Mayhem Erupts in Baltimore at Protests Over Freddie Gray's Death

April 26, 2015, 7:56 am

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Revisiting the Sites of the Boston Marathon Bombing

April 25, 2015, 10:55 pm

≫ Next: 'The Road Home' Is a Reminder That We're All in This Together and We're All Going to Die

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Irina Rozovsky is a Boston-based photographer who teaches at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. After photographing this year's Boston Marathon, she was inspired to revisit some sites related to the bombing two years ago, as well as the courthouse where Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's trial is ongoing.

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The Tsarnaev's front door on Norfolk Street in Cambridge. The family lived on the third floor.

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The Shell on Memorial Drive in Cambridge where the brothers stopped for gas in the black SUV they had carjacked an hour earlier. Tamerlan fussed with the GPS as Dzhokhar went inside to pay. The owner of the car bolted from the passenger seat, escaping to a nearby Mobile station.

Security camera footage shows Dzhokhar calmly wandering around the snack aisles, pondering bags of chips, settling on Doritos, and two drinks. When his brother comes in to tell him the car owner has escaped, he leaves the items near the cashier, raising his hands apologetically and runs out of the store.

A shootout occurred on Laurel Street, in a quiet residential area of Watertown, at 12:48 am on April 19, 2013.

The city of Boston was on lockdown and a manhunt for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev ensued. At 6pm David Henneberry discovered him hiding in the boat in his backyard on Franklin Street, Watertown. At 8:45pm Dzhokhar was taken into custody.

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The 117th Boston Marathon was held on April 20th, 2015, two years after the bombing.

The front door of the John Joseph Moakley federal courthouse in South Boston where Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is being tried.

See more photographs by Irina Rozovsky on her website.

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'The Road Home' Is a Reminder That We're All in This Together and We're All Going to Die

April 26, 2015, 12:30 am

≫ Next: When Exxon Wanted to be the Next Apple

≪ Previous: Revisiting the Sites of the Boston Marathon Bombing

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The son of a meditating musician and a Buddhist psychologist, Ethan Nichtern was born into the world of Shambala Buddhism. As the Shambala movement aged, Nichtern devoted himself to building and adapting Buddhist practices for the next generation. In his new book, The Road Home: A Contemporary Exploration of the Buddhist Path, out this week from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, Nichtern lays out a relatable account of the contemporary "commuter," who struggles to find a sense of home and moves through life with her eyes fixated on an ambiguous "elsewhere."

Nichtern's book offers compassionate, practical, and largely secular guidance rooted in his Buddhist practice. In an age of increasing fragmentation and restlessness, Nichtern offers accessible antidotes to everyday feelings of disorientation, distraction, and dissatisfaction. The Road Home ends with a stirring call to action on the global scale, emphasizing the ethical duties of the modern-day Buddhist. VICE spoke with Nichtern about selfies, self-consciousness, and the growing popularity of "McMindfulness."

VICE: You mention in the opening to your book that your father is a life-long meditator. Did you take to Buddhism and meditation immediately, or were you resistant to it as a kid?
Ethan Nichtern: A little bit of both. In the early 1970s, my parents both became students of Chögyam Trungpa, a really wild, creative, brilliant man who was one of the main pioneers of Tibetan Buddhism coming to the West. So I grew up around [Buddhism]; I took a class on it for kids, when I was ten or 11, but it was really the end of high school that I really started meditating on my own.

I was in college in the late 1990s, and it seemed like I—and everybody I knew—was depressed and could really use the practice and insights of Buddhism. At that point, [the Shambala community] had become more middle-aged, so I was really interested in how [Buddhist practice] could be framed for more Generation X, and now a Millennial audience. That was my initial reason for doing teacher training after college, and starting the Interdependence Project and teaching in the Shambala community.

READ: The Totalitarian Buddhist Who Beat Sim City

What is the Interdependence Project?
The Interdependence Project is meant to be a hub, in person and online, for people who are interested in Buddhism in a very secular, relevant, modern way. We have teachers from different Buddhist lineages teaching in person and online. [The project] is about applying Buddhist principles in conversation with things like Western psychology, activism—a lot of us were at the demonstration a few days ago to raise the minimum wage—and the arts.

Toward the end of The Road Home, your focus turn toward ethics and politics. Will your next project focus more on the activist aspect of contemporary Buddhism?
I think that [progression] is part of the evolution of Buddhist thought. If you look at the history of Buddhist thought, it started out as a very personal pursuit, but then there are teachings later on in Buddhism that are more about compassion and the interpersonal level of reality. That's the thing about living in a modern, democratic age and a globalized society: The interdependence of things makes us look at the political and ethical and cultural systems we all live in.

Our modern state of feeling lost but also connected is like an old human problem on steroids.

Is your trope of the restless "commuter" specific to the present, globalized world?
The metaphor of "the commuter" comes out of my interest in the different words used for existential confusion in Buddhism. Samsara literally means "wandering around" and the Tibetan word for 'a confused being' means something like "always on the go." That's where I get the term of the commuter. That notion of trying to get somewhere that is other than here, trying to fulfill something, trying to find home: I think that's a very ancient human feeling. There's something about how together we all clearly are—through our tech, our smartphones, our apps—but also how lost we feel and how scattered we are.

Our modern state of feeling lost but also connected, and the friction between those two feelings... it's like an old human problem has gone on steroids. To be a human being means you're trying to find your place in the universe. That's been true since [2500] years ago, but the fragmentation of modern life really exaggerates that.

You talk in The Road Home about the growing sensation of meditation in the tech world and among business executives. I have meditation apps on my iPhone! Do you think that this "fast food" version of meditation, as you call it, could actually be more harmful than positive?
What I say at the beginning of the chapter on meditation is "Meditation has become incredibly popular, in theory." But you don't see people walking down the streets of Brooklyn with meditation cushions strapped to their back the way you see people with yoga mats. Some people think, I'm going to invent a new thing, because the old thing isn't very accessible. I'm more interested in thinking, The old thing has tremendous value, so how do we actually update it and communicate it? Buddhism is about living in the present moment.

"The Mindfulness Movement" was on the cover of TIME magazine, but there's been push back against the superficiality of "McMindfulness," mass-produced or "fast food" mindfulness. But getting interested in something that helps you to treat yourself well, treat others well, de-stress, and see how connected we all are—even if you start from a superficial place, it will lead to something deeper. You start to see your own suffering, then you start to see other people's suffering, and then you start to look at society. So I say, let there be McMindfulness, as long as there are others holding the deeper view of "We're all in this together, life is short, we're all going to die. So let's try to develop compassion for ourselves, for others. Let's try to figure out how to create a really compassionate society."

READ: Tattoo Trances at a Buddhist Festival in Thailand

[body_image width='1396' height='2007' path='images/content-images/2015/04/22/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/22/' filename='mcmeditation-and-the-real-deal-with-buddhist-leader-ethan-nichtern-body-image-1429718986.jpg' id='48611']Photo by Marissa Dutton. Courtesy of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

My generation gets a lot of flack for being self-obsessed. How do you draw the distinction between selfie culture and self-reflection?
In today's culture, we're all interconnected via technology and also completely obsessed with how other people perceive us. I was watching GIRLS the other night—I hear Lena Dunham meditates every day, but that's unverified—and her gay friend [Elijah] is talking about his art. She's like, "Why are you taking so many pictures of everybody?" And he says, "I'm trying this new thing. I used to love my selfies, but then I decided—turn the camera around." I think that's what compassion practices. You start by focusing on yourself, then you realize, Oh, other people are going through this too.

When we're trying to get away from ourselves, we get locked up in the story of "What's everybody thinking of me?" That's a different form of self-regard than "Who am I? What is my experience?" We have to distinguish self-obsession from self-awareness. I worry about the kids who have to grow up in this world thinking What's everybody thinking of me? all the time. If I had a critique of millennials, it wouldn't be about you as people, it would be about the culture that you're faced with.

Check out Ethan Nichtern's The Road Home, out now.

Follow Jennifer Schaffer on Twitter.

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When Exxon Wanted to be the Next Apple

April 26, 2015, 8:12 am

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When Exxon Wanted to be the Next Apple

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Comics: Michael

April 26, 2015, 7:59 am

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Check out Stephen Maurice Graham's website, Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram.

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The WWE's First-Ever Female Trainer Is Ushering in a New Golden Era for Women Wrestlers

April 26, 2015, 3:41 am

≫ Next: Dating a Porn Star Is as Awesome as It Sounds

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[body_image width='642' height='361' path='images/content-images/2015/04/24/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/24/' filename='sara-del-rey-is-ushering-in-a-new-era-for-women-wrestlers-on-wwe-235-body-image-1429873259.jpg' id='49407']Sara Del Rey

In a February live special of WWE's NXT TakeOver, Sasha Banks, the Diva who'd spent months in the shadow of her peers, finally got her revenge. She put her former BFF, Charlotte, in her signature "Bank Statement" submission hold, and hoisted the dead weight over her body until Charlotte's shoulders touched the mat. 1, 2, 3. The career sidekick had finally captured the NXT Women's Championship. The match epitomized the total transformation of NXT, WWE's developmental program, into the world's best destinations for women's wrestling. And that revitalization has a single champion: Banks and Charlotte's trainer, Sara Del Rey, the first-ever female wrestling coach hired by the WWE.

"Sara wanted us to go out there and steal the show. To come backstage afterward and see how proud she was... I'm getting emotional right now just thinking about it," Sasha told VICE. "It just shows how much we care, how much we love this."

Del Rey joined WWE after a decade's worth of experience wrestling all over the world in independent promotions including Chikara, Ring of Honor, and Shimmer. Since being hired in 2012, WWE has produced some of their most promising female talent in a generation. NXT, essentially WWE's internal minor league, has morphed into the home of some of the networks' most riveting wrestling. Banks and Charlotte round out a once-in-a-lifetime crop alongside Bayley, Becky Lynch, Alexa Bliss, Paige, and Emma.

"Daniel Bryan, [currently one of WWE's biggest stars,] trained me a long time ago. That's how I got my foot in the door," Del Rey told VICE. "Training has always been my one true passion; it's what I really love about pro wrestling. I thought I had unique experiences and perspectives to share with the women in NXT. WWE agreed, and here I am."

Banks, who comes from an independent wrestling background, knew what she was getting into. "I had always heard of Sara Del Rey as one of the best female wrestlers in the world, and she was actually at my WWE tryout," she recalled. "She has so much experience and can teach you anything you want to learn. She's the very best we've got."

"It's irrelevant to me that's she's a woman. What matters is that she can do her job extremely well." —Triple H

Charlotte, despite being the daughter of the legendary Ric Flair, hadn't spent any time in a wrestling ring before she joined NXT in the spring of 2012, right around the same time Sara was hired.

"She had succeeded at the highest level, and now she was paving the way as WWE's first female coach," Charlotte recalled. "I just wanted to work incredibly hard for her."

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Charlotte and Sasha Banks. Photos courtesy of WWE

Wrestling training is more than just running the ropes. Learning how to absorb hits is still the foundation of the business, but today, character development is what's most important. At its core, pro wrestling is performance art. You can do every show-stopping move you want, but if the audience doesn't hate you, or love you, or sympathize with you, it's all for naught. It was in this arena that Del Rey helped Charlotte the most.

"Obviously she's my coach, and obviously we trained in the ring, but Sara brought out who 'Charlotte' was. She taught me to be confident, and melded authentic sides of who I am on the inside and with my character," Charlotte explained. "She's my biggest supporter."

Del Rey echoed Charlotte's sentiment when I asked her about her greatest strengths as a trainer. "Really, I just support them. It's just about teaching them to think for themselves," she said. "I think all those girls really know who they are, inside and out of the ring. After that, it's easy for me to sit back and let them fly."

At this year's WrestleMania, the WWE's Super Bowl, more than 40 wrestlers competed. Only four of them were women.

"You can have all the knowledge in the world, but it's useless if you can't explain it," said Paul "Triple H" Levesque, WWE Executive Vice President and the man behind NXT, in an interview with VICE. "That's what makes Sara special: She can feel it, but she's also able to articulate that feeling."

It does help that Del Rey is a woman training other women. While plenty of female wrestlers, including Del Rey, have trained with men and succeeded, those I spoke with emphasized the impact that a like-minded trainer can have in the wrestling ring.

"I trained with guys' guys for years, but it was when I went to Japan and worked with a group of all females that my technique was really fine-tuned. There wasn't a safety net," said Del Rey. "I don't think [having a female trainer] is a necessity, but it's helpful."

Related: The British Wrestler, our documentary on the underground UK wrestling scene

"Working with a female trainer here is a big plus, because we are in a male-dominated business," explained Banks. "Having a female point of view when it comes to body movement has been so constructive. Sara is very understanding. Anything we need we're able to tell her. It's like having another mother here."

Levesque is happy to admit that there's always going to be a slight disconnect when a man is training a woman, but he also views Del Rey as an all-around talent.

"Whenever people say 'Oh, it's so great you brought in a woman to train the women,' I say 'I didn't hire a woman to train women, I hired a woman to train,'" Levesque emphasized. "She's great with the women, she can relate to the women wonderfully, but she's more than that. It's the same when I bring her up to the main roster; I'm not doing that so she can just work with the women, I'm doing that so she can be a road agent. It's irrelevant to me that's she's a woman. What matters is that she can do her job extremely well."

Last month, Banks and Charlotte headlined a special of NXT. It was a great match, symbolic of WWE's future. It's no secret that there are different priorities on Raw and Smackdown, WWE's two flagship programs. While NXT tends to treat women's and men's wrestling on the same level, the "Divas" on the main roster are often saddled with short matches. At this year's WrestleMania, the WWE's Super Bowl, more than 40 wrestlers competed. Only four of them were women.

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Charlotte and Sasha Banks

On a February episode of Raw, Paige, Emma, and The Bella Twins, all talented performers, were put in a particularly short, cast-off match, causing the hash tag #GiveDivasAChance to trend worldwide. Since then we've seen the women wrestle longer matches on Raw, but we're still a ways away from parity.

Banks and Charlotte both talk about how Sara Del Rey is their "advocate," championing women not only in the ring, but in production meetings.

"She's someone who's always fighting for us," Charlotte said. "She's backstage advocating that the women deserve to be in the main event, and that the women deserve storylines. She's fighting for us everyday, and that's what's important."

"You think about #GiveDivasaChance. Sara has given us a chance," Banks told me. "Any time we want more time, she'll fight for it. Any time we don't understand something in the storyline, she fights for it. She's there at every step."

"There's no limit to what this generation of girls can do." —Sara Del Rey

"It's not that the divas never had an advocate," Del Rey explained, "but it's something I gravitate toward as a fan. It's easy for me to speak up for them, because that's what I'm interested in."

There are plenty of reasons why we don't see women in the main event spot on Raw like we do on NXT; it likely has more to do with business than anything else. But there's a lot of excitement surrounding this generation of women. Banks is on record saying that her personal goal is to someday headline a pay-per-view event, something that's never happened in the history of WWE.

I asked Del Rey if she thinks we'll see women headline Raw in the next couple of years. Her response? "100 percent. There's no limit to what this generation of girls can do."

"Do we feel the pressure? In a way, yes. Everyone is talking about us right now," said Sasha. "But we're doing what we love, and when you're doing what you love it comes easy. We're putting our heart out there, and the fans appreciate that. I believe that we're defining and changing women's wrestling. I hope little girls watch us and say 'Wow, I want to be a diva in the WWE because of these NXT girls.'

Follow Luke Winkie on Twitter.

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Dating a Porn Star Is as Awesome as It Sounds

April 26, 2015, 4:39 am

≫ Next: Kim Jong-un Is Headed to Moscow to Make North Korea and Russia BFFs

≪ Previous: The WWE's First-Ever Female Trainer Is Ushering in a New Golden Era for Women Wrestlers

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Joanna Angel. Photo via Flickr user Alain_Christian

Millions of teenaged boys fantasize about dating a porn star, but it takes a grown man with confidence, stamina, and balls to actually pull it off. I wanted to find out what type of guys are dating some of the dreamiest girls in porn, so I reached out to three of the lucky boyfriends. Aaron has been with punk princess Joanna Angel for three years. While he works primarily as a graphic designer, he's now done nearly 30 films himself after being "brought over to the dark side" by his better half. Tyler, a student, dates America's favorite political parody star Sydney Leathers. His parents knew about the Weiner scandal before he did. And Donald, a doctor and dating coach, is enjoying his own fairytale romance with the self-proclaimed "nastiest broad you will ever meet," Annie Cruz.

Aaron, boyfriend of Joanna Angel

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VICE: Hi, Aaron! How'd you get your porn name?
Aaron: My real name is Aaron; my porno name is Small Hands. I have very tiny hands for a grown ass man. When it came time to fill out paperwork I was like "Oh, shit. I don't even have a name." So I just picked something that I thought would be funny, because you know the myth about small hands...

Yes. I've learned the hard way that it's not true.
Yeah. I wanted something funny because I like to joke. Before dating Joanna I had no prior experience on that side of the camera. And I'm not technically a porn guy; I still have my other career. I do [porn] when the queen demands it, basically!

What's your main career?
I'm a graphic illustrator and graphic designer. I design company websites; that's also how I [met] Joanna. She was a client of mine, [prior] to us dating. I design all of her DVD and movie covers, all the posters that promote her company, all the merchandise. That's my main gig. A mutual friend of ours set us up first for business and then we went from there.

Everyone does the best they can. You come home, you're tired. We might make a little dinner, walk the dog, and snuggle up.

In the early days of your relationship, what was it like to be dating a porn star?
At the beginning it was a little... hard isn't the right word, no pun intended. It was unfamiliar; the whole industry was something I didn't know anything about. I didn't know how it worked. I've played in bands for many years. To me, the music business is very similar to the porn industry. Obviously as our bond strengthened and as I learned about this whole new world, it became more comfortable.

So how did Joanna bring you over to the porn world?
Basically, we were traveling and something happened with a hard drive. A website needs to be updated regularly and something happened where the updates got lost. Who knows what happened. She was like, "We really need to put something up on the website. You think you could make something happen [in our hotel room]?" I was a little reluctant. It wasn't something I was prepared for, but obviously I love my girlfriend, I love her company [Burning Angel], and she needed something. So I said "OK! I will do my very best." We filmed something very simple in the hotel room; that was surprisingly pretty easy for me and I did a decent enough job. It got a pretty good response so we [thought], Why don't I keep doing this because it helps the company?

Related: Check out our documentary on legendary porn star Belladonna.

Has your relationship changed since you began doing porn yourself?
It's made it stronger. Now that I know how it works, all the things that [would cause] a normal dude to say "Isn't this hard?" are no big deal. The common [question is] "How do you date someone who has sex with other dudes?" Now I know the reality of how it works. This is a company owned by a woman. It's an extremely controlled environment. It's safe. It's the most non-creepy thing, given what we're doing.

How does it affect your sex life when you've both been filming? Are you ever too tired for sex with each other?
On days that we're shooting, we're probably not going to have some kind of crazy two-hour long Kama Sutra sex. Joanna is not only a performer; she directs everything and she runs the company. You're talking 14-hour days: You're exhausted whether you have sex or not. Everyone does the best they can. You come home, you're tired. We might make a little dinner, walk the dog, and snuggle up. On the other days, we're just like any other couple. We like to have sex and have fun, but we're just more open about it.

Tyler, boyfriend of Sydney Leathers

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VICE: Hey, Tyler! What's it like having a girlfriend who's always in the spotlight?
Tyler: People definitely ask about her. People pretend to know her, and us and our relationship, because she is in the spotlight from time to time. This recent scandal she was going through with this congressman from Indiana was in the local news. So people were like, "I saw your girlfriend in the news." I don't think she follows any stigma [when] it comes to porn; she's not [how] you would imagine a porn star. She has a bad name, but it's really not like that at all!

How do you feel about Sydney's porn career?
I don't hate that she does porn whatsoever. I never judged her. It makes my life very interesting! She's not what she seems like; her reputation is not as good as her actual personality. When I talked to her and met her, I definitely wasn't planning on dating and moving in together. We really do have amazing chemistry, it's crazy.

What do you guys like to do together?
We are very similar in many ways but totally opposite in many others. She's kind of introverted and I'm more sociable. It's good because it balances out. If I were a total political junkie and exactly the same as her, we'd be talking over each other. I'm very analytical and technically-minded. You'd expect porn stars to date other porn stars, if they are going to date anybody. I was kind of shocked in the beginning just how affectionate she could be instead of Oh, she's just going to fuck me!

My best friends are supportive. If anything, people are more respectful of her.

How do your friends react?
My best friends are supportive. If anything, people are more respectful of her. I think I had a skewed idea of how the porn industry works. It's very mechanical and not what you expect. The average porn viewer is not getting an accurate interpretation of what's going on. They're actually human beings, believe it or not.

It sounds like you're very supportive and caring.
I'm protective, but we have a lot of trust built up, or else it wouldn't work. We do fully trust each other and tell each other everything. We've talked about intimacy and it's not just sex; it's more about sharing the same goals and aspirations. She's helping me move my life forward.

I was reading about the scandal with the Indiana Congressman ("Bitch Boy") and read he wanted to watch you two have sex from a closet?
A lot of people want to fuck my girlfriend. I was never threatened by him. It was actually really cool; he was super respectful. On my birthday he said, "Happy birthday, Master Tyler."

Are you ever going to do porn?
No. But everyone thinks we must have the greatest sex life. And we do have the greatest sex life!

Donald, boyfriend of Annie Cruz

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VICE: When I first heard Annie was dating a doctor, I was surprised. How did you two meet?
Donald: I was at the AVN Awards. I just went to chase a lot of hot girls and have a really good time. A few days before I was supposed to head out to Vegas, I called a couple of my buddies and I'm like "Let's make this an even more stupid drunken time. We're all going to wear superhero costumes." I got in before all my friends did, grabbed a bottle of Cruzan rum, and went up to my room at the Hard Rock Hotel. And I was like, "I don't need to wait for anyone! I'm going to have a good time by myself!" I threw on my Captain America costume and took a swig of rum.

Most of the other people at AVN are overweight porn fans, so you get a guy that knows how to talk to girls and is wearing a Captain America costume, having a great time, and girls are just loving it. We start talking some shit to each other and I scoop her up in my superhero arms. Being the slut that she is, she's like "I'm not wearing any panties." And being the slut that I am, I lick my fingers and am like "Let's find out."

I've been on set before and watched her get plowed by a big Russian cock and gave her a high five.

Then what happened?
I didn't know that she had a radio show. So whatever day I got back [from Vegas], I tune in. I'm wondering if she'll mention anything, and she spends the entire hour of her show describing in detail all the sexcapades that we had. To dump my ex-girlfriend, I sent her the audio.

What's it like dating a porn star compared to dating a "civilian"?
I've kind of had a stepwise progression into dating more and more sexual women. Lawyers and doctors, bartenders and cocktail waitresses and strippers, and then after that, I started dating porn girls. I've kind of segwayed my way into it. I've had a lot of experience with open relationships; I've had sex in sex clubs before. I've been on set before and watched her get plowed by a big Russian cock and gave her a high five. Like, "Yeah baby, get it!"

Follow Sophie St. Thomas on Twitter.

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Kim Jong-un Is Headed to Moscow to Make North Korea and Russia BFFs

April 26, 2015, 11:30 am

≫ Next: The VICE Guide to Mental Health: Welcome to the VICE Guide to Mental Health

≪ Previous: Dating a Porn Star Is as Awesome as It Sounds

Kim Jong-un Is Headed to Moscow to Make North Korea and Russia BFFs

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The VICE Guide to Mental Health: Welcome to the VICE Guide to Mental Health

April 27, 2015, 5:00 am

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VICE is known for traveling the planet and covering underreported stories from hard-to-reach corners of the globe, but today we're launching a series of articles focusing on something much more internal. The VICE Guide to Mental Health is a collection of essays and reports that explore some of the issues that affect the mental well-being of people around the world.

One in four adults in the US will experience mental illness this year and though this generation is undoubtably more open about these issues than previous ones, mental illness is often still considered a tough thing to talk about. Perhaps that collective reticence is one reason why the work we have published in this arena in the past has been some of our most popular.

In a way, then, this is a collection of articles that we've been pushed toward by those young people who engage with VICE every day. And because this is such a universal issue, we're proud to be launching it in 15 countries simultaneously, with contributions from many of our international offices.

We'd like to thank the organizations who have been so helpful and supportive in getting these stories together, as well as our UK senior editor, Eleanor Morgan, who worked night and day to pull the majority of this package together.

- Alex Miller, Global Head of Content

If you are concerned about the mental health of you or someone you know, visit the Canadian Mental Health Association website.

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The VICE Guide to Mental Health: The Life, Death, and Possible Resurrection of the Asylum

April 27, 2015, 5:00 am

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In 1841, a woman named Dorothea Dix walked into Massachusetts's East Cambridge Jail to teach Sunday school classes to the female inmates there and was horrified at what she found. Mixed in with the criminals were what she'd call "idiots and insane persons," who were being mistreated and left to rot in the cells of a prison that wasn't designed to hold them.

Though women couldn't vote or hold office back then, Dix began a political crusade on behalf of the mentally ill. She toured the state's prisons and almshouses (as poorhouses were called) and found example after example of disturbed people locked in cages, chained, beaten, kept in solitary confinement for years, or cruelly neglected by their keepers. In an almshouse in Newburyport, she found a woman who had been locked in a tiny cellar under the stairs and a man who lived next to a "dead room" where corpses were stored. She recounted all this in a "memorial" note she sent to the Massachusetts Legislature in 1843 that called for "an asylum for this class, the incurable, where conflicting duties shall not admit of such examples of privations and misery."

Dix was at the leading edge of the first wave of mental health reformers in the US, who demanded that people suffering from mental illness be treated more humanely and less like animals. In the second half of the 19th century, mental institutions, many of them inspired by the writings of Thomas Story Kirkbride, were constructed in hopes of providing a place of refuge for the mentally ill.

"There is abundant reason why every State should make ample provision, not only for the proper custody, but also for the most enlightened treatment of all the insane within its borders," Kirkbride wrote in his influential 1854 work On the Construction, Organization, and General Arrangements of Hospitals for the Insane . "The simple claims of a common humanity... should induce each State to make a liberal provision for all its humanity."

That ideal of "enlightened treatment" deteriorated pretty drastically over the course of the following century, however. Asylums became overcrowded nightmares where the mentally ill were warehoused for years and "treated" with electroshock therapy and lobotomies. They started being referred to as "snake pits," after a 1948 film about a woman's terrifying time in a mental hospital. By the early 60s, a new breed of reformers began demanding the emptying of institutions that early mental health advocates like Kirkbride and Dix had fought for. The arguments were pretty clear-cut: Keeping people in asylums was expensive and cruel, and it wasn't even necessary thanks to new drugs, most prominently Thorazine, which could calm the psychotic and make it possible for them to pursue relatively normal lives.

So the mental hospitals let their patients go en masse in a process known as "deinstitutionalization." In many ways this was a major success, as thousands of mentally ill people became free of their oppressive institutional surroundings. Indeed, today the vast majority of the mentally ill lead perfectly ordinary existences and have no need of hospitalization. But many in the mental health field say this process went too far too fast, and that nothing grew up to replace the old snake pits, a view that has led to yet another wave of reformers who think it's time to bring asylums back.

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A 1907 photo of Bryce Hospital in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, one of many asylums built on the Kirkbride Plan. Photo via Wikicommons

Today the problems with the American mental health system are obvious to anyone who walks into a prison, as Dorothea Dix did 174 years ago, or visits a street where the homeless congregate. In New York, mentally ill inmates at Rikers Island have gotten into fights and been beaten by guards; in Washington State, a Department of Corrections psychiatrist told the Seattle Times in 2013 that 20 to 30 percent of inmates were mentally ill; cuts to mental health funding in Alabama and Minnesota have created severe shortages in services. Across the country, the problem is the same: There aren't enough services for the severely mentally ill who cannot take care of themselves, and as a result they wind up out in the cold. According to a 2014 USA Today article, the Department of Housing and Urban Development estimates that of the 610,000 homeless people living in America, 124,000 have a mental illness.

Earlier this month, VICE News released a video report on what is thought to be "the largest mental health care provider in America right now": Chicago's Cook County Jail, where approximately 30 percent of the 9,000 inmates have a mental illness. The concentration of the mentally ill in the jail has been helped along by cuts to state- and city-wide mental health services; because of this, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart told VICE News, many bounce back and forth between the streets and jail, unable to care for themselves and falling through the system's widening cracks. The video shows one bipolar young man curled up alone inside a cell after visiting with a counselor who placed him on suicide watch—he's receiving some form of care, at least, but it's hard to imagine that he belongs behind bars.

"Honest to God, I can't think to myself that a thoughtful society would agree that this is how we should treat people," Dart told VICE News correspondent Danny Gold.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/-fQ50a-m92Y' width='640' height='360']

There was no single moment when it was decided that so much mental health treatment should happen within prisons and jails. Like many long-term public policy shifts that look flawed or damaging in retrospect, deinstitutionalization was a result of piecemeal decisions made at multiple levels of government over time—good or at least well-intentioned choices that add up to catastrophe.

The asylum population in the US peaked at 558,000 in 1955, and since then a series of moves has reduced the number of patients in state-run mental hospitals to 45,000. One of the most important of these moves, the Community Mental Health Act of 1963, promised that 1,500 small community mental health centers would be constructed—but this ideal never materialized.

"The program was never adequately funded by either the federal government or the states," Paul Appelbaum, a Columbia psychiatry professor and longtime critic of deinstitutionalization, told VICE. "Since then, a patchwork of programs has been created but never enough to meet the demand."

Another problem, according to Appelbaum, was that "the proponents of deinstitutionalization allowed ideology to trump their better judgment. Beginning with the perception that many people with mental illness did not need long-term hospitalization—which is absolutely correct—they came to conclude that almost no one needs longer-term care."

Over the years, many psychiatrists and others worried that deinstitutionalization had gone too far, too fast. Back in 1974, the American Psychiatric Association issued a position statement expressing concern that patients were being released "without adequate planning, which in turn results in their living in substandard and dehumanizing circumstances." In 1981, a New York Times editorial denounced deinstitutionalization as "a cruel embarrassment, a reform gone terribly wrong" because the mentally ill were not being properly cared for in the community. Even as the issue of severely mentally ill homeless people got more and more media attention in the 80s, the Reagan administration did little to address it, instead shifting the responsibility for funding and running community mental health centers to the states.

Some disagree with the broad narrative that deinstitutionalization has directly caused mentally ill people to become homeless or incarcerated. Mark Salzer, a psychologist and chair of the Department of Rehabilitation Sciences at Temple University, told VICE that the percentage of mentally ill people in prison didn't rise until the 80s, decades after the beginning of deinstitutionalization. The problem, he says, is that the war on drugs and other law-and-order policies ratcheted up the imprisonment of addicts and poor people, and the mentally ill are more likely than the general population to be poor or addicted to drugs.

"The police are arresting everybody who does certain things," Salzer said. "It's not just because they have a mental illness."

The problems faced by the seriously mentally ill have worsened thanks to the financial crisis leaving states with massive deficits, which many responded to by drastically slashing mental health budgets. Some experts think these sorts of cuts don't actually save money, since it costs more to treat the mentally ill in emergency rooms and put them in jails, but the sad truth is that there hasn't been much political will to fund programs that might help.

"The mentally ill are, by and large, a population that is darn close to voiceless other than some great advocacy groups that are really all that's left," Sheriff Tom Dart told VICE News.

"This was the original meaning of psychiatric 'asylum'—a protected place where safety, sanctuary, and long-term care for the mentally ill would be provided." –Dominic Sisti

This January, an op-ed appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association with the subtitle "Bring Back the Asylum." In it, University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Dominic Sisti and his coauthors argue that it's time to return to the sorts of reforms suggested by Dorothea Dix: Instead of trying to treat the severely mentally ill and indigent in prisons, we should construct new hospitals where the few people who need inpatient treatment and structured, institutional-based assistance can get it. "This was the original meaning of psychiatric 'asylum'—a protected place where safety, sanctuary, and long-term care for the mentally ill would be provided," the authors wrote. "It is time to build them—again."

These would be state-of-the-art facilities with highly trained staff, Sisti told VICE—no lobotomies, no snake pits. He said the use of the word asylum was meant to hearken back to Quaker ideals, which he described as "to basically respect individuals with mental illness as human beings, as persons with dignity, and to give them the safety and time they need to recover their lives."

The article touched off a cycle of controversy in the mental health community. Psychology Today and the New York Times published opinion pieces generally supporting the idea of more asylum-like institutions, which in turn inspired a series of letters to the Times, some of which expressed incredulity that cash-strapped state governments would be willing or able to build mental hospitals that wouldn't suffer from the same problems that plagued the last generation of asylums.

"Anyone who knows their history or understands their features appreciates that the original intent of 'asylums' cannot be achieved," Mark Salzer wrote in a rebuttal published on Philly.com. "They were never, and never can be, pleasant sanctuaries of healing."

Even if it was clear that more mental hospitals were necessary, it's not obvious how many more of them would be needed—or, more importantly, where the money to build them would come from. The broader issue is that across the country, mental health services remain underfunded and scattershot.

"Perhaps more than anything else, we need a vision," Paul Appelbaum said, "a comprehensive blueprint of an integrated system for mental health treatment that the states and the federal government can get behind and bring incrementally into existence."

What would that system look like? It might involve police officers specially trained to handle the mentally ill, a program that San Antonio has implemented with some success. It might feature centers that the mentally ill could be sent to rather than being warehoused in jails, as some state lawmakers in Minnesota have recently proposed. It would almost certainly mean improving the everyday lives of the mentally ill by helping them form connections within their communities. Salzer, for one, thinks that the US needs to embrace a more holistic model of mental health that works to help the mentally ill overcome common problems like poverty, isolation, and joblessness.

"If you have a lot of people who are unemployed and you're not doing anything about it, you're missing a great treatment opportunity, "said Salzer. "It's not all medications, it's not all case management, it's not all hospitals."

If you are concerned about the mental health of you or someone you know, visit the Canadian Mental Health Association website.

UPDATE 4/27: An earlier version of this article implied that Dominic Sisti was against electroshock therapy when in fact, he believes it is "valuable for a certain population."

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

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The VICE Guide to Mental Health: Inside Britain's Mental Health Crisis

April 27, 2015, 5:00 am

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Artwork by Nick Scott

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

It was Kerry's "worst breakdown." She was 27 years old and convinced she had to set herself on fire to save the world. Now she was wrestling with the lid of a petrol can.

Kerry knew she was really ill. She'd had schizoaffective disorder since she was 19. She could spot the warning signs. She'd already tried, and failed, to get help from her doctor and other services. Eventually, feeling unable to stay safe, she went to the A&E (a British term for "emergency room") in the middle of the night and pleaded to be admitted. She was told that a bed couldn't be found and sent home with the promise that a mental health team would visit in the morning.

"I was lucky. I couldn't get the lid off the petrol can. It was stuck shut. So that's kind of why I'm still here. Three days later I was sectioned [British slang for "committed to a mental ward"]. The whole thing really damaged my trust in services. I kept asking for help but no one was really doing anything."

Now 31, Kerry has seen the best and worst of NHS mental health care. The frustration of being dumped on long waiting lists. The anger at being shunted "like pass the parcel" between services. The trauma of being stuck in a police cell while mentally ill—"one of the worst experiences of my life". But the support she received from a specialist psychosis team transformed her life. She just wishes it hadn't taken seven years to get it.

"That team pretty much turned my life around from not really functioning at all, to me doing a master's degree and then getting a job and getting engaged," she says. "They were absolutely brilliant. But before I got to see them, I'd found it really, really difficult to access services."

Mental health conditions are common. Around one in four Britons (23 percent) has a mental health issue each year, according to the last official survey. That figure includes a range of conditions, from the 15 percent of people with depression or anxiety to the 0.4 percent with psychosis disorders like schizophrenia.

But experiences like Kerry's aren't unusual. Good care is out there but it is too rare and takes too long to find.

Barely a week goes by without a crisis in mental health services hitting the headlines. A national bed shortage means people in crisis are being shunted all over the country for hospital care. Kids are waiting over two years for treatment and being admitted to adult psychiatric wards. And, worst of all, in the 21st century we still see thousands of mentally unwell adults and hundreds of children put in police cells because NHS services can't or won't take them.

Why is this happening? Partly, it's because our mental health system is being forced to do more with less.

Demand is rising. Doctors prescribed an average of more than 1 million antidepressants per week in 2013, double the number prescribed a decade earlier. There were 1.75 million adults getting help for severe mental illness in 2013-14, up 10 percent from the previous year. People were detained under the Mental Health Act more than 53,000 times in 2013-14—the highest recorded level, and 30 percent more often than ten years ago. And the number of children admitted to hospital for self-harm is at a five-year high.

These growing numbers may partly reflect improving public attitudes to mental health. The fear of seeking help is being broken down, partly due to the national Time to Change anti-stigma campaign launched in 2009. And awareness among medics is improving, too. As one doctor said to me, "Why are we seeing more mental health cases? Partly, because we're better at looking for them."

And yet the growing demand for mental healthcare also reflects the stress on our society. Austerity has hit hard. A study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry last year found that suicides in Europe had been declining until 2007. But in 2009, the year after the economic crash, there was a 6.5 percent increase—a level sustained until 2011. And in a survey of mental health social workers published last year, three-quarters of respondents said benefit cuts were the greatest challenge facing their clients.

Daisy Bogg, a mental health social worker, tells me deep cuts to housing, social care, and welfare have increased the stress on people at a time when they're vulnerable. And the "strivers versus skivers" rhetoric trotted out by politicians doesn't help.

A 2012 study concluded that mental illness accounted for 23 percent of the NHS's disease burden but got 13 percent of the cash

"We're very punitive. That's fed by sound bites about 'hard-working people' and all of that. It's not the only factor, but it feeds the general idea of social unacceptability," says Bogg. "Because actually we all just want to belong somewhere. You can cope with a lot of things if you have something to anchor you. But if everything's falling apart, then what have you got left?"

Mental health services don't get their fair share of NHS funding. A 2012 London School of Economics study concluded that mental illness accounted for 23 percent of the NHS's disease burden but got 13 percent of the cash.

Pinning down whether that funding picture is improving or not is trickier, as the coalition government scrapped the only national survey of mental health services. But an investigation I carried out found funding for NHS mental health trusts—the organizations providing most mental health hospital and specialist care—dropped 8 percent over the coalition's reign. A second set of figures showed that spending on children's mental health dropped 6 percent between 2010 and 2013.

The funding shortage impacts care at all levels of the system. I recently sought help for depression. Mine's pretty low-level. My dpctpr prescribed me antidepressants. He also recommended I joined the queue for talking therapies and I was told I'd face a six-month wait. I fared better than some. A survey of 2,000 talking therapies patients published last year found that one in ten had waited more than a year to get help. One in six attempted to take their own life while waiting. My doctor also referred me to a dermatologist for a minor skin condition. That took two weeks.

If you have long-term or more severe mental health needs you'll probably be put in touch with specialist mental health services. These vary depending on your needs but include psychosis teams like the one Kerry eventually got help from and community mental health teams, where social workers or nurses will give you ongoing support and monitor your condition. The problem is these services have seen funding flatline over the past five years, while referrals are up about 20 percent. The result is staff hold more cases. People are seen less. Waiting lists increase. And people fall through gaps in the system—deemed too unwell for talking therapy, not ill enough for specialist services.

But it's in crisis care that the pressure is really showing. People going through their own personal hell and in need of emergency support are routinely being let down. People phoning crisis helplines are struggling to get through to understaffed teams. Beds are scarce. More than 2,000 mental health beds have been lost while the number needing them has increased as the health and social care support to keep us well and out of hospital has been stripped back. A Royal College of Psychiatrists survey of more than 500 doctors found more than a quarter (28 percent) had sent a "critically unwell" patient home because they couldn't get a bed. If beds can be found they are often hundreds of miles from patients' homes. Worse still, at least seven suicides have been linked to problems involving access to beds.

The problems are similar in children's services. Nikki Mattocks was 14 when she started to hear voices. She began to self-harm and made several suicide attempts. She sought help through her school, doctor, and A&E but found herself turned away time and again.

"It was horrible because it takes a lot of courage to say, 'I need help,'" says Nikki. "I was told I wasn't severe enough even when I was self-harming or just told waiting lists were long. It's ridiculous because if you had a broken arm you wouldn't be expected to wait a few months and see if you're alright by then." Nikki has just turned 18.

A Royal College of Psychiatrists survey of more than 500 doctors found that 28 percent had sent a "critically unwell" patient home because they couldn't get a bed

She received help after six months. But she eventually needed several hospital admissions. There was a young person's unit five minutes from Nikki's house, but it was always full. So, Nikki ended up in hospitals up to 30 miles away. It made it difficult for friends and family to visit.

"When you're ill you need people that you know and love around you to remind you of why you want to get better. When you're sent away you can't really have that," she says.

But have services ever been up to scratch or are problems just receiving more attention now?

I asked Bogg, who has been a social worker in mental health services for more than 20 years, how the current state of services ranks. "Services haven't always been great but it has got tighter and tighter in terms of what we can offer," she says. "The chance to build up relationships has pretty much gone. Have I known it to be under as much pressure as it is now? No. We see services cut, beds cut, staff cut... everything."

Ask people working in or using services why our services have been allowed to be cut back and they tell you that mental health has long been treated as a second-class part of the NHS.

For Professor Sir Simon Wessely, chair of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the inequality rears its head in different ways. General hospitals are full of flowers but mental health wards are often bare. Some medics still treat psychiatry as a lesser branch of medicine and some mental disorders are dismissed as "not real illnesses." The same bias means mental health services are low down the pecking order when local NHS commissioners carve up their slice of the £97 billion ($145.8 billion) NHS budget.

"Clinical commissioning groups have been told to do more on mental health but the standard response is, 'Once we've handled the important issues—A&E, cancer, maternity services—then we'll get to mental health.' That's not parity," says Wessely.

The flip side is that those in power are showing a greater interest in mental health than ever before. More people with experience of services are also speaking up to raise awareness of mental health generally and the need for drastic improvements in care.

Paul Farmer, chief executive of the charity Mind, points to some key moments. Three years ago MPs spoke openly about their own mental health problems. A social media–led campaign forced Tesco and Asda to withdraw "mental patient" costumes. The last year has seen more high-profile media exposure of problems in the system. And now, says Farmer, people are increasingly demanding improvements to services, too.

"That's one of the reasons the public is paying more attention and why politicians are paying more attention," he says. "People are much more confident at saying it just isn't acceptable for us to have a mental health system that really isn't fit for the 21st century."

Farmer is leading an NHS task force charged with improving the system. It's the latest effort to close the gap between mental and physical healthcare. In 2012 the coalition enshrined in law a pledge that the NHS would value mental and physical health equally. That commitment was a landmark moment but true equality is a long way off.

There have been other steps forward. The coalition also introduced the first ever mental health waiting time targets. By this time next year more than half of people experiencing psychosis should get care within two weeks. At least 75 percent of people seeking talking therapies should be treated within six weeks.

The government's final budget committed to spending £1.25 billion ($1.9 billion) extra on children's mental health services over the next five years. Proposals have also been floated to ban the use of police cells for mentally unwell teenagers. And mental health seems, for the first time, to be an election issue rather than simply buried in manifesto small print.

Ask Kerry and Nikki what the next government should do and both say help needs to be available for people much earlier. Nikki also wants to see mental health lessons taught in schools. Farmer, Wessely, and Bogg all say securing more funding to stop the rot and help services deliver better, earlier support has to be an immediate priority. "A bit of reality" on the damage being wrought by cuts to welfare and social services, which look set to get worse, is well overdue, says Bogg.

Will politicians listen? Who knows. But, as Wessely points out, in the past year Nick Clegg has dedicated several speeches to mental health. Ed Miliband became the first party leader, and Jeremy Hunt the first health secretary, to visit the Royal College of Psychiatrists. David Cameron has championed research into dementia. And NHS England's five-year blueprint for the health service features mental health prominently.

"All of that is symbolic, but it means something. We'd like to see it translated into a real increase in resources for services but it's a start," says Wessely. "In an era when it's easy to be cynical about politicians, let's be clear that the change in the importance given to mental health has been tangible."

And you can see it, too. Mental health gets a total of 44 mentions in the three main parties' election manifestos, compared to seven in 2010. It's on the front page of the Lib Dem manifesto, with plenty more inside (33 mentions specifically), including a promise of £500 million ($759 million) a year in extra mental health funding. Labour say they'll increase the proportion of mental health cash that goes to children's services and introduce a new right to access to talking therapies. Meanwhile, the Tories promise better mental health support for pregnant women and people who are out of work.

But with most polls forecasting a hung parliament there's no guarantee these promises will survive coalition talks—remember the Lib Dem promise to scrap tuition fees back in 2010? And with all of the parties looking to reduce public spending it also looks like the cuts to welfare and social care that can contribute to mental ill health are set to continue to some extent.

Ultimately for those depending on services, the policies and rhetoric need to be backed up – not just with funding but also by those in government taking responsibility for the state of the NHS mental health system that they oversee.

"At the moment we just keep hearing, 'It's not down to us, it's down to decisions made by NHS commissioners and different groups'," says Kerry. "You can say all the wonderful things you like about mental health but if the money's not there, too much of it is just gimmickry."

If you are concerned about the mental health of you or someone you know, visit the Canadian Mental Health Association website.

Follow Andrew McNicoll on Twitter.

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VICE Vs Video Games: I’ll Never Love a Console Like I Loved the Game Boy

April 27, 2015, 4:50 am

≫ Next: What It’s Like to Be an Asian Woman in a 21st-Century Interracial Relationship

≪ Previous: The VICE Guide to Mental Health: Inside Britain's Mental Health Crisis

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More than 18 million gamers saw this screen. That's a lot.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

My torrid love affair with the Nintendo Game Boy began in September 1992, at age six—the happy result of a cycling accident that also left me with dentures and a permanently bee-stung lower lip. Mildly traumatized, with a face caked in crusted blood, I sat in an Isle of Wight emergency room, waiting for a doctor to appear and re-insert my front teeth. Ever the pragmatist, my dad offered to buy anything I wanted from the Argos catalogue to cheer me up.

The answer was a knee-jerk no-brainer. My cracked mouth forgotten, an expansive, bile-green 8-bit world was about to open up in front of me. Eventually kowtowing any more significant memories, the next half-decade would become a blur of monochromatic Wind Fish, lone Apache gunships, and anthropomorphic puffballs.

Obsession took hold immediately. Asides from the top-set anxieties of primary school and my inert lack of ability at sports, life as a pre-pubescent was almost pathetically stress-free, and I had plenty of free time in which to embrace the joys of my new gray brick—embellished by the fact that I was the only one of my friends not obsessed with the Sega Game Gear, then (erroneously) considered the hipper machine.

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The original model Game Boy in all its glory, via Wikipedia

Retrospectively, of course, that's bunkum—rushed out in 1990 as a technologically and visually zippier alternative to the Game Boy, the Game Gear was a clunking goon of a rival. Sure, the color graphics were better, it was designed to emulate the feel of a Genesis controller and you could watch crackly episodes of Neighbours via a plug-in aerial. But the Game Boy's perfunctory design, and the limitations of its Zilog Z80-derived microprocessor and four-shade monochrome screen—and, subsequently, its more idiosyncratic visuals and sound—are in part what made it so appealing. (Not to mention influential, as evinced by current trends in retro pixel worship and chiptune's lasting influence across various genres.)

For months, I owned just Super Mario Land and Hudson Soft's Bomberman port, Dynablaster, but I was hooked. I devoured copies of Mean Machines and its successor, the awkwardly titled Nintendo Magazine System, images of forgotten games I'd never play—from Parasol Stars to Dr. Franken II—permanently burned into my cortex.

Related: Watch our documentary tracing the history of pinball from illegal gambling to Mac DeMarco.

My subsequent collection was average at best, pieced together with random purchases and cast-offs from friends, severely lacking many of the classics: no Metroid II or Street Fighter, Kid Dracula or Gargoyle's Quest; Super Mario Land's grander sequel, Six Golden Coins, briefly borrowed and completed; my attention segued to the SNES by the time Pokémon was released.

Instead, I developed a blinkered, fatherly love for nearly every game I owned. Sunsoft's Speedy Gonzales—an early favorite—was a shameless rip-off of Sonic (even down to the impatient foot tapping), but a decent one, imbued with a woozy, "La Cucaracha"-riffing soundtrack; while Kirby's Dream Land 2 was perhaps the superlative Game Boy platformer, a psychedelic mess of inventive level design and brilliantly cutesy graphics that stands as one of the bulimic puffballs's finest outings.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/mIjf6PSuST4' width='560' height='315']

'Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves' gameplay

Electronic Arts' non-linear Gulf War shoot 'em up Desert Strike showed that the Game Boy could be gritty rather than twee, gung-ho Americanisms and taste-baiting subject matter be damned. Ropey film tie-ins were rife—even I could tell that Beetlejuice was a nadir—but I played Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves to the point of nausea on long drives to the Dordogne, flitting between ant-like melee battles, side-on duels and torpid wandering, ever-confused that the developers had rendered most of the character portraits accurately enough save for Costner's protagonist, who looked exactly like David Hasselhoff.

Sci-fi blasters were a running theme. Super Return of the Jedi was frustrating and visually muddy but beguiling just for the ersatz-3D hover bike sequences on Endor. Mega Man: Dr Wily's Revenge was also wincingly difficult but visually brilliant; Accolade's Turrican was its aesthetic opposite, a creepy, lifeless realisation of a cold future with huge, seemingly free-roaming levels. All flawed, but held in lofty reverence all the same.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/puPPNaw0PKo' width='560' height='315']

'F1 Race' gameplay

Perhaps most underrated by myself at the time was F1 Race, a frenetic simulator replete with piercing industrial sound effects courtesy of the Game Boy's integrated white noise channel—pure parental kryptonite.

And then, then there was Zelda. Link's Awakening was (still is) a revelation. Thinking of it now drags me, Proust-like, back to the hotel poolside in Lanzarote where, after picking the game up at duty-free, I took those first trepid steps on Koholint's beach, blindly feeling my way through a new control system, unaware of the sprawling island world just out of sight and the crushing melancholy that would come with finishing it. God knows how many hours I spent on the fucker; I certainly spent enough of my parents' money calling the Nintendo Hotline whenever I got stuck (which was often).

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The expansive map of 'Link's Awakening' via Reddit

The graphics, sound, rich storyline and fleshed-out characters—I was entranced with every bit of it. I loved all of my games, of course, but with Link's Awakening came the first recognition that there could be something below the surface—a deeper emotional resonance that would stay with me for years after completing it. Unlike A Link to the Past—the only other edition of the series I would play properly – the game doesn't end in a heroic climax. Your purpose, in collecting the eight Instruments of the Sirens and waking the Wind Fish, is purely self-serving, a means of escape from otherwise hopeless abandonment. That the relationships you've formed and island you've grown familiar with end up being part of an omniscient whale's naptime is superfluous to the fact that you're forced to obliterate it all, an act as nihilistic as it is painfully inevitable. The game's closing frames—Link dropped back in an endless ocean, the Wind Fish's ethereal outline drifting overhead—are truly wistful. It was, for my eight-year-old self, grindingly existential stuff. (And if you, too, love Zelda, read our piece on the series' greatest moments.)

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'Link's Awakening,' the final boss battle and ending

The bliss wouldn't last. As the Game Boy became something of a relic around 1996, I part-exchanged most of my games and moved on to the SNES, a glut of PC strategy and FPS titles, and the N64, my interest in video games waning steadily until my mid-20s. The old brick may be deceased—the screen finally swallowed by the black bar of dead pixels that grew up one side the longer you played it, making it little more than a noisy paperweight—but it's still there in spirit, a ghost of a gift that keeps on giving.

Follow Thomas Howells on Twitter.

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What It’s Like to Be an Asian Woman in a 21st-Century Interracial Relationship

April 27, 2015, 7:05 am

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'Elementary' costars Lucy Liu and Jonny Lee Miller. Photo via Flickr user Alatele fr

About a year ago, I spent a weekend at my boyfriend's cottage with his family. They say nothing brings out the worst in people quite like a competitive game of beer pong, and one Friday afternoon, I happened to be in the right place at the wrong time.

As I watched a group of drunk 20-somethings rearrange a set of cups into a pyramid, one of them turned to me and said, "Hey Vicky, this is your game, it's like ping pong."

And there it was. A timely "joke" that categorically placed me, an Asian woman, under a racially driven stereotype that is often recycled again and again in cringe-worthy films such as Balls of Fury. But what was more subtle was the reminder that I was the "token Asian," the one unlike the others, in a group of white people.

My decision to not react at the time was not only based on the fact that no one else did; I didn't want to risk being seen as "overly sensitive" in front of my boyfriend and his family, all of whom were uncomfortably trying to change the subject.

Looking back, there is still a part of me that feels my lack of reaction actually perpetuated a stereotype about Asian women that I've tried to separate myself from—that we're submissive, passive, and eager to please.

Either way, I couldn't win.

My current relationship began four years ago, but until that moment in the cottage, I'd never been more aware of the fact that it is also an interracial relationship.

Growing up in Toronto, one of the most culturally diverse cities in the world, I rarely experienced outright racism from other people. But being in an interracial relationship has made me increasingly aware of the subtle (and often unintentional) comments thrown at me by people who end up forcing me back into neat and racially labeled boxes.

It's hard to believe, since interracial couples are a fast growing demographic and spotting them in a major city is about as common as finding a string of cabs at a downtown intersection.

Between 1991 and 2011, the number of interracial couples in Canada increased from 2.6 percent of all couples to 4.5 percent, according to the most recent data released by Statistics Canada. Meanwhile, the Pew Research Center found that in the United States, interracial marriage rates have nearly tripled since 1980, from representing 6.7 per cent of all marriages to 15.1 per cent in 2010.

My curiosity about what these trends actually mean led me to reach Katerina Deliovsky, a sociologist who has studied interracial couples for years.

"We know very little about the actual challenges and joys that interracial coupling brings," she says. In fact, Deliovsky points out that the celebrated increase of interracial couples hides their complex experiences of discrimination, including how they deal with racism.

As for Asians, they tend to be perceived under the "model minority" category; the popular assumption that because Asians are prone to achieving high levels of academic and economic success, their assimilation into mainstream society makes them less likely to experience racial discrimination than other minorities.

Deliovsky says that because of this, Asians often experience more implicit forms of racism hidden under the public veil of tolerance.

I've experienced my fair share of casually racist slights. At a Christmas party last year, a young woman came up to me and demanded I tell her exactly what race I am. Every time I'm asked this question (and I'm asked this a lot), saying I'm simply "Chinese" often generates a response along the lines of, "But you don't seem Asian." In this case, her disappointment in my answer was rooted in an observation that my "eyes and lips are really big." Meanwhile, she simply turned to my boyfriend and asked him what he did for a living.

The interesting thing about casual racism is that it's hard to call out. These days, it's so taboo to call someone racist that most people get defensive when confronted over it and accuse the person complaining of hypersensitivity or lacking in humour.

And when you're an Asian woman dating someone who possesses every privilege in the book (white, heterosexual, middle-class, male, and conventionally attractive), you can't help but internalize two things: differences in how you and your partner are treated by people outside of the relationship, and differences in how you and your partner understand those experiences.

Unfortunately, to this day, there is very little critical qualitative research that explores in depth the contemporary challenges of interracial coupling, says Deliovsky. Without such research, we're left with the unverified assumption that interracial couples are engines of social change.

My interviews with Asian women residing in some of the world's most diverse cities suggest that the negative stereotypes about Asian women feed also into those of the white men they date. For that, we can thank the media and all the creeps out there who have helped develop the term "Asian fetish."

Kiki LaViers, a 31-year-old journalist in New York City, says the "Asian fetish" is unfortunately very real. LaViers prefers not to disclose her real name due to the intimate nature of her experiences.

"I once dated an Irish-born man for one year before finding out he would search 'Asian' with every type of porn name on Pornhub.com," she recalls.

"It was sad and humiliating to find out that perhaps he didn't see me for who I was, and it instilled a sense of trepidation in me to look out for so-called warning signs."

For LaViers, even classic Asian cinema directors such as Zhang Yi Mou and Wong Kar Wai don't do much to subvert the idea that Asian women are "submissive, spicy, sultry—with tiny little vaginas ripe of fucking... [instead] they promote it and romanticize it."

The stereotypes of Asian women and white men can be quite nuanced depending on the age bracket of the man and woman, and where the Asian woman is from, says Claire Fourel, a 30-year-old lawyer in London, England.

Fourel, who is a mix of Japanese and French, says loose stereotypes for young couples include the assumption that "the guy is a hipster who wants an Asian girl as arm candy—for some reason it seemed trendy in the last decade in North America—or is a closeted gay."

Fourel says one thing she and her white partner of six years are always told is that they would have the most "interesting" looking children. "My partner would not notice the comments about children— he would take it as a compliment of him being attractive rather than there being an inference about race!"

For Lila Yu, a 26-year-old in Toronto, her experiences with casual racism have resulted in some heated conversations with her white, blue-eyed partner of three years.

Yu prefers not to disclose her real name because her political views are much more progressive than those of her colleagues; she describes herself as a paper pusher in the financial services industry.

One of her most vivid memories was during a dinner with her partner's family. "My partner's aunt was responding to criticism from other family members that her nails looked unappealing. She said something along the lines of, 'I'll have to go get my nails done by a Vietnamese girl,' and then proceeded to affect some broken English."

She says the worst part was that no one said anything after that.

"I realize just how subtle yet damaging micro-aggressions can be, and how frustrating it is to talk about racial relations with people who seem oblivious to what a problem it really is, and how it affects you in a cumulative way."

One thing Yu pointed out is the tendency for some people to fall into the trap of feeling "guilty" over white privilege. "Taking privilege personally obscures the fact that it's a systemic problem."

Ultimately, learning how to act and react to casual racism is a reality, says Nari Osugi, a 31-year-old marketing director in San Francisco. "You learn which battles to fight and which to ignore."

From my own experiences, I can say that being in an interracial relationship means you aren't just opening yourself up to the person you're dating, but for other people to judge you in a completely different way than if you weren't a couple.

There have been times when peers suggested I'm with my boyfriend because I'm ashamed of my own culture, and times when drunken idiots reduced our relationship to a white man's fetish for "tight Asian pussy"— how creative.

There have been moments when I've given into insensitive comments, and troubled my mind with ways in which I could prove the legitimacy of my relationship, away from the idea that it is a political statement or a product of fetish.

Ultimately, I can't change the things that happen outside of our relationship. But I can change the way my partner and I respond to them.

One trait I have always admired about my boyfriend is his ability to not give a shit about what people think of him. Over the years, we've certainly disagreed over whether I should take certain racially insensitive comments and questions seriously.

But he has only really been offended when I (out of defensiveness) questioned his intentions in our relationship. Because that would mean that I myself believed what we have is anything less than a genuine relationship between two individuals, and more like a walking sideshow.

We may never be able to fully understand each other's experiences, but we talk about it. And I think this has allowed us as a couple, and me as an individual, to navigate racial dynamics a whole lot better than before; ironically, by having a laugh at the insensitive things people say about race – ranging from the unintentional to the ridiculous—and not giving those comments legitimacy.

I'd like to add that the morning after the "ping pong" comment was thrown at me, my boyfriend apologized on behalf of the individual.

I accepted that.

↧

At Least 3,700 Dead in Nepal Earthquake Tragedy

April 27, 2015, 6:26 am

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At Least 3,700 Dead in Nepal Earthquake Tragedy

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3-D Printing in Space Is Really Hard

April 27, 2015, 6:22 am

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3-D Printing in Space Is Really Hard

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Photos of People Who Got Rejected from Nightclubs This Weekend

April 27, 2015, 6:50 am

≫ Next: The People Who Risk Jail to Maintain the Tor Network

≪ Previous: 3-D Printing in Space Is Really Hard

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The line outside Mahiki. Photos by Carl Wilson

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

It's a lot harder to get turned away from a London nightclub than you might think. At somewhere like Berghain, where the bouncers are notoriously fussy, it makes sense to consider what shirt you're wearing or how many entire bottles of schnapps you drink before you leave the house. In London, it seems you can gain entry to even the most pompous of clubs, regardless of the fact you've decided to team jeans with smart shoes and a shiny suit jacket.

I know this because Carl, a photographer, and I spent a total of three nights staking out various London clubs, waiting to speak to people who'd been turned away. We didn't have much luck.

At Ministry of Sound, both you and the minibuses full of Americans in candy raver club-wear will have no trouble getting in. At Fabric, you're good to go following a rigorous search by the door-staff. Outside Tiger Tiger, you can sway and stumble all you like; after an arm-spread and a pat-down you're free to spend the rest of your night listening to the sound of Oliver Heldens and the smell of CK One.

Even the kind of grandiose places where Geordie Shore cast members spend £400 [$600] on a bottle of vodka—the Mahikis and Whiskey Mists of London's fund manager quarter—will let you in, almost no questions asked. A steady stream of freshly-pressed nautical blazers and eight-inch stilettos streamed through the doors unhindered.

But don't let all that discourage you. If you're really looking to properly fuck up your evening, bent over under a Burger King awning as you drunkenly try to call your friends, little bits of very acidic vomit coming up your throat and into your mouth, we managed to find the one place that will have no problem turfing you out: Heaven, the self-described "most famous gay club in the world."

We spoke to some people about why they had been turned away.

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Emily (left): "I was apparently too drunk. I mean, I am quite drunk, but have a little look at my eyes..."

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Daniel (left): "It's my birthday. But apparently my cock's too big for a gay club."

Ishmael and Elena: "I don't know why we didn't get in. Because we don't have this fucking membership card that says G-A-Y Late."

Borez: "I'm tipsy, but I'm not that drunk."

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Alice: "We didn't have membership cards, but actually I'm pretty sure this isn't a membership-only club."

Ilise: "These motherfuckers—they say I drink too much."

Jalina (front center): "Because we're such a big group, apparently we're not regular enough to go in. The reason for clubs like this is to show that everybody's allowed in. People push for equality. I'm not saying it's stopping equality, but it's not helping by not letting people like us in."

Follow James and Carl on Twitter.

↧

The People Who Risk Jail to Maintain the Tor Network

April 27, 2015, 8:26 am

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The People Who Risk Jail to Maintain the Tor Network

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Toronto’s High-End Restaurant Patrons Are Dying Off

April 27, 2015, 8:14 am

≫ Next: After Losing Her Mother to ALS, Kathryn Calder Looks for a Higher Platform to Speak From

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Toronto’s High-End Restaurant Patrons Are Dying Off

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After Losing Her Mother to ALS, Kathryn Calder Looks for a Higher Platform to Speak From

April 27, 2015, 8:44 am

≫ Next: Meet the Smut Specialist Who Will Buy Up Your Dead Grandad's Porn Collection

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After Losing Her Mother to ALS, Kathryn Calder Looks for a Higher Platform to Speak From

↧

Meet the Smut Specialist Who Will Buy Up Your Dead Grandad's Porn Collection

April 27, 2015, 8:42 am

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[body_image width='2000' height='1333' path='images/content-images/2015/04/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/27/' filename='we-buy-any-porn-rambooks-789-body-image-1430142565.jpg' id='50091']

This article originally appeared on VICE UK. Photos by Justinas Vosylius

There are lots of things to deal with when a close relative dies. Grief, obviously, being the big one. But there's also the more tangible stuff: there's a funeral to arrange, a lot of very depressing phone calls to be made and, in some cases, a sizable collection of porn to quietly get rid of. Until recently, that tended to mean a trip to the dump. Now, however, there's a company that will take it off your hands and pay you for the privilege.

Dave (who didn't want his last name or photo published) started webuyanyporn.com as a way to collect stock for his soon-to-be reopened vintage porn shop, Rambooks, in North London, helping himself and the community. More good news: you don't even have to be dead for Dave to buy your porn; if you're very much alive and have some jazz rags to sell, get in touch and you might be able to do a deal.

I caught up with Dave over the weekend at his shop on Holloway Road.

VICE: Hi, Dave. How do these house clearances work?
Dave: Well, originally it was just a plain idea to buy some stock. I've just done one this morning. Someone called me. I went to Bow and picked up 1,000 magazines.

Wow.
They were not fantastic. Some Escorts from the year 2000 onwards. The guy called me because they found these magazines as they were clearing out his grandfather's house and didn't know what to do about it.

That's quite a collection. Do you normally get that many?
I've had thousands from different places. People usually have 100 to 200, though.

What's the most interesting haul you've had?
I once got a call from a vicar. I'll leave it at that.

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What kind of things do you sell—is it vintage or homemade?
There are some homemade books downstairs, but it's mostly all vintage from the 1950s upwards. That was the golden era of porn, with great photographers like Harrison Marks, who used great lighting. That's where porn really started. Most of these books have the details of the lights they used and aperture inside the pages, all technical.

So porn was exclusively for the photography enthusiasts?
Actually it was used to get around the law. They sold it as art.

Have porn shops had trouble with law more recently than that?
Yeah. I saw it happen on a weekly basis in Soho back in the 1970s and 80s. Police would come in and say, "We think that's illegal." It's a very gray area and it's never been changed. But [the BBFC rating] R18 came in, which laid down more specific guidelines of what was acceptable.

[My] shop is kind of a representation of what Super Mags in Soho used to look like. Nobody would ever spend any money on the shops as the police would always come and smash them to pieces. Some say Rambooks is like walking into a sex shop in the 1980s.

Why do people buy vintage porn?
It's for collectors. Some people recognize their youth and tell me, "I know that girl!" Even the electrician who came in remembered one of the girls. It's nostalgia, even down to the smell the magazines give off. Playboys are thick—they keep the aroma.

Related: Watch our Skinema episode about legendary porn star Belladonna.

Halfway through our chat Dave decided to give me a tour of Rambooks, which is set to relaunch next week. Everything in there is vintage, from the pin-up Betty Page poster draped over the window to the shelves filled wall-to-wall with classic porn magazines.

We walked down the narrow stairs into the shop's basement and straight into the erotic literature section. There was a separate room dedicated to American collections, where I caught a glimpse of a Nazi symbol on the top of a comic-cum-fantasy magazine from 1962. Dave explained: "They all start with girls being tortured and stuff like that, but it's a story, so they'd always win and end up thrashing the Nazis."

Back upstairs it's slightly more traditional, models meticulously sorted by magazine title and period. "She became a born-again Christian—so did she," Dave informed me. He's got an encyclopedic knowledge of not only the titles, from Reader's Wives to Zeitgeist and Naughty Forties to Knickers, but of the beehived women they feature.

Rambooks seems to cater to whatever kind of fetish you might be harboring. "Over there is a book just full of clits," said Dave's friend, Camp Freddy, confirming my thought. I wanted to know how things have changed throughout Dave's 30-plus years in the business.

Inside Rambooks

What has the internet done to porn?
The internet killed the porn industry. Nobody is printing any more. How old are you?

I'm 23.
So you don't know anything else. It's killed it in a bad way because there are no styles, no limitations. It's all instant gratification and hardcore porn. Bigger porn producers, ones from Russia and the Far East, they go that step further and there's no control. They just push the envelope.

And now porn is all over social media, too.
Normal people just stick pictures up all day long on their Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter accounts. You've seen Tumblr—it's mad. Everybody's getting in on the act.

So my generation is fucked?
No one's publishing and there's no sense of imagination. The closest things now are suggestive Instagram pics or naked selfies, which are bringing back some of the allure.

There's a precedent here though, right? Porn has always been at the forefront of technology. It's going 3D next.
Porn has always pushed the boundaries, all the way through. It kind of pushed VHS along, pushed DVD. Porn always grabbed the new technology and the internet as well.

Why is this place called Rambooks?
Rambooks used to be a sex shop in Soho back in the day. In the late 1970s I used to work in Super Mags, Rambooks, and then back to Super Mags. It was all magazines—no VHS back then.

What's the most valuable porn you have here?
The stuff from the 50s can be, like, the most collectable things. If it's in mint condition it's worth more than something that's been thumbed with its corners turned. It's like having a stamp that's brand new. Some of the [glamour photographer] Harrison Marks can fetch £40 to £50 [$60 to $75]. The American magazines are very rare—Issue 1, Volume 1. All mine are in fantastic condition; some have never been read.

Tell me more about the homemade stuff.
They come with photographs with different stories from early German or Dutch magazines. The pictures aren't done by the same people, but they're original photographs. Again, I've got about 1,000 of them, which I'll sell for about £50 [$75] each.

And do you have a personal favorite?
Men Only. It was one of the first magazines for men, not boys. It wasn't just porn either, there were interviews with people like George Best and Muhammad Ali.

Thanks very much, Dave.

Follow Jack on Twitter.

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