Here's a little behind-the-scenes interview about how Eat! came to be with director Janicza Bravo and actor Brett Gelman.

Watch the short film, here.

More from Brett Gelman on VICE:

Rat Tail

Combover

Toupee

Noise-makers Alexis Krauss and Derek Miller are back with "Bitter Rivals," off their forthcoming album of the same name, due out October 8 via Mom + Pop. The music video was made in conjunction with The Creators Project and directed by Sleigh Bells. Krauss is in punchy fighting spirit, donning a leopard-print boxing gown and shadow-boxing and shuffling her way through the lyrics, while Miller is happy to headbang. Safe to say, they look like they're having a ball. Welcome back.

Read more, and check out Sleigh Bells tour dates, over at The Creators Project.

The Cabazon Dinosaurs as they appear in Pee Wee's Big Adventure.

The Cabazon Dinosaurs are a couple of giant concrete dinosaurs located out in the desert near Palm Springs, California. 

The Cabazon Dinosaurs as they appear today. 

But if the quality of this dino trash can that's currently gracing their museum is anything to go by, I don't think they'll be reaching their expansion for quite some time. 

@JLCT

Previously:

I Got Saved at San Diego's Creationist Museum (Just Kidding, it Sucked)

There's a Creationist Zoo in England

The Science of the Creation Museum

Foxes are absolutely everywhere in London. And, by the looks of it, not only do they sex each other up nonstop in our sheds and the ditches at the ends of our gardens, but their chief food source is the stuff we throw away. We're nurturing them into existence by mistake, and their population will keep growing in tandem with our own propensity for waste. It's gotten so bad, in fact, that London mayor and human merkin stand Boris Johnson recently suggested Londoners start hunting them.

This situation has obvious downsides: foxes wake me up in the middle of the night with their deafening, girly screams, which is kind of bizarre given they're normally so good at being covert. They gnaw at my shoes and throw them around the garden and tear anything made of leather to bits. Still, I can't help having a real soft spot for them—so much so, in fact, that when I bump into one I usually end up taking its photograph if it sticks around long enough.

There's something about foxes that fits London perfectly. They hide in all the dark nooks we tend to ignore, turning our gardens and streets into nocturnal playgrounds and staring out from their hiding places with their beady little paranoid eyes.

More by Alex Sturrock:

Nerdstock

Anti-socials

Larps of the Near Future

Promotional lobby card for One From The Heart depicting an entire outdoor set pointlessly built on the studio lot. Image via

Last year, I interviewed for a writing job at Hollywood Center Studios. I remember thinking I’d clearly aced the interview (I hadn't), and afterwards I roamed the premises, exploring a studio lot I assumed would be my new workplace. My smartphone reeled off an impressive list of masterpieces filmed onsite: Green Acres, I Love Lucy, Jeopardy!, One From The Heart.

One from wha-huh? I'd never heard of it. Few of my pals, I soon learned, had ever heard of the film. Was it cursed? Banned? A myth? An internet hoax? Me and my friends displaying our filmic ignorance?

Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. In the early 80s, following the prolonged public drama of Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola decided to make a nice little romantic comedy. Instead of jungles and insanity and napalm, he'd settle down in his brand new studio and craft an intimate romantic comedy. But after deciding to shoot exclusively on the backlot, the production costs soared from $2 million to over $25 million (for comparison, Star Wars, a film in which an entire planet gets blown up, only cost $11 million).

The movie made a mere $637,000, which is not even 3 percent of the total investment. Creditors repossessed the backlot after just one film, and Coppola spent the next decade paying off debts. Years earlier, speaking about his time in the jungle, the director famously told Roger Ebert, "We had access to too much money, too much equipment... and we went insane." Turns out he was actually describing his next project. 

The film follows one couple's separation like an elaborate stage play, with dissolving walls and dramatic lighting shifts. The dialogue seems pulled from a less elaborate stage play, perhaps one staged by a struggling Midwest civic theater. The plot and pacing and wardrobe choices come from a low-income junior high school stage play, one with a stylist who thought it’d be smart to plop a floppy little Afro on Harry Dean Stanton.

And yet Frederic Forrest is the leading man! We all love Frederic Forrest. We enjoyed his lax parenting in Valley Girl, we feared for his safety in The Conversation, we excused his racism in Falling Down, and we mourned his beheading in Apocalypse Now. When he inevitably catches up with Garr in the airport gangway and haltingly sings "You Are My Sunshine" to win her back, we want to cry, No Forrest! It's not worth it! There will be other films! Walk away!

Of course, it's not really an airport. Instead of driving four hours to Vegas, Coppola simply built a replica of a McCarran International Airport terminal inside his own studio. When Forrest stands in the rain and watches Teri Garr's plane swoop off into the night, he is quite literally seeing a full-sized commercial jet, purchased by American Zoetrope Studios and hoisted on wires from the studio ceiling.

That's actually not the most impressive scene. Earlier in the film, the director built his own private Old Town Vegas, complete with Fremont Street and gigantic signs and presumably working slot machines. The sheer, obscene tonnage of neon mocks the entire endeavor of filmmaking, including Blade Runner, which wouldn’t be released for another four months. The sets go on and on. Outdoor lots are really huge indoor lots with distant painted backdrops, like the largest dioramas in a nonexistent natural history museum. It's reminiscent of The Truman Show or, more accurately, the massive indoor stage set in 2008's Synecdoche, New York—a life-size replica of NYC—in which actors are walled into fake apartments and carry out entirely fake lives without the benefit of an audience.

Beautiful two-millimeter miniature neon signs were designed specifically for the film, although it would have been much easier and cost-effective to film the Vegas strip itself. Image via Aargon Neon

Did I mention this is a musical?  Tom Waits starts up over the opening credits, and doesn't let up for the rest of the movie. Crystal Gale joins him for a few songs, and the two form an impromptu Greek chorus, describing the characters' doings with a boozy, end-of Saturday Night Live vibe. Does that sound good? Because it really isn't. This tinkly piano jazz is still playing at the end of the film, when a curtain descends and credits announce that yes, the film was indeed "filmed entirely on the stages of Zoetrope Studios," as if that were something to be proud of.

And yet pride is exactly what drives the film. An army of artisans and electricians and designers all labored under the watchful eye of a man who'd made three of the 20th century's most celebrated films in less than a decade. Failure must've been the farthest thing from anyone's mind. Certainly the concept of failure must've been quite remote from Coppola's, as he perched in his canvas director's chair, sipping his own vintage of wine, oblivious to history’s mighty schlong descending for a smackdown.

Thwack!

Previously - Where Are All the Films About Economic Apocalypse?

"Rio de Janeiro," from the book, (based on a true story)

Magnum is probably the most famous photo agency in the world. Even if you haven't heard of it, chances are you're familiar with its images, be they Robert Capa's coverage of the Spanish Civil War or Martin Parr's very British holiday-scapes. Unlike most agencies, Magnum's members are selected by the other photographers on the agency, so becoming a member is a pretty gruelling process. As part of an ongoing partnership with Magnum, we will be profiling some of their photographers over the coming weeks.

David Alan Harvey discovered his love for photography at an early age and was talented enough to turn that love into a career. He first received recognition for his 1967 black-and-white self-published book, Tell It Like It Is, which documented the life of a poor family in Norfolk, Virginia, and he followed that up by traveling the world for years, shooting for National Geographic and picking up the Magazine Photographer of the Year award from the National Press Photographer’s Association in 1978. He became a full-time member of the Magnum family relatively late in his career, in 1997.

Since then, he has continued to photograph all over the place as well as highlight the work of others via his web magazine and publishing house, burn. His new book, (based on a true story), is a beguiling visual story that acts as a sort of Rubik's cube with pictures that can be placed in different orders. I caught up with him to chat about his secrets on life and photography.

From the book Divided Soul

VICE: I’ve read that you started shooting at a really early age.
David Alan Harvey: Yes. Lightning kind of struck when I was a kid. I mean, I was 11 or 12 and light bulbs just went off. So yeah, that was a lucky break—not just for photography, but for life in general, right? I had something to focus on early, so it kind of kept me out of trouble. Although, not completely [laughs].

Do you remember what originally attracted you to photography?
Well, I had polio when I was a child, so I was in an isolation ward in a hospital at the age of six. I was seriously in, like, solitary confinement because polio was a greatly feared disease at that time. The only thing I had going for me was that my grandmother and my mother would send me books to read and magazines with pictures, so that was my escape—books, magazines, a combination of literature and pictures. Pictures were in my life in a very real way early on. At some point, I got a camera—probably like every other kid did—but I also got a darkroom and I realized that I could do anything with a camera.

Rio de Janeiro, from the book (based on a true story)

Were there specific photographers whose work you enjoyed at the time?
I actually started looking at the work of European artists. I wasn't too interested in 99 percent of American photographers, but I really enjoyed European art—the French Impressionists, for example, and the Italian and Dutch painters. All of these people really influenced me early on, just in the way that I looked at stuff.

The people I liked were those who were able to do something with nothing—painters, writers, and photographers. I looked into photography and I saw that there were sports photographers who needed an Olympian, fashion photographers who needed a model, and war photographers who needed a war. [Henri] Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank, and [Marc] Riboud and those guys—they didn't need anything. They would just look out the window or go to the garden.

In other words, the everyday life situation became a gold mine for these artists, and I gravitated towards the fact that you could take something right next to you and turn it into art or communication. I liked the integrity of journalism but I was always interested in photographs. Photographs didn't have to communicate a great concept, they could just be.

How did you come about the subject matter of Tell It Like It Is? 
I was in college and I got a photo job at the beach. It was six or seven of us who took these little plastic pictures of people, and it was a great way to get a tan and meet women. However, I got screwed up by guilt because I got halfway through the summer and I was kind of leading this hedonistic lifestyle—I felt like I was using my camera for the wrong thing. So, I got in my car and I drove to Norfolk, Virginia, which is 16 miles away but it's on the other side of the world culturally. I went into the ghetto and I thought, I gotta help these people.

I wanted to show what it's like here, because the white people who live in my neighbourhood in Virginia Beach—they don't have any clue what this is like. And, right away, I met a family and stayed with them. I slept on their sofa and went to school with their kid. No white kids did that. I didn't know how to do anything with my pictures, but I was able to publish this little book and we sold it for two bucks, took the money and gave it to the local church to buy food and clothes for the neighborhood. There's only four left in existence, since we dumped most of them when I went off to grad school. I had no sense that someday that would become something.

Pages from Tell It Like It Is

You joined Magnum part-time in 1993, right?
Yeah, I was old when I joined Magnum. I had a flirtation with them when I was about 30; I was named Magazine Photographer of the Year and they did a little flirtation with me. I was married with my wife and two kids at the time, and she—like most wives—was more practical than I was, so she really leaned on me to not think too much about Magnum. I had steady work from National Geographic, which was really the only picture magazine that would send you out for weeks at a time. So she convinced me that I better stick with National Geographic. She saw Magnum as not a very good way to survive, so I went with her decision on that one.

But then, as time went on, it always ate on me that National Geographic was going to be my thing. I don’t disparage National Geographic, because they do what they do and they do a great job at it, but I knew that I wasn't really living up to my full potential by shooting for them. So I had a staff job at Geographic and went through my tenth midlife crisis, got divorced, and quit National Geographic all at the same time.

Did that open up more for you?
Yeah, I just went out there and got this incredible burst of energy. I went down to Chile and started working. Then I went to Oaxaca, [Mexico] and started building up all the work that turned into the book Divided Soul. I guess about five years after I quit Geographic I was nominated into Magnum part-time in 1993.

I went to Vietnam, I went to Cuba, I went to the enemies of the US, went to Libya, went to every place where we didn’t have an embassy and did all kinds of stuff around the world. Magnum was really, really great because it gave me a sense of independence and a sense of validation.

Rio de Janeiro, from the book (based on a true story)

Your assistant sent me a beautiful copy of (based on a true story) and I loved it. It seems like a lot of your work covers Spanish culture. 
Yeah, well, Spanish culture is part of it. It's the migration of Iberia into the Americas, which includes West Africa. So you're dealing with four cultures: Spain, Portugal, West Africa, and the indigenous who were in America in the first place. So that was a 25-year adventure that had me all over the Americas and then all over the Iberian peninsula and West Africa.

We built the hell out of that book, and we spared no expense in the physical building of it because it wasn’t easy. I’ve always been interested in making art objects and handcrafted objects. If I weren’t a photographer, I’d probably be a potter or something. So I liked the physicality of that. Now, I think, signed the book is worth—well, it's not worth anything signed if you take it down to the local deli [laughs]. In the marketplace, I think I sold one for $1,200 the other day—really expensive.

How does that feel, out of curiosity?
It feels good, because I’m absolutely not an entrepreneur. It felt good that I made something all by myself. I didn’t have a big magazine behind me, I didn’t have any big company behind me, I just had me. And we spared no expense on building it. We didn’t cut any corners of any kind, like most publishers often have to do. I could give a shit about the money, because the profit I made from that book went into giving away the other one. See, at the same time that I did this, we printed another version of the book on the same paper but without some of the bells and whistles, and we gave that away for free. I just got back from Rio, where we gave away 2,500 copies of the book for free in the place we shot it—in the favelas of Rio.

It’s fun—absolutely fun. It set up a whole way of thinking for me for projects I want to do in the future and gave me a real sense of independence—not backed up by financial wealth, just backed up by attitude, you know what I mean?

From the book Divided Soul

What has it made you start thinking about for the future?
Mostly, I work with other people. That’s the other thing. I bust ass for myself, for sure—I do take care of David Alan Harvey—but I spend a lot of my time working with other photographers. I spend a lot of time mentoring and I always have workshops going on in the loft.

Honestly, it’s really commendable that you—as someone who's been working for so long and could easily just go and relax—have taken on this role as curator, editor, and mentor.
Yeah, I’m busy. The thing is, it's funny—I’ve actually been doing the mentoring thing the whole time. I started teaching photography when I was a grad student, when I was 22—I’ve always done it. I always felt lucky or blessed that things worked out for me. I’ve worked hard for it and I deserved it, but even if you deserve something, it still takes luck that a bus or something doesn’t hit you. I always felt lucky, so it always seemed, like, why not pass it on?

Well, you have good karma going for you.
People you mentor energize you. It’s really nice to get away from yourself. You know, you get so focused on your own thing, and then it’s really easy to get burned out on yourself, so to speak. This way, you get to learn the hand of new photographers and get excited about their work. That’s stimulating all by itself. Then it’s kind of like, OK, now I’m going to do my thing. Then, when you get sick of yourself, which I do easily, you can focus on someone else. You’re not eating yourself up.

For sure. There’s nothing more inspiring to me personally than looking at another photographer’s work.
Absolutely. I had some photographers asking me, “Why are you giving it all away?” I just don’t look at it like that. I feel confident in what I know how to do. I was always successful in college and high school and I got a good newspaper job right out of college—I never had the feeling of needing to go out and compete with somebody. So I was always able to plow a lot of energy back into other people.

Life is all about how you look at something. It’s all attitude and philosophy more than actual reality, because everyone’s reality is kind of the same, but everybody has problems or advantages. So I always worked with my fellow students and told them how to think about it. That was my main thing—I’ve just done that all along.

Click through to see more photography by David Alan Harvey.

Pages from Tell It Like It Is

Rio de Janeiro, from the book (based on a true story)

From the book Divided Soul

Rio de Janeiro, from the book (based on a true story)

Rio de Janeiro, from the book (based on a true story)

From the book Divided Soul

Rio de Janeiro, from the book (based on a true story)

From Tell It Like It Is

Follow Christian on Twitter: @christianstorm

Previously - Dominic Nahr's Eerie Photos from Conflict Zones and Disaster Areas

More from VICE Loves Magnum:

Bruce Gilden Takes Street Photos Like You've Never Seen Before

Chris Steele-Perkins Can't Let Go of England

There's More to Stuart Franklin Than the Most Famous Photo of the 20th Century

Can you keep a secret? CSEC's job recruiting video is awkwardly Canadian, while also stressing the crucial importance of CSEC secrecy.

While much of the world’s major news in 2013 has revolved around Edward Snowden’s leaks about the ultra mysterious (and now unwillingly semi-transparent) NSA, America’s #1 spy agency, little has been said about Canada’s own version of the NSA, the Communications Security Establishment Canada, also known as CSEC. In fact, so little is known about what CSEC actually does, our own federal government only began acknowledging the 68-year old agency’s existence 11 years ago.

What we do know is that CSEC is part of the Five Eyes, an intelligence cooperative (and supergroup of international BFFs) forged with the NSA in America, the GCHQ in the UK, the DSD in Australia, and the GSCB in New Zealand. These massive brain trusts of each country’s most excellent espionage enthusiasts willingly share information with each other in order to create a global net of surveillance. And as we now understand from the information Edward Snowden has leaked, the work of the NSA, which all of these other agencies are in bed with, is both highly secretive and very invasive.

While the operations of CSEC itself have been questioned here and there by the Canadian media, very little has been accomplished in terms of learning what this spy agency does. To put its size into perspective, the agency is building a 72,000 square foot headquarters in Ottawa that’s worth $880M dollars, and employs nearly 2,000 people.

As an ultra-Canadian side note, the CSEC planned on installing a hockey rink in their new building but apparently the head of their union thought that sounded dumb and scrapped the whole thing, carelessly robbing someone of the envious job title of CSEC Zamboni Operator.

Skating rink or not, the headquarters of CSEC is apparently known as the ‘Taj Mahal’ to its employees “because of its numerous amenities.” Basically, it sounds like a massive structure inhabited exclusively by Canadian spooks which takes about as much energy “as a small town.” Their ambitious and mysterious new headquarters will be fully built sometime in 2015 or 2016.

When the massive chunk of public funding to build a new HQ was first granted to CSEC, speculation and skepticism was running high in Ottawa, as no one knew what the fuck these people were doing and why they needed nearly a billion dollars to do it—plus another $5 billion thrown their way over the next 31 years.

The former chief of CSEC, John Adams, answered that cynicism bluntly: “if you were to ask the Canadian Forces if there is anyone that has saved Canadian lives in Afghanistan, they would point to us.”

It’s known that a huge part of CSEC’s job is signals interception, i.e. listening in on phone calls and emails to secretly learn about things the Canadian government wants to secretly learn about. There’s a base in Ottawa called CFS Leitrim that is simply devoted to intercepting communications—of which we are told are purely foreign conversations.

There aren't too many lunch options for the staff of CFS Leitrim.

While that’s all well and good, the Globe and Mail broke the news in June of this year that our defence minister Peter Mackay green lit a program in 2011 that would allow the government to collect telephone and internet records of Canadians it decided were suspicious. While that program was apparently scrapped, what we’ve learned from the amount of leaks in the US is that there are multiple mass surveillance projects running simultaneously, so whether there are other initiatives to spy on Canadian citizens other than the one that was scrapped is unknown.

What we do know, thanks to Edward Snowden, is that the NSA uses a program called PRISM—which Canadians should be concerned about—to spy on the internet at large. This was not the first time that knowledge of a major internet surveillance tool had been leaked to the press. In 2002, William Binney, a lesser known NSA codebreaker and intelligence analyst whistleblower, went public regarding the Trailblazer Project, a surveillance program he worked on. Most recently, news broke on Sunday that the DEA has been in bed with AT&T for decades, through a project called Project Hemisphere, that AT&T has participated in by archiving phone records on their customers’ supposedly private telephone habits since 1987.  Clearly one member of Five Eyes have a history of sneakily breaching the privacy of their citizens.

The NSA and CSEC comparisons may seem unfair, but the close bond these two agencies have through the Five Eyes group shouldn't be discounted. While the workings of the Five Eyes are fairly unknown, super-secret spy technologies are absolutely shared between countries.

When the Guardian released internal presentation materials regarding an NSA spy tool called xKeyscore, that reportedly can track “nearly everything a user does on the internet,” and judging from screenshots, appears to make warrantless digital surveillance as easy as ordering a pizza. Said screenshots were labeled with headers that unanimously read “TOPSECRET/COMINT [Communications Intelligence]/REL [Relay] to USA, AUS, CAN, GBR, NZL.” In other words, “share this top secret shit with the Five Eyes.”

So if Canada is, at the very least, in the loop on all of the latest and greatest mass social media wiretapping software, are we using it as well? And if so, are we using to spy on Canadians? Recent incidents where the Canadian government has spied on First Nations activists in the Idle No More movement would suggest that yes, somtimes we are. And this is really what freaks me out about our current surveillance state.

While most law-abiding individuals will have nothing to be personally concerned about when it comes to the government saving every copy of every email they send, the anti-dissent climate this type of Big Brother system creates is, in my opinion, astoundingly dangerous to sustaining a democratic society.

When unpopular or radical opinions, like those of environmental protesters—who some believe much of this surveillance system was designed to target—can be so easily detected and criminalized, the power for that machine to grow into a runaway freight train of bullshit imprisonments rises exponentially.

But not everybody sees it that way. To learn more about Canada’s role in the Five Eyes, I gave James Cox a call, a man who “helped oversee NATO strategic military intelligence activity throughout the Eurasian landmass” and wrote an academic primer on the Canadian surveillance state called “Canada and the Five Eyes Intelligence Community.” Mr. Cox does not believe CSEC’s closeness with the NSA is any cause for concern.

“It's my understanding that the whole story of the NSA [leaks and their surveillance machine] is a specifically American story. It is more consequential to their role in the world as a superpower, and they obviously have a lot more concerns and challenges than we have in Canada. I don't think there's any equivalent [mass surveillance] program in Canada that CSEC in running, which is the bottom-line. I don't see that happening in Canada.”

While it’s true that Canada would never want a comparably intimidating surveillance machine to the United States, we’re also a country with just over 10% of the population and a distinct lack of threatening foreign enemies. The issue is not necessarily that we would do something as crazy as America, but that we would even have some of the same tools. Plus, much like the way we rely on America’s military, could we be doing the same thing with their surveillance power? Most of our digital communications run through their country anyway.

Cox talked to me about the amount of privacy that can and should be “appropriately compromised” in order to gain the necessary information needed to protect Canada’s democracy. Comments like that always remind me of The Dark Knight, where Batman activates every microphone inside all of Gotham City’s cell phones, in order to create a giant listening device to track the Joker. Ultimately, it was a good move, because then Joker stopped blowing up hospitals. But this mass surveillance tactic, of course, requires citizens to have a lot of trust in the people who are behind the control panel, listening in. This is not Batman we’re talking about. It’s the Canadian government, and depending on how much you trust them, all of this surveillance power might sound worrisome to you.

James Cox, however, thinks there’s nothing too serious to be worried about: “In Canada, very honestly, I think our government, national institutions, and our courts are smart enough to do it right. Even so, I don't think there is much blanket surveillance of the internet or emails here in Canada as we've heard of in the program in the NSA.”

“While we are a member of the Five Eyes, that is not to say we are privy to, or partner to, all the specific national agendas of the other partners. We're not involved in every American activity around the world. We aren't involved with every Australian activity around the world. Even though we're a member, we're still a sovereign state and are quite capable of fighting for ourselves, if we're going to carry out any particular activity.”

So, while there certainly has been no news storm to suggest that CSEC is up to anything worrisome, given the examples of Idle No More spying, the defunct plan to collect internet and telephone data from Canadian citizens, and the NSA’s own awful, secret history with mass surveillance, the stage is not exactly set to trust that everything is being run smoothly and to the letter over at CSEC’s Taj Mahal.

Unfortunately there are very few avenues for discovery when it comes to CSEC itself, so unless some kind of Canadian Edward Snowden packs a bunch of crazy shit into an encrypted email attachment and sends it off to a journalist, who then might have to spend the rest of their days being detained at airports, there probably won’t be much more to talk about CSEC when it comes to their day to day spy missions. While the NDP called for an emergency debate on CSEC's actions earlier this year, ultimately there is very little oversight regarding the agency's actions. And that’s the kind of non-transparent planet we live on.

Follow Patrick on Twitter: @patrickmcguire

Previously about Canadian surveillance:

The Canadian Government Is Not Bothered by PRISM or the NSA

Canadians Should Be Concerned About the NSA and PRISM

Michael T. Sestak before his arrest.

In June, Michael T. Sestak, a former cop and naval officer who went on to work for the US Foreign Service in Vietnam, was brought before a judge in Washington, DC on corruption charges. Sestek was allegedly a major part of one of the most lucrative illegal visa scams in history—while he was employed at the US consulate in Ho Chi Minh City, he had a side business rubber-stamping fraudulent visa applications for paying clients fed to him by a Vietnamese-American family, a gig that netted nearly $10 million all together according to the Department of Justice. 

Sestak took his share, $3.2 million, to Thailand and bought condos in Bangkok and Phukett, while Sestak’s alleged co-conspirators—a Vietnamese-American businessman named Vo Tang Binh and his beauty-queen wife—have disappeared with $5 million in cash. According to Vietnamese immigration officials, the couple hasn’t left Vietnam since they last entered the country in early April 2012. A former US Ambassador who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity figured they wouldn't last long: “There are certain advantages to having a police state,” she said. That was three months ago, and the Vos are still at large. In the meantime, the Feds are holding Binh’s little sister at the Correctional Treatment Facility in Washington, DC. Her lawyers say she’s been kept isolated for 23 hours a day and permitted to bathe only three times a week.

Sestek, for his part, confessed during his interrogation in Bangkok, where the authorities caught up to him in May. “I worked in law enforcement long enough and what’s the adage?” Sestak told Simon Dinits of the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service (DSS) in a taped interview. “Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time. OK. I did something wrong and I deserve to pay for it, and I know I’m going to go to jail, I’m going to go to prison.”

No one (not even his defense attorneys) could tell me why he confessed. “That’s the $3.2 million question,” said one law clerk working on his case. “That’s what makes it such a crazy story.”

It's a crazy story, but save for Sestek's decision to fess up, it's not all that unusual. Sestak is far from the first consular bureaucrat to get caught selling visas for money, sex, or both. A Diplomatic Security spokesperson confirmed that 31 employees at US embassies and consulates (24 Americans and seven foreign nationals) have been convicted of bribery, conflicts of interest, and visa and passport fraud since 1999, the first year the State Department prosecuted anyone for visa fraud. Sestek isn't even the first member of the Foreign Service in Vietnam to be charged with corruption. The husband-and-wife team of Acey Johnson and Long Lee was convicted in 2003 of hatching a visa-selling scam at the embassy in Hanoi that continued in Sri Lanka and earned them $700,000.

In the past decade, crooked consular officers sold visas to a crew of Colombian cartel members and the roommate of two 9/11 hijackers. During that same period, visa applications from university professors and kidney donors have been denied. Last month, the State Department yanked a consular employee out of the Georgetown, Guyana, embassy amid allegations that he was selling visas for ass and cash, and a columnist for a state-run Cuban newspaper accused the Havana consular staff of accepting bribes.

The State Department denied the Cuba allegation. But they say they’re looking into the Guyana stories, and Gale Smith of the DSS told me that their agents are now embedded in consular affairs departments who work with the local cops to keep a close eye on everyone.

“Many US embassies now have a special program within the Regional Security Office to investigate both external and employee fraud,” she wrote in an email. “This special group of investigators works alongside host-country law enforcement.”

Most people at the State Department freaked when asked about how much sex and money they got during their stints on the visa desk. Many denied that there were any illicit gains to be gotten at all. But at least one old timer has gone on record as saying, “Some of the younger guys were trading visas for the favors of young ladies” during his posting in the Dominican Republic.

Some people I spoke to said the State Department would rather ignore some instances of low-level corruption and quietly reassign wrongdoers. “The ‘send him home’ response is very common for all sorts of problems,” emailed Peter Van Buren, author of We Meant Well, a tell-all about the reconstruction effort in Iraq. “State is loathe to air its dirty laundry and so just deep-sixing someone with pay removes the problem with no public fuss.”

Van Buren described bribery and visa fraud as impossible to quantify. “I suspect State has no idea how many visas get traded or sold, especially on a small scale,” he wrote. “It is painfully easy for someone to issue a visa, and the reasons behind the issuance (money, sex, whatever) usually only come out when something goes wrong. In most cases, I feel that both parties are satisfied (consular guy got the sex, visa person got the visa and quickly leaves the country never to be seen again). How could you even investigate something like that?”

Van Buren guessed that the only people who get caught are the ones who are greedy. But even then, they seem to be treated with kid gloves. An anonymous State Department employee blogging under the pen name Diplopundit claimed that things have improved on this front.

“In the past, folks who were suspected of visa malfeasance were sent home, or allowed to retire, that is true,” the blogger wrote in an email. “But starting around the late 1990s to this date, the USG has routinely taken them to court with better results.”

Another issue is that every consular officer I spoke to said consulates and embassies had no systemic review process for visas. “In all my years on the job, no one ever came up to me and asked, ‘Hey, why did you issue this person a visa?'” said David Seminara, a former Foreign Service officer who now works as a journalist. “Consulates are bombarded with emails and phone calls from friends, relatives, and senators asking, ‘Hey why didn’t you give this person a visa?'... Most of the time consular managers are just chasing down denials.”

He points out that it's already pretty easy for most people to get visas (90 percent of Mexicans who applied for visas in 2012 got them), so it’s pretty hard to notice when someone is handing out too many. And if you illegally get a piece of paper letting you into the US, you're in for good—though billions of dollars have been poured into scanning tourists' eyeballs and fingerprints since 9/11, the alphabet soup of security agencies in charge of monitoring every dock and airport still has no way of keeping track of who comes or goes.

Like most people who bother to study this stuff, Seminara recommends that the entry-level drudgery of the visa desk should be treated as work for law enforcement to do—something that would be best handled by the drones at the Department of Homeland Security. That might make the visa process more like airport security, but it also might cut down on the next Michael Sestek's opportunities.

More on Vietnam:

Exploring Vietnam's Lunchtime Sex Motels

How to Date in Vietnam

I Ate a Dog in Hanoi

Image by Courtney Nicholas

Not long ago I caught a double feature of portraits of creative types at the IFC Theater on 6th Avenue in New York: Noah Baumbach’s great Frances Ha, starring Greta Gerwig at her best, and Paul Schrader’s strange The Canyons, starring Lindsay Lohan and the porn star James Deen. The first movie capitalizes on the filmmakers’ knowledge of New York culture with its quirky and moving portrait of a dancer’s struggle amid financial and personal woes. The second movie purposefully showed unlikable movie types in Los Angeles using each other and being disgusting for no good reason. It was a depressing film, not because the characters were all antiheros, but because it seemed like everyone could have had more fun depicting such people. If you’re going to get depraved, at least have fun doing it. And if it’s not fun for the filmmakers, it’s probably not going to be fun for the audience. That said, I am still a Schrader fan for his stylish explorations of America’s underbelly and a Brett Easton Ellis fan for his unabashed and flagrant embrace of narcissism and nihilism.

While waiting in line for my small popcorn, no butter, I saw that the IFC was selling a new Criterion edition of Pier Pasolini’s Salò: 120 Days of Sodom. I bought it along with a special Werner Herzog shirt that mashed his name with a Danzig logo. I had seen Salò years before on VHS after buying it out of some bargain bin on Melrose. I felt dirty watching it alone in my little Sherman Oaks apartment. If you don’t know, Salò is the name of a town in Italy where Pasolini plays out some of the activities that the Marquis de Sade describes in his masterwork, 120 Days of Sodom. The text was written while Sade was imprisoned in the Bastille for some sort of extreme behavior in a brothel (Whipping? Stabbing? Sodomy? Whatever it was, was nothing compared to what is described in 120 Days.) Sade’s text catalogues the depraved acts in an isolated chateau that a quartet of wealthy decadents inflict on a group of teenagers that they have either kidnapped or procured for this purpose. The descriptions of the live acts practiced on the teenagers are interspersed with sexual narratives from a group of old women hired to spice up each day with such lewd stories from their own youth. In the textual format both the acts imposed on the teenagers in the present and the storytellers’ narratives about the past are flattened into the same mode of delivery. There is little difference between an old prostitute talking about her experiences and Sade relating what the rich perverts are doing to the children, you read both things. But in the movie, the stories from the past are told and the acts with the teenagers are shown. “Manga, manga,” says one of the men to the children as they are forced to eat their own shit that has been collected in a large pot. And we watch them consume it. (It’s really just berries and sausages, or something like that, covered in brown sauce.) On film what is shown and what is told are very distinct.

Pasolini’s masterstroke was to set Sade’s 18th-century tale in fascist Italy during WWII, so that the horrible acts are tied to unbridled political power, something specific, rather than the random pillars of power in Sade’s version. The Criterion disc delivers great interviews with the late Pasolini, which must have been shot during the making of Salò, because Pasolini was murdered (run over repeatedly by a car) before Salò was released. In the interviews Pasolini talks about his hatred for power and its chaos and unchecked desires, as well as his distaste for the commodification of bodies in the sexual revolution of the 60s (he had a strange reading of such sexual politics). But whatever his reason for making it, what he made is amazing. It is one of the most disturbing movies I’ve ever seen, but not because of what is shown (much of the violence is implied) but because of the nature of the subject matter: corruption, rape, and the murder of youth. In Sade, such depictions seem to be a rebellious affront to the conservative morals and authority of his day, in Pasolini the depiction seems an ironic indictment of authority that he sees as those who have assumed the role of unrestrained torturers. Either way, they both had to wade in the shit, so to speak, in order to present their material.

Both men died before their works were seen by the public. Sade thought his manuscript was lost in the Bastille fire. It was only published 120 years after his death in the early 20th century. Pasolini was killed weeks before Salò was released, unavoidably tying his death to his last film, which is filled with more death. Neither artist had to defend his work. It’s still shocking to think that Salò was filmed at Cinecitta Studios in Rome, the home of great Fellini films and so many other Italian classics. On the DVD there is a wonderful behind-the-scenes documentary that shows Pasolini directing the climactic torture scenes where boys with huge (fake) cocks (called “the Fuckers” in the book) and the quartet of decadents take turns burning, hanging, whipping, and raping the teenagers in a courtyard, while the other men watch from above with binoculars. It’s amazing to see the casualness with which Pasolini constructs these acts, at one point one of the actors asks, “What horrible thing do you have for me to do in this scene?

This is the art of the depraved. But isn’t it also the art of honesty? Salò owns up to what it is. It doesn’t shy away from what it’s doing, it just presents its message in a way that is obviously unappealing. Maybe what’s worse is something like a Britney Spears music video, where the intentions are obscured. Where young teenagers are playing at sex, doing everything but having sex on screen, all to the tune of a catchy soundtrack. Where is the honesty in that?

Last weekend I premiered my adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God at the Venice Film Festival. It’s a movie that follows a murdering necrophiliac, but it doesn’t shy away from its subject and it talks about something that’s inside all of us—the need to connect with others, but also the need to control others.

More by James Franco:

What We Talk About When We Talk About a Couple of James Carver's Short Stories

Aspects of E. M. Forrester's 'Aspects of the Novel'

Psycho, Psycho, Psycho

The methadone structure. via WikiCommons.

“Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction is already happening to some extent in our own society.”
―Theodore Kaczynski

Orange Is the New Black is providing lazy Netflix watchers all over the place with an opportunity to escape into the life of prisoners, but however fashionable prison entertainment may be, the truth is that Canada’s prison system, on all levels, is pretty messed up right now. When you look at stories of cost cutting, population growth, and the rise of inmates suffering with mental health issues, it’s hard not to shudder at what else might be going on behind bars.

Drugs, in some form or another, have always been a problem within the prison system—there’s certainly no denying the two have had a fairly intimate relationship. The failed war on drugs has done nothing but increase this unhealthy bond. However, in the last few years, there’s been one drug in particular that’s raising alarm bells for some prison staff: methadone.

Methadone is a synthetic-opioid similar to heroin, and is often referred to as “liquid-cuffs,” because it’s so hard to get off of. It comes in a liquid form, and is often mixed with Tang of all things. The drug is used to treat opioid addiction, but many users will end up being hooked on it for the rest of their lives. 

I spoke with two nurses who have been working in a maximum-security prison in Ontario for nearly 25 years, who said the number of inmates hooked on methadone is escalating at an alarming rate, which in turn is perpetuating the problem of addiction and drug abuse in our country’s prisons.

Both nurses—Helen and Lydia—said what’s happening has become an epidemic of negligence and doctor oversight, as methadone is being used as a Band Aid solution to silence a much greater problem.

“I’ve honestly never seen anything like this. The prison smells like methadone. We’ve had to open a separate area just for administering it.” said Helen.

According to Helen and Lydia, a decade ago methadone users represented 1% of the prison population, now over 20% of inmates are hooked on the stuff.

“This is no way to treat addiction, especially in young people. It’s very disturbing to watch. These young guys are becoming further imprisoned into a life of being on methadone.”

It seems pretty backwards that people are going to prison, and ending up in worse shape, mentally and health-wise, than when they entered. As a result, it’s hard to see the rehabilitative value in pumping prisoners full of methadone, when at the end of the day, is just another narcotic getting passed around from cell to cell.

Kingston Pen. via WikiCommons.

“Inmates are being fed this drug who were already addicts, they have problems, and those problems aren’t actually being dealt with. They’re just on more drugs,” said Helen.

More people are recognizing addiction as a serious mental health issue, rather than some sort of conscious act of defiance. Becoming an addict is not a choice people willingly make. While there is obviously a large percentage of the population who can try any drug a couple times without turning into a full bown addict, that’s not true for many other people.

“Now it seems like there are no rules, anyone can get on [methadone]. This honestly seems just like the tobacco companies; hook them while they’re young and they will never get off,” said Lydia.

The rampant prescribing of methadone in prisons has also led certain medical professionals to realize there’s money to be made in the business of pumping people full of synthetic dope. Doctors can bill for a lot of extras, such as urine tests, administering the drugs, and daily patient visits. As Helen told me: “Doctors and pharmacists outside prison are making money hand over fist with this stuff too, because they can see so many patients a day.”

She continued, “Our methadone doctor is also our family physician. We had a psychiatrist here who dropped that job to open a methadone clinic full-time, because it was so lucrative. It’s hard to watch. It’s the easy solution, but it should be a crime."

Because methadone is so addictive that patients require constant monitoring, a methadone user will end up having a unique relationship with their doctor. In early treatment, patients will need to visit a pharmacist and check-in with their doctors daily. This has led to some questionable doctoral practices, and is one reason why both Helen and Lydia think the program is more a crime than actual therapy.

Eventually, as a methadone user, your doctor should start to decrease your dose, which could range anywhere from 2mg to 100mg or higher. But what’s happening in prison is that oftentimes dosages are remain stagnant or are increasing in size. It’s very difficult to monitor this program properly in prison, due to the lack of staff and doctors.

The conditions for remaining on the program in prison have also changed, seemingly for the worse.

“It used to be that if you peed dirty too many times, it was clear the program wasn’t working and you would be taken off of it. Now, these guys are constantly coming up with dirty urine tests. It got so bad we actually had to start a ‘dirty program,’ they don’t even try to hide it anymore.”

Inmates who try to get off the program are realizing how hard it is to do. 

“We have guys literally screaming for it. If they haven’t got their drink on time, or didn’t get enough. I saw someone try to drink his own urine thinking there [would be more methadone] in there.”

Both nurses have seen pregnant women come in demanding more for their babies. On one occasion Helen said a woman came in who was “losing her mind,” and screaming, “my baby wants more, my baby wants more,” and she had to give it to her.

“I honestly believe it’s one of those things where there were a lot of really good intentions to begin with, but it turned out bad. I know there are people who truly and absolutely believe in this program, but they don’t realize or understand the mentality of drug addiction, or the subculture of the prison system.” 

Both nurses said if they thought the program worked, they’d get behind it, but time has shown it doesn’t.

It’s unfortunate to be living in a culture that treats drug addiction with more drugs. If you’ve ended up in prison, you’ve already got serious issues, especially as a drug-addicted youth, so clearly this methadone free-for-all is not helping. Our prison system should be working to rehabilitate and free people, not push them further into a downward spiral. While a prison full of sedated individuals may be easier to police, the ramifications of cycling addicts from cells to society cannot lead anywhere good, and it’s certainly an issue that requires further analysis in Canada, before it gets any worse.

As Helen put it, “Handing over a bottle of methadone is not going to fix any problem.”

More about methadone and prisons in Canada:

My Methadone Clinic Is The Happiest Place On Earth

Prison Guards See Some Crazy Shit

Afghan hash imported into Saudi Arabia. Photos courtesy of the interviewee

“Abdullah” sounds nervous over the phone. He nearly didn't want to talk to me in the first place, even though I'm not using his real name in this article. His paranoia stems from the fact that a close friend was recently arrested for possessing some of the hash Abdullah had sold him, and now he believes the authorities are "out to get" him, too. Which is why he's recently shut down his Facebook, deactivated his email account and gone into hiding from the mutawa—the country's religious police.

I've been an expat in Saudi Arabia for almost 15 years, so I'm well accustomed to how frustrating its hardline Islamic restrictions can be for secular people trying to live their lives. However, this doesn't compare to the dangers of doing what Abudllah does and illegally importing or selling drugs or booze, crimes for which perpertrators can be thrown in jail, lashed, or even publicly executed. Increasingly, the mutawa are the ones responsible for finding and catching those deemed guilty of these crimes against Sharia.

Regardless of the law and the heavy penalties for breaking it, liquor and many other illicit substances are available in Saudi Arabia—it's just a question of knowing where to look. A rare study on the topic, published by the World Health Organization in 1998, found that 24 percent of patients at a hospital in Riyadh had abused alcohol. More recently, WikiLeaks exposed the royal family's wild parties, which include liquor, cocaine, and prostitutes.

Despite its official status as one of the Middle East's "dry" countries, Saudi Arabians have a reputation for being some of the biggest lovers of black-label whiskey and hashish in the region. I wanted to find out how true this was, and how easy it is to access illegal substances if you don't happen to be second in line to the country's throne, so I called up Abdullah—who is heavily involved in both the alcohol-and-drugs trade within the kingdom. 

“Most of our shit originates in Afghanistan,” he informs me. “It’s a long chain of selling that starts with nomads in Afghani fields. They grow it, then it gets hidden between crates away from the mutawa and goes from seller to seller like a spider web—and then some goes on to Karantina.”

Karantina—or the "hot spot," as it’s known locally—is an area close to downtown Jeddah where the majority of the illicit trading happens. It's there you can find drugs, alcohol, prostitutes, guns, or anything else you'd expect to find in a warlord's lair or at any black market worth its weight in bad vibes. Even the mutawa don’t go there for fear of getting killed.

“No one goes there without a gun. Like, seriously, man, it’s so dangerous,” Abdullah tells me. “If you went there by yourself, you’d probably get raped or killed. Unless you know people, you’re fucked.”

A stash of alcohol, cash, and pills that would get Abdullah into a lot of trouble were he to be found with it.

As for alcohol, he was almost certain that foreigners use the consulates to sneak liquor into the country. “It all starts with the embassies and ambassadors," he says. “Diplomats' baggage, man—the mutawa can’t check it." (By law, the police can't rummage through baggage headed toward embassies.) “The government knows about it, but they can’t just raid the embassies or they’d get fucked over by those countries," he continues, alluding to the importance of Saudi’s ties with the likes of the US and the UK, whose embassies he claims are "loaded" with alcohol.

The likes of Abdullah apparently buy this booze in bulk from embassy officials—20 bottles a month at around 400 riyals (about $100) each. Dealers can sell these to thirsty locals for at least quadruple the price; the cost of a bottle of vodka can range from around 1,000 to 3,000 riyals ($265 to $800), depending on the size of the bottle and quality of the product. 

Due to his current predicament, Abdullah has stopped selling booze for the moment. The threat from the religious police has grown exponentially in Saudi since the Arab Spring, he tells me. Fearful of protests breaking out within their own country, the royal family apparently channelled funds to the mutawa to recruit new members in a huge covert operation to keep the country in order. And their tactic seems to have worked, as the few protests that did take place in Saudi petered out into nothing, helping it avoid the turmoil that hit other countries in the region. However, Abdullah tells me that while it may have helped prevent the death and destruction seen in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, the mutawas' dominance has had other consequences. 

“Even Saudis fear for themselves here now," he explains. "Yes, OK, it's a given that you expect us all to keep to our religion, but the mutawa just want us all to shut up and stay at home. No parties, no cruising with friends, nothing.” This only serves to fuel black-market demand. In many cases, people turn to taking drugs in the relative safety of their own homes as an alternative to being hounded for having a little fun in public. 

I put that theory to Abdullah and he agrees. “The more religious they grow up, the harder they rebel,” he assures me, referring to the kids in discreet revolt against the mutawa and the country's laws. “And now it’s more strict, I have more Saudi customers than ever.” 

More stories from Saudi Arabia:

What's It Like Being a Stand-Up Comic in Saudi Arabia?

Unveiled

Let Them Build a Women-Only City in Saudi Arabia

The first time I read Gary Lutz, I went slower and slower as the pages progressed. Each sentence seemed to want to grab me by the wrists—they kept bending inward on themselves and then opening backward onto whatever was to come next, like an Escher drawing made out of language. Lutz is one of those talents who can write about anything he wants—office supplies, men’s rooms, skin—and still be able to keep you ruminating on any single phrase or set of phrases for hours at a time, figuring out the different ramifications buried in its face.

In short, a new Lutz book is something to take pause for, and now happens to be one of those times for pause, as Future Tense Books has just re-released, in paperback form, 2007’s Partial List of People to Bleach, a collection of a dozen of Lutz’s previously uncollected fictions. Also included in the new version is his now-seminal essay on the mechanics of language, “The Sentence Is a Lonely Place,” and a rather insane and babbling two-page introduction from the ever-ridiculous Gordon Lish, who published some of Lutz’s earliest work. It’s a nice little package of worlds, and like every Lutz release, something you should own.

Gary was kind enough to answer some questions via email in regards to his general practice of making sentences.

Gary Lutz and a cat. Photo via vwalive

VICE: I remember you saying once that you only write one story a year, during the summer. Is that still true? If so, do you have the urge to write during the time you are not writing, or is it more of an incubation thing?
Lutz: I cannot recall ever having felt the urge to write. My stock of urges has always been awfully small—eating, trying to sleep, and walking as far away as possible from everything are the big three. I'm not what you would call a writerish type. Writing is something I have done to make big bad time go away when there is too much of it coming down upon me at once, as there often is in warmer weathers. Nothing of a verbal nature is incubating in me during the rest of the year, when I am not writing. Nothing wells up. My writing doesn't come to me organically or bodily. It's not a thing of the mind, either. Writing is mostly a reason to get out of the house. I'll drive to one place for lunch and then right afterward to another place for another, more cholesterolly fortifying lunch, then pick up some lousy croissants-manque at a doughnut dump and arrive finally at a windowless office where I situate myself at a work station with the lousy croissants and start loading words in 24-point type up onto the screen. This is a slow and drowsy approach that usually yields one low-word-count stretch of fictionesque sentences by late August. But my last couple of summers have been different. Time began battering me in ways I wasn’t accustomed to.

Why do you particularly like 24-point type? And is the windowlessness important?
From my way of looking at things—and I have never been much of a looker—a word, enlarged to 24-point type (though I sometimes allow myself to go far larger, and I’m partial to the rondures of the Cambria font), presents itself to the eye as something hulky, just another lump of matter. The more colossal you get a word, the easier the meaning can seep out of the hollows and bowls and dimples of the letters. Sometimes, though, you have to scoop it out, and that can slow you down a bit. You’re left, ultimately, with something bony-looking and gutted, and you listen to the air whistling through the cavities, and something eventually comes over you: you want to fill those holes, pack them full, with something else, usually the plentisome slops and slimes from your own psyche. You’ve got to get something discrepant going on inside of the word. Then that word, with a louche sort of air about it now, and with a shifted import to it, can present itself to another word and start something swackingly unnatural. 

As for the windowlessness, the tiny portion of the local world I mess my way through during daily stumbles to and from fast-food concerns and dollar stores and work sites and my slummy sleeping quarters (decades into adulthood, I still, for the life of me, take my slumbers on the shaggy floor) is rife with little bits of everything ungorgeous, so am I to be blamed for preferring that things in the main be kept as unbeholdable as possible? A vista would do me no good out here.

Can you say at all where, when you do begin writing, what it is that strikes you to start a sentence, or, even before there's a sentence, the first word or words?
I might be reading a newspaper or a magazine, and sometimes in an article about this or that setback (because I usually head straight for the business section), a word pokes out at me from its curbed circumstance on the page and seems aching to throw off its burden of journalistic accuracy and factitude. I’m not talking about unusual words or vogue words and abbreviatory formations like “selfie”or “IRL,” but just some verbal ordinaria, like “crass” or “minder.” Sometimes I just seem to sense when a word like that is asking to be excused from its newsy duties and be taken out for some exercise and freshening stimulations. So that word might become the start of a sentence of my own, the goading word of what eventually gets going syntactically, and I’ll stare rather unmercifully into it and take the measure of its features, its frame, its lineaments, until the thing starts looking less like just another unimpeachable piece of the public vocabulary and more like just a façade of something else, as if it has all along been a sort of sham bit of language, and the meanings that had been forced into the thing start trickling out little by little and I’m left with mostly just a shell that begins filling up with the mood I might be feeling, the mood having gone fluid, and the mood, more often than not, being one in which I’m trying to get a jump on some loss to come, a mood of anticipatory bereavement, which is what life usually feels like on the least ugly days of a person my age. By this point, the vowels seem to be pealing purely, and the consonants are straight up and unpuckered, and the word feels ready to attract others to it in the sickness of having to get something unheartily, unfalsifiedly, said.

Are plots, or things that stand in as plots in your texts, completely incidental products of language, or is there an underlying scaffolding at any point?
Life is plotproof, muddled, desultory, irreducible to chains of cause and effect. It’s sweaty and rampantly sad. It’s a motion of moments. There’s no line of any kind other than the one that runs from birth to thwarting to death. As a reader, I drop out of a novel or even a short story as soon as I sense that the writer has a scheme and is overarranging things. I’ve had it with the masterminded. That’s just my own prejudice, obviously, but I’m the same way about humor: I don’t want to wait through a setup for the punch line: I want one one-liner after another: I want the upshot, I want everything to feel final from the first, I want the conclusion. I don’t need to know what it took to get there; I only need to know that there’s nowhere else to go. In my fiction, life sweeps over people as they sum themselves up on the fly. There’s no backstory for them to take shelter in. They can’t luxuriate in ancestry and hand-me-down handicaps. They’ve never once felt as if their bodies were earmarked for life. It’s all they can do to just view each other’s ruins and blurt out their apercus in nothing flat. There’s nothing more to it than the fact that in every moment everything’s over all over again. It’s not as if there were something to be had from life. And there isn’t one thing to lead to another, because there’s only ever just one thing—maybe it’s a man rubbing a woman’s feet every night, often for hours on end, the woman keeping her socks on while he rubs, thick socks, happily and athletically striped and reaching almost to the knee, and the man not minding having something to do with his hands, which otherwise would only be falling asleep, because he’s over in Japan teaching business writing to homesick Americans, even though he doesn’t know the first thing about business writing, and the woman is just another American, of appealingly clouded mind and projective hair, nothing else going on between the two of them except for the foot-rubbing, though she is growing on him, but only as if she is literally appending herself to him, and what she’s screaming about at the top of her lungs is either only the fact that she’s in a faraway place but doesn’t feel far away or the fact that just because she means something doesn’t mean anything other than that with any luck she will one day probably get away with calling the man a friend.

Previously by Blake Butler - The Permutating Brain of Stephen Dixon

@blakebutler

The Snapchat screen of a lonely Snapchatter (the author).

I'm calling it right now: Snapchat will be buried next to ICQ and Napster in the useless app graveyard by the end of next year. If you're not aware of what Snapchat is, you’re lucky. Basically, it's an app that lets you send 1-10 second video clips or photos to someone (or multiple someones) in your contact list, that are allegedly deleted instantly, and sent straight to hell once they’ve been viewed.

It’s the perfect medium for people to send titty and dick flicks of themselves to willing and unwilling lovers alike. In fact, a study from the UK shows that 47% of Snapchat users have received nude pictures while 67% had received images of “inappropriate poses or gestures,” which I'm assuming consist mainly of people recreating the D-Generation X crotch chop or the classic Eminem middle finger.

Nudes and rude gestures aside, one of the more serious controversies surrounding this application is the fact that the photos and videos you send actually aren't deleted at all. All of the images are actually saved on the Snapchat server, and hidden deep in the perverted memory bank of your your phone.

Plus, just when you thought it was safe to send a video of you doing naked summersaults in a gas station bathroom to someone you met at a Taco Bell last week, along comes an evil application called SnapSave that automatically saves the content you send without notifying you. Sounds like a backstabbin’, pervin' good time, right?

With all the ridiculous controversy surrounding Snapchat, you would think the user experience is more fun than a party hosted by GG Allin at Dave and Buster's, but really it's the party-time equivalent to having a lazy-eyed gentleman try to make conversation with you while you’re stuck on a bus in bumper-to-bumper traffic, and you have your headphones in.

Ultimately, it’s the users who make Snapchat boring. I say this because most people who use it send mediocre, boring “snaps.” It might just be that I'm a jaded blog writer who doesn't receive nudes on the reg, but regardless, here are some of the most notoriously lame bandwidth bandits you might just encounter on your Snapchat journey.

The Selfie
Oh wow, would you look at that! It's you! I saw you 24 hours ago but I'm sure a lot has changed since then. How did you know that I wanted to take 10 seconds out of my day to stare at your dumb face on my phone? You've chosen a clever caption as well, such as “Tired” or “Hungover,” as if I was so inclined to know about how many shots you did at a sports bar last night. Unless you recently lost an eye, or you're violently throwing up while giving the metal horns, please don't send a selfie ever again.

The Foodie
I have yet to understand the fascination people have with sending pictures of food to each other, as if the other person is supposed to care about the meal that they're not about to consume. I suppose this section could also go for people who send snaps of the dump they just took, which admittedly is sometimes funny, but when you send your fourth poop snap of the week you’re totally entering serial killer territory. If you’re one of those people who enjoys sending food or poop snaps, may I suggest that you never send one without the other? I’d like to see the full narrative of your dining experience pop up in my Snapchat inbox.

The “I'm walking down a street and filming what's in front of me or my feet”
Sometimes, I wonder if the people sending me this shit actually hate me. If you've ever thought, "I wonder what it'd be like to be inside my friend’s brain, walking down the street, looking at their shoes," then a snap like this could make your most boring fantasy come true. Those enchanting 10 seconds of human feet moving along can provide a level of escapism that can mentally transport you anywhere—from a sidewalk, to a lobby, or maybe even a field! This virtually immersive experience is comparable to that of Being John Malkovich—so visceral that once you experience it, you’ll want to you drop to your knees and scream at the sky.

The Artsy
A lot of Instagram users fancy themselves artists. It’s the same on Snapchat, except instead of having pretty colour filters to apply to your photographs, all you can do with Snapchat is draw some crude smiley faces over your low resolution dick pics; MSPaint style. If you thought filming some elevator doors closing was considered art, well, then you clearly don’t know a thing about art. If all else fails you can take a snap of your city’s most offbeat graffiti artist’s sick new tag. I don't think anyone has done that yet. 

The Eavesdropper
Have you ever walked by someone on the street and caught a snippet of their conversation? Of course you have. Sometimes it's something amazing, like “I had never seen so many dead strippers in all my life,” and other times it's so irrelevant you think absolutely nothing of it.

On Snapchat, the eavesdropper films their friends talking midway through a conversation, without their knowledge, and then sends it to their “friends.” Sounds exciting, right? You're god damn right it is! When I’m forced to watch one of these snaps, it has the same level of excitement I get from being on a long road trip with a bunch of awkward people who don’t know how to keep up a conversation, while I listen to the quiet ticking of the turn signal and pray for death.

The Ambiguous
Sometimes you just don't know what the hell you're looking at. Is it the inside of a glove? A UFO? Was that part of a foot? Why are you sending me this shit!? Why did I watch all 10 seconds of that as if it had some dramatic ending? Oh that's right, because my life is that boring. 
 

Here’s the thing, friends. Snapchat doesn't always have to suck. For example, right now my pal Vanessa is in Indonesia getting poop thrown at her by orangutans, which should make for great Snapchat material. Going to the nightclub district on a Sunday morning and filming chunks of girls’ weaves rolling down the street like tumbleweeds is also a classic. Good or bad, I'm sure after my friends read this I won’t be getting any Snapchats anyway. Which is fine by me.

 

Send Pat terrible Snapchats. His username is: patmaloney1

Previously:

How to Sext Without Looking Like an Idiot

Hip-hop is having a renaissance right now in the city of New York, where it seems like every other day a new MC rises up out of the five boroughs with an even more unique style and approach to the music than what we thought was possible before. Motley crews like the A$AP Mob, the Beast Coast, and World's Fair have given us a reason to love rhymes again. We've written a lot about this stuff, but sometimes words don't do it justice. So, we've linked up with scene insider Verena Stefanie Grotto to document the new New York movement as it happens in real time, with intimate shots of rappers, scenesters, artists, and fashion fiends.

This week, Verena caught up with NYC's Flatbush Zombies, who brought their European tour to London. Check out these pictures from on stage, backstage, and... somewhat adjacent to the stage. Along the way, the guys got their hands on some big-ass candy bars, which we can assure you were eaten quickly.

Photographer Verena Stefanie was born and bred in Bassano del Grappa, Italy. The small town is not known for hip-hop, but they do make a very tasty grape-based pomace brandy there called grappa. Stefanie left Bassano del Grappa at the age of 17 to go and live the wild skateboarding life in Barcelona, Spain, where she worked as the Fashion Coordinator for VICE Spain. Tired of guiding photographers to catch the best shots, she eventually grabbed the camera herself and is now devoted to documenting artists, rappers, style-heads, and more. She recently directed a renowned documentary about the Grime scene in UK and has had photo features in GQ, Cosmopolitan, VICE, and many more. 

Check out her website and follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

@VerenaStefanie 

Previously - The Wu-Tang Clan Storm London

As some of you may have seen, I recently wrote an article about attending Corey Feldman's birthday party. Corey told me that I was only allowed to write about the party if he had final approval on my article. I was slightly disappointed that I wouldn't be able to go and just make fun of the thing, but agreed anyway because I felt that, no matter how I presented it, a post about Corey Feldman charging people $250 to attend a birthday party at his house could be nothing but hilarious. 

The day after the party, I sent Corey the article (including the photos) and he said it was a "great article!" but he wasn't too happy with the pictures. In an email, he told me, "there's a bunch w the only old woman I allowed into the party."

However, after seeing a wider selection of images, Corey said, "Obviously it's your mag and U can do as U wish." So I ran it.

Unsurprisingly, once it was posted people made fun of him and the party. There is no possible spin you can put on a $250 per head birthday party thrown by a former child star in an unfurnished, beige McMansion in the suburbs, surrounded by women in their underwear and "happy 22nd birthday" signage, to make it seem anything other than utterly bleak and miserable. 

BOTTOM FEEDERS LIKE @JLCT WHO GO OUT OF THEIR WAY TO DESTROY GOOD PPL NEED TO B OUTED SO THEY CAN'T TAKE AFVANTAGE OF MORE GOOD PPL!! RT!

— Corey Feldman (@Corey_Feldman) August 24, 2013

When he realized people were making fun of him, Corey had a full-blown Twitter meltdown. He either tweeted or retweeted about me and the party roughly 500 times.

Despite many of the tweets containing untrue statements about me (and one with my personal phone number), I felt it was best to ignore them, because, honestly, I feel sort of bad for the guy. It must be hard to be in a place where your life is so grim that an honest representation of it can go viral because of how pathetic it is. 

But then on Monday he sent out a press release accusing me of "bullying" him. The press release read, in part:

Last month, he released his new single Ascension Millennium on YouTube, which has received mixed reviews and controversy from the public and media. A personal birthday party he also hosted was met with strong criticism online; criticism Feldman strongly feels is cyber bullying.

 

“Unfortunately, we have grown into a society whose belief system holds to bring down rather than to build up. Bullying is present in schools, homes, professional environments and online (cyber bullying), and here is a case no different from just that. I can take criticism, but what people are saying online as of late is far beyond that,” said Feldman. It takes a lot of balls to put yourself out there in the hot seat, so I encourage everyone to not be afraid of what others will say or think. Move forward and ignore the haters,” he added.

Unsurprisingly, antibullying experts weren't too psyched about Corey using a serious issue to promote his new book/movie/album/party. 

Speaking to Fox News, Dr. Chuck Williams, a clinical professor at Drexel University and director of the Center for the Prevention of School-Aged Violence said, "This is horrible! I can’t believe that Corey would utilize such a serious issue to gain traction for his ‘comeback.’ If this is what I think it is, Corey should be ashamed and every national bullying organization should demand he apologize.” He added, “This could be what I call the ‘Miley Cyrus Effect’—doing anything, no matter how pathetic, in order to get attention.”

And he's right. Piggybacking off a serious issue to promote himself and make people who are critical of him look bad is a pretty shitty thing to do. 

In order to help Corey better understand what bullying looks like, let's take a look at how he reacted to my piece:

First, he sent out the above two tweets in which he explicitly accuses me of lying to him. Just to be clear, I did not lie to Corey at any point.

He's since deleted the tweets, presumably because they contained screencaps of emails from me, which quite clearly showed I had not lied to him. 

Im really sad that there r so many liars n haters n the world. This online site went out of the way to make beautiful ppl look bad..so sad!

— Corey Feldman (@Corey_Feldman) August 21, 2013

He replaced this tweet with a more vague subtweet about me. Once again, he implied that I had lied (I still hadn't).

4 THE RECORD, IM NOT JUSTIFYING MY ACTIONS, OR DEFENDING MYSELF: IT'S CALLED PUTTING THESE LOSERS ON BLAST 4 BEING LOW LIFE LIARS!!

— Corey Feldman (@Corey_Feldman) August 24, 2013

And also later sent out another tweet calling me a "low life liar." 

@Corey_Feldman @CourtneyAnne12 haha no,those guys from Vice were too busy trying to hit on my friend & I insted of actually doing their ...

— Azzurra (@diva_zura) August 21, 2013

He then retweeted Twitter user @diva_zura who, apparently, had also attended Corey's party. In her tweet, she accused me of hitting on her and a friend of hers. This is an especially odd accusation as I am gay. (Though, even if I weren't gay, I'm fairly certain I wouldn't be hitting on any of Corey's "angels.")

pic.twitter.com/INFWc4R0KB

— Corey Feldman (@Corey_Feldman) August 24, 2013

Having found a new angle he could use to make me look bad, Corey ran with it.

Here is a picture he posted of me (taken at the insistence of the woman in the photo) attempting to turn me into a meme. The implication being that I acted inappropriately toward the women at his party. Despite the fact that I AM GAY.

Here is a second attempt at turning me into a meme. I know it's probably hard for you to figure out what is being said here, as whoever made it doesn't know how to spell or use capital letters, but they are attempting to call me "Creepy McCreepintine"—once again implying that I was acting inappropriately toward the women at his party. Once again, I am still gay. 

@LouisPeitzman @JLCT he's not jealous of me, he's jealous of them!

— Corey Feldman (@Corey_Feldman) August 24, 2013

After retweeting a few more people claiming that I was acting inappropriately toward women at his party, someone tweeted at Corey and told him that I am gay. So Corey moved on to saying that I was attracted to him (the "them" he refers to in this tweet are the Corey's Angels). Just to be clear, I am not attracted to Corey Feldman. He looks like what I imagine Courteney Cox's ghost will look like. 

Imagery intentionally. The good news is they were @ my house and we hav video footage of them setting me up, harassing. More 2 b revealed.

— Corey Feldman (@Corey_Feldman) August 24, 2013

Corey also claimed that he had video footage of me 'harassing' him. As I only spoke to Corey briefly, I assume this video footage is another lie.  

Another pic from @Corey_Feldman bday, it's @JLCT and his @VICE junior assistant arriving to cover the party! pic.twitter.com/RuC9yPtamF

— Bambi LeFist (@BambiLeFist) August 24, 2013

Then a woman named Bambi LeFist who lives with Corey in the "Feldmansion" tweeted a picture of two people who seem to be disabled. Hilariously, she said that the picture was of me and the friend I attended the party with. LOL! Corey retweeted it. 

2 pose 4 pics, they actually put ppl n awkward positions, n manipulated the photos, 2 make it look empty, and lame. They took unflattering

— Corey Feldman (@Corey_Feldman) August 24, 2013

Corey then moved on to claiming I intentionally took unflattering pictures of his guests, as well as staged and manipulated photos. Again, none of the things he's saying are true. 

@diva_zura they were looking 4 moments when people might look bored or awkward. They also arrived early, so they could take loads of

— Corey Feldman (@Corey_Feldman) August 24, 2013

He also claimed that I arrived at the party early to take photos that intentionally made it look bad. I arrived at the party one hour after it started. 

GREAT ARTICLE: A TRUE PERSPECTIVE OF ANOTHER UNDER COVER JOURNO @CoreysAngels BDAY BASH, W A VERY DIFF VIEW! http://t.co/5Dfi7hKTJM

— Corey Feldman (@Corey_Feldman) September 3, 2013

Then a week or so passed, and I figured Corey had forgotten it and moved on with his life. After all, in his press release he urged people to "not be afraid of what others will say or think. Move forward and ignore the haters."

But then he started tweeting out links to a blog post that he asked a friend of his to write about the party. In the post, the writer claims that I asked her "where the drugs were at this particular soiree." Which, again, is not something that actually happened. 

And then, finally, he issued the press release accusing me of being a bully. 

So, to clarify, Corey has falsely accused me of lying, tweeted out my personal phone number, retweeted hundreds of negative comments about me, indirectly accused me of trying to buy drugs in his house, implied I sexually harassed his female friends, implied I sexually harassed him, and then, without any hint of irony, accused me of being a bully.

Great job, Corey. 

Previously - I Went to Corey Feldman's Birthday Party

@JLCT

Being a radical artist in China is a pretty tricky prospect. Considering censors banned paradigm of inoffensive banality Katy Perry from the country's airwaves for supposedly being too vulgar (and not forgetting that time authorities made Ai Weiwei disappear for posting seminude photos of himself online), you would have thought that Chinese photographer Ren Hang would lay off filling his portfolio with gaping buttholes and models pissing on each other, or sustaining his unparalleled level of dedication to photographing erect penises.

But he hasn't, which is a good thing, because his photos are great—somehow managing to desexualize naked bodies and turn them into sometimes funny, sometimes beautiful, sometimes gnarled, hairy, human-shaped sculptures that make you want to get naked with all your friends, paint your dick red, and hang out on a roof in Beijing. Which is basically the end game all photographers are going for, right? I wanted to talk to Ren about his work, so I did. Here's that conversation.

VICE: First off, why is everyone naked in basically every single one of your photos?
Ren Hang: Well, people come into this world naked and I consider naked bodies to be people's original, authentic look. So I feel the real existence of people through their naked bodies.

Is that why the bodies aren't presented in a kind of conventionally "sexy" way, even if the photos are sexual? 
No, I don't take photos with any particular purpose or plan—I just grasp whatever comes into my mind, arrange that in front of me and take a photo of it. I don't pay too much attention to whether a scene is sexy or not when I'm taking photos.

Yeah, a lot of the bodies end up looking more like kind of grotesque sculptures.
That's not really intentional, although I do consider bodies as sculptural—or, as you say, grotesque sculptures—so I suppose the sculptures exist because the bodies exist.

Yep. What's with all the pee in your photos, too?
Again, I don't use urine on purpose. The models urinate, I shoot. 

OK, I can already guess the answer to this considering nothing you do seems to have a purpose, but the dicks—there are a lot of dicks. Is that a statement about patriarchy, or something, or do you just like dicks?
No, taking pictures of penises is meaningless. But I do think that erect penises are the most real and beautiful penises. People sometimes even forget they have a penis unless it's erect, which I think is very powerful. But it's not just dicks I'm interested in, I like to portray every organ in a fresh, vivid, and emotional way.  

What do you think is more beautiful—the male body or the female body?
Gender isn't important when I'm taking pictures, it only matters to me when I'm having sex.

What's your opinion on sex? Do you think it's a big deal?
Yeah, I do think sex is important, but I don't emphasize its importance all the time. After all, sex is a part of a normal, healthy life, just like eating and sleeping.

True. Who are all the models? Your friends?
Yeah, most of the models are my friends. I like shooting my friends because they trust me, which makes me feel more relaxed. I can only take my best work when I'm in that state; being with total strangers makes me nervous. 

How choreographed is each photo? 
I don’t plan before shooting. Inspiration usually comes to me while I'm holding the camera and looking at the models. I don't take pre-planned, previously realized photographs, I just shoot, you know? Although most of the time models follow my ideas instead of acting stuff out themselves, so I suppose that is choreographing to an extent.  

How have your photos gone down in China?
My photos, especially the ones of naked bodies, are forbidden to be shown in Chinese galleries. Only occasionally can the ones that aren't explicit be shown, but I still face many difficulties even with them. For example, one of my shows was canceled by the Chinese government on "suspicion of sex" and, another time, a visitor spat at one of my photos. And those are just a couple of examples of the problems I've had. None of China's press will publish my books and I've been arrested while shooting photos outside before.

Doesn't that get frustrating?
Well, I'm used to those kinds of situations now. And I love China and I like shooting Chinese people. I was born here and I feel a big connection with my hometown. True, I'm restricted here, but the more I'm limited by my country, the more I want my country to take me in and accept me for who I am and what I do.

Interview by Jamie Clifton.

Take a minute to subscribe to VICE Japan's YouTube channel, why don't ya.

Previously — The Art of Taboo - Nobuyuki Oura

More photographers we like:

Ian Berry Takes Jaw-Dropping Photos of Massacres and Floods

Peter van Agtmael Won't Deny the Strange Allure of War

David Alan Harvey's Beautiful Photos of Poverty and Beach Parties

More realness from Will and his work here.