and shot up a speedball—a mixture of cocaine and heroin—which caused his heart to fail. Tom had such a big heart I thought it would never stop beating. He was sprawled out on the stage at the Boho Club where he collapsed—his body now cold and lifeless. I sat sobbing over him for five hours until the paramedics finally came to bag him up and take him away.

Tom's funeral service was held at One-Uni. I went with Carol and all the usual suspects were there: the girls Baker had affairs with towards the end; Mickey Ruskin, the owner of One-Uni; a sober Jim Fourrat, who went off on a tirade about how Tom had really died of drug overdose, not a heart attack as we had told his parents. I said something at the microphone, after which Mickey Ruskin told me that he'd always thought that I was nothing but a giant fuck-up, but that I was really good.

A month later we would have a repeat funeral performance when Mickey Ruskin died of his own heroin overdose.

Bob Brady gave me a black eye a few nights before or after Tom's funeral, when he said he overheard some gossip about me saying that he was responsible for killing Baker, but I forget the hows and whys.

I think he just wanted to hit me.

Life suddenly wasn't as much fun, and even worse was that Norman Mailer had summoned me to his home in Brooklyn Heights to get the facts on what had happened to Baker.

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Tom had been writing a memoir of his life that was tentatively titled Oxymoron, before the term was in vogue, and I was reading it and giving him feedback as he was making the transition from actor to writer. Tom was a smart guy and adept writer, and I had high hopes for the book. I brought a copy of the manuscript when I went to see Norman, who seemed dispassionate about Baker's death, or even angry with Tom for killing himself with drugs. I couldn't figure out why Norman seemed so oddly removed. Then I panicked, and thought maybe he found out about Tom fucking Beverly?

But how?

I was glad that I didn't get together with Beverly after all, I don't think I could have suffered Norman's wrath. But I was the only one who had witnessed Tom and Beverly's tryst, and I had already forgotten it. No, it couldn't have been that, it had to be something else...

When I met with Norman I laid out the facts. I told him how I stopped Tom from going to see "Joe the Junkie" the night before his birthday, but wasn't with him the next night. I told Norman I wished I had been there—but he remained curiously indifferent. Annoyed even.

"Legs, you're not fooling around with that shit, are you?" Norman asked before I left.

"No, Norman, just beer," I answered, "I'm just your pedestrian Irish drunk..."

Norman stared at me hard, one of the most intense stares I'd ever seen; I don't think he believed me. No one ever believes me when I'm telling the truth.

I left Baker's manuscript with Norman and told him I thought it was good. Norman got the book back to me about a month later, without any comment.

It was a queer ending to Tom Baker's life, which led me to believe that Norman had indeed found out about Beverly and Baker's tryst. In hindsight, Norman's reaction to Tom's death seemed like pure jealousy, an emotion I thought he was far too superior to indulge in. I was young and naïve.

I guess some women have that hold on you, no matter how hard you try to forget them. I guess some women are so sexually adventurous and thrilling that you can never forget those choice snapshots of elegant, loving carnal abandon....

Some women you just can't forget. Ever.

As Norman Mailer wrote about Beverly, under the name of Cherry, in his novel The American Dream:

Her ass was indeed a prize—with my hands on her, life came back to me again across all the glaciers of my fatigue... not 30 seconds had gone by before I slipped quietly into her... I felt like I could go on forever... I was alive in some deep water below sex, some tunnel of the dream where effort is divorced at last from price. She was exquisite. She was exquisitely sensitive... I had never moved so well. It was impossible to make a mistake...

Impossible to make a mistake?

Back in 1975, Legs McNeil co-founded Punk magazine, which is part of the reason you even know what that word means. He also wrote Please Kill Me, which basically makes him the Studs Terkel of punk rock. In addition to his work as a columnist for VICE, he continues to write for his personal blog, PleaseKillMe.com. You should also follow him on Twitter.

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The remains of a house on Kubulau peninsula in Karoko that was flooded during high tides and then subsequently removed. January 2015. All images by Jeff Tan.

The customary Fijian greeting, bula, doesn't mean "hi" or "how's it going?" It means "life," and while that may sound quaint, it's also bittersweet given Fiji is sinking.

The island nation's low-lying seaside villages are bearing the brunt of climate change. A year after being the first community to be relocated due to encroaching seas, the villagers of Vunidogoloa are relieved to be away from the surging tides that would flood their township after their sea wall failed. The village was moved a mile and change up a hill on land that the village previously used for crops.

Other threatened areas include the Kubulau peninsula of Karoko, as well as Vunisavisavi, where the sea water reaches their doorsteps when tides are particularly high. Nukui village, an hour's boat trip from the capital, is protected for the time being by a sea wall, while on the other side of the village, the tide causes the river to burst its banks.

According to scientists including [rofessor Elisabeth Holland, author and director of the Pacific Center for Environment and Sustainable Development at the University of the South Pacific, the sea has risen faster over the past decade than at any time in the last century. "By mid century, on the current emissions trajectory, sea level is projected to rise an additional 30 millimeters [two inches] for a total sea level rise of about a half a meter [one and a half feet]," she told VICE.

Spending time photographing these communities, their reactions to the crisis were mixed. Some were frustrated that various NGOs had come and discussed relocation but nothing had come of it. The sense of who was to blame also varied. Some villagers weren't aware of the causes of climate change, only that it was happening. The more educated ones, such as the teachers, knew where emissions were coming from and how this was affecting the climate.

Pacific Islanders, however, are not ones to complain. This is particularly true of the villagers I spoke with, who were very laid back and cheerful people. These attributes, as well as their resilience, will be tested as the waters continue to rise.

For more on climate change and how it affect sea levels, watch our new VICE HBO episode, "Our Rising Oceans."

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Jihadi John in an ISIS video.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Quintin Kynaston Community Academy in London's St. John's Wood neighborhood has often produced figures that typify media representations and public perceptions of the city's poor, troubled youth. In the 1980s it was Madness's Suggs (their hit Baggy Trousers is about Quintin Kynaston), in the 2000s it was N-Dubz's Tulisa Contostavlos, and now in the 2010s it is Mohammed Emwazi—"Jihadi John"—the executioner and morbid star of several ISIS beheading videos.

Before "Jihadi John" was revealed as Emwazi, an alumni of the school, I'd jokingly said to a friend, "I bet he went to QK." If any school could produce a "Jihadi John," it'd be ours, and we all knew it. My reaction to reading Emwazi had indeed gone to Quintin Kynaston was a specific type of shock—not of disbelief, but that an intuition had been right.

Emwazi is not the only Quintin Kynaston alumni to make the journey from London schoolboy to international Jihadi. As of writing this, two other ex-students have been identified as having gone abroad to fight. Mohammed Sakr went to fight for al-Shabaab in Somalia, and Choukri Ellekhlifi went to fight in Syria. Both are now dead.

Emwazi's "unmasking" came hot on the heels of the flight of three London schoolgirls to Syria. This phenomena of, as we see it, children biting the hand that feeds, is now practically an existential question; what is it to be British? What is it about growing up in this country that leaves some vowing to destroy it?

These are questions that have dominated my thoughts since Emwasi's identity was revealed, as I was to learn that I had in fact gone to primary and secondary school with him. At one point we were neighbors.

Further information came out and the rest of our connections were revealed to me. Nothing in this has put me more ill at ease than envisioning Emwazi in my Year Six class, playing with the same classroom board-games I'd played with, sitting one desk away from my own.

The night the story broke, a friend messaged me in shock, telling me that he'd realized that we knew him personally. My friend and I would skip lessons in the same loose group to play soccer.

This forgotten fact made me realize that Emwazi, who I had seen around primary school, secondary school, my own home, who I'd played soccer with, had been so inconsequential that I didn't even recognize him. He wasn't gregarious or charismatic, but nor was he a loner or an outsider—words applied to killers to justify why we didn't see it coming. He simply wasn't someone you'd remember.

What isn't inconsequential, however, are the experiences which led him and two others from Quintin Kynaston down a path where thoughts of fighting for ISIS or al-Shabaab ended up being acted upon.

Quintin Kynaston is based in the exclusive St. John's Wood, but draws its students from incredibly deprived areas of London. Many of its students are from immigrant families, many are impoverished. In 2006, Tony Blair used Quintin Kynaston as the venue from which to announce the timetable for his resignation. As a "flagship" academy school, it was supposed to be emblematic of his "education, education, education" agenda. It was a guinea pig for a top-down reform, with a new structure that aped the private sector, was management heavy, and open to corporate sponsorship.

Then there were the demographics—the large number of Kosovan Muslim students would have been thankful for Blair's interventionist policy. The thought of Blair being pictured with one of the few groups of Muslim kids who would be happy to see him would have been well calculated. By announcing his resignation there, he could not have sent a clearer signal about what he wanted his legacy to be.

However, that announcement didn't go to plan. Outside the school, students stuck around against the orders of staff. Half-coaxed by activists, half of their own volition, they chanted "Blair the murderer," "Blair out." The area was smothered with pictures of a blood-soaked Blair. It was the school in microcosm; lauded but unpredictable, and at times uncontrollable.

The reforms improved grades and league-table positions, but it didn't deal with the wider issues. Since his identity was revealed, Emwazi was described by teachers as "hardworking." He got the grades to get to university, but all that proves is that academic success is not an indicator of moral character, nor of being safe from radicalization.

I remember a student calling a teacher a "Jew," and the teacher replied that it was the student who was the "Jew."

Staff often found themselves with students they had zero authority over. I've read articles where it is "revealed" that Emwazi used "Jew" as a slur and went on anti-Semitic rants. This would be no revelation to anyone who went to the school. "Jew" was a standard insult. There was normally no conviction to this—it was teenage rebellion no different really to the "edgy" comments made in any other school. At Quintin Kynaston, however, these comments often went unchecked.

Pro-9/11 statements were also commonplace and teachers, often not from the local community, did not have the intellectual resources to tackle this rhetoric because it was totally outside of their experience. Many ignored it, some tried to curry favor by joining in. I remember a student calling a teacher a "Jew," and the teacher replied that it was the student who was the "Jew." Another teacher, totally at a loss at how to control the class, talked about 9/11 conspiracies, how it was an inside job—yes, "Sheikh Osama" had nothing to do with it.

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Jihadi John as a student. Photo via University of Westminster.

In an interview, Quintin Kynaston's ex-headteacher has said no children were thought to be at risk. A student from my year made a brief appearance in a BBC Panorama documentary on radicalization in 2005. That's one child at risk, surely. What is being protected here—reputations or students?

The only thing to look for at that age is alienation—no student at the age of 15 is going to have a fervent and concrete Islamist ideology to spot. An ISIS patch sewn on to their backpack, a "radical" hairstyle, a passion for edgy Islamist bands. If that's what they're looking for—some caricature of what a "problem child" looks like—they'll never find it.

The knee-jerk reaction to blame Muslims for fundamentalist children is proven presumptuous by the fact that both of Lee Rigby's killers were converts—not brought up as Muslims. This reaction could only come from people with no connection to these communities.

That's a problem that goes right down to the teachers. We understand the white foster parents of a black child will not be fully equipped to deal with issues of identity. Likewise, we understand the need for female teachers so that girls can have female role models—it goes without saying. We understand that the black experience in the UK cannot be experienced by white teachers, and thus black teachers are needed. And so on, and so the last Labour government rolled out programs to fast-track ex-City workers into teaching—another stab at bringing the private sector mentality to schooling—and the current coalition government has sought to fast-track ex-soldiers. Neither group is ideal for tackling radicalization in schools.

Why are Muslim women, black men, white working-class women not fast-tracked into teaching? These people all too often find themselves as teaching support staff, while people from less appropriate backgrounds and with less genuine connection to the children are trusted to teach. It's another example of the subtle but ubiquitous class privilege and institutionalized racism that pervades British society.

Whatever we want from society, we need to recognize that it will come from schools. If we can't control what socialization goes on in schools, students will continue to become radicalized. Teachers have to show marginalized groups that they have a place in British society—one that doesn't involve being a specter hanging over it. This will hinge on whether British society is prepared to make room for these groups—when teaching is still a predominantly white, middle-class profession, it's debatable whether it has even tried.

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Beijing's Silk Market. Photo by Flickr user Trebz

I came to China with two goals: The first, of course, was to climb the Great Wall. The second was to buy enough counterfeit goods in the shopping markets of Beijing to last me through Christmas 2022. Because nothing says you've had a well-rounded cultural experience like an imitation Calvin Klein watch.

I flew to Beijing with one of my best friends from high school, an investment banker with classy taste, who I knew would be the perfect ally for navigating the tricky waters of shopping in a foreign country for imitation luxury goods. She has had experience with the finer things in life while I thought Burberry was kind of Pokemon for most of my life, so if there was anyone who would serve as my spirit guide to the world of shopping, it would be her.

We spent a majority of the trip sightseeing, but we dedicated our last day in Beijing to the mecca of knock-off goods: the Silk Market, an oversized, seven-story shopping mall with aggressive overhead lighting and a sea of counterfeit goods. Every storefront had a nearly identical display. If you wanted a designer purse, you could look down a row of shops and find that exact same designer purse in all 30 stores. It was kind of like that robot movie with Will Smith, but instead of an army of dysfunctional killer robots, we were staring down an army of shiny, leathery purses.

Strangely, there were signs posted everywhere warning that haggling was explicitly prohibited. I kind of clammed up—were we at the right Silk Market?—until one of the vendors started talking to us.

"Hello sir, how are you? Buy a beautiful purse for your wife!"

"No, thanks."

"Only $300!"

"No, really, I'm OK."

"OK, OK, for you just $250!"

The sheer potential for haggling was intoxicating. I'm generally a cheapskate, but if there's anything I love more than not spending money, it's getting a good deal. And here was a place where getting a good deal was a sort of game.

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Inside the Silk Market. Photo by Flickr user Sierra Michels Slettvet

Our first few stops made it clear that the only sense of consistency in the market was the inconsistency of its clerks. I turned down one store's offer on a pair shoes and the owner told us that not only would we never find an offer so good again, but she'd make sure to it that none of the neighboring shoe places would accept our business as long as we were in Beijing. Also pretty sure she told us "fuck you" in Mandarin. Then I turned down another woman's offer on some vintage Chairman Mao posters, and she simply flashed us a polite smile, told us to have a nice day, and hoped we enjoyed the rest of our time in China. (For the record, I definitely went back to the shoe department and managed to snag a sweet pair of shoes at a much fairer price.)

As we continued shopping and refining our haggling skills, we realized that most of the store employees assumed my friend and I were a couple. Not only that, but when we falsely corroborated their assumptions, they actually seemed more inclined to lower their prices. I don't know China well enough to know whether this is a cultural thing or simply the temperament of the people we met, but fuck, I would pretend to be married to a lizard in cowboy boots if it meant I could get deals like these.

As we moved from store to store, the details of our faux love story quickly escalated. Sometimes, we'd say we were high-school sweethearts; we told other clerks that we were in Beijing for our honeymoon. They all lapped it up. In retrospect, the ethics and weirdness of our whole narrative was questionable at best, but it certainly did get us better deals.

Best of all, what gets interpreted in America as a "vaguely-effeminate-is-he-or-isn't-he-into-dudes" swagger was, here, interpreted as charm by the storeowners. While it would have been nice had it been interpreted similarly by the three women I've ever hit on in my life, I would gladly relive all 24 years of limp wrists and sexual ambiguity knowing what bargaining power it holds overseas.

With our fake matrimony and my silly banter firmly in our bargaining arsenal, the carnage truly began. Twenty dollar shirt? Five bucks. Forty dollar sunglasses? Fifteen dollars with a free case. Thirty dollar watch? Eight dollars and the promise of my firstborn. The first 80 percent of our day was not only successful but also mostly positive. Most of the people we haggled with seemed equally satisfied with the final prices of the things we purchased as we were. And who doesn't love that warm, fuzzy feeling you get when everybody is happy at the end of a cold-hearted capitalist exchange?

But then, drunk with haggling power, things started to go downhill. First, my friend stepped ankle-deep into a puddle of urine in the women's restroom, which I'm fairly sure was karmic intervention for the love story I had crafted. Then we decided to go scarf hunting.

It would be apparent to even Helen Keller that some of the obviously fake products at the Silk Market are significantly higher quality than others. Luckily, since my friend works as an investment banker with high-end clients, she was able to sniff out the good stuff. That is, except for a specific brand of Italian scarves.

The interaction started normal enough. Then, when I found a scarf I thought my mom might like, things got dicey.

"You like this scarf? I'm going to sell it to you for a good price."

Her declarative statement should have been a warning.

"It's $70. It's the best price I can do sir. It's the best price for you."

"Oh, you know, that's a bit too much for me. I think I'll pass.

I began to walk away when she firmly grabbed my wrist. I felt my spichicter clench out of sheer instinct.

"Sir, please don't go. Let's talk. How much can you spend?"

"I don't think you'll like my answer," I warned her.

"Just, tell me sir. How much?"

"$15?"

Her eyes bulged. She began speaking rapid-fire Mandarin with her co-supervisor. Then she laughed manically while she seemed to stare right into my soul with her piercing eyes. This was starting to get scary, so I tried to slowly back out of the store, but the clerk grabbed both my wrists and physically dragged me back towards the scarves. Never has a technicolor selection of soft pashmina been so terrifying.

"Sir, come on," she insisted. "Make me a real offer. I won't let you leave until you do!"

I believed her. But because I have a strong sense of what I believe to be right (and more importantly, a petty habit of doing the opposite of what I'm told), I was unyielding. I was going to get those scarves and I was going to get them for $15. Our exchanges went as followed: My price was too low, hers was too high, I was crazy, she was crazy, she kept holding onto to me, my wrists started to get a little numb, I had to demand her manager make her let go of my arms.

We went back and forth for 40 minutes until I was exasperated. It was time to call it quits. Physically moving myself out of the store seemed out of the question (tiny lady, but massive upper body strength) so I took the equivalent of $20 out of my pocket and gave her an offer: Take the money or the deal is off.

With the power of reflection and time passed, I'm still not sure that was the right call. She did take the offer and snatched the money right out of my hand. But instead of happily sending me on my way, she took the scarf I had just purchased and threw it rather aggressively at me. That is, after she pushed my chest. And then she began yelling at me in Mandarin. Again, I'm pretty sure there was a "fuck you" somewhere in there.

She started throwing more things at me—except I hadn't purchased any of these products. She was just pelting shit at me. Somehow, while doing this she managed to switch back and forth between Mandarin expletives and telling us in English to "Get the fuck out of my store!" My friend and I booked it out as fast as we could, hearing her screams in the background until we made it to the subsequent floor.

I don't think it's quite the commercial exchange Chairman Mao had in mind when designing his China. But despite a rocky and mildly traumatizing end to our time in Beijing, we were satisfied with our finds from the Silk Market. As we left, we walked by a green tea store offering us some discounts. When we politely but firmly turned down the clerk's offer, he remarked.

"OK sir. Well, good trip and good health to you then."

If only it were always that easy.

Follow Alex Castillo on Twitter.

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Lisa

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Lisa has been affected by depression since she was a teenager. She's been diagnosed with anxiety, bipolar disorder, and obsessive compulsive disorder, and has attempted suicide several times.

Brought up as a boy in Zimbabwe, Lisa began dressing in drag in her 20s. She was arrested and put in prison for six weeks before being subjected to electric shock treatment as a "cure." After being deported from Zimbabwe, Lisa came to live in England, where she went through gender reassignment. This—coupled with her mental health problems, Lisa believes—was simply too much for mainstream therapists to cope with.

"They just don't know how to manage my situation," Lisa says. "I am quite a masculine person from Africa, who's six foot four. I am transgender and I stand out. I've had very unique experiences and they don't know how to deal with that."

Kerry has depression and anxiety and, at 17, was referred for therapy, feeling suicidal. The fact that she, like Lisa, is genderqueer and pansexual—though these aren't labels they would have used as teenagers—was not the issue. Kerry's therapist, however, had different ideas.

"For some reason, this male psychiatrist latched onto me mentioning I was gay, not the part where I was expressing how I'd been bullied by students and teachers," Kerry says. "He went on to tell me that, 'When you find a man, get married, get a house and a job everything will be fine.' I think sexuality and gender become the scapegoat when not understood correctly."

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Kerry

Since I began researching this feature, I've come across many stories like Kerry's and Lisa's. If gender and sexuality are myriad, so too are ways of misunderstanding them. However, one thing seems certain: Trusting every therapist to be knowledgeable about these issues is a mistake.

"We know that LGBT people are more likely than the wider population to experience suicidal feelings, self-harm, and mental health problems such as depression and anxiety," says Geoff Heyes, policy and campaigns manager at mental health charity Mind. "Despite this, there's still a lack of local services which successfully cater to their needs."

Just this January, the UK Council for Psychotherapy and the Department of Health brought together 14 organizations to sign a Memorandum of Understanding promising to end the practice of conversion therapy (any type of talking therapy which attempts to change sexual orientation). It seems staggering that such an agreement was still needed at the beginning of 2015, and critics have pointed out that the memorandum has a major omission: it fails to mention therapies aimed at converting transgender people back to their birth gender.

While outright "trying to talk someone out of being gay" is now rare in the UK, a kind of conversion therapy–lite still seems to exist, especially at the margins of gender and sexual diversities. I heard stories of people whose therapist refused to acknowledge their gender; people whose kink so horrified their therapist it became the focus of all subsequent sessions. A sex worker told me her therapist implied that she must have been abused to take up such work; a lesbian woman was asked if she'd consider a heterosexual relationship.

In response to clear need, specialist services have sprung into action, promising access to therapists who won't try to convert you, turn your sexuality into a massive pathology, or simply look bewildered.

Pink Therapy caters to people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender and others who are gender or sexually diverse. Under this umbrella fall people who are asexual, celibate, polyamorous, non-monogamous, those involved in BDSM or kink, and anyone on the gender spectrum.

"I've no idea how anyone could ever think that mainstream therapists are neutral around gender and sexuality," says Pink Therapy CEO, Dominic Davies. "Some are positive and affirming, some are well informed and others bear the same kind of prejudices as anyone raised in a heteronormative society where they've not had to question and deconstruct their assumptions."

Like the rest of us, therapists are a product of their environment, so of course they bring a particular worldview to their practice—more than ever, perhaps, in the fraught realms of gender and sexuality. In an ideal scenario, these assumptions will be examined during training, but with sex and gender diversities barely covered in standard courses, prejudices endure into careers and, somewhere along the line, rear up to slap clients in the face.

"My therapist couldn't understand why anyone—particularly someone with mental health issues—would voluntarily enter into a poly relationship," says Jodie. "She totally didn't get any of the pluses of polyamory. She asked directly if I'd tried being in a monogamous relationship, which was insulting as I'd often talked of the years I spent forcing myself into monogamous, heterosexual relationships. None of those went well or were fulfilling or healthy relationships."

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Meg John Barker (Screen shot via)

Psychologist, author, and lecturer Meg John Barker is part of London Sex and Relationships Therapy, a group of therapists who specialize in gender and sexual diversity. Barker believes that mainstream therapists have a long way to go, particularly in understanding those who don't fit into a tidy man/woman gender binary.

"Many of the therapy trainings still include nothing on gender, or even explicitly teach that gender is binary and that any other experience is pathological," Barker says.

"I've heard from both bisexual and non-binary people that therapists have tried to change them to be 'one thing or the other.' Many therapists have issues with people who engage in behaviors that are considered 'gender non-normative,' particularly people they perceive as 'men' wearing 'women's clothes.'"

It's the same story in the world of kink. If your bedroom repertoire extends much beyond a pair of fluffy handcuffs, you might be interested to know that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders classifies a significant proportion of kink as "paraphilia"—i.e "weirdo stuff"—meaning your spanking session is viewed as a pathology. The manual was updated in 2013 (DSM-5) and now only "paraphilia" that causes mental distress is singled out as needing fixing, but the category itself still exists.

Paul (not his real name) is into what he considers a "normal" level of BDSM. He likes role play, a bit of bondage, and being sexually dominant. Not enough, he says, to put himself in a special category or seek out a specialist therapist.

"It's not any more than I thought everyone was doing," he says. "But last year a therapist told me my 'sexual practices' were wrong and needed curing. I'd just come out of a relationship and she said a lot of what was wrong with me mentally was because of my sexual actions."

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A reenactment of someone having therapy (Photo by Samantha Evans)

It's clearly unhelpful for a therapist to insist that every problem must be related to a client's sexuality or gender. There may be a correlation, there may not. Like the next person, people who are trans, or poly, or kinky are subject to being fucked up by all manner of life events, not to mention plain old brain chemistry (depression, for instance).

Likewise, there's a difference between being fucked up by society's perceptions of you (stigma) and being fucked up by your "difference" itself. In many cases, it's dealing with an onslaught of negative reactions that's the problem.

"For the majority of non-binary folk, gender has got nothing to do with the issues they come to therapy with," Barker says. "However, due to the discrimination and invisibility that non-binary people experience, they do currently face higher levels of mental health difficulties than binary gender folk. This means it may be relevant to discuss these matters in therapy. In either case, it's useful to have a therapist who's clued up about non-binary gender."

And if you think being in a sexual minority is hard, try being from an ethnic minority at the same time. Brace yourself for a therapist who breaks into panic sweats at the merest mention of kink.

"We make assumptions that people from other cultural, ethnic, and religious backgrounds aren't kinky, non-monogamous or queer," says psychotherapist Ronete Cohen. "In my experience, nothing is further from the truth. But it can be even more difficult to find a therapist, since the few sex-positive therapists around won't necessarily be knowledgeable about your cultural background. There is a real mismatch: the advice white, Western therapists give won't be appropriate for your needs, while the likelihood of finding a suitably aware therapist within your community is very small."

"You can go deep into long-term psychotherapy training but learn nothing much about working with gender and sexual diversities." –Tania Glyde

Tania Glyde is a therapist and author with an interest in sexual diversities. She says it's partly lack of affordable training that's leaving therapists unable to cope with anything apart from the most meat and potatoes version of gender or sexuality.

"You can go deep into long-term psychotherapy training but learn nothing much about working with gender and sexual diversities," Glyde says. "One of the biggest roadblocks to change is money. Training costs a fortune, and this excludes a number of people and makes the population of people who qualify very homogenous. This applies to race, ethnicity, and class, and also to those who are gender or sexually diverse."

We're lucky to have the services that cater to the UK's soaring rate of mental health issues, and should be grateful to those who work in them. But these services are among the gatekeepers of "normality;" this is the place you go at your most vulnerable, trusting you'll get your head together enough to carry on with life. It's vital, then, that understandings of normality are wide enough to encompass everyone.

It would be hard to argue that the patriarchal, heteronormative society we live in is working for everyone, and those who chip away at its rigid boundaries should be supported.

Follow Frankie on Twitter.

Kerry finally received help through an LGBT charity and is now training to be a therapist themself. Lisa has also accessed psychotherapy and says she has turned her life around. She's volunteering at Mind in Springfield.

If you need a therapist who understands gender or sexual diversity try Gender Spectrum or Gay Alliance.

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For all those who have semi-jokingly suggested historians will comb our Gmail accounts for wisdom and gossip after we die, there is, as always, an app. Founded in 2010 as "the place to render your communications eternal," Memeoirs is a startup company that converts users' emails, Facebook chats, and WhatsApp messages into a "beautiful book" that will immortalize your typos (and, many would say, devalue the written word) in a few easy steps. You specify the contact(s), the time frame, and cover, and Memeoirs does the rest: puts it into chronological order, deletes redundant content like your quirky recurring signature, and even divides your messages into chapters based on—aw—the season of the year.

The upcoming publication of I'm Very into You: Correspondence 1995-1996 seems like the highbrow version of the impulse that has given us Memeoirs, though the former probably has more insight and gossip than the majority of the output from the latter. A 117-page email correspondence between the experimental-slash-postmodern-slash-feminist-slash-queer American writer Kathy Acker and Australian media theorist-slash-public intellectual McKenzie (Ken) Wark, I'm Very into You is not just any book of emails, slung together for novelty or keepsake; it's a book of love emails, exchanged with several-times-daily intensity in the two weeks following Acker's brief visit to Sydney, where she and Wark had what sounds like a touching, powerful, and deeply confusing fling.

It's a weird book, also touching and confusing, and of course it feels voyeuristic, even if you ignore the sex talk, of which there is some. In his introduction, the writer/artist/critic Matias Viegener—who wrote the introduction and also appears as a friend and kind of character in Acker's emails—doubts whether it should have been published at all. "Initially very enthusiastic," Viegener says of the respected novelist he asked to write a preface, "on closer reading the novelist found the letters too personal. In declining, the novelist said it felt too much like rooting around in someone's underwear drawer."

Ultimately, obviously, Viegener goes ahead, deciding that the personal nature of the book is in keeping with the personal natures of Kathy Acker and Ken Wark. Indeed, that's part of the reason this book is so weird: Most works involving either writer are weird; their reputations precede them, both within their encounter and in this book. Acker was a real fucking punk, influenced as much by the underground sex and art scenes of New York and San Francisco in the 1970s and 1980s as by critical and French theory; she rode motorcycles and was fascinated with and covered in tattoos; her novels, plays, and artwork are dedicated to the brazen depiction of topics like incest, rape, and violence, plus stuff like gender-bending and queerness and sex-positivity that no longer terrorizes us enlightened Internet people of 2015, all in a boldfaced, antiestablishment style. When Ellen G. Friedman, interviewing Acker for the Review of Contemporary Fiction in 1989, asked her, "Are you a bad writer purposefully?" Acker replied, "Yes, sure—'piss, fuck, shit' scrawled over a page—sure, of course. This appalls the literary establishment." My favorite Acker quotes come from the interview she did with Mark Magill for Bomb magazine. He asks her, "Why do you feel you are qualified to give this interview?," and she replies, "I want to fuck you, Mark." A radio producer once introduced her on his program as "the most evil person in the world."

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Kathy Acker. Photo credit: Michel Desol. Courtesy the artist

Wark was (and still is) a dynamic figure, too, but Acker, a likely candidate to follow Joan Didion and Susan Sontag as internet feminism's next pseudo-intellectual obsession, is far and away the book's headliner. I've never liked her work—actually, when I first picked up Blood and Guts in High School, her metafictional novel about a ten-year-old who has a sexual relationship with her father, becomes a prostitute, and ends up in Northern Africa in an abusive relationship with the French writer Jean Genet, I reacted with a swift "I fucking hate this." But pissing people off is a big part of the point, so I ultimately buy what she's theoretically selling; you don't have to like everything you respect.

...Except that over the course of this book, I think I did come to like her. I'm Very into You both reaffirms and undoes the popular image of Acker getting off on a motorcycle as she rides it into a drag fisting party; what emerges from her emails that's not as obvious in her work is a person, rather than a persona.

Why? Despite being sourced from the early days of the internet, when what was quintessentially email was still being defined, this book depicts an intimacy that is quintessentially email. (Acker: "MY phone just rang? Can my phone ring when I'm on this?") If I had to tell you honestly what it is I live for, it would probably be a toss-up between emails and sex, though I think what I like about both is similar: the anticipation, the unexpected joy at an unexpected response, the development of a closeness with another person as you gradually (or quickly, over the course of a couple of weeks) learn more and more about them. Viegener says, "To call [the emails] love letters would exaggerate their tenor and consequence, but there is an irresistible tug of seduction in them. Not love letters, but certainly letters of intention." This isn't Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller. "Love emails" doesn't have a ring to it, but that's what they are.

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Kathy Acker. Photo credit: Michel Desol. Courtesy the artist

These aren't your perfunctory It was great seeing you last week. Let me know when you're back in town! kinds of messages, though. They range from one line to hundreds of words and cover a wide array of subjects, from Baudrillard to gossip to Portishead to gender "slippage" to can we please clear up some mixed signals you gave me to Acker's fuck-these-games crescendo: "I do want to sleep with you again and wish we didn't have to hedge around (is that a phrase?) each other so much... I'm very into you." They're messy and often composed drunk but not totally unconsidered or uninhibited, given the amount of "hedg[ing] around" they engage in; there's room for "blabbing" about work to turn into a lengthy discussion of what the fuck sex is, exactly.

The Memeoirs promotional materials speak to this thing about email that makes it, as Viegener writes, "perhaps do best with crushes": The PR almost exclusively depicts couples. The homepage of the Memeoirs website features a video that will make all long-distance relationship graduates cringe: A sheepishly lip-biting Anaïs (yes) and lovingly warm-eyed Henry (I'm not kidding) drinking their respective hot drinks, performing their respective genders, typing away in their respective parts of the world, sad to be apart but happy to be at least cosmically together, knowing it will one day all be worth it when their wrinkled, as-in-love-as-ever hands get to hold a bound copy of the typoed sappy bullshit they emailed each other in the halcyon days of their coupledom before Henry realized Anais does actually fart sometimes.

This is not and was never going to be the fate that awaited Acker and Wark, who would make a bizarre but very entertaining pair for a promotional video—not least because at the time they were writing they had funny haircuts, multiple lovers of different genders, and Wark was 34 and Acker 48. There's also no happy ending or growing old together. Rather, the narrative that emerges is that of a fierce and intense relationship that's over as quickly as it began: The emails stop after two weeks, when Wark visits Acker in San Francisco on a brief stopover on his way to Vancouver; she sends one message six months later; and then a little less than two years after that she dies of breast cancer complications in an alternative treatment facility in Tijuana.

---

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Kathy Acker sketch/holograph to Ken Wark's copy of 'Pussy, King of the Pirates.' Courtesy of the owner

Wark initiated the correspondence after driving back from (presumably) dropping Acker off at the airport. He writes that he's "in a daze," alludes to a previous in-person conversation about books, and then drops a paragraph full of feelings that would surely be classified as "coming on way too strong" by all the world's emotophobes:

...The shared intimacies of the body, mind and spirit: it's such a fleeting thing, so singular. I think we're both probably pretty solitary in our own ways, but for a slice out of time we were singular together. There are no words. I just want to say there are no words. I'm glad you came; and I'm glad you came. Thinking about you sleeping on a plane with those knockout herbal sleep-bombs of yours. Bear with me. I'll have something to say for myself sometime soon. When I remember who I thought I was in the first place. Even if I've been displaced a little from wherever that I was.

This is the kind of thing we want when we click on one of Maria Popova's endless links to literary love letters from history: sappy bullshit, done poetically, and it's a bonus if there's a tragic ending. In turn, Acker, the woman who will later tell Wark she is experimenting with "how you can piss and come at the same time," receives this lovely sentiment with an excitement that is positively tender: "It's so great coming home to your message... what becomes/became present was how easy it is to be with you. Like: you the one I want/wanted to talk to."

Although Acker's novels are full of emotion, there she wields it like a weapon; here she has to claim it, and that makes her endearingly flustered. She says she's "not good at saying things emotionally"—she "just get[s] awkward"—and her email, so suited is the form to crushes, makes this very clear. Crushes are all about vulnerability—they're an embarrassment of emotion—and what most people understand Acker to be is completely counter to that. Acker's confidence in discussing Georges Bataille and scrawl[ing] "piss, fuck, shit" all over the page dissolves into insecurities that will be familiar to anyone who has slept with a person they actually like. At one point Acker confesses that she "didn't want to bug" Wark but nevertheless has some burning questions—as long as her asking them won't jeopardize their friendship, which she repeatedly notes she values and has been "working hard for":

1. The last night we slept together, why didn't you want to touch me?" (You don't have to answer this one. I've thought of all sorts of possible answers and they run the gamut from understand even cool to awful....

2. How should I have acted? Ignored you? Held you? I didn't have a clue and I was scared to do the wrong thing.

Avant-garde intellectuals—they're just like us! Acker moves on to the juicy stuff—"What do you like best sexually?", "What turns you on in women when you're in bed with one?", "How to give the best blowjobs?"—and then ends this message (after a brief explainer on Blanchot) with a self-conscious shield against rejection, also very familiar: "You'll probably hate me after all these questions anyway."

It feels petty to ascribe so much significance to a form of writing we often produce automatically, without much thought, but that's exactly why this book is so personal—emails contain the breadth of the automatic and the depth of the confidential (and they're often composed when you're vulnerable, drunk). I've not yet enjoyed a relationship in which I gave myself over to the sharing of Gmail passwords—and I don't know if that's something anyone does—but it seems like the final frontier of closeness. Until then, I guess I have a crush on Kathy Acker. I'm Very into You disrupted all my dismissive notions of her as a necessarily inflammatory radical who just wasn't my thing and made me feel like I was understanding something beyond her public persona. Unfiltered access to Acker's emails, even—or perhaps especially—this small sample, fabricates a relationship with her that's very weird, but only because it's a pretty normal thing we all go through, liking someone more as we get to know them. Of course Wark didn't hate her after all those questions. I don't see how anyone could.

Follow Lauren on Twitter.

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Photo courtesy of Veronica Nizama

Bailey Nizama is gone but not forgotten. Her ashes are in a box that's decorated with a depiction of her wiggling down a rainbow road in the clouds toward whatever guardian keeps ferrets' souls. Nuestra hijita, hermana, the tribute reads. Our sister, our daughter. The box is kept in the living room of Bailey's successors, Nacho and Watson, who spend their days happily chattering—or "dooking"— rolling around the floor, burrowing inside couches, and scaling the walls.

"I feel like they have the best of cats and dogs," Veronica Nizama, their owner, coos.

Technically, she is breaking the law. Nacho, Watson, and Bailey are all illegal residents of New York City, where a ban on ferrets has persisted for decades. That means Nizama, a 28-year-old with an asymmetrical haircut and a Zelda obsession, can't exactly take her beloved boys out in public.

For the past three years, she's worked tirelessly to lift the ban. Nizama and the hundreds of ferret owners in New York City got their biggest break yet when the Board of Health agreed to reconsider the ban last week. But after the big buildup came a devastating letdown. Although the Board voted 3-2 in favor of allowing ferrets, six votes were needed for passage. The fact that four members abstained is a sticking point for Nizama.

"You don't want to think that government is lazy and that your crazy Republican uncle is right," she says. "But then something like this happens."

Ferrets were first banned from New York City in 1959, under the city's health code provision about owning "wild" animals. In 1999, the Board of Health went over the list of prohibited critters and decided to keep ferrets on there, citing their "unpredictable behavior" and attacks that have "become notorious for their severity and capriciousness." Fearing that a ferret could crawl into another apartment and eat a baby's face, the board concluded, "It would be irresponsible from a public safety perspective to allow a ferret to be kept as a pet in New York City."

About a month after that decision, on July 23, a ferret-rights activist named David Guthartz called into the mayor's weekly radio show the confront him about the ban. It caused Giuliani to go into a now-infamous rant. "There is something deranged about you," the mayor told Guthartz. "The excessive concern that you have for ferrets is something that you should examine with a therapist." And throughout his tenure as mayor, Giuliani kept his hardline anti-ferret stance. In 2001, the New York City Counsel voted 26 to 13 to end the ban, only for him to veto the measure. (Guthartz, who isn't affiliated with Nizama's effort to legalize ferrets, was opposed to the bill the Board of Health shot down.)

"You don't want to think that government is lazy and that your crazy Republican uncle is right... But then something like this happens." –Veronica Nizama

New York City is far from alone in its disgust with the weasel-like creatures. They're also considered samizdat in Hawaii, California, Puerto Rico, Guam, Salt Lake City, and Washington, DC, among other locales. But even in jurisdictions where ferrets are allowed, their owners are often stereotyped as being smelly, eccentric hoarders, possibly because of their pets' odd, long bodies and musky scent.

Growing up in Miami, Nizama never imagined that a ferret could be so political. In her city of origin it's the pit bull that causes public hysteria. Since 1989, when one ripped off the face of an eight-year-old girl, the breed has been banned within county lines. Pretty much ever since, advocates have argued that pit bulls are only as dangerous as their owners, and that the ban itself is classist, since people from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds tend to own them.

But none of this ever affected Nizama growing up. She wanted a ferret like her childhood friend had. So she bought one for herself, and when she relocated to New York, she didn't pay the ban much mind. "It's not illegal for vets to look at ferrets," she explains. "It's pretty easy to get around the law." Even when she wanted to get a second one, all she had to do was call a pet store in Long Island, just outside NYC city limits.

In 2012, she formed the Ferret Club of New York City and started flyering pet shop bulletin boards. She quickly found a compatriot in Isis Vera, who got into ferrets growing up when her father's coworker's daughter didn't want hers anymore. "And from there, one ferret became two ferrets, and then when I went to college I became the ferret person," Vera told me

Vera and Nizama were bolstered by the promise of new mayor Bill de Blasio, who many thought would be on the side of the nonhuman animals. During his campaign, he vowed to end carriage rides in Central Park, a cause backed by some animal rights supporters. Friends of Animals, an international advocacy group, called him "NYC's First Mayor for Animal Rights." And last year, the New York Times reported that a repeal of the ferret ban seemed imminent under his leadership.

But old arguments—and what some would call prejudices—began to complicate things. Much like pit bulls in Nizama's native Miami, ferrets have become associated with violence toward children. In 2011, for instance, a ferret ate seven of a baby's fingers in Missouri. And in January, one ate a baby's nose outside of Philadelphia. "The parents, I believe, have problems," the local police chief told he the Delaware County News at the time. "They can't take care of these kids."

"I'm not at all convinced that it wouldn't be a substantial health risk to allow ferret ownership in New York City." – Dr. Lynn Richardson

No matter whether it was human or beast at fault, it seems like the Board of Health was influenced in part of these grisly media accounts. The argument against them was focused on the animals' "unique skeletal structure," which would allow them to escape from apartments and—presumably—eat a baby's face.

"I have to say that, at this point, I'm not at all convinced that it wouldn't be a substantial health risk to allow ferret ownership in New York City," Dr. Lynn Richardson, a member of the Board of Health, concluded last week.

Nizama says this line of reasoning is ridiculous. Holding up a toy that her ferrets like to burrow inside of, she shows how big an opening there would have to be to facilitate an escape. "You'd have to have a really fucking large hole in your house [for a ferret to get through]," she says. "You'd have bigger problems than ferrets at that point."

To vent, Nizama is planning a bit of rebellious fun. Today she's having a St. Patrick's Day celebration at which people will bring their ferrets from all over the city to socialize. But after the party's over, it's right back to organizing an appeal for next year. There are about 400 members of the Ferret Association of New York, and none of them takes the issue lightly.

"We want to go to Central Park with our ferrets, we want to go to Coney Island and bring them to the beach," says Vera. "We just want some peace of mind in owning ferrets."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

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Photo via Flickr user k4dordy

Last week, the crew running the Fort Greene housing projects across the street from me asked if I knew a guy named Paddy Irish.

Of course I did; he's a jailhouse celebrity. Paddy was born into the Westies, an Irish-American gang from Manhattan's Hell Kitchen, a neighborhood real estate agents have almost succeeded in renaming "Clinton." He went to prison as a kid with a murder conviction, the standard 25 years to life.

By the time I met him in 2004 he had 20 in and lights out—which is to say he was never going to be released. Living up to the Westie reputation for violence, he had killed three additional people over the two decades he'd spent inside. The jail bodies, as they're called, upped his bid to 100 to life. He would have to live a long, long time to see a parole board. Paddy wasn't counting on it. Besides, he smoked. Accepting his fate stoically, he enjoyed the boons of his notoriety and treated me well.

I spent three Saint Patrick's Days with him.

Back in 2004, when I arrived at Green Haven, a maximum-security state prison about 70 miles north of New York City, I was quite green myself. Despite having committed armed robbery, it was immediately clear to the cops, the crooks, and myself that I didn't exactly belong. But while I may not have fit in, I did hail from an immigrant family and knew right away to find a niche. Adaptation was the key; my six-member clan left the Soviet Union in 1977, each person only allowed to bring $30 with them. Having learned new ways and prospered, they spend that on lunch now. Adaptation is humankind's strength, an immigrant's hope, and a prisoner's salvation.

It was Correctional Officer O'Something who first frisked me, and the notorious Paddy Irish who welcomed me into the yard. I suspected the prison guard was following a family trade, and Paddy Irish certainly claimed he was. Today Hell's Kitchen features residential towers that boast spiffy views of the Hudson River, but in Paddy's lawless youth it was defined by the tales of criminal legends like Mickey Spillane and Eddie the Butcher. Irish-American criminal culture has venerable roots; the specter of the 19th-century underworld that turned into Scorsese's Gangs of New York (which is based on Herbert Asbury's old book of that name) lingers to this day. The Departed did a lot for Boston's notoriety by elevating Whitey Bulger as a national figure, but New York's Westies held their own in the streets and onscreen as the Irish Mob. Every single O'Convict with aspirations to a reputation in prison invented some connection to them.

Of course, it was just as likely that they were related to an O'Copper. Law enforcement today isn't quite the same kind of ethnic club it once was, at least in big cities like New York, but the consequences of that legacy persist in prison. Holidays for state inmates mean an (unpaid) day off work and a special meal. There are a few major festivals with unique dishes, while the rest get a standard holiday tray. When I was inside, Presidents' Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Columbus Day and Veterans Day were each celebrated with two hot dogs and two hamburgers per prisoner. New Year's Day was chicken breast, Thanksgiving was turkey roll, and Christmas featured roast beef.

But there was an additional once-a-year meal at the top level, at least in New York State: corned beef and cabbage on St. Patrick's Day. The annual slice of Ireland was good, but there weren't even dogs and burgers for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, a slight grumbled about annually by the mostly minority prisoner population. The chow hall was where holidays were used to declare authority. Authorities let the inmates know what they thought of civil rights by ignoring MLK Day, the Irish legacy in law enforcement announced itself with a Christmas-grade meal on St. Patrick's Day, and even the convicts had a special day, on September 13, when we ate nothing at all. (That's when cons mark the anniversary of the 1971 Attica riots by taking their trays and silently abstaining from a single bite. Sometimes the guards even switched around the menu to make sure it was chicken day, everyone's favorite, but in the maxes—maximum-security facilities—this ritual was respected.)

In the medium-security joints, I found myself to be the one explaining Attica day to some of the inmates. Most of the men I described it to were unconvinced, but every convict who had come down from a max participated. On St. Patrick's, so close to the ignored birthday of MLK, no one boycotted the food, although I was one of the few who ate the cabbage.

The prison yard of my first big house was divided into courts, about 20 squares that were fenced by invisible lines. Each had weightlifting equipment and a table. Joining a court meant much more than a place to lift; it was your base, your association, and your protection. The borders separating courts were crossed either by invitation or provocation; spitting on the Italian court got my bunkie, the son of a "made man," stabbed through the mouth ten feet away from me. That was my first summer.

Gangs like the Bloods and Latin Kings each had a court, and there was a Christian one that did not require "clean" paperwork to join. (The others demanded documentation clearing you of being a sex offender or informant.) Many courts were ethnic strongholds—the "guineas'" plot was foggy with cigars, while the Jamaicans worked out in a different kind of smoke. There was even an "Asian" court, where Koreans, Chinese and one Japanese sadist were lumped together. The Dominican court featured fried patties and heroin for sale.

Of course, there wasn't one for Jews, or Russians, or NYU alumni—clubs that I could conceivably claim membership in. But the Irish took me in.

I was a member of their court for four years. We exercised and had parties and told endless lies to each other, but it wasn't all bullshit. I had to participate in the court's defense and once spent an afternoon wielding a scalpel with magazines taped around my torso. (Nothing happened, thank God.) I was not the only foreigner—a Colombian biker was a member, and so was a one-armed wino named Bum who told grotesque sex stories about his stump.

Maybe because the Irish have a lengthy history on both sides of the law in America, their court was the most inclusive; it even had a place for me. You might expect that kindness to have weakened our reputation, but instead the Irish court was admired for not being xenophobic. And it didn't hurt to have the notorious murderer Paddy Irish ruling from his throne on the incline press. On St. Patrick's Day, the custom was to wear green and bring snacks. I did both for three years running along with the rest of the court.

They say everyone's Irish on March 17, but for the first third of my sentence, it was Saint Paddy's every single day.

Follow Daniel Genis on Twitter.

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Nigel Farage. Photo by the author

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Yesterday, Nigel Farage announced that if he doesn't get elected in Thanet, he'll stand down as UKIP leader. Not winning would be "curtains" for him, he said, as Question Time schedulers hyperventilated. But how likely is that to happen, really? And if it did happen, would it be that big a deal? Surely UKIP is bigger than one man balancing a pint on his head and smoking cigs like some kind of depressing seal? I asked Eric Kaufmann, Professor of politics at Birkbeck University in London and an expert in white working-class responses to diversity in the UK, what he reckons Farage's statement means for the party.

VICE: First things first. Nigel only said he'd stand down if he loses. What are the chances of Nigel winning his Thanet seat?
Eric Kaufmann: The chances are high, he's been polling very well there, it's one of the most favorable seats for UKIP and he's the favorite.

OK, so what's really at play here? Could this be some sort of attempt to shift the focus away from him?
I think he would like the party to be stable and resilient—to not to rely on his leadership, and a lot of people would like that too. The jury is still out, but I think he's trying to prove the party isn't reliant on him, but to me and many others, it looks like they may well be.

How important is Nigel Farage to UKIP?
He's very important. A lot of the thinking on the popular right suggests that these parties will ebb and flow based on leadership, because they don't have the traditions and branch structures of more established parties. They don't have the institutional establishment that they often bemoan.

A leadership change means that such a party may struggle to keep support at current levels, as it's tied to a charismatic leader. Parties like UKIP are much more vulnerable [to leadership change].

What would the consequences be if he stood down for the party? Is UKIP bigger than Nige?
It would be difficult. A large part of their brand is tied to his image. Of course, the sentiment of less immigration, less ethnic shifting and the UK leaving Europe is solid and will remain regardless. But even with that, you need a figurehead for support to gather around.

There would be a vacuum without Farage, and they would need a credible alternative who could make a connection with voters. People identify Nigel as expressing who they are—the bloke down at the pub. You may not get that with another figure.

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A UKIP voter in Clacton showing his support for Douglas Carswell before he was elected as the first UKIP MP. Photo by Oscar Webb.

Who would be the most likely replacement for him?
If you think of charismatic figures with heft, Douglas Carswell is definitely one of them. Their issue would be that he's more on the liberal wing of the party, more motivated by political reform than other issues. Don't get me wrong, he is set on getting out of Europe, but he may alienate other members of the party. Nobody else comes to mind.

What about Mark Reckless, the other UKIP MP?
He's generally seen as more lightweight; Carswell is seen as more talented.

Have other European right-wing parties had a problem when a leader has left the scene?
Yes, Jorg Heider was the leader of the FPO, the Austrian Freedom Party, and their splinter groups on the far-right in Austria. [When he died in 2008] it was a blow and support declined without their well-known and charismatic leader.

In France however, Marine Le Pen has managed to craft a new brand that binds it with the party and core supporters, after her father [and former FN leader] Jean-Marie stood down, and the party is still extremely popular.

It comes down to the way that leader connects to the electorate, and how they unite competing factions within the party. Far-right movements have often been subjected to splits when there is a vacuum in the centre, dating back to the 1920's KKK, collapsing from millions of members to just a few thousand in the space of a decade.

Sudden drops in support do happen. But, with UKIP, there is a lightning rod of support on the key issues, but that will need a vehicle, a popular leader to take them forward.

If we assume that Nige stepping down would be catastrophic for UKIP and they started shedding support, what would that mean for UK politics in a wider sense?
Well I think right now UKIP draw disproportionately on Conservative voters, notably their working-class supporters, who switched from Tony Blair by the late 1990s and early 2000s. These voters are motivated by issues of immigration and Europe, so support wouldn't end up in left-wing parties.

Some may come back to the Tories and others may not vote. To the extent that UKIP is weaker, it will help the Tories. There doesn't seem to be a huge reservoir of Labour support according to my research. There is some, but less than people seem to be suggesting.

How significant would that swing back to the Tories be? Hypothetically, if Nigel Farage quit, and that meant UKIP were no longer popular, would it be enough to change the outcome of an election?
Hypothetically, if UKIP were to collapse before election day this year, then it would mean a Tory win. The only reason that the Tories aren't well ahead now is that UKIP have split the right. UKIP are helping Labour get a foot in the door.

Follow Mike on Twitter.

Christianity has been around for a while now, and every musician from Kanye to Justice have dipped into its well to appropriate a symbol or two—but that hasn't diminished the strength of Christian iconography. Father Murphy, an occult-influenced psychedelic project from Italy, understands the lasting power of Christian symbology, and their new video animates a graphic crucifixion scene with strange and crafty stop-motion animation. The video's song is repetitive, intense, and entrancing—it's off the band's upcoming album, Croce, which you should immediately buy and listen to. It's hard not to love a band that lists its genre as "Italian Occult Psychedelia."

Buy Croce via The Flenser.