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What We Talk About When We Talk About Porn

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It was obvious we were watching pornography. Even on the other side of the heavy wooden door you could hear those telltale soft, urgent grunts, the wet noise of skin slapping skin. A student knocked, then stuck her head in. "I'm so sorry to interrupt," she offered, beet-red and clearly embarrassed, "but could you please turn that down?"

It was my freshman year at the University of Pennsylvania and my classroom—where Deep Throat was blaring from a big screen—stood adjacent to a room where a group of writing tutors met weekly to workshop other students' essays. Those tutors knocked on the door many times over the course of that semester, because there they were every Wednesday, and every Wednesday, we watched porn.

So when I heard about Christian Graugaard, a professor in Denmark who said that " porn belongs in the classroom," I found myself nodding along. Of course students should watch people have sex on camera in an academic setting—how else are they going to learn about porn?

Obviously, it's a lot more complicated—and controversial—than I'm making it out to be. A few years ago, a professor at Appalachian State University was quietly placed on leave after screening The Price of Pleasure in a sociology class (that's not even porn, by the way; it's a documentary that's critical of porn). You can barely let the word pornography escape from your lips before people are shouting about how the very concept is coercive, how it's demeaning to women, how it's the source of all the awful sex in the world today. It's already bad enough that teenagers spend all their free time jacking off to the stuff; why bring it into school?

When I reached out to Debby Herbenick, an associate professor at Indiana University and the author of dozens of books about sexuality, she seemed kind of put off by the whole thing. "I don't believe that porn needs to be shown to teenagers in school-based sex education," she said.

But the truth is, there's so much more to pornography than just tits and ass, and to suggest as much is reductive. Just look to the burgeoning academic field of "porn studies" and the PhD holders who are treating dirty movies seriously.

Shira Tarrant is one of those people. She recently co-wrote New Views on Pornography, a book that dissects the debates and empirical research about porn; she also teaches a class about pop culture at Cal State Long Beach, where—surprise—she and her students use porn as a launching point to talk about culture.

"There's a lot of moral panic around [pornography]," she said. Porn has been around for as long as images have existed, and yet the debates about pornography are retrograde: Is porn good? Is porn bad? We're only beginning to move past that. "Just last year, Routledge started publishing an academic journal called 'Porn Studies,'" Tarrant told me. "I hope what's happening now pushes porn past the stalemates."

The journal publishes studies about history and culture, studies about the politics of pleasure, studies about trends in porn consumption, and more. The point of all this is that there's a lot more going on than two (or more) naked bodies getting down to business.

I learned that during my freshman year of college, when I signed up for what I thought was a creative writing class—though, actually, it was called " Uncreative Writing" and taught by experimental writing guru Kenny Goldsmith. Instead of getting to work on essays or short stories, however, we dived into erotica. We watched Deep Throat, in its entirety, twice. We pulled porn clips from the 70s and compared them to videos we found on XTube. We watched Andy Warhol's Blowjob, and then we wrote about it as if we were composing a police report: Man fidgets. Makes eye contact and then averts eyes uncomfortably. Looks toward ceiling. Closes eyes and tilts head back, exhaling. Opens eyes and rolls them around.

I'm going to be honest: That class was really fucking weird. During the first few weeks, when the freshman boys who lived on my hall found out that my homework involved watching porn, they giggled a lot and asked me, "So, wait, what are you supposed to be learning?" I stared at them blankly and shrugged, universal teenager for "I don't really have the tools to talk about this."

But after a few classes, I learned to divorce the material from its sexually gratuitous nature and I discovered that through pornography, you can pretty much talk about anything. Our class had discussions about race and gender and representation; there were conversations about power, about protection, about figuring out what turns you on. Topics like the evolution of pubic hair and breasts in pornography led to discussions about culture, politics, and identity. Porn wasn't just a way for us to learn about the mechanics and expectations of sex; it was a lens that allowed us to view the entire world. It also gave us a lens to view porn.

When Christian Graugaard spoke with VICE News about his proposal to incorporate pornography into Danish classrooms, he said what I already knew: It's not the images that are important, it's the conversations that spring up around them. Even softcore pornographic images "may generate valuable discussions about the diversity of eroticism and even raise issues such as personal integrity, gender equality, human rights, and 'safer sex.'" And of course, that's exactly the point: There is good porn and bad porn and plenty in between, but none of that matters if we're not talking about it.

Obviously, porn doesn't have a place in every classroom ("Today's lesson is on string theory... but first, here's a clip of Stoya getting pounded in the ass") but there are certainly settings where talking about these videos and images in a critical setting can be eye-opening. People are going to be watching porn anyway, they might as well be able to think and talk about it in a serious way.

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.


VICE and Nick Cave Are Teaming Up for the Release of His New Book

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VICE is ecstatic to announce a partnership with Nick Cave around the release of his new book, The Sick Bag Song.

The book was written by Cave as he and the Bad Seeds undertook a mammoth tour of 22 cities across America last year, and in it you can feel all the exhaustion, romantic longing, musings, memories, and moments of significance such a marathon entails. It takes its name from the fact it was scrawled by Cave on airline sick bags as he and his band criss-crossed the United States and falls, he says, somewhere between The Wasteland and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

The first part of the partnership will be an exclusive interview with Cave as part of our VICE Meets series, which will air next Friday, March 27, right here at VICE.com.

The book will be available exclusively from thesickbagsong.com, in all kinds of special editions and formats. Stay tuned for more news.

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Photo of Nick Cave by Cat Stevens

Cry-Baby of the Week: A Guy Allegedly Shot Someone for Bringing Him the Wrong Brand of Beer

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It's time, once again, to marvel at some idiots who don't know how to handle the world:

Cry-Baby #1: Clarence Sturdivant

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Screencap via Google Maps

The incident: A guy brought his friend the wrong brand of beer.

The appropriate response: Saying nothing and drinking it, or going and fetching yourself a new beer, depending on how much you dislike the brand.

The actual response: He allegedly shot the friend.

Last Saturday 64-year-old Clarence Sturdivant was hanging out with his 66-year-old neighbor, Walter Merrick, in the parking lot of their apartment complex in Harvey, Louisiana.

According to police, Clarence asked Harvey to get him a beer, which Harvey did, going to his apartment and fetching him a can of Busch.

Clarence was reportedly not too happy with this choice of beer, and told Harvey that he wanted Budweiser—his preferred brand.

This disagreement turned into an argument, during which, police say, Clarence took out a shotgun and shot his friend before fleeing the scene.

Harvey was struck by shotgun pellets in the arm and chest. His injuries are not life-threatening.

Police tracked Clarence down a short while after and arrested him. He denied Walter's version of events, claiming that, though they had argued over beer, he fired in self-defense after having a gun pulled on him first.

According to a report on Nola.com, despite no weapon being found on him, Harvey was issued a citation for aggravated assault. There's no word on whether the men still consider themselves friends.

Cry-Baby #2: An unnamed Ohio woman

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Screencaps via Google Maps and ABC 22

The incident: Someone left a note on the windshield of a non-handicapped woman who was parked in a handicapped parking space.

The appropriate response: Not parking in the handicapped parking space if you don't need to.

The actual response: The owner of the car left a vicious note, calling the amputee a "cry baby one leg."

Twenty-six-year-old Ashley Brady of Miamisburg, Ohio, lost her right leg after an accident last year. She's learned to walk again with the use of a prosthetic, but she has trouble walking across the parking lot of her apartment complex due to snow and ice. "I fell multiple times all of which my neighbors have seen," she told ABC 22.

Because of this, Ashley's landlord created a handicapped parking space near the complex's entrance for her exclusive use.

"I finally get my handicapped parking spot last Thursday," Ashley said, "and then I come home on Saturday and they're parking in my parking spot."

After checking the car that was in her spot and seeing that it didn't have a handicapped tags, Ashley left a note for the owner. "I was stern and confident in what I was saying and just letting her know she doesn't know what its like to walk around without your own leg," said Ashley.

The next day, Ashley found a note on her car. It read:

Hey Handicap!, 1st never place your hands on my car again! 2nd honey you aint the only one with 'struggles' you want pity go to a one leg support group! You messed with the wrong one! I don't care what your note said shove it, but you touch my car again I will file a report, I am not playing! I let the office know the cry baby one leg touches my property I will cause trouble so go cry your struggles to someone who cares cause Im walking away with both mine!!!!!! -Bitch-

After finding the note, Ashley filed a report with the local police, and informed the manager of the apartment complex. "My brain just couldn't even process the level of mean that it was," she said.

The apartment complex says they have not yet decided what action to take against the tenant who left the note.

Which of these guys is the bigger cry-baby? Let us know in this poll down here:


Previously: A guy who sent a garbage man to jail for starting his shift early vs. a group of people who attacked the staff of a Chuck E. Cheese's over a broken photo booth

Winner: The garbage man guys!!!

Follow Jamie Lee Curtis Taete on Twitter.

VICE INTL: Russian Grave Robbers

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Thousands of soldiers were killed on the border of Germany and Russia during World War II, and many of their bodies were never found. Half a century later, a group of "black diggers" have come together to illegally unearth the remains of WWII soldiers and sell the military artifacts they find.

What I Learned from Giving Up Porn for a Month

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Illustrations by George Heaven

I remember the moment I figured it might be time to quit watching porn. Half of my Facebook friends were sharing this story, which links out to a bunch of tests that tell you whether the amount of jerking off at a screen you're doing is healthy. The lead image is an empty black leather couch in the middle of a room, facing a dark shiny desk. Sound familiar? If not, good for you. It rang some bells for me.

That couch is the first shot of many a porno. Generally, these videos tend to involve a woman walking in and sitting on the sofa, a seedy guy with a ponytail and big hands pretending to cast her for some photo shoot, her undressing, and the two of them eventually fucking over the desk. The article warned that if you immediately associated that black couch with porn you might have a problem.

I knew I had a problem.

Thing is, my problem wasn't that I was watching porn every day; it's that even if I wanted to I couldn't use my own brain to summon up fantasies. The internet was always right there, the sirens of PornHub singing their sweet song 24/7, lulling me in with their ballads of anal beads, BDSM, and bukkake. So why bother doing all the work myself?

At New Year's Eve, talking about resolutions, my friend Matteo said, "You know what? I'm going to stop watching porn for a while. I need to detox." He then told me that Milan—the city where we both live—has one of the highest per capita rates of porn consumption in Europe. The thought that I was contributing to this number—to this faceless army of fervent masturbators—was a uniquely depressing one.

"I'm going to stop, too," I said, with all the right intentions. The next day I watched some porn. However, when February rolled around I decided to start my mission in earnest.

I'd been watching porn on a very regular basis, clicking on RedTube or YouPorn or Tube8 most nights before going to sleep, or sometimes during the day if I was bored and felt like giving my wrist a bit of a workout. With that in mind, I assumed it would be hard to just cut myself off cold turkey, but for the first few days it was actually surprisingly easy. The closest thing I can equate it to is quitting smoking; not lighting up becomes a point of honor, a personal challenge, a battle you need to win in order to continue thinking of yourself as a decent human being.

This feeling—for the first couple of days, at least—was more pleasurable than the craving I'd decided to forego. I masturbated as I'd always done, and the novelty of using my mind again was exciting. I fantasized about ex-girlfriends and lovers and the things I'd always wanted to do but had been too shy to suggest. None of this was completely new, of course, but I'd never done it in such a systematic way. Now, every time I wanted to jerk off, I had to create a video of my own: concentrate, add details, flesh it out, give it a chronological order.

Feeling slightly self-righteous, I started to believe that the no-porn month laying ahead of me wasn't going to be so hard after all.

Turns out this confidence was premature.

The first—and most troubling—problem was my imagination. My fantasies quickly became repetitive: the same scenes, same places, same people, same bodies, same sex. I was unable to stretch my inventiveness any further than it had already been stretched. Each time I tried to expand on what I had, I fell back on what I already knew, like an old married couple going through the motions: lights off, missionary, leg cramp, a glass of water, silence.

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Ten days into the experiment I stopped masturbating. However, I did still feel the need to orgasm. I'd forced blue balls on myself because I didn't want to undergo the process to achieve the end result. I soon realized—and this might seem quite bleak and obvious, but until you've experienced it firsthand it's hard to empathize with the concept—that using your imagination can be a bit of a chore. A chore I wasn't used to anymore.

I realize how lazy this sounds: a man who literally cannot be bothered to summon up a mental image of a naked woman. But the main problem I had was in synthesizing a sense of desire. I've been masturbating for roughly 15 years, and in this time porn has become a sad surrogate for lust—thousands of videos, most of them blurring into one image of a dick mechanically entering and exiting a vagina, helping me create what was missing. Dejected, I recognized the fact that I had rarely used my mind to orgasm in nearly a decade and a half.

Jesus, that fucking sentence.

Thankfully, this second phase slowly came to an end. The next step was a welcome return of natural desire: For the first time it was about my body, not my head. It was something I hadn't experienced before, or at least couldn't remember experiencing.

Before I quit watching porn, the pattern was as follows:

  1. I felt like jerking off.
  2. I went on a porn site.
  3. I found a video.
  4. I jerked off.

None of the process felt organic, which is probably because it wasn't. The porn was just one step in a tedious, familiar plan, helping me to achieve something I'd already mapped out in my mind. Now it had gone back to some thought or image randomly awaking a sexual desire, me fantasizing about something, and then masturbating. Much better.

I also noticed that, for the first time, I wasn't thinking about anything in particular. Not the French couple, not the threesome in an Ikea-furnished bungalow, not the college orgy—rather about physical sensations and actually being able to appreciate them. It was more similar to sex than any of the many, many times I'd previously jerked off.

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I shared my thoughts with a friend. She told me—and it was the most obvious thing in the world to her—that when she masturbated it was rarely to a defined set of images. That it was more about creating a sensation. She also underlined something I'd never noticed before, despite having watched thousands of porn videos throughout my life.

"In 80 percent of porn there are no hands involved," she said.

"What do you mean no hands?"

"I mean no hands. Exactly that."

The need to show penetration and to focus on the woman means that all the acts we associate with good sex—hands, grabbing, hugging, pulling—are eliminated in favor of getting the best angles. Sex without what makes sex great.

After that little lesson, I noticed a substantial improvement in my orgasms. Before I stopped watching porn, as I came there would be a moment when the sensation peaked, before quickly disappearing and leaving little trace. But not any more. Coming lasted for much longer. As it happened, the sensation lingered throughout my body. I felt much more involved.

If, before, I clicked on a video, skipped through it, found a scene I liked, came, and quickly closed the computer to hide my embarrassment, I was now taking my time. That sinister post-masturbatory depression was gone.

A little over a month has passed, and I've decided to continue with the no-porn jerking off policy. I don't know how long I'll last, because you can basically keep anything up for a month without it becoming too much of an issue. It's in the post-honeymoon stage that it starts to become a little more difficult, when the novelty of the challenge wears off and the power of a well-established pattern starts playing on your mind.

I reckon I'll be able to keep on going for a long while yet, but I'm also realistic about how easy it would be to slip back into it. I guess it's like smoking a cigarette after you've quit: The first couple of drags taste awful, but give it a couple more and you'll be hooked once again.

Follow Albert on Twitter and visit George's website.

A Group of London Squatters Called ANAL Have Moved in Next to the Queen

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Pall Mall: home to the Queen, the Oxford and Cambridge gentleman's club, the embassy of Kazakhstan, and endless tourists transplanting themselves into these scenes of luxurious white empire with their selfie sticks. It's not the kind of place you'd expect to find a squat, but that's London I guess—always full of surprises.

I was wandering around Pall Mall yesterday when I spotted the banner: "anticapitalism," unfurled across the front of a building that on closer inspection was covered in defaced newspaper articles: cartoon penises scrawled upon the face of Nigel Farage, that kind of thing. I started taking photos of the scene when I realized a guy with dreads was staring through the window. I made some hand signals at him and moments later he gestured for me to go around the back.

"K," the dreadlocked window man, greeted me with a smile. "Hiya," he said. "Would you like a cup of tea?" He told me he was part of a group called the Autonomous Nation of Anarchist Libertarians (or ANAL for short) and said the historic building they'd squatted was the Institute of Directors. Inside this huge empty room, built by John Nash at the behest of the royal family in the 1820s, was just the odd bike, some sleeping bags, an old, crappy laptop, and a guitar. Cables and wires stuck out of the ceilings but due to the grand empty space it all seemed to be clean and ordered. I just wanted to run around in circles.

K introduced me to the rest of ANAL, who gave me a grand tour of the seven-story building, from the empty vaults in the basement—which were very creepy—up to the kitchen area. Another ANAL guy named "J" offered me bananas and oatmeal that he was boiling up in a rice cooker. I felt like I'd walked on to a weird episode of Cribs.

Eventually I sat down with K and J to talk squatting, ANAL, and the housing crisis.

VICE: So what are you guys doing here?
K: Well, we are occupying this building at the moment to highlight that there are huge buildings in London that are just collecting dust when they could be transformed for the good of the people. This building is owned by the Institute of Directors, which is effectively a group of massive companies, CEOs, and politicians who have endless wealth. Evidently they can afford to leave a seven-story building, which could home about 300 people, empty during a supposed housing crisis.

J: This is a protest against the entire system of property ownership and the majority of property is owned by a minority of wealthy people. The way this works out in London is that rent is hugely high and in the meantime we have a lot of homeless people, so we are defying the whole system of property ownership by going into these big empty buildings, living here as people who don't have anywhere to go and refusing to pay rent for it and at the same time we set up a collective that opens this space to other people.

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So what is your group? How do you define ANAL?
We are the Autonomous Nation of Anarchist Libertarians but we are also a federal monarchy and our squat dog "Zeus" is our king.

K: As a structure we are horizontal, so instead of having a boss or a landlord we are a collective. It's quite clear to see that the people running society are the ones causing the problems and this situation is getting worse. The wealth gap is only increasing, especially with measures such as the bedroom tax, so we are literally the rejection of capitalism.

J: Basically through doing this we are showing them that, yeah, they can make all of these decisions that are good for them and bad for everyone else but there will be resistance. Essentially we, the people, are fighting back through occupation.

So how did you get in here? Have you guys done anything like this before?
J: We have been occupying buildings in Mayfair and Soho for a while now. this is actually the 17th building we've occupied in this area. We were the group that occupied RBS bank as the "love activists," we occupied a hotel in Mayfair and a few other big buildings. We were walking past this one, saw it was empty and just thought, Why not live here, man?

Also we had been kicked out of our previous building.

OK.
I mean there are ways to test if buildings are empty; we do land registry checks just to make sure no one is actually living in them.

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So, you're kinda standing out with the banners—are you getting much attention?
K: This is where the richest and the wealthiest people are, so of course. We are here so people can see that we are not happy with what they are doing. And yeah, we plan to be here until the elections, maybe after.

When did you move in?
A week ago. Since then we've been trying to organize workshops for people and create more awareness. We don't think we'll have the building very long because of the nature of the court system now. Of course it's not exactly going to be in our favour.

Yeah, you're probably right.
Since the ban on [squatting] residential [properties] in 2012, lots of established squats in old residentials have been forced out onto the streets. By force, by the police, and the TSG.

J: But it's still legal to squat commercial buildings, so as long as no one is using the building and if you don't cause any damage when entering the building—e.g. you come in through an open door or open window—then you can live temporarily. But as soon as you have contact with the landlord or the police they will take you to court or take an IPO out on you which means you have to get out within 48 hours, because after that they basically get the dogs in. Then we just move on. It costs the property owner money, which can only be a good thing.

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Have you had any issues with this way of life? Like fights or things getting out of control?
K: No, normally things are fine. We see people who have become homeless due to the way the system affects them—maybe they develop mental health problems, problems with the use of hard drugs... So a few of the people we opened up buildings to were unstable and would start having fights and eventually we had to start a crew where we would take up only a few homeless people.

J: We give out free food to everyone, we basically get most stuff from skips and stock that supermarkets throw away that's not gone bad.

So you're a bit of a charity then?
K: We are anarchists, so we don't believe in charity. We believe in mutual aid, so we'll help each other and at the same time we are taking on the system that means that these people need charity in the first place.

J: "Charity" doesn't really help people and even then there's a monopoly on who can actually help. We did a food kitchen in Trafalgar Square where we gave out free food to everyone but were shut down as we were deemed "antisocial."

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What do you guys have coming up?
K: Everyone is welcome to come and visit—we have lovely free food and workshops on the history of squatting and a presentation on politics and art. Every night we also take food donations; we don't take money, just food. And we have loads of space, so if anyone reading is interested in doing workshops, yoga, etc, they should just come down to Pall Mall. And look, we are right next to the Queen in Buckingham Palace!

J: I mean this building is nice. But a palace would be nicer. We are getting closer and closer, so watch out and we'll see what happens.

Follow Nidira on Twitter.

The Mostly Terrible Things I Learned by Listening to Police Scanners for Six Months

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Photo via Flickr user Paul McCord Jr.

She's a woman in her mid 50s or early 60s and she's about 20 stories up, standing on the edge of her apartment balcony. It's a mid-January night in Toronto so it's absolutely freezing outside but she's not wearing a coat or mittens or a hat or even socks—probably because she's not planning to be outside long enough to get hypothermia, or even frostbite.

She has Stage IV cancer. I don't catch the type or when she found out but I know it's terminal. And I know that the only way she wants to get off the balcony is the one where she passes 19 floors on the way down.

This isn't happening in front of me, mind you—I'm listening to it happen in real time, but even then, I don't hear the woman or the wicked gusts of wind that are blasting through the city that night or even the voices of the police officers that are trying to calm her down.

All I have is the back-and-forth between one officer and a dispatcher as he updates her on what's happening on the scene, their crackling voices coming through the police scanner and bouncing around the small room I'm confined to for eight hours a day, two or three times a week. Since September, I've been working at a newspaper, where, among other things, I used to listen to police and paramedic scanners for breaking news. The scanners picked up radio transmissions between officers or paramedics out in the field and their dispatchers—it's long given crime reporters, tow truck companies, and hobbyists an auditory backseat ride in almost every cruiser and paramedic vehicle in the city. Of course, I got to hear police and paramedics respond to the things that made the 6 o'clock news or the front page—the shootings, the stabbings, the home invasions, the 20-car pileups that cripple traffic for hours—but more often than not, I heard things that news editors decided a long time ago shouldn't be broadcast or printed.

And you know things like mental health calls, bar fights, domestic violence, and suicides happen. But it isn't until you listen to them get called in, day in, day out, that you really start to understand the magnitude in which they happen and what first responders have to deal with every day.

The officer with the woman on the balcony faithfully reported back to dispatch about every 30 seconds until, suddenly, the frequency went silent.

Twenty minutes later, his voice resurfaced. He was at the hospital.

"We're, uh, notifying next of kin," he said, deadpan.

Listening to the scanners taught me a lot about the city I thought I already knew everything about.

Encrypting the chatter
But we scanner listeners are a dying breed. Peel and York Regional Police forces switched over to digital radios and encrypted their signals in 2014, meaning that for media, hobbyists, and post-crash cleaner crews, the scanners have gone silent. Both police forces cited officer safety and citizen privacy as reasons to block everyone else from listening in; York Regional Police's chief later admitted that several news programs broadcasting the final words of an officer fatally struck by a car, heard over the scanners, also contributed to York's decision. It's the latest in a growing wave of silence creeping on to the scanners—Hamilton police started encrypting in 2012; Durham, since 2000. Toronto police had said they would make the switch in May, but earlier this month, their frequencies went silent too.

Toronto police spokesperson Mark Pugash said the switch has been years in the making and is necessary to protect both police and public safety and to keep the sensitive information often included in transmissions private.

"Has it happened that the media got to scenes before police? Yes, absolutely, it happens with frequency ... If we're going to arrest someone, there's a considerable element of surprise. If there are TV broadcast vans there before we get there, there's an extremely high likelihood that the element of surprise will be lost," Pugash said.

"We're not going to wait for someone to be killed, we're not going to wait for some disaster ... Your presumption seems to be that this information should be open for eavesdropping. I challenge that. The media have been able to eavesdrop on this information because the technology didn't exist to prevent that. But this is very sensitive information ... We are changing because there are dangers and risks involved in [transmissions] not being encrypted."

Cracking the codes
You have to get used to emergency service lingo when you start listening to scanners. Male, very HBD? A guy who's shitfaced (has been drinking). The police are transporting a body? Don't get too excited, because "body" in cop-speak means a prisoner. Paramedics are transporting a patient from the scene, CTAS1? Well, better get on that because the poor bastard is treading the fine line between life and death. CTAS3? They're mostly fine. And VSA? If it's a criminally-related call, that's definitely making the crime blotter because that means the patient's heart and lungs have stopped (vital signs absent, but remember, no one's officially dead until they've been pronounced—patients can be VSA and be brought back). It wouldn't be fair to let the letters have all the fun though: 10-2s is the verbal shortcut to mean police (as in, "10-2s are on scene"), and yes, they really do say 10-4 at the end of some transmissions.

After you crack the code and can start listening without having to constantly glance at a cheat sheet to decipher the short forms, a few things start jumping out at you.

Statistics IRL
Did you know that in Toronto, there were four times more suicides than murders in 2009? The fact that suicides far outweigh murders as a cause of death isn't exactly a secret, but it's one thing to read a statistic and another to hear the sheer number of suicide attempt calls that police have to respond to every day. Editors and mental health experts have long cited fears of triggering copycat suicides to justify not reporting on them.

Another thing everyone's probably unconsciously aware of but doesn't really notice is the loose correlation between weather and crime. In general, a drop in temperatures usually equates to a drop in crime—when winter really hit Toronto and the city fell to below freezing, the radios went largely silent. The exact opposite holds true when it starts warming up.

"The hot days, you could guarantee the scanner was going to be busy," said Richard, a hobbyist, who did not want his last name printed, who started listening in on Toronto police emissions in 1988. It's not just anecdotal—a 2013 study found that with temperature spikes come crime rate spikes too. "After midnight after the bars let out on a Friday or Saturday night, fights were and are still common," he added.

Most fights don't make the news. Neither do the muggings, domestic violence or thefts unless they occur under ridiculous circumstances. (I once overheard police responding to a man getting robbed of his cash, wallet, cellphone, and pants—that one made the crime blotter.)

And of course, crime seems to cluster in some areas.

It's not all doom and gloom, though—you occasionally get to hear a happy transmission, or at least one that makes you giggle. Lost kids get reunited with worried parents; wandering elderly are brought back home. No one ever seems to swear on the radios, either, which means cops or paramedics sometimes update their dispatchers that they're leaving a scene because someone told them to "go self-fornicate." And I don't think the average citizen realizes how many times a month police officers have to chase down someone who decides to get naked and run around in the streets (hint: it's a lot).

One evening shift, I listened as paramedics sped to an address because a concerned friend had received a text message from the resident saying he needed help and stopped responding. Five minutes later, they cleared the scene. The resident had indeed needed help, but not of the medical kind—he just wanted to move his couch but couldn't do it alone. Another time, the police needed a unit to respond to a woman who had, among other things, "uncontrollable sexual urges."

As a scanner listener, you have the luxury of observing from a distance. There's a weird sort of disconnect: You know what you're hearing is playing out somewhere in the city but at the same time, it feels a little surreal.

"When you hear it on a radio, it's almost like it's not happening. It's desensitized," said Edward, another hobbyist who wanted his last name kept private, who first started playing around with scanners 25 years ago. He now runs a Twitter account, @TorontoStreets, that he occasionally uses to Tweet breaking news from.

"It's a theatre for the mind, what you're listening to. It's like a good book," he said. "I think that fact that it's live is the fascinating part of it."

First responders don't get that luxury, and it doesn't take long to see why paramedics and cops have some of the highest rates of PTSD in the population. For every emotionally unstable or violent person, there are at least two first-responders who have to handle someone who's possibly a danger to themselves and to everyone around them. For every suicide attempt, there's an officer or paramedic who has to try and talk to person down. For every murder, there's an officer or paramedic who had to be first on scene and see the terrible things humans are capable of doing to each other. It takes a toll—you'd be surprised by level of exhaustion you can detect in a stranger's voice, even when it's coming through on a crackling radio.

One shift last year, the mostly quiet scanners suddenly exploded with activity. There had been a shooting out west, near a school, and then one downtown. I remember police dispatchers calmly and methodically sending units to the scenes while gathering information from officers on site. I remember officers panting heavily as they chased the suspects in the school shooting through a park, relaying descriptions and their positions back to dispatchers. I remember the dispatcher for the downtown shooting warning all officers in the area to be careful because two suspects had fled the scene. It was cacophony of voices saturated with adrenaline and authority.

But what I remember most clearly came through the paramedic scanner. An ambulance had picked up the downtown shooting victim and was rushing him to hospital. A female paramedic was reporting back to her dispatcher, and I heard something I haven't heard before or since—a paramedic yelling, her voice tinged with urgency bordering on defeat.

"One male with three shots to the chest and one to the back of the head," she relayed.

"VSA."

Three people died during my shift that day. Two of them were high school students in their teens. The third was a man in his early 20s.

I spent the rest of my day after the shift with a weird feeling that I've never quite been able to pin down.

Radio silence
The growing encryption trend has drawn the ire of journalists and hobbyists, who argue that not only do silent scanners make it harder to find breaking news, but also give police more power on what's reported—unless someone's lucky enough to stumble upon an active crime scene, the media knowing something criminally-related is happening is now almost completely dependant on police telling them.

I remember the last big crime call I listened to before encryption kicked in. It was another relatively slow overnight shift (some non-fatal stabbings) when Edward sent me a message on Twitter telling me to tune into the 54 and 55 Division channel.

Reports of shots fired at a McDonald's.

Then, reports of someone lying on the ground.

An officer confirms someone's on the ground and that the person is not moving. Shortly after, another person is also found on the ground, not moving. They're both pronounced dead on scene. The McDonald's is cordoned off, and then the streets around it. There's a bit of confusion as to who the shooter is or where he went, but it doesn't take too long for police to figure out it was an armed security guard who apparently fired on two men after some sort of physical fight. The guard stayed on scene and cooperates with police. All the employees are accounted for and safe.

The last crime call I heard was on March 1—a police car chase and then foot-hunt for suspects in three armed robberies. No one was hurt, thankfully, but police did cordon off a few blocks and bring in a tactical and K9 unit to try and track down the suspects. One man ended up getting arrested; four or five got away.

The radios were encrypted by the time I came in for my next shift. Toronto paramedics spokesperson Kim McKinnon told me that, for now, the service does not plan on encrypting its transmissions, so I still have paramedic chatter to keep me company in the room at work. But the paramedic scanner was never nearly as active as the police scanners, and more often than not now, I find myself sitting in silence, sometimes for hours. It's the eeriest on the overnights when the newsroom is completely empty.

The police scanners still sit on a table beside the computer desk, though. Every time I go in, I crank the volume up all the way in the hope that somewhere, some radio in some squad car was missed in the switch. So far, no luck.

Follow Jackie Hong on Twitter.

VICE Premiere: VICE Exclusive: Listen to Iles's New Song, 'In Tents'

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The post-punk revival in the early 2000s gave us a handful of excellent bands and a million lesser knockoff groups. There were a few great bands with great first records, but they all petered out lamely and none have released anything particularly groundbreaking this decade. That sound and scene has largely faded from view, but some musicians are still carrying the torch, like excellent LA-based songwriter Iles (think "Miles" without the "M"). Iles's song "In Tents" is from his upcoming record, Apartments, and its twisting lead guitar and songwriting nods to Walkmen-inspired 00s rock. It took Iles six years to finish Apartments, so maybe he's not intentionally reviving a past era—maybe he's just really late to the party.


Protesters Drove a Tank to the BBC's London Headquarters Because They Love Jeremy Clarkson

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

One of the political bloggers from well-known right-wing website Guido Fawkes and another guy dressed as "the Stig" have just roared into the BBC's Broadcasting House IN A TANK to campaign against the injustice of Jeremy Clarkson being suspended from Top Gear for punching a man over a steak. THIS IS 2015 AND THIS IS YOUR REALITY. THIS IS REAL AND THIS IS HAPPENING. BRITAIN'S DADS HAVE GONE MAD.

At midday today, the tank—rented from Tanks Alot, the light-hearted tank rental company—turned up with Harry Cole of Guido Fawkes sticking his big head out while wearing sunglasses, and a lumpen version of the Stig standing legs akimbo on top. The tank was bearing banners that read "ONE MILLION SIGNATURES, BRING BACK CLARKSON," and the Stig—who was wearing a joke-shop Stig costume, which apparently consists of a two-piece faux-flameproof suit that slits in the middle to show the full vista of a tucked-in vest straining over a beer belly, and a crumpled foam hat in lieu of an actual fucking white helmet—handed over the printed-out petition to whoever at the BBC it is who has the job of accepting and then shredding pointless petitions about Jeremy Clarkson.

Some questions:

i. You can hire a tank but you can't find a plain white motorcycle helmet at short notice? Sort your fucking lives out, Guido Fawkes.

ii. Yeah, wonder what the reaction would be if we just drove a tank around to make a point about any minor and petty complaints we had pending? Because I've got a quibble with my council tax bill but I'm pretty sure I'd be shot to death by the police if I turned up to City Hall in a tank.

iii. It's sort of apt and beautiful that one million people got mad about one man punching another man so hard he got fired on the day that the stars aligned and the moon eclipsed the sun and the universe conspired to remind us that hey, we are small and pointless and our petty bickerings are nothing compared to the awesome majesty of our solar system, but no actually scratch that and correct it because one of David Cameron's pube-headed mates has been briefly suspended from a TV show where they try and make cars interesting.

iv. What kind of country do we live in where a Sun columnist is allowed to hire a tank without question?

v. Do you not think that if you're going to drive an actual tank about to protest anything, it should be, like, unemployment rates, or the housing crisis, or the repeated failures of local councils to deal with child sex rings, or the Westminster pedophilia cover-up, and not, like, a millionaire briefly losing his job.

vi. Just thinking about the Guido Fawkes bloggers, and how this is the best day of their lives. Like: They must feel ten feet tall right now. "Yeah!" they're probably saying. "We fucking did it!" They are out of breath in that same way they are when they go up the stairs too fast, but just off their own sheer nervous energy. "Fuck!" they are saying. "Jesus!" One of them wants to go to the pub. "Pub?" he's saying. And someone goes: We cannot go to the pub. We are in a tank. How do you park a tank by a pub?

vii. Fucking hell. Fucking hell. The absolute state of this. This is one of the most embarrassing days in Britain's history, and we've been invaded multiple times. Like: We've voted Jim Davidson a Celebrity Big Brother winner. This is a nadir.

Anyway, we're sending an intern down to go and ask questions like, "Yo, what the fuck?" and "What the fuck? Why?"—so more news as and when we get it.

Follow Joel on Twitter.

VICE Vs Video Games: PlayStation vs. Nintendo 64 Was the Last Console War That Mattered

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The Nintendo 64. Photo via.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Have you seen the latest advertising for the PlayStation 4? "The world's most powerful console," it boasts (not for the first time), chest puffed out, pair of socks stuffed brazenly down its pants. But while this claim may be technically true from a numbers perspective, it's also a little misleading. The Xbox One is hardly a wheezing Citroën 2CV compared to Sony's Hummer, is it? This isn't David and Goliath, or George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley. There isn't, in all honesty, much disparity between the two. You might get to play Battlefield Hardline in 900p on PS4 as opposed to the Xbox's 720, but is this a gulf in output worth losing sleep over? Not unless you're extremely precious about things that don't actually matter, or you're 12.

This generation's "console war" is built on the untruth that there's a fundamental difference between the Big Two. Bar a few exclusive titles, there isn't. It was the same with the last generation. And the one before that. In fact, the last console war that really mattered—the one in which a choice meant siding with one of two fundamentally different approaches to what a console should be—happened all the way back in the mid-to-late 1990s, in a world of corduroy Billabong jackets, TGIF, and pop-punk.

Though it still enjoys a devoted set of fans, the Sega Saturn never really put up much of a fight with Sony's original PlayStation when they both launched in late 1994. Despite its ostensible similarity to the PS, the Saturn was expensive, underpowered, under-gamed, and comparatively unfashionable. Nights into Dreams and Panzer Dragoon Saga were amazing, and both systems shared huge early hits like Tomb Raider and Resident Evil. But Sony's strategy of a lower price, easier and cheaper development tools, and the subsequent superior library of titles placed Sega's system inside the Big Black Book of Hubris and firmly slammed it shut. This particular console war was over fairly quickly. Yet there was a giant lurking in the wings.

Back in 1988, with one eye on the future, Sony and Nintendo agreed on a deal to develop a CD add-on for the SNES, much like the ill-fated Mega-CD. This snappily titled SNES-CD eventually became a standalone device called the Play Station. But due to a falling out over the ownership rights of software produced for the system, the two companies acrimoniously parted ways, leaving Sony to develop the console alone. It was released, minus the space in its name, as the PlayStation. Meanwhile, Nintendo had a change of heart regarding the CD format and began work on the cartridge-based Ultra 64, which would be released in Japan in the summer of 1996 as the Nintendo 64.

By the time the N64 came out here in the UK, in March 1997, the Saturn was already on its ass, and the PlayStation was gamboling off to the horizon. Priced at a frankly unreasonable £249.99 [$370] without a game, meaning early adopters had to shell out a further £60 [$90] for Super Mario 64 (Turok: Dinosaur Hunter weighed in at a fairly twattish £70 [$105]), the N64's bungled launch looked like an own goal, giving the PlayStation another easy scalp. But just two months later, and in a huge slap across the face for anyone who'd shelled out for the console earlier, Nintendo dropped the price of its new machine to £149.99 [$223]. The war was on.

Consumers without the necessary funds for both systems faced a huge choice, and not a simple one between the odd exclusive title and speck of superior online functionality like today. No, this was a choice between one entire ethos and another. A choice with considerable costs and rewards either way.

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Yes, we know this isn't an original PlayStation pad.

The PlayStation's use of CDs as a storage format afforded it many advantages, not least of which was the extra available megabytes affording its games CD-quality audio and swish full-motion-video sequences. In a time when recorded speech, proper, actual music tracks, and video in games were thrilling technological advances, this was a huge selling point. The Chemical Brothers and Orbital provided music for the PlayStation's UK launch title Wipeout. This, coupled with the ability to play audio CDs in the system, awarded Sony's grey box the kind of cool points Nintendo would have dreamed of, had it any notion of the existence of cool points as an abstract concept.

The infinitesimal memory on the N64's cartridges meant even its flagship title, GoldenEye 007 conveyed speech with soundless text and moved the story along with clunky in-engine cutscenes. CDs weren't perfect, though: they needed to load, like Spectrum or Commodore 64 games did from cassettes. N64 owners balked at this inconvenience like spoiled seventeenth century fop using a lace handkerchief to wave away unsatisfactory hors d'oeuvre. And CDs scratched easily, while N64 cartridges were the steel-plated, megaton-resistant cockroaches of the information age.

Though cartridges felt like a distinct step backward technologically, the superior grunt of the N64 itself, plus the revolutionary controller's analogue input, meant there were N64 games that simply could not exist on PlayStation. This, from launch title Super Mario 64 onwards, was what Nintendo was selling: new, unique experiences. Wave Race 64's water physics. Turok 2's Expansion Pak-aided hi-res environments. Perfect Dark's near PC-quality visuals. Banjo-Kazooie's buffed, vibrant sheen. Ocarina of Time's game-changing, well, everything.

Meanwhile, the PlayStation had strengths of its own. Though outgunned, it used its storage capabilities and some canny programming to amass a repertoire of classics that were beyond the reach of the N64—a collection at which Nintendo-siders peered at covetously. A huge coup for Sony was securing Final Fantasy VII that, at three discs in size, would have required, ooh, a billion N64 cartridges to house. Likewise for Metal Gear Solid's reams of recorded speech and the Resident Evil series' FMV, voice acting (such as it was), and pre-rendered backgrounds. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater's soundtrack oozed class, while Gran Turismo's vast catalog of memory-hungry car models made its rivals' on the N64—which, arguably, never had a truly great racing sim—look fairly paltry.

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The differences in each system's game selections weren't simply due to mechanical limitations, either. Both had contractual exclusives that made their opposite number envious in the extreme. Nintendo had the then-untouchable Rare in its garage toiling away; Sony had Hideo Kojima and Square. Sony had cannily marketed itself at the teen and young adult market: intense, mature ads showcased games with gore, swearing, and lots of exciting violence.

Nintendo saw itself as more of a good-clean-fun family company, and such things in its games were tightly controlled. Duke Nukem 64 was heavily censored, and the risible Carmageddon 64 featured zombies instead of humans, while Sony was happy to release Grand Theft Auto to a huge public outcry, selling a massive number of PlayStations in the process. Its console was seen as the dangerous bit of rough. Each system's library of games differed hugely from its opponent's, and cross-platform releases were the exception rather than, as it is now, the norm. You had to choose. And choosing one side meant missing out on a hell of a lot from the other.

As time went on, both consoles would inevitably become increasingly homogenized. Sony released an analogue controller in 1997, bringing it in line with the N64's (though it's worth noting that the decomposing Saturn beat Sony to the punch with this, bundling Nights into Dreams with its 3D Control Pad). Nintendo would eventually relax its iron grip on taste, signing off on god knows how many uses of the word "fuck" in Conker's Bad Fur Day. And cartridge technology would advance to the level that Resident Evil 2 saw an N64 release in all its FMV splendor. Four-player games—Nintendo's trump card—became available on PlayStation with the Multitap, albeit never to the giddy heights of GoldenEye's majestic, friendship-ending free-for-alls. The N64's syrupy visuals would remain the connoisseur's choice, while the PlayStation's endless pool of games and pirate-friendly software format would make it the everyman's. Arguments between fans would continue.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/MCWJ6SyPa4M' width='560' height='315']

Some choice scenes from the N64's 'Conker's Bad Fur Day.'

In each successive console generation since then, the choice hasn't mattered as much. PS2 and Xbox? Basically the same, with the odd exclusive each, leaving the GameCube or Dreamcast as interesting if thankless secondary options. PS3 and Xbox 360? Basically the same, again with some appealing exclusives, leaving the Wii as the option your grandma likes if she's drunk. PS4 and Xbox One? You can see where this is going.

With the PlayStation and N64 you were either in one camp or the other. Blur or Oasis. Ribena or Vimto. Weed or whizz. Sony's cheeky James Hunt or Nintendo's meticulous Niki Lauda. Either way, you were right and, like Newton's Third Law, equally wrong. If you're old enough to have made a decision at the time, chances are you'll defend it to this day, and still secretly worry that it was the wrong one.

It was gaming's last great rivalry. Not being able to play Bloodborne on an Xbox just isn't the same.

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Control pad photography by Brandon Allen, from his Deconstructed series—see the full set of shots at his website, here.

Follow Luke on Twitter.

The SXSW 21: The 21 Thoughtfluencers Who Won #SXSW

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The SXSW 21: The 21 Thoughtfluencers Who Won #SXSW

Is It a Fashion Ad if It Doesn't Show Any Clothing?

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Is It a Fashion Ad if It Doesn't Show Any Clothing?

This Guy Plans to Swim Across the Pacific Ocean This Summer

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All photos by Gino Kalkanoglu

Next July, while you'll be lazily roasting your back in the sun, getting fatter and fatter from BBQs and beers, swimmer Ben Lecomte will be attempting his second ocean crossing with only the strength of his arms and the odd kick of a leg to help him.

Originally from France, Ben chose California to be his home 20 years ago, and in 1998 he successfully swam across the Atlantic Ocean. Every day he goes for long swims of at least three hours along the coast to keep in shape. Ben's latest journey will take him from Tokyo to San Francisco, and is set to last for five months. That's 5,500 miles worth of swimming, the first-ever attempt by someone to cross the Pacific in this way. Ben will be swimming eight hours a day at the average speed of two to two and a half knots per hour. He'll burn around 10,000 calories daily.

Obviously this presents a lot of questions. Mainly, "Why?" So we called him to talk.

VICE: How did you get into this sort of thing?
Ben Lecomte: I've been involved in open-water swimming for a long time. It's a passion of mine, which started by learning how to swim in the Atlantic Ocean with my father. Being in a pool always felt very restrictive to me, so I always liked swimming in a more open environment. I was also always more attracted to the "adventure" side of things, rather than competing. Then when I was a teenager, Gerard d'Aboville, a French sailor, rode across the Atlantic. I started comparing our speeds, and that's how the idea came. My dad's death from cancer gave me the final push to pursue my dream.

Did you have a day job?
Yes, I am an architect. But for the last two years I've been focusing exclusively on the challenge: I want to dedicate myself 100 percent to avoid having any regrets later.

How are you preparing yourself for the swim, on a day-to-day basis?
A big part of it is logistics. On the other side, it's training and staying fit. I do from three to five hours of swimming everyday, depending on the time I have.

What about the logistics of the swim?
There will be a boat behind me with a support team of six people. I have to stay close as the boat will give me directions thanks to a line under the water, so that I don't need to lift up my head. The line has different markings indicating whether I'm falling behind or whether I'm in the right spot.

The boat is also equipped with a sonar system to detect sharks, so I have to stay near so that my team can warn me if they notice anything suspicious. One of the difficulties to handle is that strong waves can potentially crush me against the boat.

Christ. What actually happens if your team sees a shark?
There's an alarm that they can ring. There are different types of alarms: two short beeps mean, "Watch out, there's something around!" and continual short beeps mean, "Get on the boat as soon as possible!"

How will you feed yourself when swimming?
Every 20 to 30 minutes, I will be given a bottle of liquid or soup, or something easy to ingest. I will then swim on my back for 15 or 20 seconds to drink it. I don't need to stop.

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How did you pick your starting and arrival points?
You need to take advantage of the weather patterns and of the current. There are strong currents flowing from Tokyo to the US—the Kuroshio and the North Pacific currents—creating a big push. The idea was also to arrive close to the time when the UN Climate Change Conference will happen in Paris next December.

When you crossed the Atlantic, there was a shark following you for five days. How did that feel?
The shark was circling the boat for five days. In the mornings and evenings, when the device that creates a magnetic field to repel sharks wasn't in the water, you could see the fin going around the boat. As soon as it was on, the fin disappeared. The last day, I was actually able to see the shark coming a little closer, passing below me, so I decided to do a shorter day of swimming. The following day, it was gone.

Were you not scared?
It gets your attention, of course. You have to be very cautious, watch how they behave and bear in mind that they are wild animals. If they're there, it means they're either looking for food or for a mate. I suppose they don't look at me as a mate...

What was the toughest thing during that first crossing?
It changed every day. Sometimes, you're seasick and can't eat properly, you have cuts on your skin that sting in the salty water. you're deprived of contact with your loved ones, your mood gets affected easily... It's an accumulation of things rather than a particular one.

Did you ever want to give up, or have moments of weakness?
You get these moments, of course. But then you have to remember why this matters to you, what's the goal around it. Back then I was raising funds for cancer research. People were emailing me saying that following me was helping them get through their chemo. I couldn't let these people down. You realize that it is bigger than just you.

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What do you think about when you swim?
That's a very key point. The most difficult part of the challenge is mental rather than physical. You need to be able to motivate yourself. It is essential that keep your mind occupied. For that you need to have a very structured approach, and know exactly what you're going to be thinking about throughout your day. So I have a schedule: I'll first think about my father, then try and count in different languages, then try and solve a math problem and so on... You need to know what you're gonna do with your mind. If you don't, then you start asking yourself too many questions. You have to dissociate your mind from your body, and have your body on autopilot.

How do you keep your morale up during the challenge?
The line between pain and pleasure is very thin, of course. You're constantly moving along that line, one way or the other. But these are moments when I feel very much alive. It's very rewarding, and overwhelming at the end. I don't imagine my life without this. I have to do it, there is no other way.

The best way to tackle is certainly to have a "day-by-day" approach, instead of thinking of how much you've got left ahead.

What's the bigger scope of the challenge?
I will be raising funds for the Climate Group, who are involved in the low carbon footprint campaign, and for another organization protecting oceans which is yet to be chosen. The swim is a way to get people's attention and make them think about environmental issues.

We will have a platform with live-streaming so that people are able to follow the swim, and react on social media. A documentary will also be released at the end. The aim is to bring people together, show them what's happening in the middle of the ocean and to make people realize that small changes in our lifestyle can have a major impact on the environment. Experts will also be commenting and be part of the discussion. We want to rally as many people as possible around the issue.

What will you do when it's over, will the next challenge be the Indian Ocean?
I can only answer that once this challenge is over. Right now, I'm trying to just focus on this. But I guess, once the event is finished, I would like to use the created platform to go further into educating people, and to use it to interact with schools and give children classes about sustainability. I believe this should be taught at an early age. Knowing about sustainability should become part of our curriculums.

Follow Ben during his swim at thelongestswim.com

Follow Alice on Twitter.

This Elderly French Couple Will Have to Return 271 Stolen Picasso Artworks They Kept In Their Garage

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This Elderly French Couple Will Have to Return 271 Stolen Picasso Artworks They Kept In Their Garage

Meet Wayne Boone, Canada’s BDSM-Loving Nudist Ambassador

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Wayne Boone, nudist ambassador. All photos by Jennifer Gosnell

Wayne Boone's nude months run from June to December. You can wear clothes if you want when you visit him, but these are his nude months and so he'll be naked—it says so right there on his Couchsurfing profile.

Strangers often find themselves in Boone's home in Eastern Passage, Nova Scotia for a couple days, a week, or longer—over the past seven years, he says he's hosted over 500 travellers.

Knock on his door and he'll greet you in a plush blue robe—to appease his neighbours. But once inside, the robe is off.

With Halifax being the most eastern major city in mainland Canada, and because Boone offers drives from the airport and train station to his home, this is the first Canadian living room seen by many travellers.

In his living room, an eight-foot wooden cross with steel shackles leans against a wall holding two different dartboards with suggestions for sexual activities instead of points. The room is full of boxes of sex costumes and stacks of books on religion, home repair, gardening, travel and the Royal Family. On one shelf, books on astrology and numerology sit behind pictures of his children and the four medals he received in the Navy. The room also features a $500 floor-mounted portable stripper pole.

"My neighbours just look at me [when] I'm going to a party—of course I take my stripper pole, I take my cross, I take my massage table and it's: 'Oh, the freak is going somewhere,'" he says with a shrug.

Boone, 55, has hair that is as grey and long as it will ever be. A whisper of brown in the moustache of his Santa beard jiggles when he speaks in his thick Newfie accent, punctuated with coughs from years of chain smoking.

His heavy, tanned body—he tries to spend four hours a day in the sun—is animated at any moment. Swivelling around, he points to the floor where a fabric chair with a rope and trapeze bar sits.

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"This is, like—I have a love swing, this here. It's a portable thing that I can go and set it up in somebody's living room and hang in the love swing," he says.

Up the stairs past a velvet samurai painting on the staircase ledge, I head into the room where the door's already open to reveal a gynecologist's table sprinkled with dildos and vibrators and something that looks like a nutcracker.

Speculums and doctor's tools lie on a table next to sex toys. Five candles are equally melted atop a shelf full of books on the human mind, health, dreams, relationships, the tarot, the I Ching, Native American culture, Wicca, and Buddhism.

"So, this is pretty much the only room I got open for Couchsurfers right now," he says.

Letting almost all of it hang out
Couchsurfing.org is a website millions of people use to find host travelers and find homes to stay in for free when they travel, and Boone is one of Halifax's most popular hosts. Despite being ostracized around town, and even among some of the East Coast kink groups, through the service, Boone has served as ambassador to Nova Scotia to folks from France, Japan, Nepal and over 25 other countries.

Anyone who comes over to Boone's house knows he's a nudist—he demands visitors express they're aware of this before they come over.

But you will not see his dangling bits, or even the rooms of his home, on Couchsurfing.org.

Any content deemed "sexually explicit, obscene, pornographic, indecent, lewd," or "suggestive" is banned from appearing on the website, which means the only room that can appear in any of Boone's profile pictures is the living room—unless he does some serious redecorating.

But no sex gear is ever moved out of sight within the house—not when his daughter or son, both in their 20s, come over; not when his government-appointed cleaner shows up; not when new travelers arrive.

According to Boone, it's unfortunate that Couchsurfing hosts who are into bondage hide their gear when visitors come over. He thinks they're missing out on crucial opportunities to make potential kinky friends.

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"You guys don't mention a word about BDSM, and you don't have any things out where they can see your stuff, it's like your mother and father are coming to visit, and you don't want 'em to know what you're up to," he says. "So if they don't know what you're doing, then how are you gonna know if they're kinky or interested in kink?

"You're not going to talk about it, so you expect them? 'Oh, could you tell me where the nearest nudist place is? Or the closest BDSM club is around here?'"

Rave reviews
After you host or stay with someone through the Couchsurfing website, you can leave a positive, neutral, or negative reference with a message that ends up on their public profile. Boone has over 150 positive references and no negative ones, while he estimates over 500 strangers have stayed at his house in total.

Alice, a 25-year-old traveler originally from Kolkata, India, stayed at Boone's for a weekend this January. "I pitched a really last minute request on the Couchsurfing website, for a host, and Boone responded within a couple of minutes," she says via email. She did not want to use her real name for this article. "His response was very candid, warm and welcoming, which made me feel grateful and excited to meet with him."

Alice says her initial impression was that it looked like Boone lived in a thrift store converted into a house. "I can't say I wasn't overwhelmed, but it was his welcoming spirit, generosity and 'no judgments' attitude that put me at ease almost right away," she says.

Over two days they visited popular tourist spots around Halifax like Peggy's Cove and the Titanic Memorial while talking about topics like alternative medicine, women's rights, and nudist philosophy.

"I learned that I although I have never spent time with a nudist before, I was not in the least uncomfortable with Boone's nudity," says Alice. "Spending time at his house and experiencing his lifestyle offered me the opportunity to realize that I do not associate our human physicality with sexuality by default."

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Shore leave revelation
Next to the guest room is Boone's bedroom, where a rainbow of whips, handcuffs, and ropes hang off the girders joining the four eight-foot pillars of his massive bed. Years of living on a ship's two-by-six foot bed while serving in the Navy influenced Boone's affinity for king-sized beds when on land.

He was born and raised in Corner Brook, Newfoundland & Labrador—just Newfoundland while he was there. His father was a generous bus and taxi driver who sometimes brought needy patrons home for meals. He died when Boone was seven. Boone and his two sisters never had to keep secrets from their mother. He attributes his own openness to her welcoming attitude.

He worked various jobs before enlisting in the Navy a year after graduating high school. Over 27 years, he advanced to the rank of Leading Seaman.

He says that while he was in the Navy, Europeans in foreign ports used a service called Dial-a-Sailor to meet Canadian sailors like him and his crew. They would be shown around town, taken out to dinner and stay at local homes for the weekend—similar to what he does now through Couchsurfing.

His nudism started in the service, when a trip early in his military career took him to Jamaica.

After arguing lengthily with a man who tried to make Boone and some crewmates pay to visit a beach, they were told it was a topless beach—they quickly offered up $2 for entry and, from then on, Boone says he was "pretty well a nudist."

And the trip from nudist to BDSM wasn't that long.

"When I was a teenager, and when I was married and everything, sex was basically the same as everybody else thinks it was," Boone says. "In the bed. Open legs. Fuck, and come, and that was sex..."

He says that when he was in foreign ports, he'd learn more and more, but only started practicing BDSM after he was middle-aged and single. "And what I know now is basically 11 years of studying everything I could find and learn."

He sits on his living room couch, on top of a massive plush blanket plastered with imagery from the tarot.

"So now I teach people, you know, be open-minded. Don't be scared of things. You know, somebody tells you sex is supposed to be in the bedroom? Tell 'em to go fuck themselves. Have sex wherever you want."

Dealing with whip snobbery
Halifax does have a few societies dedicated to kink, but Boone doesn't keep close ties with them. He says many groups dedicated to BDSM are too elitist.

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He recalls the time he was driving a group of Couchsurfers to Cape Breton, when he saw a leather store off the highway. He pulled the car over, entered the store and bought all the spare scraps he could—only a few dollars a strip.

On the way back from the trip, he stopped at Home Depot to buy a four-foot plain wooden dowel. Affixing the strips to the dowel, he says he made his own whip for less than $40, while some professional BDSM practitioners in town pay upwards of $300 for a custom whip.

When he brought this creation to a kink party, a woman said to Boone, "Your whip is fucking disgusting. Where did you get that?"

"I made it," he answered.

But his whip of wood and spare scraps of leather was laughed at, and Boone never returned to the Society of Bastet.

Feeling uncomfortable with the judgment in the BDSM scene, he's instead started relying on social networking to find partners. "So I just stay away from it all. If I wanna play, I find someone I wanna play with. That's it."

FetLife is a social networking site for fetishists. About 9,400 accounts are registered to the website's Halifax group, with a few thousand more in the rest of the province.

Boone's FetLife username is Sensual-Master, because he "loves sensual play and being a master." He's not much for poetry. His profile features a list of 54 different sexual activities he is interested in meeting people for, from "abduction play" to "whips."

The welcoming outsider
Boone receives $50,000 a year through pensions and insurance policies. He's deemed unfit for work because of physical and psychological injuries he's sustained from his time in service.

He suffers pain from injuries in his back and feet sustained from 27 years of wearing improper footwear on steel ships, and jumping from ships onto small boats.

In 1998 he was on a ship responding to the aftermath of the Swissair Flight 111 crash off the shore of Peggy's Cove, where divers lifted parts of plane wreckage and human bodies from the ocean. Boone revisits the site not only in his nightmares, but when he takes Couchsurfers to Peggy's Cove. It's one of the spots travelers most want to visit, and he has a story to tell them when they arrive.

His only commitment is to be at Harbourview Weekend Market from 8 AM to 4 PM on Friday and Saturday, where he sells items that once occupied his house. He does odd jobs sometimes. Otherwise, he's free to spend time with Couchsurfers. They get to see parts of Nova Scotia not mentioned in any tourist's guide, like Boone's nude spots in the woods.

He's no longer in touch with anyone he served with in the Navy, where he always felt like an outsider.

He says most people are programmed to be robots by the time they're 20 and he does what he wants, not what society wants him to do.

"I'm not willing to lower myself now to just living a life where I go to work, come home, go to work, come home," he says, now drinking a can of Coke and eating cold fish from a bowl.

"Go to work, have a family, go back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, then they die. In Newfoundland, we knew a lot of our neighbours. I don't even know my neighbours. All you do is see people come home, go in, they don't talk to you."

"So, me? I like being open. I like getting to know people, and enjoying life, and that's the way I'll be. And a lot of people don't understand that."


Hidden No More: a Woman’s Murder Has First Nations Group Rallying Against Domestic Violence

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A photo of Malena that a family friend superimposed over a beach. It remains one of the family's favourite images of her. All photos by Adam Dietrich

Sometimes, when Malena Loonskin took her three little boys to visit her mother, she'd have fresh bruises, a black eye, or both. But when her mother, Maria Loonskin, would plead with her to come home for good, Malena would refuse.

"She must have feared a lot for her boys," Maria says now, eyes wet. She sits shoulder-to-shoulder with friends and family in the community centre of John D'or Prairie, one of three communities that comprise Little Red River Cree Nation in northern Alberta, closer to the border with the Northwest Territories than it is to Edmonton.

Malena disappeared on June 23, 2014. It was after midnight when Maria last spoke with her daughter; they chatted briefly and made plans to speak the next day. Malena was last seen leaving her house around 3 AM—a diminutive five-foot Cree woman, 26 years old, wearing jeans and an orange-and-pink t-shirt.

When Maria woke up and went online, she found her Facebook timeline flooded with the news that her one of her 12 daughters—she also has two sons—was missing. Eight days later, a member of Little Red River found Malena's remains in the woods near her house.

Jason Tallcree, Malena's common-law husband, was arrested and charged with second-degree murder and offering indignity to human remains shortly thereafter. An RCMP spokesperson would not disclose what led them to Tallcree as a suspect, saying it was part of the investigation.

Tallcree appeared in court on July 8, the same day of Malena's funeral, and her family assumed justice was on it's way to being done. On that day, hundreds of residents gathered to remember Malena. She was stubborn, outdoorsy, and always good for laugh. She loved country music and she cared deeply for her family, revelling in being a stay-at-home mom for her three boys. Mourners stood in the same field—near her house and across from the school—that searchers had used as a command post while looking for her. "A place where our journey began," read the funeral program, "and where our journey ended."

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Malena's mother Maria as pictured in the John D'or Prairie community centre on March 16, 2015.

Driven to speak out
People don't usually talk about domestic violence in Little Red River. Some residents attribute this silence to fear and a lack of institutional support. Little Red River includes more than 5,000 people, but it has no women's shelter, it is served by a single psychologist who visits only once a month, and the nearest towns—Fort Vermilion and High Level—are at least an hour's drive away.

Getting mental health and addiction services is a particular struggle in rural Alberta, said Dr. Richard Starke, who led a review of rural health care ordered by the Alberta government last fall. The committee's final report was released this week and the government says its already taking action to improve access, including the development of a provincial model for EMS delivery and the creation of 10 operational districts to improve community involvement in decision making.

Dr. Starke said it's challenging, "particularly in remote areas and John D'or Prairie, of course, being in the most northerly part of the province."

"All we have is our family," says community member Darlene McLean.

This silence has consequences. According to the National Collaborating Centre for Aboriginal Health, an unwillingness to identify domestic violence is one reason such violence is relatively more widespread in rural communities like Little Red River. Another is a dearth of social services including mental health resources. And there is another effect: information consolidated by the federal Department of Justice shows that aboriginal people charged with this type of violence are relatively more likely to see the charges dropped or be found not guilty, in part because the victims are reluctant to come forward.

The self-reported 2009 General Social Survey found aboriginal people were almost three times as likely to experience "violent victimization," such as sexual assault, than non-aboriginal people. They were also more likely to experience it at the hands of someone they know.

But Malena's murder had an extraordinary effect. It spurred the Loonskin family and frustrated neighbours to begin a public conversation about domestic violence. Within weeks of Malena's death, a group formed under the name Women's Advocacy for Change and began recruiting members. The group is now just shy of 800 members; McLean is one.

In Little Red River, "this is one of the first instances [of domestic violence] we've had that's had such a huge impact on the community," says McLean.

Last fall, the community organized a domestic violence walk, "in Malena's honour" and "for Chasey, Eric, and Zander," her three sons aged nine, seven, and two. Maria wears the t-shirts the group made for the walk, touching her hand to the shirt's purple ribbon, right above her heart.

Maria doesn't know what to say to her grandsons. Zander is so little; Eric always wants to visit the graveyard and bring flowers to his mother; but Chasey "never talks about his mom." Maria says: "I've never even seen him cry, he's just bottling it inside."

There's a donation box in the band office for the boys, with a photograph of Malena and their smiling faces taped to it.

"I tell them she went to heaven and I don't tell them anything else," Maria says.

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Malena's family in the John D'or Prairie community centre on March 16, 2015. Mother Maria holds the picture of Malena.

Released
In recent weeks, the Loonskin family says the community's grief has mixed with a new emotion: fear. On March 6, a friend called Maria to report that she'd seen Tallcree stepping off the Northern Express bus in High Level, Alberta, a 90-minute drive west of John D'or.

Tallcree has a criminal record. In March 2006, he pleaded guilty to pointing a firearm. Two months after that, he pleaded guilty to failing to stop a vehicle, evading an officer, driving with no insurance, and failing to hold a valid operator's license. In December 2007, he pleaded guilty to two counts of sexual assault and one count of unlawful confinement; for this, he was barred from possessing firearms for ten years and sentenced to 48 months in prison. In 2012, he pled guilty to assault and failure to comply.

The charges laid against him in connection with Malena's death had been stayed, so Tallcree had been released. "There was no reasonable likelihood of conviction," said Alberta Justice department spokesperson Michelle Davio via email. "Information from key witnesses was found to be unreliable, which further impacted the ability of the Crown to proceed."

Stayed charges can be recommenced within one year of being stayed.

Maria says no one called to notify her that Tallcree had been released and might be on his way back to his community. Her friend's courtesy call had come as a shock. She says she confirmed his release with an official days later. RCMP spokesperson Josée Valiquette says an investigator notified a family member on March 6, although she wasn't sure with whom the investigator spoke. The family denies receiving the call. Maria says she wasn't told until she called herself. Valiquette says an investigator did speak with Maria a few days later, on March 10.

Maria worried and worried. Would Tallcree return to John D'or? Would he try to take custody of two-year-old Zander, Malena's only child with Tallcree?

"I thought when he got out he would come and take [Zander] away from us," Maria says. "I was so scared."

However, within days of his release, Tallcree was arrested again. He faces charges of assault, sexual assault, unlawful confinement, uttering threats of bodily harm and three counts of breaching conditions—breaches that the Alberta justice department says are likely related to previous offences. His case has been set over until April 7; meanwhile, he remains in custody.

Tallcree's lawyer did not return repeated requests for comment.

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The field in John D'or Prairie, pictured March 16, 2015, where the command post for Malena's search was based and where her funeral was held. Her remains were found in the woods pictured.

Anger directed toward police
Tallcree is not the only focus of the Loonskin family's anger. The charges laid against him in connection with Malena's death have been stayed, and the Loonskin family blames this on a shoddy investigation.

Malena was reported missing on June 23 to the North Peace Tribal Police Service, who the family says told them they had to wait 72 hours for an investigation to begin, but that they were allowed to start a search on their own. Valiquette says the Tribal Police handled the first three days of her disappearance and the RCMP was only called in when the case was deemed a homicide investigation and no longer a missing persons investigation, as she says is standard when there is a police service with jurisdiction.

The North Peace Tribal Council says the Tribal Police, a cooperative service started two decades ago to keep local communities safe while providing culturally sensitive police services, ceased operations in January due to a staffing shortage. Its contact numbers are now out of service. On the Council's website it says "the elders saw this service as an enhancement, not a replacement" for the RCMP.

The Edmonton RCMP Major Crimes Unit officially became involved on June 26 when the case became a homicide investigation—three days after Malena went missing. But the family alleges that when the RCMP finally arrived and Malena's remains were found by a member of the public eight days after she went missing, the national police force simply took custody of her body without conducting a proper investigation.

The family says the RCMP should have been involved in Malena's case from the get-go. The family alleges the absence of both police forces, but particularly the RCMP, in the early days left the crime scene evidence to be compromised by well-meaning but untrained searchers.

Valiquette says she can't discuss the details of the investigation.

Malena's uncle, Allan Loonskin, is blunt in his assessment of the investigation: "the attitude toward the native population is that they can kill each other off and there's no money for investigations."

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Malena's mother Maria pictured showing off the domestic violence shirts they made for the walk commemorating Malena. Taken in the John D'or Prairie community centre on March 16, 2015.

One of many
Malena now belongs to a group of more than 1,100 aboriginal women in Canada who have gone missing or been murdered since 1980. The number continues to grow. Across the country, Canadians have called for a national public inquiry into this issue. The government continues to say no. Malena's family and friends are now joining in this call.

Given the public conversation that developed after Malena's death, it may seem odd that the community's interest in a national public inquiry was sparked not by Malena's death, but by Tallcree's release. McLean says this reflects their initial faith in the justice system.

"He was already in prison, it seemed straightforward," she says.

"We didn't think he'd be released this early," Malena's aunt Rhonda Cardinal says. "It's not even nine months."

Maria wants a restraining order against Tallcree, and full custody of Zander. But she also wants Little Red River Cree Nation to talk about domestic violence, and for Tallcree and other violent offenders to be prohibited from living in, or even visiting, the community. Community members have recently started gathering signatures to petition Little Red River's leadership to do just that. They are nearing 1,000 signatures as of Thursday afternoon. The family plans on presenting the petition to community leaders today.

"This is history for Little Red," McLean says, "This is the first time that a family has ever stepped up like this."

Right now, when you grieve in Little Red, all you have is family, friends, the relief of a smoke, and maybe the monthly visit from the psychologist. But Maria hopes for more. If the community talks about domestic violence—if it offers emotional support to victims and rids itself of offenders—then maybe witnesses will come forward, and maybe there she will get justice for Malena.

"I know I'll never see my daughter again," Maria says, "but I want him to pay for what he did to us."

Follow Jane Gerster on Twitter.

Don’t Take Your Drug Advice from CTV

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Screenshot

Earlier this week, I did a dab of a sativa extract. My friend assisted me as he lit a rig with a crème brûlée torch until the metal part was red-hot, poking it with a stick holding a tiny bit of THC wax as I inhaled a grassy-tasting, clean smoke. Although I watched a weird Keanu Reeves movie and felt a bit sleepy, I didn't overdose and die, but according to one Canadian news outlet, I totally could have because it's basically like doing meth!

In an article published Friday morning on CTV News, a journalist who has clearly never had this experience wrote about "shatter" (AKA dabs, a type of THC extract) in a way that made it seem like it was the hottest new deadly drug to enter the scene in the small city of Stratford, Ontario. Within the article, there was a direct comparison between meth and THC: "[Police] say it's not as addictive as methamphetamine, but still poses a high risk for overdose." While this statement was attributed to police, in journalism, it's important to double-check any statements of fact, even if attributed or in the form of a direct quote. If that task had been done in this case, the sentence would have proven to be false.

On top of that, the article claimed that, "According to police, shatter is a toxic and highly addictive drug that's 10 times more potent than a marijuana cigarette." Clearly someone at CTV figured out that in some way part of the article was wrong, because as of this afternoon, the piece was edited to exclude these statements—without any note of correction.

In case you've been sleeping on cannabis consumption during the past few years, dabs (or shatter as it's occasionally referred to, like in the CTV article, because of the broken-glass-like texture it can sometimes take on) refers to highly concentrated THC extract made from weed using a process involving butane and Pyrex. While the process is admittedly dangerous (one thing the CTV article got right) and can lead to an explosion if done improperly, it can be done safely if using proper lab technique: wearing protective equipment like goggles and gloves and working in a well-ventilated area. Essentially, it's a new-age take on hash oil, which your parents probably smoked if they came of age in the '60s or '70s. The major difference is that in the extraction process for hash oil, the alcohol and butane remain, whereas, if made properly, they are absent from dabs.

To make it seem as if dabs are some new dangerous drug is outright incorrect since it's basically just an evolved version of hash oil. No matter how you spin it, comparing the effects and supposed addictiveness of THC to that of meth is not a sound argument. Police, as much as they love to take on the War on Drugs mentality, shouldn't be spreading misinformation. However, as this happens somewhat often when it comes to drugs, journalists should be mindful to not become a mouthpiece in these situations.

THC is not inherently addictive, and while some people do stupid things while high on it, it's not in the same capacity as a Schedule II drug. While I have no idea if this analogy was posed by a reporter in the form of a question or if it was simply offered up by police, it by no means holds up. If you've ever seen the "Faces of Meth," you probably understand the effects of smoking crystal. But what you'll notice is that you've never seen a Faces of THC, although, if such a series of photos existed, it might consist of slightly sleepy, chilled-out, smile-bearing people.

Follow Allison Elkin on Twitter.

The Great Sweatpants Controversy of 2015

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Ronald Reagan image via WikiCommons.

Earlier this week, actress and new mother Eva Mendes—star of such films as Hitch, 2 Fast 2 Furious, and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans—gave an interview to Extra in which she claimed that sweatpants were the number one cause of divorce in the country. Now obviously, she didn't actually mean this, but the message—that sweatpants are bad, sent waves throughout the internet, where people like to report on things that don't matter and then get mad about them.

Mendes's comments, which were quickly refuted by her partner Ryan Gosling, struck such a nerve because they spoke to a tacit understanding in our culture: Sweatpants, largely, are viewed as the domain of the sexless, as if swaddling your privates in cotton rendered them nonexistent. Think of Mike Judge's 2009 film Extract, in which the driving force behind the entire plot is that Jason Bateman's character Joel is driven to do horrible, antisocial things because his wife, played by Kristen Wiig, is always wearing sweatpants when he gets home. When the sweatpants go on, the viewer is told, Wiig's sexuality turns off.

Sweatpants are unsexy, we get told, they're also unfashionable and lazy. Whenever we dogpile onto a celebrity for letting themselves go, one of the things we harp on is the deployment of sweatpants. They were there for Britney Spears when she was a walking American horror story, and they kept Wolf of Wall Street's Jordan Belfort cozy as he was busy taking horse tranquilizers and crashing his car. Famed designer Karl Lagerfeld once called them a "sign of defeat." Years ago, black metal icon and amateur fashion critic Gaahl told VICE he hated them, saying, "If you're going to be a part of society, you can at least dress properly."

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In the past couple of years, meanwhile, sweatpants have wiggled their way into streetwear fashion—En Noir makes a pair of all-leather ones that run for about $800 on eBay and have been seen on the likes of Drake, Kanye West, Beyonce, and Usher. The ever-hateable lifestyle brand Supreme currently sells $128 sweats, and brands such as Mishka and Ron Bass manufacture printed sweatpants that look like an intern's mood board threw up on them. Track pants, the prissy, private-school cousin of the sweatpant, have seen a similar bump in popularity. A Google Trends search for Adidas track pants indicates increased consumer interest in the pants in the past couple of years (a representative for Adidas told me the company doesn't share sales figures), but a trip to any en vogue rap or electronic show will provide all the evidence you need for the $50 pants' renaissance in popularity. Both track pants and fashion sweats catch flack for the opposite reason sweatpants classically have: They supposedly render it impossible for the wearer to be taken seriously.

On the other hand, have you worn sweatpants before? They're amazing. I spent the latest never-ending New York winter in sweatpants, wearing them every day, even to work. My spindly legs stayed (relatively) cozy thanks to sweatpants' patented design of having a shitload of warm fabric. Sweatpants are a simple pleasure, which is why they've been around for nearly a hundred years (there's even a pair on display in the Smithsonian!). Their bad reputation is relatively recent, which means it could shift the other way pretty quickly. Maybe this time next year everyone will be blogging about how amazing sweatpants are. Maybe by then the hottest new media property will be a blog that shows nothing but photo after photo of Taylor Swift in sweatpants. Maybe we will no longer care about such things because the oceans will have risen and we will all just be looking for dry land, sort of like in Waterworld. Wear what pants you like.

Thumbnail image via Flickr user cloppy.

Follow Drew Millard on Twitter.

Does Prince’s Secret Vault of Unreleased Music Really Exist, and if so, What's in It?

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When it comes to Prince, it's not easy to separate the music from the man, nor the man from the myth. The Man in Purple is a Cracked.com reader's dream and a fact-checker's nightmare, generating more questions than answers: Did he change his name to an unpronounceable symbol as part of his desire to slip out of a limiting contract? Were all those side projects by collaborators and protégés like Vanity 6, the Time, and the Family simply fronts to release more music than it was thought the market could bear? Does he prefer bathing his lovers to bedding them? Does he require double hip replacement surgery that his religion forbids him from having? Is that why he carries a cane? Did he, standing at 5'2", really once dunk a basketball over Charlie Murphy's head during a heated game of pick-up, and then upon landing say, "Game: Blouses," as portrayed in the famous sketch on Chappelle's Show? Also, is his middle name Rogers or Roger? (The Encyclopedia Brittanica and IMBD say the former; as of this writing, Wikipedia and the algorithmically-produced search-engine listing in my Chrome browser claim the latter.) Is he playing tonight in your hometown?

While some of those mysteries may forever remain unsolved, veteran journalist and Prince super-fan-turned-scholar Mobeen Azhar's new BBC radio documentary, Hunting for Prince's Vault, sheds light on one, more musically focused question: Does Prince have a massive horde of hours upon hours of unreleased albums, outtakes, and demos?

Azhar has worked at the BBC for ten years, and while his work primarily focuses on Pakistan, terrorism, drug trafficking, and gay rights, he has long been a Prince fanatic. He's seen him live 53 times and, in 2013, when Azhar found himself in the same elevator as 3rdEyeGirl, he says he got so excited that he almost threw up on them. (He must have made an impression: At the next show one of the members invited him onstage, where he walked over to Prince and whispered, "I love you," to which Prince nodded politely.)

Hunting for Prince's Vault is a well-researched—and, it must be assumed, well-financed—documentary that captures fascinating interviews with a host of the elusive artist's former collaborators. Some notables include Dr. Fink, who played keyboards on Sign ☮ the Times and Purple Rain; Sonny T, his childhood friend and bass player for 19 years; Cat, a dancer and rapper he played with in the late 80s; recording engineers Susan Rogers and Hans Martin Buff; and Alan Leeds, president of Paisley Park records and Prince's ex-manager. Although Azhar never manages to squeeze all the way inside the closed gates—Prince himself abstainedfrom the proceedings, operating through his PR company and legal team—this hour-long documentary takes listeners further inside the musician's notorious—and litigiously guarded—vault than ever before, and provides us with a valuable document of music history on the artist formerly known as this symbol, formerly known as the Artist Formerly Known as Prince.

I Skyped with Azhar from London earlier this week to learn what he discovered about Prince and his (surely purple) vault in Paisley Park, Minneapolis.

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Clip from 'Prince Documentary: Hunting for the Secret Vault' (2015)

VICE: Why did you decide to make this documentary?


Mobeen Azhar: I didn't want to make a standard Prince documentary. For me, as a fan, there has been so much said and written about Prince. A lot of it is quite formulaic. What I mean by that is it normally starts off with, "Hey, Prince grew up in Minneapolis, which is really white and suburban and he was this black kid and that's how he got this really quirky sound. It was like he took the funk and the soul from his black heritage and mixed it with the rock of the white community that was around him. And then he made Purple Rain, and guess what? He's still making music." That's kind of the standard format for a Prince doc, so what I wanted to do was distinctly different to that. It was looking at the myth of the vault.

I think the Prince persona generally attracts a lot of speculation. It's something that he plays with. He's ethereal in how he presents himself. Over the years I've heard some odd rumors like, "Prince doesn't apparently need sleep." Like he's actually a vampire. Another rumor that has a lot of currency amongst crazy Prince fans is that he hasn't cried since he was a child. One that has more currency perhaps is this idea that Prince has a vault. Prince has spoken about the vault as a place where he keeps these unreleased songs. So the whole point of the documentary was to investigate whether or not the vault exists, and what is in the vault. And when we say "whether or not," we know it exists because Prince has spoken about that. But we wanted to know how much of that was urban legend or Prince toying with an idea and how much of it is actually true. Is there a physical vault? If so, where is it? What does he actually keep in it? Is it the masters to the albums that are out, or is there other stuff? We all know that he's got b-sides and extended versions, but what else is in there?

Was getting everyone to talk to you difficult?
I have to say, getting a hold of Prince was hugely difficult. It's probably worth me telling you that I've been in touch with Prince's PR company for ages, and they weren't very helpful. The requests would go around in a circle. Once, every couple of months, I would call up and say, "We're doing this documentary. I want to know about Prince's availability. Is there any way we can interview 3rdEyeGirl, the current band, or Prince? Maybe I'd get a response back in two weeks saying, "We've put this request forward."

When things really started moving and I went into full-time production, the first interview I got was with Matt Fink, the keyboard player for the Revolution. He plays that famous riff on "1999." A few days later, the PR company emails me one line—this is after six months of me being in touch—and the one line is, "Hey, Mobeen, who have you got signed up to do this documentary?" And I'm thinking, OK, do I tell them? Because at this point I've spoken to, I think, six or seven people and the only two who have really signed up are Cat and Matt Fink. So I think I don't want to mention Cat. I'll just test the water and say I'm speaking to Matt Fink and a host of other Prince associates and protégés. Within 24 hours, Matt Fink emailed me and says, "Hey, Prince's lawyers have been in touch. I can't do the interview. Take care. Bye."

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Mobeen Azhar with Prince drummer Michael Bland in 2015. Photo courtesy Azhar

So I give Matt Fink a call and he's really blunt and says I really actually want to do the interview. I really enjoyed speaking with you about my time with Prince, but Prince's lawyer got in touch and said that they're not really happy with me talking about this. So my journalistic take was, "Great, let me speak to the lawyer and sort this out because I want you to be comfortable." So I then contact the lawyer. I called them like three times, leave three voicemails over the course of five days, send a couple of emails. Eventually the lawyer picks up the phone after five days and says something like, "Prince is aware of the documentary and he feels the only person qualified to speak about his music and to speak about the vault is Prince himself." So I say, "OK, that's wonderful. I'd like nothing more than to interview Prince. So why don't we set up some time where we can interview the current band? I'll come and meet Prince in Minneapolis." And the response was like, "No, that's not in the cards and you need to go back to the PR company." I explained to this woman that I'd been in touch with the PR company for a number of months now and they hadn't been able to advance my request one bit. I ask, "Is there someone more effective than the PR company?" And at that point she says, "No, and we'd like for you not to do this documentary."

Wow.


Now I'm sure Prince understands, and I'm sure his lawyer understands, that's not really the way journalism works. You can't say, "We don't want you to do a story" and stop the story. Following that, I tried to keep them in the loop with what we were doing, but the shutters came down. And effectively after that, I got a few more emails from the PR company saying, "Tell me who else is on the cast list." Obviously, at that point, I didn't. It was very clear that it was because they wanted to get in touch with them and give them cease and desist orders. Thankfully Matt Fink said, "Look, I think this is silly and the lawyer has contacted me again and said, 'We can't actually stop you. So do what you want to do. But just be careful.'"

I flew to the States having spoken to six or seven Prince associates or band members, and I came back with 12 interviews, so much stuff we couldn't even use it all in the documentary. It's kind of being pushed now as a 60-minute TV doc, which we might end up making later in the year. I interviewed Rhonda Smith, who was Prince's bass player from 1996 to 2009. I didn't use that interview in the end because she didn't really want to speak about the vault, but there were some really interesting bits that came out of that. My point is we ended up with a whole bunch of stuff.

She asked, 'Why are you working on a holiday?' And Prince just laughed and said, 'This might be work for Hans. It's not work for me.'

Is there anything, just a taste, that you'd be able to share?


Yeah—OK, I want to know how to put this diplomatically—let me put it like this: One big theme which comes across no matter whom you speak to, in terms of people who have dealt with Prince—everyone respects him hugely, but if I had to sum up their experience in one word, that word would be control. And he has constructed this world in which, thankfully for him at least, he is in control of everything. He is one of the freest artists, you could say, in the world. He has a record contract only when he wants one. And unlike everyone else who is trying to make it in the music business, he will have record contracts that have special terms on them, distribution deals, where he can decide what he delivers, he can decide what's on the record—he has his own studio for god's sake—it's not like he's hiring studio time or the record company's paying for anything.

Something else that's snappier and isn't mentioned in the documentary is, without mentioning any names, I know on good authority that one thing that's in the vault and unlikely to ever come out is a collaboration with Madonna that Prince has toyed with releasing and was going to release it at one point but he hasn't. So that's quite a big deal, and also there's a collaboration with—do you know who Meshell Ndegeocello is?

Yeah.


He spent a night recording with her in New York. So Prince, Rhonda Smith, his bass player, and Meshell worked on some stuff together and that's all in the vault, just sitting there.

Pretty much if Prince is awake, he's either on a stage, or he's doing a soundcheck, or he's recording. His engineer, Susan Rogers, told me that during the four-year period from '83 to '87 he would deal with business calls for maybe an hour and after that he would record. It was really common for them to work on a song from scratch and by the end of a session have it completely mixed and finished. He would quite often come in having written lyrics, lay down the bass track, lay down the drum track, lay down the synth lines. Lay down the vocals, and by the time he leaves the studio, it's finished.

Both she and Hans Martin Buff, who was there in the 90s all the way up to 2000, had very similar experiences in the sense that they were on call all the time. Hans Martin Buff said to me he never really knew he had a day off until the day was over. He carried around a pager. So imagine, he's there from '96 to 2000 and in that period they get Christmas off, but apart from that he has a pager and that pager can go off at any time. When the pager goes off it means Prince is ready to record. He has to run to the studio and get everything set up. And that could be at 3:00 in the morning—quite often it is. If the pager doesn't go off, he just goes into the studio at noon and Prince is usually there by 1:00 and they work until the next morning anyway. But for weekends and the days that other people would classify as holidays, he has this pager. Hans Martin Buff told me that they had a guest in, and she said to Prince, on I think it was Thanksgiving or a particular holiday, "Why are you working on a holiday?" And Prince just laughed and said, "This might be work for Hans. It's not work for me."

Michael Bland, Prince's drummer said, 'If I was laying in bed at 3:00 in the morning, watching Dick Van Dyke with my wife, and Prince wanted to record, I recorded.'

Alan Leeds, who's Prince's manager, said that he's not a religious man but he really felt that Prince was a funnel and it was as if someone was pouring music into that funnel. That's a theme that runs through everything as well, even now. Many of the people who are closest to him told me that he plans on recording a song a day for the rest of his life.

If you're on call at all times, that doesn't leave a lot of time for yourself. Where are the boundaries when you work for Prince?


Everyone who spoke about him went out of their way—even when we weren't on tape, even when we were just talking—to say to me it was a great time in their life working for Prince. They felt they were making music history. But they also all said that it burnt them out and you don't have a life outside of it. You're kind of on call. It's like—I think we used the clip—but Prince's drummer [Michael Bland] says, "If I was laying in bed at 3:00 in the morning, watching Dick Van Dyke with my wife, and Prince wanted to record, I went, I recorded." You can't say you're tired. It would be the pinnacle of any musician's career, so you go with it.

This isn't in the documentary, but Michael Bland told me about the recording of "Money Don't Matter 2 Night" and "Willing and Able," both of which are on Diamonds and Pearls, and those songs were both recorded after a concert. They were in Japan at the time. Michael Bland told me he had the stomach flu. He went through this whole concert thinking he was going to throw up and then after the concert Prince says, "Yeah, I've had a few ideas. I want to go into the studio." And from scratch they record those two songs for the next album. And Michael Bland says he can't listen to those two songs without feeling nauseous because it reminds him of how he was feeling. To me, the drumming on them is really ornate and beautiful. But it was just an insight into this idea that you can't really have stomach flu because Prince wants to record.

Another thing everyone said is that Prince isn't into technical perfection, he's more concerned with getting the idea on tape. Susan Rogers told me a story about the recording of "If I Was Your Girlfriend." When she was setting up the studio, she said she was just exhausted and for whatever reason didn't check the mic and it had gain on it. So when Prince's vocal came out and she went to do the mix—he's just come out, he's recorded "If I Was Your Girlfriend," one of the best fucking songs in the universe—she goes in to do the mix and she's sitting there thinking, What the fuck have I just done? The vocal's all distorted. And she thinks, He's gonna kill me. He's gonna sack me. And she does the mix the best she can. She tries to repair any damage and he comes back and listens to the mix and obviously he can tell the vocal is slightly distorted and he says, "Do you know what? It was the way it was meant to be." That's the version you hear on Sign of the Times.

Do you feel that, in the course of your research and the documentary, you too have become part of this history? People might be trying to get a hold of you now, to ask about Prince.


[Laughs] Maybe I'm a footnote or something.

The documentary, at the end of the day, is about the vault. But I have a million stories. Most people would tell me—and this correlated with people who worked with him through all the different phases of his career—that he tends to sleep for about four hours. That's the way he's programmed. So quite often, he'd be at the console. He'd be mixing something that he'd started that afternoon and it'd be the early hours of the morning when he'd finish that. He'd go home and by 12 noon, four hours later, he'd be back in the studio and the whole thing would start again.

They should put him on that infographic about the work and sleep habits of famous geniuses throughout history.


Maybe one way to summarize it is Susan Rogers told me that the average human brain, if we take a guess, would be on input 70 percent of the time, meaning we're taking in information, and maybe we're on output 30 percent of the time, we're creating something or we're doing work. She said, with Prince, he's on output 90 percent of the time. He's constantly on output. He's constantly creating.

It sounds superhuman.
To have the amount of material he has locked away, it's not normal. To be on output that much of the time is not normal.

It's well documented how much Prince doesn't like bootlegs, but I was surprised to learn from the documentary that he doesn't even like covers of his work. Do you know of any that he actually likes?


I know for pretty much a fact that he really didn't like Ginuwine's version of "When Doves Cry," and he really didn't like Dru Hill being all over "The Beautiful Ones" with Mariah Carey. In terms of stuff that he does like I know that he likes "I Feel for You," by Chaka Khan. He's cool with that because they performed it together and he likes that stuff. This is mainly from the people who I spoke to. It's not that he's got a problem with cover songs [generally], because he himself has covered other people's songs. It's this kind of idea that he doesn't want to be out of that creative process. If someone does something interesting with a song of his that he likes and rings true with him, he's cool with it. But when that doesn't happen, then he feels that something has been stolen.

So the fact that he used an image from a Chappelle's Show sketch as the cover to his own single must really mean something.
It does absolutely. I think that there's a mutual respect.

In regard to bootlegs, I'd say that Alan Leeds was really the person who explained the bootleg culture to me, in terms of Prince's perspective. Prince was fairly blasé about giving away material to his girlfriends, leaving tapes with friends, and so bootlegs started to make their way onto the black market. In the 80s I think it added to Prince's mystique because as a kid, in the 90s, I would go to Camden market looking for Prince bootlegs. It added to this notion that, yeah, we've all heard Diamonds and Pearls and "My Name Is Prince" and Purple Rain, but did you know that there's this record that just leaked? Now, in the mid 90s, the internet becomes a reality and all of a sudden it's not about mystique anymore, because anyone can search for a Prince bootleg and download pretty much any leak that's ever been there. And I think that's the point where Prince turned his back on it and decided he didn't want anything to leak anymore.

Prince isn't necessarily thinking in terms of years or decades—he's thinking in terms of centuries.

Another thing that Alan Leeds said to me is that as time went on, it became really apparent that Prince was more upset about the sale of bootlegs than he was about fans hearing the music. The fact that someone else, like a businessperson wearing a gray suit somewhere was setting up these bootleg labels and getting his records pressed and making money out of it. So that's when the bootleg culture stopped. But Prince has continued, to this day, to release music in really unconventional ways.

I don't know if you came across this, but three days ago Prince played concerts in Louisville. So he's playing those concerts and what does he do? Everyone who has bought a ticket, they get an email with two songs attached and it says here's a thank-you from Prince—two new songs. Songs you can't buy anywhere. So, effectively, a few days before that, these songs were sitting in the vault. And he just sends them out to people. He sends one to a community station in New York and one is played on a Christian-rock radio station in Louisville. It's almost as if he enjoys—and a lot of his associates told me this as well—he enjoys the idea of buried treasure. He enjoys the fact that no fan can just go on Amazon and buy all his albums. If you really want the complete works of Prince you have to dig and dig and dig and all the fans I've ever met will always say, "You know what? If you keep looking there's always more Prince music out there."

Do you suppose the vault will ever be opened and released to the public?


I came away, having spoken to all the people I spoke to, thinking that it will. I'll sum it up like this: Sonny T, his bass player and one of his childhood friends, said to me, Prince isn't necessarily thinking in terms of years or decades—he's thinking in terms of centuries. Because it's not like Michael Jackson who has a few tracks here, a few tracks there, and then they get Justin Timberlake to finish off a few songs and add a few vocals here and there. Prince has hours and hours and hours of unreleased material. You could go in there and you could compile album upon album upon album. I think the issue isn't when will it open, but instead, will we be around long enough to actually hear everything?

Listen to Mobeen Azhar's documentary "Hunting for Prince's Vault" on BBC Radio 4 at 10:30 GMT on Saturday, March 21, 2015. A longer version can be heard on BBC World Service from 20:05 GMT, or afterwards on the BBC World Service website.

Follow James Yeh on Twitter.

Would You Eat Swedish Blood Pudding with Me?

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Would You Eat Swedish Blood Pudding with Me?
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