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Click through the slideshow for all August reviews.

This month around VICE junction, the heavy and weird stuff ruled, and the normal crap and rap music drooled. There are exceptions, of course; A$AP Ferg’s 'Trap Lord' is great; meanwhile, the faster we eradicate Norma Jean from the face of the Earth, the faster we will know true happiness. For bonus points, see if you can find the phrase “face anus” WITHOUT hitting command f. It won’t necessarily make you any happier, but it will let you know when it is and when it is not appropriate to equate your mouth to a willing and welcoming asshole.

More music from VICE:

Keep Chief Keef Weird

False Punx

"Motorola Queen"


The Armpit of the Internet: Will 3D Hentai Kill the Human Porn Star?

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Collages by Sam Dwyer.

Poke around the cum-stained corners of the internet’s vilest porn repositories, and you’ll find that it doesn’t get much filthier than cartoons. Freed of the body’s physical limitations, animated porn stars can keep guzzling demon dick long after Sasha Grey succumbs to lock jaw. Thanks to its ability to fulfill all taboo desires, hentai (the Japanese word we used to describe all kinds of cartoon smut) has always skewed kinky and now that it’s entering the realm of hyper-realistic 3D animations, it’s only bound to get weirder.

3D hentai is still relatively niche. A Google search only yields 8 million hits, while regular hentai generates 26 times as many results. This won’t be the case for long, because unlike the frozen faces of their two-dimensional counterparts, the computer-rendered porn stars of 3D hentai look positively fleshy. And when their asses jiggle, even their buttcracks cast a shadow. Anyone can see why this is an improvement.

Our attraction to digital verisimilitude is nothing new. Mainstream video games, CGI films, and even advertising have long been aiming for OCD-level attention to detail. Cartoon porn is just catching up. As the adult film industry grinds to a halt again from yet another HIV scare, it’s easy to see why these digital avatars could easily replace frail disease prone adult actors. Honestly, I can’t wait to never see another awkward porn star faking an orgasm.

As for its content, 3D hentai is rife with the same demon rapes, tentacle fucking, and barely disguised pedophilia found in its 2D equivalent. And while you might chalk up these fetishes to our degraded modern condition, one of the earliest and most well-known erotic cartoons is, in fact, a woodblock from 1814 called The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, which depicts a woman with her legs spread wide, getting pleasured in all her welcoming orifices by an octopus. In other words, creepy sex isn’t a new phenomenon. Weird shit has always lit up our proverbial fires.

In fact, hentai is actually short for hentai seiyokuto, or “perverse sexual pleasure.” According to Mark McLelland, a Japanese cultural historian and Associate Professor at the University of Wollongong, the term was coined in the 19th century to describe abnormal sexual behavior, and in the 1920s, thanks to Freud’s brand of psychopathology, the definition had shifted to mean any kind of sexual disorder. By the time Japan’s postwar period rolled around, the word was used to describe all non-normative sexual preferences, similar to what the word queer means today. Nowadays, hentai is the domain of manga fanboys all over the world, including this adorable French-boy next door.

Conventionally speaking, not much changes when hentai transitions from two dimensions to three. Websites still have thumbnail galleries, videos, and paywalls. Some advertisements are grotesque: “Blood, sperm, broken pussies, pain, nightmare, tentacle monsters fucking innocent teen girls with their many dicks!” And some come in broken English: “Is the 3D girls porn of your interest? Than why are you waiting for a permission, click here and let yourself enjoy the pretty damn good amount of 3d girls porn with the hottest teens.” Common tropes still include insatiable virgins with monster papayas abiding faithfully to the Madonna whore paradox. 3D cartoon porn even has its own A-list stars.

The biggest difference between 2D and 3D hentai is the latter’s hyper-reality and how we perceive what we’re jerking off to. Even though computer-rendered cartoon porn aims to look lifelike, its masturbatory appeal lies in the fact that these massively endowed stars are actually superhuman, therefore more virtual, more expressive, and more pliant than their human colleagues. Their eroticism doesn’t lie in looking completely human, but rather in their surreal strangeness. The tension between naturalism and fantasy teases at a certain sense of un-canniness that is so fucking weird it becomes, perhaps unintentionally, funny.  This particular aesthetic of 3D hentai reminds me of certain types of wacked-out internet art, like Wendy Vainity’s creepy animations, or the discombobulated talking heads of Ian Cheng’s virtual models. It also helps that both Vainity and Cheng have a great sense of humor.

Because of its fucked up, violent, and taboo themes, 3D hentai is already facing all kinds of censorship. Second Life, the online community where user-generated cartoon porn has proliferated, had its adult community confined to a red light district in 2009. When I wrote to Professor McLelland asking him to elaborate on his research, he refused, saying that in Australia, where he is based, “even talking about this stuff is potentially illegal.”

Nevertheless, the beating off goes on. Very soon, the Oculus Rift, the world’s first virtual reality gaming headset, will be released and like clockwork, someone has already developed a cartoon porn game for it. The game is called Custom Maid 3D and it’s mostly about leveling up so you can peel off your maid’s clothes. Needless to say, it’s way more boner-inducing than Diablo.

@MichelleLHOOQ

The Armpit of the Internet is a biweekly column exploring the most odorous and crust-ridden corners of cyber culture.

Previously: Here's Whats Happening on the Internet's Most Racist Forums

Hey Toronto, Come Party with Raz Fresco and Tre Mission On Friday

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Hey Toronto, Come Party with Raz Fresco and Tre Mission On Friday

Neither Big nor Easy: A Pilgrimage to Gypsy Lou Webb, New Orleans’s Patron Saint of Beat Literature

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Gypsy Lou Webb holds a copy of the first issue of The Outsider, which featured her on the cover.

One of the brightest flags of late-period beat literature got planted in New Orleans in the early 1960s when Louise “Gypsy Lou” Webb and her husband Jon Webb founded Loujon Press. The Webbs ran Loujon mostly out of various small French Quarter apartments on Ursulines and Royal, and all their books and journals were art objects handmade on giant old printing presses, a process that resulted in pages in myriad different colors, textures, and typesets. Gypsy Lou even pressed flowers into the later issues of The Outsider, the couple’s literary magazine. The Webbs’ publishing venture was short-lived but they put out two of Henry Miller’s books and, in The Outsider, featured poetry from the likes of Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. They’ll always be best remembered, however, for unleashing Charles Bukowski upon the world, having hand-printed the drunken master’s first two major books of poetry, It Catches My Heart In Its Hands (1963) and Crucifix in a Deathhand (1965), both of which are now collectors’ items that cost hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars.

New Orleans doesn’t lay claim to Bukowski as enthusiastically as it does Tennessee Williams, Walker Percy, or even Anne Rice. But the city is arguably as important to Bukowski’s story as it is to, say, William Faulkner’s. During the Loujon Press years, Bukowski came and went from New Orleans, carousing, drinking, fighting, fucking, and occasionally writing. He supposedly carved “Hank Was Here” into the cement outside of what is now the Royal Street Inn, which only in recent years renamed what was once billed as its “Bukowski Suite.” Meanwhile, Lou sold paintings to pay the rent so Jon could break his back producing Buk’s work.

New Orleans eventually heaped upon the couple a mountain of bad luck that forced them out of the city. They continued publishing from other locations until Jon (in his mid-60s and 11 years older than his wife) passed away in Nashville in 1971. Bukowski later wrote in one of his Los Angeles Free Press columns about how he’d immediately attempted but failed to fuck Lou, who appeared in the story as “June” mourning at “Clyde’s” funeral:

“June, the dead are dead, there’s nothing we can do about it. Let’s go to bed…”

“Go to bed?”

“Yes, let’s hit the sack, let’s make it…”

“Listen, I knew Clyde for 32 years…”

“Clyde can’t help you now…”

“His body’s still warm, you bastard…”

“Mine’s hot…”

After her husband's death, Gypsy Lou moved back to New Orleans and carried on as a respected eccentric and bohemian scene maven who could be found in Pirate’s Alley selling touristy paintings that she did not take seriously. She served as a muse to transplanted New York painter Noel Rockmore, whose etchings graced Crucifix in a Death Hand. The Upperline Restaurant in New Orleans to this day proudly displays Rockmore’s paintings, including Homage to the French Quarter, which depicts Gypsy Lou and all of her now-dead friends. She was a chaste muse, however—she pledged eternal faithfulness to Jon, whose ashes hung in a vessel around her neck. Reportedly, she ate little bits of her husband over the years until none of him remained.

In the early 1980s, just as New Orleans was about to bungle the World’s Fair, Gypsy Lou’s poor health forced her out of the Quarter and into her sister’s house in the watery burbs of Slidell. She flickered in and out of public life, participating in the writing of Bohemian New Orleans: The Story of the Outsider and Loujon Press (2007), and also helping to narrate a terrific movie about Loujon Press, The Outsiders of New Orleans (2007). The death of her sister in 2010 left Gypsy Lou temporarily homeless. Then she had a stroke. She’s now 97 and dependent on the $200 or so she receives each month in social security. Naturally, she’s not participating in the city’s cultural life like she used to—she’s reluctant, for instance, to drive all the way from Slidell to New Orleans to attend the Historic New Orleans Collection’s new Loujon Press exhibit, which runs until November 16. Still, she’s surely more alive than most of us will be at her age. 

When I went to see her recently, I prepared less for an interview than for a trip to a very old woman with a bad memory and even worse hearing. I baked her a meatloaf, mashed some potatoes, and packed up my guitar. I rode over to Slidell with Rich Marvin and his wife Tee, major proponents of painter Noel Rockmore. Because Rockmore’s paintings decorate several Loujon books, the Marvins made a point several years ago to befriend Lou, and ended up happily joining her roster of de facto caretakers.

I also happened to bring all four 50-year-old issues of The Outsider, which a friend had purchased some years back as presents for his now ex-wife. The books looked like relics of another age—just as they did when they were first printed—and still contained Gypsy Lou’s pressed flowers. Original copies of The Outsider serve as the crown jewel of the Historic New Orleans Collection’s Loujon exhibit, so carrying them out from the car made me nervous.

We knocked, and through the window saw Gypsy Lou stand up and step onto the clean newspapers she’d spread across the floor for her new rat terrier. (She recently outlived her 20-year-old dog, Jolie.) Her cramped apartment is not unlike those Bukowski once lovingly detailed: two tiny rooms, one bathroom, a kitchen, particleboard counters. She wore a simple, lightly embroidered dress as black as her dyed hair. She’d just eaten but was impressed I’d cooked for her. Rich and Tee had come armed with cleaning supplies but a young lady from STARK was already there wearing yellow gloves; Lou showed surprise each time she reappeared into the crowded kitchen where we all sat talking.

Rich presented Lou with some old photos of herself posing with his hero Rockmore. “Oh!” Lou cried out, her memory jolted. “All the years I knew him I have never had a picture of Noel! Look how handsome he is.”  

“Remember when he asked you to marry him?” Rich said.

She nodded then looked at me. “He made every woman in the French Quarter except me. I was married to Jon!” She picked up another of the photos of Rockmore. “Oh no… You’re up in heaven now?” she whimpered, then growled, “I don’t think so.”

Gypsy Lou Webb with Noel Rockmore, right, and a friend.

She put the photo down and remarked to Rich, “Someone called this morning, some photographer. About some pictures?”

“That was me,” Rich said.

“That was you?”

“I called. Those are the pictures.”

Webb grabbed the next photo of herself amid a group that included Rich, Tee, and… “Who is this?” Lou asked.

“That’s your sister,” Rich said. “She died.”

“That’s my sister?!”

“That was taken when we visited you at her house.”

Lou looked at me and cringed, then shrugged off concern for her unreliable faculties. “I lost my mind when I had the stroke two years ago,” she said. “But I am getting better.”

Tee took the opportunity to plant an idea in Lou’s slippery mind: “You’re in that Rockmore show soon in Baton Rouge, you know, Lou. We want to take you.” Lou had missed opening night at the Historic New Orleans Collection after falling and hurting her leg, and now Rich and Tee were afraid she would miss their show too. “We went to New Orleans and saw that Loujon show. You should see it. It’s all about you, Lou!” She handed Lou a copy of the program for the exhibit.

Lou’s eyes widened like she must be misunderstanding this woman: A show about me? She looked back down at the program and pointed out a photo of her husband’s old printing press. “The University of Tulane gave him that press,” she remembered. “He tried to give them money for it. They didn’t want to take it. But they took it.” She pointed to another photo: “And that’s Charles Bukowski. Went by the name of Hank. That was one hell of a nice guy. He drank a lot.”

“I get that from his writing,” I joked.

She nodded a look like she still worries for Hank. “He was a nice guy. He drank a lot, but he was nice.”

When Rich couldn’t find thumbtacks, he went about taping Lou’s new photos to her walls—as I removed The Outsider from the bag, slowly, so as not to startle her. When she saw it she shouted, “Look! We did this!” She whipped it open and in a rough manner the book’s new owner might not approve of, began kissing the pages.“We did this. I did that. We printed this. I remember that.”  

Rich and Tee went out to walk Gypsy Lou’s new dog as Lou grabbed the Sharpie with purpose and signed the journals like she all of a sudden remembered the important person she was. She smiled at her own face on the book’s covers and gasped upon finding her old pressed flowers. “I remember doing hundreds of these,” she said, kissing them. “We did everything. That poor Jon.”

Rich returned and again tried to secure her attendance at his big Rockmore show in Baton Rouge. Webb asked for the date, then remembered it before anyone else. “Ed Blair called me, all pissed off,” she nearly shouted. “They had a big show in New Orleans somewhere that I was supposed to go to. But I fell down! I couldn’t walk! It’s slippery, I’m barefooted, what the hell I am supposed to do? He was supposed to pick me up to meet all these people—you know, who cares? ‘All those people came,’ he says, and I was supposed to come, dressed up like a gypsy…”  She shook her head. “Bullshit. C’mon. When I was selling paintings—you do a lot of shit when you’re selling paintings, you talk funny, you look funny, the whole damn thing. Those days are done.”

Over the past few years, she’s had chances to return to the vibrant cultural district she left more than 30 years ago. At the 2007 New Orleans premier of The Outsiders of New Orleans, a fan offered down-and-out Lou a free French Quarter apartment. On another occasion, Tee tried to book her into the famous Christopher Inn assisted living facility in the most musically active section of Faubourg Marigny. Either scenario would have meant a constant stream of fun sycophants running her errands and bringing her home-cooked meals. But according to Rich and Tee, Gypsy Lou, a 60s radical after all, didn’t want to give the Man her social security number, and so was unable to sign a lease on either apartment and ended up back in Slidell. Gypsy Lou herself claims she’s simply happy where she is. “I. Want. To. Stay. Here!” she announced. “I don’t want to live in the French Quarter! I lived there for 32 years! I’ve had enough of it!”

Then another memory distracted her. “I did that,” she repeated, again tapping Bukowski’s pockmarked mug on the famous “Outsider of the Year” cover. “He was such a nice man,” she said. “Drank so much though.”

Michael Patrick Welch is a New Orleans musician, journalist, and author of books including The Donkey Show and New Orleans: the Underground Guide. His work has appeared at McSweeney'sOxford AmericanNewsweekSalon, and many other publications. Follow him on Twitter here.  

Previously: Defending the Daiquiri and New Orleans’s Go-Cup Culture

The Site of Hitler’s Suicide Is Now a Playground

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This slide sits atop the site of Hitler's cremation.

By the afternoon of his suicide, Adolf Hitler hadn’t seen the sun in ten days. He had been living in a concrete bunker 28 feet below the ruins of Berlin for months. There was a time when the dictator was able to walk his German Shepherd, Blondi, in the Chancellery gardens above, but during those last days, the advancing Soviet artillery had made that impossible. Anyway, Blondi was dead—fed cyanide on his master’s orders the night before. Hitler shot himself with a pistol the following afternoon. In accordance with his wishes, his corpse was doused with gasoline and cremated in a shell-crater just outside the bunker exit.

Sixty-eight years later, Berlin is almost unrecognizable. The Chancellery has been replaced by a kindergarten and a Chinese restaurant. The bunker, now half demolished is sealed beneath the parking lot of a beige apartment block. And, the cremation site lies under a weird, polychromatic children’s slide that the modern-art-hating Hitler would have abhorred—which is exactly the reason my translator Gaïa Maniquant-Rogozyk, who is Jewish, likes it. She came along to help me interview the local residents about how it feels to live alongside this dark part of their history. We took turns surfing down the slide as we waited for passersby.

“I don’t think I would have come here if the bunker was still existing,” Gaïa mentioned.

“Why?” I asked.

“When you grow up in a Jewish family,” she replied, “and when half of that family has been exterminated, you have a duty of memory. I went to Auschwitz on a school trip and I finally understood what happened. It’s so big that it’s easy for it to be abstract—just like a story—but in Auschwitz, there’s those big rooms with all the bowls that they found, and another one with all the prosthetics, and there’s a room with all the hair shaved from the heads of prisoners. I saw the hair and I had to leave. At that point, I understood what happened and I didn’t need to see anything more. I had fulfilled my duty."


The apartment building constructed above the Führerbunker

Just then, a German man exited one of the buildings. Gaïa led the way, introducing me. The man’s name was Max, and he was 24. We shook hands.

“Do you ever think about the events that happened here?” I asked.

“Not really,” he admitted. “I’ve never been too interested in history. I had it in school, but for me there’s nothing special about it. There’s no connection anymore to the past. I’m not saying it should be forgotten, just that it’s not part of my history.”

“So, you make your own history?”

“That’s right.”

“Do you have any emotions toward the bunker at all?”

“I did see it when they opened it—when there was a construction site around it. As kids, we used to climb the fence. We didn’t know what it was—we were just playing a game to see who would go the farthest inside.”

“And, did you go the farthest?”

“No. I was scared.”


Crossed out neo-Nazi graffiti

After saying goodbye to Max, we walked through a corridor to another part of the property. The whitewashed walls were spray-painted with black neo-Nazi symbols. Each one had been crossed out with blue spray-paint, and anti-Nazi slogans had been added: “No Tolerance for neo-Nazis!!!” read one.

An elderly German woman with a cane hobbled past with her eyes set straight. A little dachshund padded after her. Gaïa intercepted her, and I asked about the bunker.

“It doesn’t really make a difference to us,” she stated. “We’ve been here for a long time. If you always had to think about Hitler, you’d just become crazy after a while. It’s not the only thing you can think about.”

“What’s your name?” I asked in parting.

“Why?” she responded, narrowing her eyes.

“A first name is fine,” I assured her. “It’s just for the article.”

She hesitated for a couple beats longer. “Edeltraut,” she offered finally, before pursuing her dog down the corridor.

We watched her shuffle off. Gaïa leaned in close, raising her eyebrows. “I guarantee,” she said, “that is not her real name.”


Roc’s new book, And, was released last year. You can find more information on his website.

(Photos by Roc Morin)


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We Wandered Around Brampton, Ontario with Batman Himself

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Playing with shadows, deep in the heart of scary ol' Brampton. All photos by Jeff Campagna.

I wanted to write at least 500 words about how difficult it was to track down the Brampton Batman. I wanted to write about having to lurk in dark alleyways. Spending my free nights scanning suburban rooftops for blurred silhouettes of a cape and cowl. Asking locals about sightings much like the awkward, four-eyed journalists from the comic books. But finding Brampton, Ontario’s homegrown version of Batman wasn't that difficult at all. As it turns out, a modern-day Batman requires only a Facebook page to keep his gloved finger on the pulse of the sleepy burbs. I just had to message him. No bat signals or bat phones needed.

It's 10:30 on a Saturday night. I'm waiting to meet the Brampton Batman (who prefers to be called The Dark Knight) at the corner of Steeles Avenue and Dixie Road in the bowels of Brampton, a gnarly notch on the commuter belt northwest of Toronto. If you haven’t been to Brampton, you’re probably better off. Imagine an abandoned theme park taken over by thinly-veiled rub ‘n’ tugs, roti shops and dystopian police stations. I feel uneasy, but I shouldn't. I grew up not far from Brampton. I've passed this intersection countless times before, though not in this context. Relatively normal things suddenly seem sketchy. A woman steps off a public bus and scurries into the darkness, looking over her shoulder as she goes. A drunkard sleeps on the boulevard. Colorful characters in low-hanging jeans and backward hats with the stickers still on glare at me as they pass. East Indian party music pounds from a nearby strip mall. I start to feel as though I'm in a watered-down, still-born recreation of Gotham City.

At 10:39 I spot him from maybe 100 yards away. As soon as I confirm my sighting I get really excited. But I’m still apprehensive. My wife is certain I'm going to get raped. Batman is walking with purpose. It’s more like he’s marching. So fast, I can imagine him toppling forward ass-over-ankles. I meet him in the middle of the road and shake his hand. I compliment him on his killer suit. He apologizes for being late in a voice so deep it's goosebump inspiring. He sounds like the guy from movie trailers. Or like God. I'm happy he doesn't sound like Christian Bale. He’s black, which makes sense in the melting-curry-pot of cultures that is Brampton.


The Dark Knight, waiting to cross the street in the middle of suburbia.

By 11:00 we're marching together up Dixie Road against the heavy flow of traffic. Batman demands that I walk on the inside so that he is between the speeding cars and me. "For safety," he says, establishing the strong superhero/helpless citizen relationship… it's kind of weird because I am pretty certain that I am older than him, though not by much. His concern for safety supports the rumor that he is an off duty cop. I ask him about his bat suit. "My previous suit was a bit more of a hands-on project," he explains while cars rocket past and honk at him. "But one of the best things, of course, is the realization that being Batman is not just the suit. You really do have to be Batman on the inside. Those who know me with my cowl off still call me Batman." He tells me that he has three police citations for civilian bravery. If he’s not a cop, he certainly has a real hard-on for justice.

Batman’s current suit is the real deal. Thirty-two pounds of boots, chest armor, a utility belt, cape, cowl and gloves. It's an exact replica from Nolan's The Dark Knight. Batman won't tell me where he purchased the suit or how much it cost but a strikingly similar suit is for sale from UD Replicas for $1,564. A constant drip of bat sweat beads off the tip of his rubberized nose armor like a leaky faucet and he continually dabs it dry with a shredded paper towel. 


A crowd begins to amass around The Dark Knight out front of Bramalea Mall.

Around 11:30, at the corner of Dixie Road and Queen in front of the hulking mall known as Bramalea City Centre, he attracts the first crowd of Bramptonians. They pour out of a nearby bar called All Stars that looks suspiciously like a shawarma joint. Batman shakes everyone’s hands, poses for Instagram pictures, and utters "Good evening,” "Pleasure to meet you,” "You got it” and "Stay safe,” with Tickle Me Elmo consistency. I end up taking photos for everyone with their smartphones and it's getting annoying. "Are you Robin?" people ask me with drunken slurs. A young dude smelling of smokes and cheap beer tells Batman his friend lost his license because of an altercation last week when The Dark Knight chased down a car that was driving on only three tires and called the cops. Apparently the driver was covered in coke: classic Brampton. Batman seems unfazed by the story.

By midnight, we're patrolling down Queen Street toward central Brampton. I ask him why he's parading around as Batman in the first place. He says, "I've been Batman since I was 14. Putting on the cape and cowl was just for me. It's about going out and being who you are. It just ended up that who I am is a recognizable symbol. For a regular person to be able to bring joy to people is addictive." I am starting to think that Brampton Batman is simply a really nice guy. Polite, mannerly and hates (as he puts it) the N-word. He oozes political correctness like Canadian propaganda which adds to the weirdness because the real Batman is kind of a brooding dick.

Then, a robotic voice from somewhere within his suit says "Incoming Message" and he bends his forearm out to check an iPhone embedded in his bat glove. It glows brightly and has an old-school bat symbol as its wallpaper. "Twitter is alive," Batman says, "they are looking for me." At this point, I realize that he takes this shit very seriously. He’s committed to really being Batman, albeit a nicer, Canadianized version.

An hour and a half into our patrol and I'm feeling it. My thighs are burning. My feet feel like I've worn them down to nubs. And even though it's cold outside I'm getting hot. And if I'm hot, he must be dying. I can smell sweat and hot rubber.


The Dark Knight contemplates his order at Sonny's Drive-in.

Sometime around 12:30 AM we end up at Sonny's Drive-in, a Bramptonian landmark of late night drunken eats. "Are you allergic to anything?" he asks before entering the dive. It's lit like an operating room. Suddenly I can see the flaws in his suit. It all feels a bit garish and a little fake. Like when the house lights are turned on  in a strip club and you look at the girls and feel slightly duped. Batman orders a double bacon and cheese banquet burger and two Vitamin Waters. I realize he is ordering the burger for me and I'm slightly bummed that I won't get to see Batman eat a cheeseburger. I leap to pay. Batman beats me to it by pulling bills out of yet another hidden pocket in his bat glove. "Yo. Why you guys chargin' Batman?" a drunken girl in tight leopard spandex asks the cashier. "Batman comes in here too often for us not to charge him," the tattooed cashier responds. There's at least five people in line. They all have their phones out snapping pictures and video (most of which I see later that night online with the #BramptonBatman hashtag). I feel like Alice plunging further and further down the rabbit hole of awkward suburban fucked-up-ness. 


The Dark Knight jacks up a Pontiac Grand-Am for some Bramptonians in distress.

Shortly after, I am greedily mowing down on my banquet burger in the parkling lot. Across the street an old Grand Am sits lopsided with a flat tire. Four young Bramptonians stand beside it calling out for Batman. Before I know it he’s already across the street,down on his haunches jacking up the car. The four suburbanites in distress are a sight to behold. Girls with pink hair. Shirtless guys with faded, indiscernible tattoos. Cigarette smoke. Cheap booze breath. And enough slang and street talk to fill a DMX album. Again, I feel as though I am in a semi-retarded Canadian version of Gotham city where Batman changes tires with help from a flashlight app and two shirtless dudes. "Be quick and be very careful,” Batman barks. “Who’s got the light? Give it to me. Well done. You got it. Secure it quickly. Who is smoking a cigarette near me? Secure the tire. Do you guys have it from here? Stay safe."

We continue our patrol toward central Brampton. Batman’s rampant jaywalking has me reconsidering the cop angle. I feel an exercise-induced headache coming on. By now, all of Brampton is sufficiently intoxicated. Cars slow down or screech to a halt mid-traffic to catch a glimpse of Batman. They veer off to shoulders, cut sharply into parking lots and passengers hang out of lowered windows screaming "No fucking way! It's Batman!" or "How many people did you save today, Batman?" or "You get the Batmobile yet?" or "Yo, Batman! What a' gwaan?" Batman is posing for more pictures than ever. I can tell that this is the highlight of the night for these plastered, tucked-away suburbanites. It’s all a little sad.

Around 1:30 AM we reach the Rose Theater in the heart of old Brampton. "This is one of my haunts," Batman tells me. "I like to come here and reflect, looking at the theater. It gives people the chance to catch a glimpse." Standing eerily still in the empty square, he cuts an imposing figure. But where was all the crime fighting? The only person left battered and bruised at the end of the night was me. But, I guess that's a good thing. 


The Dark Knight and Jeff Campagna.

After some small talk and a few more photo ops, I get the feeling that Brampton Batman wants to head back to his Brampton Batcave. We say our goodbyes and I leave him there standing tall, cape and cowl outlining a dramatic silhouette in the early morning suburban air, like a monument to himself. I wonder if he took the bus home.

 

Follow Jeff on Twitter: @AWUTI

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Why the "I Have a Dream" Speech Still Isn't Free, 50 Years Later

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Why the "I Have a Dream" Speech Still Isn't Free, 50 Years Later

The Permutating Brain of Stephen Dixon

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Stephen Dixon, self-portrait

Stephen Dixon has published at least 27 books of fiction. There may be more—it always seems there are deeper crevices to Dixon’s body of work that I’ve somehow overlooked or lost in the big American body of words. His is one of those voices that you know immediately, yet there is always something slightly unexpected about it, if in the most everyday of ways. Still, he has somehow been overlooked as one of the masters of recording how a person thinks, how days go, what it feels like to be alive inside a brain.

The foundation of Dixon’s writing is in human interactions—not a field I’m usually hellishly into. Much of his writing is composed as if it were spoken aloud, and the sentences are often long and change course, sometimes midthought. The narration can jump years ahead in the breadth of one paragraph, and then back again, assembling in its wake a continually widening picture of a life, without the necessity of framing, reenactment, and formality that other “realistic” novels often work within.

Old Friends (2004), for example, consists mostly of a series of conversations between two aging men who have spent their lives close to each other, working as professors, trying to write. The narration, rather than depicting scenes or laying out the sprawl of two old dudes getting old together, works almost like memory itself does. The men call when there is something to say, and sudden juts of recollection pop up naturally, in conversation. Death is described with the same clipped, meandering tone as having breakfast: “It could have been a tree that fell on him while he was running. Or he could have tripped on a tree root or rock and banged his head so hard he got a blood clot and died. Or a heart attack or stroke while he was running. Or else tripped. Got up fast to continue his run—’you know Dad’—and tripped much harder this time because he didn’t know he’d broken a leg in the first fall, and then hit his head.” When one of the men gets sick, his wife becomes the voice at the other end of the phone, suddenly shifting the entire feel of the narrative, and the range of possible observations. There’s something surprisingly moving, not necessarily in any one thread of conversation, but in the way it begins to click together, the way the lives knit and build so freely, having amassed so much time. The thread of the voice seems considerate, open, placing the heavy beside the light, and carrying its experience the way skin does: by simply being.

Dixon offers as much of his protagonists’ everyday behavior as he does their moments of drama. He relays what’s happening in their lives from their perspectives whether they are simply trying to explain the article they read on the effects of drugs on a rodent, retelling what happened earlier while making coffee, or discussing the daily wear of changing the bedding of one's terminally ill wife. It all comes out in permutations of the brain struggling to interact with itself while simply continuing along.

The sick wife is certainly one of the more memorable elements of Dixon’s fiction. She shows up constantly—sometimes as an aside, and sometimes more centrally. One of the first Dixon stories I read was “The Switch” from the short story collection I. (2000], which slyly begins, “He tries to put himself in her position.” From there, the protagonist enters into the body of his wife, who is confined to a wheelchair and needs help getting in and out of bed, going to the bathroom, etc. The wife, who has gone into her husband’s body, helps the protagonist through his day, frequently becoming frustrated, often to the point that she comes across as shitty and rude. The husband begins to feel bad for being a strain on her, for ruining her life, and wonders if he should kill himself. The narrative is so clear and open in its acceptance of the protagonist having become a burden against his will that the reader forgets this is actually how the wife must really feel, and that it is the man who is subjecting his wife to these feelings, in his frustration. “I can do less for myself every day, he thinks. One of these mornings I’ll wake up a total vegetable and I won’t get any better and then when I’ll really want and need to kill myself—when the feeling to do it won’t just suddenly pop up and then go away—I won’t have the motor control to carry it out, not even to unscrew a container cap or bite it off to get at the killer pills, if by then she’d even leave them around like that.” The reversal of roles makes what could be otherwise melodramatic or obvious feelings triple in effect. Dixon’s ability to be frank with himself, to express feeling in a way that doesn’t sound affected or overwrought, puts him in a position of great power, simply by tweaking the framework and understanding how people actually think, feel guilt and pain.

Much of Dixon’s work doesn’t have a defined beginning or end beyond the subtle framing mechanisms. His plots derive their power from the protagonists’ ability to reflect, and in that reflection, use their imagination to explore what could have happened and what might happen next. Perhaps his most famous book, Interstate—which was nominated for the National Book Award in 1995—is basically a 400-page set of block paragraphs concerning one simple act played out dozens and dozens of ways. The book opens with the protagonist driving down a state highway with his two kids in the backseat. A van pulls up beside them and keeps pace beside his car. The person in the van signals to the father to roll down his window, and when he does the passenger pulls out a gun and aims it at the protagonist’s head. “'Just to scare you, the man yells, 'that’s all you know, and you’re scared right?—look at the sucker, scared shitless.'” Then nothing happens. The other car follows them, still aiming the gun, until the protagonist pulls off and reverses in the emergency lane to get away.

What is spawned, though, from this random occurrence, is an endless sprawl of possibilities and fears and traumas in the protagonist’s brain. For hundreds of pages he plays out in his mind over and over all the ways the scene could have ended differently: some in violence, some in other manners of escape, some in which the protagonist spends the rest of his life searching for the men on the highway, some where almost nothing happens related to the scene, but from which the lives of the protagonist and his children continue on. To me, Dixon’s ability to spin new emotions out of almost anything, over and over, is a great display of a writer at the height of his talent.

He should be remembered as one of postmodern modernism's greats.

Previously by Blake Butler - What I Remember from Getting an MFA in Creative Writing

@blakebutler


The Syrian Electronic Army Talks About Tuesday’s Hacks

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Hours after US officials declared that the United States may launch missile strikes against the Syrian government, pro-Assad hackers known as the Syrian Electronic Army hijacked the domain name servers of several media companies. The New York Times website was down for several hours, although the company quickly established a back-up site to continue their reporting. The DNS of Twitter and Huffington Post UK were also hacked, redirecting users to a server that appeared to be hosted by the SEA.

A confirmed official Twitter account for the Syrian Electronic Army boasted about the hack shortly after it occured:

 

Melbourne IT, who hosted the effected servers, issued a statement  confirming the attack, reported by Matthew Keys:

The credentials of a Melbourne IT reseller (username and password) were used to access a reseller account on Melbourne IT’s systems.
The DNS records of several domain names on that reseller account were changed – including nytimes.com
We are currently reviewing our logs to see if we can obtain information on the identity of the party that has used the reseller credentials, and we will share this information with the reseller and any relevant law enforcement bodies.

Twitter also released their own statement shortly after that claimed no user information had been compromised:

At 20:49 UTC, our DNS provider experienced an issue in which it appears DNS records for various organizations were modified, including one of Twitter’s domains used for image serving. Viewing of images and photos was sporadically impacted. By 22:29 UTC, the original domain record for Twimg.com was restored. No Twitter user information was affected by this incident.

The Syrian Electronic Army has become notorious for infiltrating the social media accounts and websites of some of the world's largest media corporations. Earlier this year, the SEA briefly took control of the Twitter account belonging to the Associated Press. A malicious tweet claiming Barack Obama had been injured in a bomb blast at the White House caused the DOW Jones to plummet an amazing $136 billion as automated high-frequency trading bots reacted to the tweet.

VICE has spoken to the Syrian Electronic Army on several occasions, specifically following their attacks on the Associated Press, the Guardian, and theOnion. Their members have always backed the actions of the Syrian government and have refused to criticize Bashar Assad in any way. In a previous interview with an SEA member known as “The Shadow” they told us, “There is no perfect army in the world and we cannot claim that every soldier in the Syrian Arab Army adheres to the rules of combat... We are in no position to criticize specific actions by the army from the safety of our homes.”

Last April, Shadow told us that taking control of corporate accounts would be harder following Twitter’s introduction of a two-step verification process. However, at that time they warned that the public shouldn't get too comfortable. Hijacking Twitter accounts, they said, was never their “primary attack vector.”

We contacted the SEA via email once again and received several answers from Th3Pr0, leader of the Special Operations Department in the Syrian Electronic Army. The responses to the first three questions were written in English and have been left unedited. The remainder of the interview was conducted on a separate email chain and those responses have been translated from Arabic.

VICE: How did you gain access to the DNS of the companies you targeted? And why did you go after Twitter—aren't there many people on Twitter against potential US intervention?
Th3Pr0:
We hit Melbourne IT and gained access to all the company domains, however we attacked Twitter after they closed our account 15 time and we did warned them.

Last time we spoke, you said the Syrian Electronic Army had no contact with the Syrian government. Is that still the case?
We contacted the Syrian government lately to deliver the databases of Viber.com, Tango.com, and TrueCaller.com

And why would these websites be important to the Syrian government?
Huge numbers of terrorists use Viber and Tango for contacting (communication).

Tell us more about the recent website attacks. They are much more advanced than your previous ones.
We have many types of attacks and we use a certain type depending on the target and how secure it is.

Who do you feel is responsible for the chemical attacks?
Of course the terrorist groups like AlNusra and the FSA, as commanded by the USA to be the means and justification to strike Syria militarily.

What evidence do you have to support your view?
The Syrian army won't/wouldn't use chemical weapons, and a military official has stated that this is political suicide. In addition, the fast progress by the Syrian army in Al-Ghouta.

If you believe the rebels have the technology to use chemical weapons, why have they not targeted the Syrian Army with them?
They have indeed used it against the army in Khan Al-Assal and Jobar. But the "Ghouta massacre" is to justify American military intervention because of the failure of these groups to accomplish tangible progress on the ground and shift the power balance to their favor.

Did those chemical attacks on children sicken you or make you feel angry at all?
Most of those affected were women and children and not a single terrorist, photographer, or reporter for a channel of "coordination committees" was there, which stands as an obstacle in accusing the regime. Also, how did they go to an area where "chemical weapons" were allegedly used and start filming the dead and talking without gasmasks?

Foreign Policy published this yesterday:

"Last Wednesday, in the hours after a horrific chemical attack east of Damascus, an official at the Syrian Ministry of Defense exchanged panicked phone calls with a leader of a chemical weapons unit, demanding answers for a nerve agent strike that killed more than 1,000 people. Those conversations were overheard by U.S. intelligence services, The Cable has learned. And that is the major reason why American officials now say they're certain that the attacks were the work of the Bashar al-Assad regime—and why the U.S. military is likely to attack that regime in a matter of days."

What is your response to these allegations?
As I have said before, it is not in the best [interest] of the Syrian state to use chemical weapons when the army is making such significant progress. It is foolish to use these weapons against women and children and not use it against terrorist fighters.

If, and I mean hypothetically if, it turns out the regime was directly responsible for the chemical attacks would it change your position at all?
Of course not and it won't happen. The Syrian army soldiers are loyal patriotic Syrians who would never use these types of weapons against the innocent. If it were actually to be used, it would be against the terrorist rebels. Most opposition fighters are mercenaries from Arab and foreign states. They are not Syrian and murdering Syrians is normal to them. They are sent by their masters to destroy Syria and kill its people.

Have things changed much on the ground for you guys? How are you all feeling about this possible Western intervention? The evidence is mounting, including the new video released.
No, nothing has changed. We were prepared for such a scenario and such a [staged] "film" as a reason to strike Syria.

How far do you think Western governments might be prepared to go?
Whatever their plans may be, we will stay and resist. 

Are you guys worried you might be targeted?
No we are not worried and will stay in Syria determined and resistant. 

Are there any particular issues you feel are not being heard enough?
Yes, like the massacres that occurred in the rural areas in Lattakia, where dozens of families were slaughtered by the terrorist groups and the media never mentioned it.

More powwows with the SEA:

The Syrian Electronic Army Talks About Hacking the 'Guardian' and Their Obama Bomb Hoax

Speaking with an Alleged Member of the SEA About the 'Onion' Twitter Hack

Watch: Ground Zero: Syria

Don't Kid Yourself: Macklemore's Edgy Politics Are Not Edgy

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Don't Kid Yourself: Macklemore's Edgy Politics Are Not Edgy

The Trickle-Down Economics of Nicaragua’s Drug Trade

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A mansion owned by Ted Hayman, one of the most notorious kingpins in Bluefields, Nicaragua. After his arrest last year, some people took to the streets to protest.

Some names in this story have been changed for the safety of those involved.

Bluefields, the largest port on Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast, is in many ways a typical small coastal Central American city—bustling but poor, a natural center for all kinds of commerce, legal and illegal. If you hang out by the bay you’ll see cargo ships come in and passenger boats ferry people to and from the surrounding towns, some of which aren’t reachable by overland routes. By day, the streets are filled with garishly decorated taxis, starving stray dogs, and people selling mangos and pineapples. At night, a few downtown bars stay open late to serve beer and play reggae, bachata, and country music.

The majority of the men who aren’t cops or store owners work on boats, while women often turn their living rooms into sit-down restaurants or sell grilled meat and tortillas outside their homes. There aren’t many more options for the mostly black and indigenous population of 90,000—there’s no highway connecting Bluefields with the wealthier western part of the country, and without infrastructure there’s little prospect of outside investment.

Just about the only industry that’s pumped outside money into the local economy is drug trafficking.

When Bluefields and the surrounding South Atlantic Autonomous Region (RAAS) was a hub for cocaine smugglers shipping loads north from Colombia, most of the profits were pocketed by kingpins, and violence and homicides increased—but some cash did trickle down to the locals. And every little bit helps here in the poorest region of second-poorest country in Western hemisphere.

That status quo is changing, however. In the last few years, Nicargua has received millions in aid from both Russian and the US in order to drive the narcos away. At this point, of course, no one has any illusions about “winning” the war on drugs. The plan is to just try to get traffickers to change routes. As a result, many smugglers have either moved inland or started using Nicaragua’s North Atlantic Autonomous Region (RAAN) as a waystation instead. With the traffickers gone, many RAAS residents have lost a much-needed source of income, and so far nothing has replaced it.     

One way drug money benefited Bluefields residents was through kingpins like Ted Hayman, who until his arrest in 2012 provided logistical support for cartels smuggling drugs from the RAAS up to the Honduran border. His employees refueled boats and guided traffickers through unfamiliar terrain. He also ran a sort of intelligence operation by paying fishermen to keep track of where the Nicaraguan Navy or the US Coast Guard were located. On top of all that, he operated a substantial domestic drug-selling operation that was big enough to require cover businesses, including the Hooters Hotel in Managua, Nicaragua’s capital.

At the height of his career, Hayman built a $1-million mansion in poverty-ridden Bluefields and another lavish house in his poorer hometown of Tasbapounie that overlooked tin-roofed shacks. These were grotesque symbols of inequality, but they also provided valuable construction jobs, which are hard to come by since not many residents have money to build anything.

Money also flowed into smaller communities such as Tasbapounie and Pearl Lagoon when Hayman threw lavish parties. Bluefields resident Aracely Thompson told me Hayman would pay all the shopkeepers a lump sum so that whoever came in could get whatever they wanted, including meats, rice, and booze. People would come from hours away just to partake in the festivities and get a few necessities. Thompson even admitted to going once or twice.

“The parties were great times,” she said. “If we heard it was going to happen, we would go.”

Hayman also used his wealth to buy off the local community council board and appointed people he wanted in charge, which is a typical tactic used by big-time traffickers in impoverished areas. Money talks, and in extremely poor places it talks very, very loud. His power meant he could do things like quickly grant fishing licenses, which was normally a costly bureaucratic process. Thompson said he also occasionally gave away new boat engines.

Naturally, this type of casual, widespread bribery made Hayman incredibly popular. When he was arrested in June, 2012, people protested in the streets. I asked a taxi driver what he thought about Hayman, and the driver smiled and said, “He’s a good guy! Too bad they got him.”

Another Bluefields kingpin, Frank Zeledon, who people believe is more powerful and more connected to national politicians, wasn’t touched during the series of arrests that took Hayman down. In fact, the last police captain who tried to have him arrested was promptly moved to another part of the country. That the police arrested one kingpin but not the more powerful one eroded what little trust people have for cops in the city.


Men stand guard at a gas station near Bluefields, Nicaragua. Buying barrels of gas and using it to refuel smugglers' boats is a common way to make money.

Monkey Point is a tiny seaside village of about 280 people located 32 miles south of Bluefields. It’s nearly impossible to get to without a boat, and drug traffickers on their way from Colombia have been using it as a refueling station for some time, which has created an entire micro industry.

When I visited, gasoline in Bluefields, the closest town with gas stations, was $6 per gallon, and you can’t buy more than one barrel of gas without providing a photo ID, a measure the government adopted to combat drug trafficking. Those who make money by providing fuel to drug runners at Monkey Point get around this by simply using multiple people to buy barrels one at a time, which are then taken down the river to the remote rendezvous.

According to Jack Carter, a resident of Monkey Point, traffickers pay between $2,000 and $3,000 per boat for this service, and after subtracting the cost of the barrels and the gas used to transport them, the refueling crews generally get around just $200 apiece per boat. “The people aren’t making big money off this thing,” Carter told me. “But it’s something, you know?”

He explained that people in Monkey Point live primarily off of small-scale subsistence fishing and farming, which doesn’t bring in much cash, if any. Money made from refueling can be used to buy needed supplies, gas, clothes, rice, flour, and materials for boat maintenance, which is extremely important in an area with no roads. There are several refueling spots along the coast and the traffickers generally switch between them to evade authorities (they use Monkey Point less often than they used to) but despite the infrequency, difficulty, and illegal nature of the work, people still flock to it. They’re that hard up for cash.

“The people don’t like doing it. They don’t want to do it,” Carter said. “But there’s no roads, there’s no jobs, all the people can do is fish and plant. So they gotta take what they can.”

The beneficial economic effects of the drug trade for the communities along the coast were sporadic and unreliable—maybe you’d find a couple of kilos of coke on the beach, maybe Hayman would tip you lavishly for a service—but they were real. “You used to see people placing big bets for the baseball game,” Thompson said. “You [used to] see some more people buying things like stoves. But now, no. No more of that.”

The problem is not that the war on drugs has taken money out of Bluefields and the surrounding area, it’s that nothing has emerged to replace that money. The US donates about $3.5 million a year in military and police aid to Nicaragua, in addition to gifts like new boats for the navy and parachutes for the army. Russia is providing aid money on top of that—perhaps, analysts have speculated, in order to increase arms sales and undermine US influence in Latin America.

But none of that money ever ends up in the the hands of anyone in Bluefields.

Nicaragua doesn’t seem to care about building more infrastructure to attract investment on the Caribbean coast—residents I spoke to talked at great length about their plans to persuade officials to put an industrial fishery here to create a more dependable economy, but the government is notorious for ignoring the region’s mostly black and indigenous population; if the fishery does happen, it will be an exception to the rule. Meanwhile, a controversial canal to rival Panama’s has received a lot of press, but many doubt it will ever be built, and local indigenous leaders say it will do more harm than good.

Charles Bell, a social activist from Bluefields, strongly believes that the government exploits and ignores blacks and indigenous people. But he also feels that the big-time traffickers have played the same game—they make a lot of money from smuggling drugs using local labor, but they have no interest in fixing the problems plaguing coastal communities.

“The people stay poor no matter what,” said Bell. “[Cartels] don’t do anything for the people, they just give them free stuff once in a while.”

As an example, he pointed to Little Corn Island, a popular tourist spot located a few miles off the coast that is rumored to be a sort of money laundering haven for drug traffickers. “They have beautiful hotels there. Everyone has a nice house, too,” he said. “But look at the school: nothing.” At the same time, he admits that some money is better than no money.

“People need something. What else are they gonna do?” he said.

Bell’s attitude of reluctant acceptance of the economic benefits of drug trafficking was shared by many people I spoke with. Nobody really likes the drug trade, of course. It generates misery, addiction, and violence, and getting involved with it could land you in prison or on the bad side of the cartels. But because the governments of both Nicaragua and the US have chosen to spend millions on fighting the war on drugs rather than building roads and other improvements in a region that sorely needs infrastructure, residents have few options. Drug traffickers aren’t the good guys in Bluefields, but the sad reality is that they’re often the only ones seeing to people’s immediate needs.

Follow Ray on Twitter: @RayDowns

More on the ins and outs of the international war on drugs:

Coffee, Coca, and Government Favors

Less Coca in Colombia Means Nothing for Your Supply

The Fugitive Reporter Exposing Mexico’s Drug Cartels

The Gibraltar Stand-Off Is About More Than Fishing and Fags

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The Gibraltarian border.

A lot has changed for Gibraltar in the past month. The slab of land at Spain's southern tip has gone from being an expat theme park famous for its red phone boxes and monkeys to being the potential site of a flashpoint between the British and Spanish governments.

But while the chest-puffing scenes of Spanish fishing "armadas" facing off against British warships has been good fun from a media point of view, it's detracted from the fact that the real issue surrounding the tension over Gibraltar isn't one of sovereignty at all. Instead, all this commotion is merely acting as a smokescreen for the Spanish government to hide behind while they deal with the fallout from a pretty serious corruption scandal.

Since January, senior members of Spain's ruling People's Party have had to bat away allegations that their members benefited directly and illegally from the creation of the housing bubble and its eventual crash. While the case is still in the courts, the party’s ex-treasurer has admitted to keeping a separate set of books documenting cash kickbacks paid to cabinet members by construction companies. The government has so far refused to stand down, but it’s not unthinkable that an international media outcry could force its hand.


A car being checked at the Gibraltarian border

This doesn’t really suit the interests of the troika of organisations who have leant Spain a shit-ton of money – the IMF, the EC and the ECB – or the balance sheets of Spanish companies such as Telefonica or Banco Santander, who are understandably nervous about the prospect of a third party winning an open general election and tearing up current debt agreements. So what better time for a big story involving warships to invoke some national pride? For a scandal-ridden government of a crisis-hit country, Gibraltar presents the perfect high-profile political news story to turn on whenever it needs to deflect attention from more serious issues.

Madrid’s official line on the tighter border controls is that they’re an attempt to crack down on the black market trade in duty free fags. But it's a justification that – while seemingly legitimate – hasn't garnered much in the way of support from the local population.

Last year, Gibraltar imported 175 million packets of cigarettes. Which means they've either got their toddlers on two packs a day, or they’re selling an awful lot to visitors. There’s a five packs per person limit in force, which people find imaginative ways to break, either through taping packets to their body under their clothes (one branch of Morrisons at the border even has a changing room on site), driving them across in secret compartments in their cars or – if they enjoy injecting a bit of panache into their smuggling – by jet ski.

The government estimates that 750,000 packets were smuggled over the border last year, meaning a hefty amount in lost tax revenue. But while nobody is denying the scope and illegality of the trade, for many of the residents in this area of Spain, smuggling is also a lifeline.


Some of the cigarettes Gibraltar have been importing in unbelievably huge numbers.

Just across the border from the Rock, the town of La Linea de La Concepción has one of the highest unemployment levels in Spain. Accordingly, smuggling is one of the only avenues open to those without a job. “I don’t see the harm in it at all,” states Alexis, a first-year student at Manchester University who grew up in the area and is back for the summer.

“My friend lost his job at a recycling plant last week after three months of not being paid," he continued. "What else is he meant to do?” And what about the risks involved, I asked? “I think, if they catch you twice, they can impound your car. But I don’t know anything about the fines.”

It’s not just that it’s hard to see the moral problem with making money off a product that is widely viewed as being taxed too highly, it’s that – like in any border town – a black market in white goods is a way of life. “Grannies and kids do it here. I really don’t understand what all the fuss is about,” Alexis told me.

The crackdown at the border has also affected the legitimate businesses of local Spaniards. La Linea’s mayor, Gemma Araujo, has been one of the few politicians to speak openly against the tightening of controls. During an appearance on a televised debate show last week, she made a case for the goods and services provided to Gibraltarian residents by local Spanish workers, using the rather unsexy trade of "door making" as a case in point. She also pointed out that everyone in the area has a vested interest in ending the standoff, going so far as to allege that several local members of the Spanish government were earning a second living from online gambling firms based in Gibraltar.

So, with all of that in place – as well as the impracticality of a return to Spanish sovereignty after Gibraltar’s citizens voted in favour of keeping UK citizenship in a 2002 referendum, and its obvious benefit as an economic boon to the area – it's easy to see that the dredging up of this drama might be about more than fishing and fags.

Follow Paul on Twitter: @pauldotsimon

More from Spain:

Do You Care About Gibraltar?

Spain Is a Paradise (for the World's Most Powerful Drug Lord)

Hanging Out with Spain's Angry Bazooka Miners

Hunters Talk Making Out and Making Noise

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Hunters Talk Making Out and Making Noise

Hunting for Illegal Immigrants with the UK Border Police

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Once upon a time it seemed like the vagaries of the London housing market were only whined about by the same rich tosspots who thought Nick Hornby invented soccer, but in the last couple of years that's all changed. Housing in the capital is now a problem for the masses: in the last two years, much of central London has been bought up by foreign investors and with the government capping Local Housing Allowance, an increasing number of poorer households are being squeezed out into the city’s peripheries. Thanks to the central borough of Westminster offering cash incentives for people to relocate to smaller flats and houses—nearly all of which are located in the city’s outer reaches—areas such as Newham, already suffering from homelessness and high levels of illegal immigration, are being stretched to their absolute limits.

The situation is getting so bad that earlier this year the Guardian reported that the Newham council had been sending dozens of homeless people to live in a hotel in Birmingham’s red light district. When I called the hotel to find out what was going on, the receptionist panicked and threatened to sue me if I came anywhere near the building, which would have been tough for her since at that point she didn’t know my name or what I looked like. When I tried my luck with Newham officials, however, I was told that the council’s housing department was in a state of crisis. Sending asylum seekers and claimants looking for subsized housing to another city over a hundred miles away was, they claimed, the only option left to them. To hammer their point home, they invited me on a raid of illegally rented properties earlier this month.

I gratefully accepted.

Turning up to meet the reps from the Newham council, I saw that I wasn’t alone. Eight ludicrously bulked-up officers from the UK Border Agency were also there to greet me, crammed into two black people carriers like a Navy Seal team sent to protect the British public from—shudder—the threat of financially incapacitated foreigners.

It seemed odd to me that UKBA would want a journalist along for the ride, given that they seem to have spent the last few months making themselves as unpopular as possible—with the “go home” vans parading through immigrant communities, paper checks that amounted to racial profiling at tube stations, and a Twitter feed that often read like it's being manned by someone whose usual political communiques are swastikas scrawled in pub toilets. But anyway, here we all were, a merry gang of #immigrationoffender hunters.

The thing is, immigrants are a fairly low-key bunch on the whole who are generally just trying to fit in and, you know, not get deported. There might have been a few windows covered by newspaper rather than curtains on this road in Newham that was supposed to be an illegal alien stronghold, but honestly it looked a lot like any other street in suburban London. In order to get the police into the houses, the meek-looking council workers would knock at people's doors, then when they opened up the giant robocops would spring out of nowhere and force their way inside. The plan seemed somewhat questionable to me.

I followed the police up the stairs to the first of the flats being inspected that morning. The air was stale and it felt like the window had been closed for days. The cramped, sparsely lit space wasn't great, but it was liveable, at least by the standards of anyone under the age of 25. The border police, though, clearly weren't impressed—they looked horrified as they considered the unfolded duvets in the hallway, the curry splattered over the walls, the shocking spectacle of paper towels, in packets, stored in a broken cubbyhole above the stairs.

Unsurprisingly, the occupants of the flat weren’t into my camera. The police assured me I had a right to be there, but after taking a couple of photos I left and went outside anyway, not wanting to invade their privacy as they were being interrogated. That’s when a council rep told me about a property they’d recently discovered housing 38 people, 16 of whom were children.

Despite their dilapidated state, rooms in flats like that one were still going for £300 (about $460) a month, lining the pockets of property owners who in many cases rely on them as their sole source of income. The council worker told me that one landlord, who owns an extensive network of properties across Newham and who lives in a large estate in Essex, is currently under investigation. However, as the police piled out ten minutes later with one of the men in cuffs, it was hard to tell who this raid was meant to punish: dodgy landlords, or the desperate illegal immigrants they lease their properties to.

The man pictured above, who was suspected of overstaying his visa by a matter of weeks, joked with his friends as he was bundled into the back of a police car. A female officer explained that they were students here to find work and a better education for a few years before heading home.

We continued on and knocked on the doors of a bunch of properties on the same road, but around 10 AM things went quiet and people stopped answering. If I was an illegal immigrant going about my morning routine—making some eggs, picking up a few tips from Cowboy BuildersI'm not sure I'd have opened the door to the border police either.

Minutes after knocking on one door, however, the sound of a struggle could be heard over the traffic from the main road. We made our way to the back of the property and climbed onto the roof. A window was open and the border control police shrugged. Their verdict? The occupants had either a) scaled the building and run off down the street, or b) gone to their neighbour’s house. Apparently there was no point in testing the latter theory, because they were “obviously not going to open the door to us now.”

The police looked forlorn. They had been defeated by nothing more formidable than a locked door. There we all stood, conspicuous and stumped, on the roof of the empty house. From our vantage point we could see rows of cheaply built sheds thrown together in the flats’ narrow yards—most weren't larger than a single small room and didn't have any windowns. The police told me that they'd been put up by landlords to maximize the number of people they could pack onto one property. I was led downstairs and shown one that had seemingly been abandoned at short notice, with blankets strewn across the floor and an iPhone 5 playing an incessant marimba.

Back on the other side of the street, an Indian woman opened the door, insisting that only she and her grandmother lived there. After some persuasion, the police and council workers went inside and I followed. We found two men asleep in a bedroom at the end of a long corridor. A policewoman roused them and asked for their names and ages. The first cooperated, but the second apparently got his story jumbled: he said in a Punjabi accent that he was 22, then changed that to 25. The mood didn't improve when he insisted that he was English but had forgotten how to spell his own name. The woman who had invited us in didn’t seem to know very much about her two male housemates, backing away into a living room decorated with large, brightly colored posters of Hindu gods.

While I'm aware that my presence probably meant that the day's hunt was at least 30 percent PR exercise, the police hadn't really grown aggressive at any point. But here things went a bit wrong. A second policewoman barged her way into the room and threatened the one who'd fluffed his lines. "You don't really want to upset me, mate," she growled.

What would she do if she got upset? None of us knew. The man garbled some more, he was garbling himself into a hole. "I'm getting angry, mate," she said. "Don't try to lie to me, mate." At this point, the poor guy wasn't making much sense and decided to adopt a strategy of appeasement. "I'm sorry, my darling," he said.

This isn't a good thing to say to a female police officer. "I am not your darling!" she screamed back, before launching into a bewildering speech on the basic tenents of women's lib. As you can imagine, this was awkward and I kind of wished someone would deport me out of the room. Even her colleagues began to shuffle and fidget nervously.

The other cops were keen to placate her and get me as far out of hearing distance as possible. A few more piled into the bedroom to play peacemaker, which meant there were now six cops on hand to deal with two nonviolent men, which seemed a bit excessive.

When the hysterical policewoman refused to leave the room for a minute so the two men could get dressed, I turned around and left. In a bedroom at the other end of the corridor, a kid-sized England soccer hat hung from one of the room's four bunkbeds. The woman who had answered the door to us stepped inside with her husband and explained to me that the hat belonged to her son, who lived in India with his grandmother. They try to visit him as often as possible, she said, and hope that one day they can bring him to the UK to live with them permanently.

The Newham council invited me on these raids to show what a tough time they were having with the area’s housing situation. More than anything, though, it reinforced how fearful we still are of displaced people just trying to improve their own existences. As I left the bedroom, the woman followed me back down the stairs, past the police, and onto the street outside. Before I left, she wrote directions back to the station on a piece of paper and wished me a safe journey home. Which, to be honest, was more than the police had said to me all morning.

Follow Nathalie on Twitter: @NROlah

More from London:

The Truth Behind the Battle for London's Housing

Hipster Christians Are Saving London

A Decade of Photos from London's Southbank Skate Park

VICE Eats: VICE Eats - Action Bronson - Part 1

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We followed the multi-talented Action Bronson from the kitchen to the stage during this year's Bushwick Block Party. Action headlined the party and also ran his very own food truck, supplying the masses with gourmet goodness. Check out these videos to see how his vision of combining his two passions became a reality.

Part two of this delicious video will air tomorrow.

More Action:

Action Bronson Live from an Old Folks Home - "Strictly 4 My Jeeps"

Action Bronson and Harry Fraud Passed Out Pot at the Noisey Rap Party

My Walkout Song - Action Bronson


The VICE Reader: Russian Roller-Coaster

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All images by Olivia Hinds

Tanya Paperny is a writer, translator, and professor in Washington, DC. Her essays and translations have appeared in the Millions, Bitch, HEEB, the Literary Review, the Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. More at tpaperny.com and twitter.com/tpaperny.

Andrei Krasnyashykh's short-story collection, which includes "Russian Roller-Coaster," is titled The Park of Culture and Relaxation and was published in Ukraine in 2008. It was nominated for Russia's oldest independent literary award, the prestigious Andrei Bely Prize. 

I’m afraid of God. Not the afterlife God, who doesn’t exist. But now. Wherever I look, God is looking back at me. I wanted him to be far away, like in my childhood, but instead he’s all around me. He’s like a chicken. He watches what my next step will be and is silent. It’s scary that he watches and that he’s the only one. If there were seven gods watching over me, maybe they’d argue. But just one never fights. Not even with me. 

God has always been, and when he showed up, I decided I would love him. But I didn’t end up loving him, because I immediately got frightened since he’s everywhere. They say: you made up the everywhere God or read it in books. But actually they think I’m an idiot and made it up so I could tell them about it. How clever. But how am I making it up when I take the phone and there’s God and he hears me? I want water, and in the cup—God. What do I tell him? He doesn’t say what he wants from me, and how would I know? I could say something, and he could want, or not want, me to say something else, and I don’t know.

In the cup, God is silent. Then suddenly he’s silent not just because, but to tell me something. That the water is poisoned, for example. And I drink it. Like an idiot.

It’s so simple, after all. God is everywhere. A shirt button fell off because God. They were showing a movie on TV because God. I got hungry because God. Women put on makeup because God. My neighbor’s dog got lost because God, because I poisoned it, because God wanted it this way, so I, so it wouldn’t bark at me.

God knows everything I don’t know. Like, I don’t know who lives in Brazil, but God knows. I don’t know why salt is white, like sugar, but not tasty, but God knows. 

Sometimes I act like a mouse, because suddenly God thinks I’m a mouse. Then I think, and then suddenly God thinks I’m not a mouse, and I start to fly, because God suddenly thinks I’m a bird. And they say: you’re flying because you know how to fly, and maybe God doesn’t even know you know how to fly. I say: if God didn’t know that I know how to fly, then I’d be swimming, and God would have known I swim. 

And they say: but we swim when God doesn’t know we swim. I say: And your tail and fins, where are they? Who swims without fins? Without fins shit swims. And when God knows I can swim, I swim with fins and a tail. Like you’re supposed to.

But people are stupid, because they don’t know God knows, because they aren’t afraid of not knowing. I’m afraid of not knowing God knows about me. I think: I’ll figure it out now. I sit down and think up that God thinks about me, that I’m a book, to read. And then I sneeze and feel my nose, and it’s funny to me that I thought I was a book and then sneezed. And then I think, God did it this way so that I’d sneeze and stop thinking I’m a book. And I get scared, not because I was a book, but because I sneezed.

People say: whoever’s a book is an idiot. And I respond: God didn’t want me to be an idiot, so I sneezed. People say: Maybe it’s God sneezing inside you? I respond: if God wanted to sneeze, he would have just said so, instead of sneezing. I’m the one sneezing, and God wants me to sneeze. And they say: And what if God wants you to poke your eye out? And I respond: then I’ll poke my eye out, because if I want to poke out my eye, I won’t do it, but I’m more afraid of God than myself so I’ll poke my eye out. I’m basically not afraid of myself, because it’s embarrassing to be afraid of yourself when you can fear God. I’m honest, I say, and instead of myself, I fear God.

And if I hit you, one says to me, God wants that too? He wants it, I say. And that one says: bam! And when I fall, I start to think. God doesn’t want me to get hit for no reason. When God hit me, he was thinking about me. I love to think and start to think about what God thought about when he wanted me to get hit. You can’t just hit a person for no reason, not a mouse, not a fly—so it means I’m a ball. I roll around and hop on the grass. And people laugh, and I laugh because they laugh. And they yell: ball, hey you, ball! And I understand that I understood God correctly, because I became a ball and not a frog. And I’m happy because I understood that God thought about me. 

But it’s still scary: What if I hadn’t guessed right? If I became a frog, and people were yelling: hey you, ball! But I’m a frog, so it means I didn’t guess what God was thinking. It’s so great that I’m a ball, and everyone is happy. 

And when everyone is happy, they won’t beat me anymore. But then that first one yells: soccer!—and they all start kicking my face. But God doesn’t want me to play soccer, so I straighten out my wings and quickly take flight over the earth, circle around the soccer players, and fly straight home. At home, God will open the window for me and feed me dinner. People on the street say: get married, you idiot. A wife would cook and clean. And I say: you don’t know God, which is why you all got married. Whoever has God doesn’t need a wife. Instead of a wife, I have God. He knows everything and does everything.

God thinks about me, that I want to eat, and I feel that I want to eat.

I’m scared that someday God might forget about me, and I won’t be able to want to eat and will starve to death. I’m afraid of forgetting that I want to eat. But God never forgets about me, and I always remember I want to eat.

I always eat when God thinks I want to eat, because I’m scared of not eating when God thinks that I want to eat. When there isn’t enough food, God thinks about me like a gopher, and I eat what gophers eat, or like a spider, since spiders basically eat whatever lands. When there’s no food at all, God thinks I’m a table, because tables eat nothing, and then I eat nothing.

I love when I’m scared that God is everywhere, because when I am not scared of God, I feel like he forgot me and isn’t watching me, because I’m bad, and I get even more scared, but in a different way. And this different fear is even worse, because this is the scariness of death. But it’s better to be scared of God than death. When I’m not scared that God is there, I make myself scared that God is there. 

To get scared of God, I start to think of myself on my own. I look at my hand and say: my hand, here’s my hand, my fingers, my nails. And then I think: And what is mine? Whose are these—mine? Who is this—me? I look at my hand for a long time, and my fingers go numb and start to hurt because they are mine and not God’s. How can they be “mine” when I don’t even know who I am myself? 

When my fingers are God’s, they live on their own. They twitch, do their work, take what they want, pick my nose and ear, and tickle one another. And when I think they are mine, they don’t know what to do and they don’t twitch. I don’t know what to do with my hands, but God knows.

One time I was hot all night, and for a long time, I didn’t fear God. And then I thought: my eyes are mine, my legs—mine, my teeth—mine, my hair—mine, my hands—mine. And when I’d thought that my whole body was mine, I didn’t know what to do with it, and for three days, I sat in one spot, not looking at anything. I thought: my ideas are mine, and so I stopped thinking all together. I didn’t want to eat, didn’t want to sleep, didn’t want anything, because I don’t know how to want on my own. God wants for me, but I wanted to want everything myself.

When I stopped thinking, somewhere I felt my heart. But I didn’t think: my heart is mine, because I had basically stopped thinking. I knew that I was me, but didn’t know where I sits: in my hand, in my leg, in my head, or in my chest. I didn’t feel this I in myself, but it couldn’t be anywhere outside, because outside were other things: table, lamp, window, chair, bed, pants, clock. And in these things, of course, my I couldn’t be found. But inside myself, it also couldn’t be found.

Then I decided to catch my I. I squinted and sat very, very quietly for a long, long time so that I would stop fearing me and climb out. Then I’d catch him and inspect him. But I didn’t climb out, as if he didn’t exist at all. I decided to wait and be patient, and I waited and was patient for a long time—a hundred years, or even more, maybe two or three hundred. 

I didn’t move at all, and soon the things around me noticed and got used to me. Before, I was running around the room, and they didn’t notice me. Now, that I had stopped, they started to inspect me. I myself love to inspect things and think about them, and now things started to think about me. 

That table is so clever, but the window is stupid, and the chair is nasty. He always gets mad at the table since he’s lower. The balcony argues with the whole apartment and thinks that he’s the street. The clock is nice, when it’s not fast. The lamp is sick. The door is serious. One wall is cheerful, the other is always making faces—my photos are hanging on her, and the third is serious—photos of God from a magazine are on that one. There’s no fourth, because that’s the balcony with the street. And the corner is on its own. He has pants, lazy ones because they’re dirty.

All things have personality. They have a face but no eyes, so they look at me not with their eyes but from all sides. How do they see me? Smart or stupid? Nice or mean? Good or bad? Friend or foe? They don’t speak because they don’t have mouths, and on my own, I can’t know because I don’t know where my I is.

Things think I’m God because I am just like them but not real. They think I’m pretending, to seem like them, but that in reality I am different. They don’t know me, so they love me. I am becoming the god of things. They pray to me and say that I’m good, and I act as if I don’t exist. Then they pray to me even more and say that I’m the best and the only one. But I stay silent, as if I don’t hear them. But they think I’m helping them and say thank you.

I thought: If my whole body—all my arms and legs—are mine, then who thinks in me? If the arm thinks, then how does the leg do what the arms thinks. And if the leg thinks, how does it turn the head? Use your head, they’d say. But how do you use your head? I don’t believe that the head thinks. The head eats and sleeps, spits and hiccups. The head is the stupidest and most useless part of the body. How can it make fingers twitch and legs walk? Who in me tells my fingers to twitch and my legs to walk? No one. No one is sitting inside me. No one in me is commanding my fingers. Even if some cockroach or fast beetle lived inside me, one who would run around and say: "Finger, bend, go to the nose and pick it,” the finger still wouldn’t move because it wouldn’t obey the cockroach. Then who orders my fingers around? I? Only if these fingers are mine. 

I can’t command my own fingers because I don’t know how to twitch them. I can use my other hand to bend the fingers, but first someone has to order the other hand to bend the fingers of this one.

I never know what to do or where to go, but I always do something and go somewhere. Why do I go, if I don’t know where to? Who needs me to go?

When I was a kid, Mom would say: “My little idiot, who taught you to smoke and curse?” And I didn’t understand how she didn’t understand, and would respond: “God.” And then the guys beat me up over God a lot: “God wants this, yeah? Since he wants everything, then that means this too.” They thought their fists were independent, that they were independent from God. They’d get mad because they didn’t understand.

“God just told me to make you eat shit. Eat!”

“I won’t do it. You said this, not God. God never talks. God thinks and wants for you.”

“Then who is beating you up: me or God? Me or God?”

“God wants you to hit, but it’s you who wants to hit me.”

Then I lived with this one smart man. He looked for God everywhere. He’d peek in the nightstand and wait. He was looking for God. He’d crack open the window and look at how God would fly in. Or he’d walk out of his room as if he weren’t coming back, and he’d catch God through the keyhole. Where would God crawl out of when he thought that the man had left for good?

And I said to him: “Sasha!”

“Sasha,” I said to him, “you stop looking for God. You’ll go crazy like this, looking for God all the time. You’ll scare yourself with God. Don’t keep looking for God, he’s there anyway. Look for yourself. Where are you, Sasha? Sa-sha! Here’s an arm—is this Sasha?”

“Not Sasha.”

“A leg—this Sasha?”

“Not Sasha.”

“A head—Sasha?”

“Not Sasha. Sasha is when there are two arms, two legs, a nose, and a head. Then that’s Sasha.”

Inside me, God started giggling, and I started laughing. “Sasha,” I said, “where’s Sasha? If you tear off one of Sasha’s legs, will it be Sasha?”

“It will.”

“And two?”

“Yes.”

“And if you tear off everything, so nothing’s left, where will Sasha be?”

He yelled, “Sasha is mute! Sasha is mute! Sasha is mute!”

I yelled: “Your hand is Sasha. Your leg—Misha. Your ear—Yasha. And God—Grisha. And he sits inside you and not in the nightstand. Don’t look for him, but listen to what he wants.”

Then God led me to the bathroom, and when he brought me back, Sasha was pressing his torn-off finger into his leg. I said, “You’re strong. I couldn’t have done that.”

And he said, “This finger is Pasha. And Pasha called me an idiot and made me kiss a dog.”

“No,” I said, “this finger isn’t Pasha but Lyosha. Don’t torment him.” 

“Then where’s Pasha?” he asked.

“I don’t know where Pasha is.”

And then two came over and sewed Pasha back onto to Sasha. I said: “Sew Sergei back onto me.” 

When they sewed Sergei onto me, then God disappeared. I went looking for God. I was walking and people were saying: “Who are you?”

And I said: “I’m Sergei without God. Have you seen God without Sergei?”

“We’ve seen many Gods,” they said, “but all of them with Sergei. There is no God without Sergei.”

And they didn’t laugh and didn’t hit.

“Do you want to eat?” they asked.

“No,” I said.

“Good,” they said, “we don’t have anything to eat. None of us eat. Our God is this way— noneating. And what kind is yours?”

“My God,” I said, “is a little one. He sat inside me. And what his name was, he didn’t say.”

“Ours doesn’t either. Ours just thinks.”

“And mine thought. A lot. And all about me.”

“Tell us about your God,” they said.

“He is kind,” I said. “He wants everyone to love. He wants us not to fight. To think about good things. To have no money. For everyone to eat and drink wine. For kids to grow up without moms and dads. For everyone to know about him. Not to cry when they beat us up.”

And they said: “Let’s go look for your God. Ours doesn’t let us eat, and yours even gives wine.”

And then we walked a lot, and we spoke good words about God, so he would know. And we didn’t rob the stalls, and I never promised to burn down the church, and about the president, that’s all not true. I just fed them. They always wanted to eat. Don’t beat me anymore. I won’t tell anyone about God anymore. I’ll just stay like this.

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

Read more fiction on VICE:

Thought and Memory by Ed Park

We Were Having an Experience by James Yeh

Sewing for the Heart by Yoko Ogawa

A Sneak Peek of Errol Morris's New Documentary on Donald Rumsfeld

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In The Unknown Known, Academy Award-winning director Errol Morris offers a mesmerizing portrait of Donald Rumsfeld, the larger-than-life figure who served as George W. Bush’s secretary of defense and was the principal architect of the Iraq War.
 
Morris has Rumsfeld perform and explain his “snowflakes," the enormous archive of memos he wrote across almost 50 years in Congress, the White House, in business, and twice at the Pentagon. The memos provide a window into history—not as it actually happened, but as Rumsfeld wants us to see it.
 
By focusing on the “snowflakes,” with their conundrums and their contradictions, Morris takes us where few have ever been—beyond the web of words into the unfamiliar terrain of Rumsfeld’s mind. The Unknown Known presents history from the inside out. It shows how the ideas, fears, and certainties of one man, written out on paper, transformed America, changed the course of history, and led to war.

More with Errol Morris:

Werner Herzog and Errol Morris Talk About 'The Act of Killing'

Motherboard Meets Errol Morris

 

Stoya on HIV Transmission in Pornography

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The human immunodeficiency virus, up close. Via NIAID

Last year, when the AIDS Healthcare Federation (AHF) poked their heads into pornography and started the initial push for Measure B, a rarely enforced law that requires condoms to be used in pornography produced in Los Angeles County, high-minded reformers like AHF president Michael Weinstein seemed to have an obvious misunderstanding of how porn works. Like Marie Antoinette’s debunked “Let them eat cake” quip, Weinstein’s “Make them wear condoms” solution to the potential spread of STIs in the business was misguided at best. Weinstein—who I like to imagine wearing an intricate ball gown and a towering wig—doesn’t understand the comparative rigor that professionally produced sex scenes entail. The risk of sexually transmitted infections can’t be neatly solved by a few pieces of latex, in pornography or out of it. 

Last week’s news that an adult performer named Cameron Bay tested positive for HIV has brought concern over porn practices back to mainstream attention, but you know what no one is talking about? The heterosexual end of the adult industry has not had a single case of performer-to-performer HIV transmission since 2004. In the few cases since 2004 where an adult performer has tested positive for HIV, porn performers’ self-imposed screening process overseen by the Free Speech Coalition, a nonprofit trade organization, has worked. While incredibly frequent testing has not prevented the rare occasion when a performer has acquired HIV offset, it has successfully prevented them from continuing to perform in sex scenes for long enough to pass HIV on to other performers.

Why not just add the extra preventive step of mandatory condom use? Well, condoms have been known to break even when used properly under typical conditions. But porn, if you’ve ever seen it, rarely features common condom-use cases. Where typical heterosexual intercourse involves three to 13 minutes of penetration, adult films require an average of 45 to 90 minutes. The penises of adult performers are larger than average, and the speed of thrusting is generally more intense. Because sex on a porn set is basically bigger, longer, and harder, potential sexual transmission of Hepatitis C is more of a concern than during a typical recreational sexual encounter. Syphilis can absolutely be transmitted even if a condom remains intact, as contagious syphilitic sores can appear on parts of the body not covered by a condom.

The first thing that needs to be removed from the thinking around sexually transmitted infection prevention is the concept that any sex can be entirely safe. There is no such thing as safe sex. Safer, yes. Safe, no. Declaring even abstinence completely safe is questionable because lack of ejaculation has been tentatively linked to prostate cancer.

For Cameron Bay, the diagnosis is life changing. But despite the terrible news, she has helped track potential exposures. Cameron should be applauded for this. If I had a company, I’d offer her a desk job (distributors, producers, and sex toy manufacturers, I am looking at you). To my knowledge no other performers working in the heterosexual pornographic film industry have tested positive, implying that Cameron acquired HIV outside of the adult industry and did not transmit it to any other performers. Public speculation about what specific activities in her personal life could have exposed her to this infection is rude and a horrible way for the adult industry to repay her for being so open with her test results and recent sexual history.

While the AHF was busy getting Measure B passed and California State Assemblyman Isadore Hall was proposing AB 332 and now AB 640 (laws that do or would require condom use in adult films, in addition to the already existing California Occupational Safety and Health Adminstration regulations) the adult industry has continued to take steps to improve its self-imposed testing system. Neither use of barriers or our testing system are completely failsafe. In one ideal world, we all use condoms that never break or fall off and syphilis just doesn’t exist. In the other ideal world, all potential adult performers are tested, quarantined for a month before being retested, and never engage in any potentially risky behaviors off set. The problem with both ideals is that human error and human irresponsibility will always exist. The AHF cannot prevent adult productions from moving out of the jurisdiction of Los Angeles County or California entirely, and the adult production studios cannot put all of the performers on an island somewhere with no exposure to potentially infected sexual partners or dirty needles.

The most grounded and realistic things I’ve heard being said in all of this are coming out of the mouths of performers, and neither the AHF or the Free Speech Coalition (the organization which is now responsible for keeping STD test records in a way that does not violate the HIPAA Privacy Act and dealing with tracking of potential exposures in the event of a positive test) seem to be doing much listening to us. 

In my ideal world, the people who are supposedly concerned with the health and well-being of adult performers would listen to us as a group. They would actively hear our concerns and communicate useful information. Rather than government mandated condom use and the avoidance of those laws, adult performers would continue to use regular testing and have an actual option to use a condom whenever they please. We would also all receive enough basic education to understand that there will always be a risk, with condoms or without. 

Basic sexual education used to be provided to every performer entering the adult industry by AIM (Adult Industry Medical Health Care Foundation), which closed in 2011. When a performer came in to AIM for the first time they were shown a Porn 101 video. The people who handled paperwork and took our blood gently suggested that we get vaccinated for Hepatitis A, Hepatitis B, and HPV if applicable. For my first year or so in the adult industry, the phlebotomists there would ask how I was adjusting to Los Angeles and whether I was having trouble coping with the stigma of working in porn. While we do have the FSC and their PASS system for verifying the validity of tests, we no longer have the support and education that AIM provided. Whatever faults Sharon Mitchell (the founder of AIM) had, her involvement in the organization governing performer health is sorely missed. She advocated for performers in a way that other groups do not, possibly because Sharon Mitchell had been a performer herself. Maybe those of us who are adult performers need to organize and educate each other now, but we aren't going to make anything safer by sitting around and being told to eat cake.

@Stoya

Previously - Feminism and Me

Should We Be Freaked Out About Tile, the World’s Cheapest New Location Tracker?

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Tile's sexy infomercial wants to sell you on location tracking.

If you’ve been frolicking around the internet lately as an identifiable 18-34 year old, you may have noticed banner ads for a new, thin, plastic 1”x1” square location tracker called Tile—that’s obviously being marketed to our young, cell phone and wallet losing demographic. If you watch the video above, you’ll see how this magic, matchbook sized device will allow you to remotely track your lost items, all for the seemingly reasonable price of $18.95. So, if you drop your keys under your bed, or forget your pet that you tied to a post in the park and walked away from, because you’re a terrible person and a terrible pet owner, Tile can help you find these things again.

Not only can you track the whereabouts of your own property with Tile, you can add friends to your Tile social network who—in the event you lose a backpack that you stitched a Tile into—can help you search for your lost items using their Tile app, by triggering the location of your Tile, that’s attached to the object you are looking to find. What a world we live in!

Anyway, when I first saw Tile being advertised, I got an itchy, all-over heebie jeebies feeling. Firstly, adding a whole new matrix of location data to our digital world of over-sharing has some potentially scary implications. Do we really need a brand new social network, set up to monitor the whereabouts of our personal property? And what could be done with that data if it were to be placed in the hands of someone with malicious intent? Or, better yet, the NSA and the United States government who we now know have paid millions of dollars to companies like Google and Yahoo to make them more compliant for the purposes of government surveillance.

But mass government surveillance programs aside, I also wondered what exactly you could track with a Tile. Since Tile is just a small plastic square with an adhesive backing, could you slap one of those on your cheating ex-lover’s car, fire up the Tile app, and track their whereabouts through the day?

Since the official FAQ glosses over most of the privacy and security concerns that Tile could potentially cause, I wrote the company and asked them some of my potentially paranoid questions. After getting bounced around from department to department, I was told, as far as sticking a Tile to someone’s car and following them around with your iPhone, it’s not exactly that simple, because Tile’s range is kinda crappy.

A Tile does not contain a GPS unit or a cellular radio and cannot provide continuous automatic location updates. Therefore it is not a good solution for real-time tracking of moving objects. The goal of Tile is to help people keep track of or find items they are likely to lose, and will not support long-distance tracking of moving items.

So basically, if you lose your keys and there’s a Tile attached to it, you will need to be within 100-150 feet of your lost property for your phone to recognize it’s in the presence of your precious, lost Tile. This means if you were to clandestinely put a Tile on someone or something you wanted to keep secret tabs on, you would need to be so close to them in the first place that you’d essentially be stalking them anyway. And while you could, theoretically, boost the range of your Tile tracking capabilities by having a bunch of co-conspirators with the Tile app, tracking that same Tile you put onto someone else’s property—that would be a wildly inefficient criminal operation, and again, would be tantamount to stalking anyway.

All in all, it doesn’t sound like Tile is going to produce a serious security vulnerability given its poor location range, nor does it sound like the perfect solution to finding stolen property, given it’s limited range. It does, however, raise interesting questions about the consequences of putting our personal property on the grid. Plus, the sleekness of Tile’s design, and its youth-targeted marketing campaign, will undeniably result in a surge in location tracking usage. As Peter Sunde, co-founder of the Pirate Bay and the developer of a new encrypted messaging program with an Apple inspired graphical user interface told me, “To get people to use important technology, you simply have to make it more attractive than anything else, to get them to care enough to move over. Few people would buy a really ugly car—even if it were super fast. They'd rather buy the car that looks fast and is slow as hell.”

Evidently, Tile’s limited technological capabilities are not a major cause for concern, but the acceptance and reliance on location trackers in society could certainly result in a new wave of security threats, as the technology gets stronger and people learn new and crazy ways to manipulate it. This kind of tech has been available to law enforcement and spy shop consumers for a while now, but we can be sure that having a cool, sexy marketing machine behind location trackers will put them in more people’s hands than ever. That’s not necessarily something I’m very comfortable with but, hey, welcome to the future right?

 

Follow Patrick on Twitter: @patrickmcguire

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This Man Believes All Major News Events Are Staged By Actors

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It's obvious now that you have all the beautifully Photoshopped facts in front of you, isn't it?

Have you ever played that road-trip friendly game where you try and decide which actor would play a famous person in their hypothetical Hollywood biopic? For example, if some wacky producer were to make a movie about Amy Winehouse’s tortured life—who would you play the late soul singer? My first choice would be Lady Gaga: her nose is crooked, she sorta has a good voice, and her outrageous personality could potentially match up with Amy’s. But, what if we were to take this incredibly fun challenge to the next level by pretending that Amy and Gaga are actually the same person, IRL. Are you still with me?

Well, according to my new favourite website, WellAware1, this kind of bodysnatching celebrity insanity is only the tip of the iceberg, or the beginning of the rabbithole, depending on which conspiratorial metaphor you prefer. WellAware1 exposes one the most unbelievable conspiracy theories I’ve ever heard—and if you follow my writing, you probably already know how much time I spend talking about shadow governments and alien cover-ups.

The main premise of WellAware1 is that the “real” people you see interviewed in news stories—whether they’re small town mall employees who got robbed at gunpoint or famous musicians and politicians—are not who they say they are. They’re all actors who have been hired by our governments to manipulate our perception of reality, and push forward some sort of actor-driven totalitarian agenda.

I know what you’re thinking: totally insane, right? Well, don’t shrug the theory off so quickly. First off, WellAware1 is not your average black-background-red-font conspiracy theory website, even though that’s exactly what it looks like. What sets WellAware1 apart from other conspiracy website, is the sheer amount of content and “proof” that its webmaster has assembled. Since 2011, WellAware1’s creator Ed Chiarini a.k.a. DallasGoldBug, has been publishing articles about how the world’s major news events are actually just dramatic, fictional productions on his website. He argues his case with videos, audio samples, and Photoshopped images uncovering hundreds of scenarios where everyone you think you know is actually someone else who you also know. You know?

If, like me, you want to spend a few days poring over his endless research and Photoshopped “evidence,” you might stop to think about the amount of dubious data he’s collected that hasn’t yet made it onto the website—over 6,000 records, including audio, high-res pics and videos—that he is trying to crowdfund his way into releasing. His GoFundMe page even includes a completely absurd video that tries to prove Columbine was staged, in part, with inanimate human dummies.

Somehow, he’s raised $2,600 out of his $5,000 goal, presumably from “Well Aware Ones,” to leak his treasure trove of information that, he insists, will support his wild claims and prove the world’s news stories are all just elaborate fictions. The financial support from God knows who is almost enough to make you think, hey, maybe he’s onto something here! But before you get too carried away, check out these examples of exactly what WellAware1 believes.

Rejoice! Not only is Tupac alive, he’s also Dave Chappelle! I knew Dave was a master of disguise when the The Artist Formerly Known as Prince himself put Dave on his new album cover, but to discover that he was also Tupac all this time is a whole other level of cultural manipulation that I was not mentally prepared to discover.

As Ed, the owner of WellAware1, says: “the ear does not lie.” Any loyal WellAware1 reader knows, ear biometrics is a safe way to confirm a person’s identity and we have the proof here. Dave and Pac’s ears are the exactly the same, “right down to the piercing”.

If you have any appreciation for Steve Carell’s wide range of characters, like a lovably dumb paper company manager or a lovably dumb television news anchor, you already know that he’s one hell of an actor. But did you know he is also Alice Cooper and Boy George? Fascinating.

Yes. In case you weren’t aware, everyone’s favourite anti-apartheid revolutionary is in fact highly celebrated actor Morgan Freeman’s father. “Like father like son,” the saying goes. Again, check how BOTH of their ears have curvy bits on the inside and are used for hearing! Coincidence? Fuck no!

This one is just plain offensive.

This kinda stuff goes on and on and on...

I recently tried getting in touch with Ed to give him a chance to talk about the specifics of his theory. I also wanted to know more about disguise techniques, and how someone like Steve Carell can be both Alice Cooper and Boy George. The response, shown below, was not exactly what I had expected (he also discussed my apparently nefarious interview request in one of his many, long video blogs).

According to a notice on WellAware1’s homepage, Ed recently had to delete his Facebook profile, “due to the number of death threats” he was receiving.  That might explain his reticence to speak with me. But this could have been Ed’s chance to refute all of the moronic haters out there who claim he is pushing for a New World Order-type agenda—and instead he accused me of being part of the problem. Oh well.

Ed is a mystery, and as much as I want to stop, I just can’t help but keep reading about his twisted theories on current events. Even if you think he’s nuts and doesn’t deserve any attention whatsoever (too late, you read this article), you have to admit that what he’s accomplished is pretty impressive, in that completely insane kind of way. I can’t even process the number of conclusions he draws between the celebrity system and their supposed role in manipulating world news. Who has the time? What is it like to live in a world where Chevy Chase is Jim Morrison and John Candy never really died? We might never know.

 

Ed, here’s your chance to set the record straight. Tweet at Steph: @smvoyer

More on wacky conspiracy theories:

Conspiracy News: Osama Not Buried at Sea!

Conspiracy Theorists Are Dangerous Enemies to Make

Meet Paul Hellyer, the World's Highest Ranking Alien Believer

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