B. B. King, a blues icon and one of the world's most legendary guitarists, passed away last night in Las Vegas. He had been in home hospice care for two weeks due to dehydration, CNN reports.

B. B. King, born Riley B. King, was a WWII veteran and Memphis disc jockey who rose to prominence as a recording artist for Sun Records in the 1950s. His musical output over the next few decades inspired a generation of guitarists like Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page and helped cement blues in the American musical canon. King was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989 and toured relentlessly throughout the majority of his life. Last fall, his decades-long struggle with Type II Diabetes caused him to cancel a string of tour dates.

Earlier this month, the mayor of Memphis declared May 12 to be "B. B. King Day" in honor of the blues legend.

Want Some In-Depth Stories About Music?

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2. Liturgy's Rap-Metalocalypse
3. Perfume Genius Sings Scary Songs for Homosexuals
4. A Place to Bury Strangers on the End of Death by Audio and Their New Album 'Transfixiation'

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

Cry-Baby #1: Elantra Cunningham

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Screencaps via Google Maps and Fox Atlanta

The incident: A man smashed a woman's car window, as she had left her dog locked in it on a hot day.

The appropriate response: Not being such a dick in future.

The actual response: The man was charged after the owner of the car insisted on pressing charges.

Earlier this month, a man named Michael Hammons (pictured above) was in the parking lot of a shopping center in Athens, Georgia, when he saw a small crowd gathered around a car.

The crowd, he discovered, were awaiting the arrival of the police, as a small pomeranian mix was locked inside with the windows rolled up and no water. Instead of waiting, Michael smashed the window of the car with the footrest of his wife's wheelchair and freed the dog, reports ABC.

After getting the dog out of the car, Michael took it to a nearby shaded area and gave it water.

When the dog's owner, 22-year-old Elantra Cunningham, returned to her car, she was reportedly really not happy about her window. "She said 'you broke my window,' and I said 'I did.' She says 'why would you do that?' I said 'to save your dog,'" said Michael.

Elantra was given a citation from animal control for leaving the dog in the car. But, despite this, she insisted on pressing charges against Michael for the broken window. "We didn't want to charge him, but he told us he broke the windows and when you have a victim there saying she wants him charged, we had no other choice," Chief Deputy Lee Weems, of the Oconee County Sheriff's Office told Fox.

"I knew there'd be consequences," Michael said. "But it didn't matter. Glass, they make new glass every day, but they could never replace that dog."

After news of Michael's arrest went viral, PETA announced they were awarding Michael with a Compassionate Action Award. "Rather than be arrested, this man should be applauded for deciding not to stand idly by, but for acting in the best interests of the victim," PETA's senior director, Colleen O'Brien, told Fox.

Cry-Baby #2: Anthony Hultine

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Screencap via Google Maps.

The incident: A dog "made a mess" in a guy's home.

The appropriate response: Cleaning it up.

The actual response: He allegedly shot the dog.

According to police, 19-year-old Yuma, Arizona resident Anthony Hultine, was looking after his roommate's pit bull mix puppy mix while the roommate was out of town.

The roommate had taken the puppy in several months earlier after finding it wandering in the street.

According to an account of the event that the roommate later gave to police, the dog "made a mess" while Anthony was looking after it. The nature of the mess was not specified by police.

In response to this, Anthony drove the dog to the nearby Blaisdell area, where he shot it and attempted to bury it, according to the roommate.

The injured dog was discovered later that day by a passerby. The Yuma Sun reports that the person was able to track down Anthony's roommate through social media. The roommate, after collecting the injured dog, called the police.

Anthony was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct, cruelty to animals, and criminal damage. All of which are felonies.

The dog (which has since been named Brady) survived, but required surgery. It is currently in the care of a local Humane Society chapter.

Which of these dog-related psychos is the bigger cry-baby? Let us know in this little poll down here:

Previously: A guy who allegedly attacked someone with medieval weaponry during a road rage incident vs. a man who allegedly shot someone for talking to his wife.

Winner: The road rage Braveheart!!!

Follow Jamie Lee Curtis Taete on Twitter.

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Gordon Mac in the studio at KISS 94FM, c. 1986, image courtesy Gordon Mac.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

In the 1970s and 80s, pirate radio stations like Radio Invicta, Radio Jackie (lated JFM), London Weekend Radio (LWR), Dread Broadcasting Corporation (DBC), Horizon, and KISS met a demand for black music that wasn't catered to by the BBC. The path pioneered by the likes of Radio Caroline in the 60s had swapped the North Sea for London estates and rock music for soul, reggae, and R&B.

Radio One had formed in 1967, but it predominantly offered chart hits. At the time, there was very limited exposure for black music, I'm told by KISS founder Gordon Mac and former KISS DJ and Head of Music Lindsay Wesker, ahead of a new exhibition at the ICA, Shout Out! UK Pirate Radio in the 1980s. The exhibition looks back at this early tower block pirate radio movement. Beforehand, Mac and Wesker had been forced to make the best of a bad situation, taping specialty shows such as David Rodigan's reggae show on Radio London, and replaying them all week.

"We liked some of that [chart] stuff," Wesker says, "but we wanted to hear our music 24 hours a day. We didn't want to stop every now and then for another Elton John or David Bowie song. We wanted to hear black music all day."

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Dancer in Nightclub, London, c.1985-89, courtesy Lindsay Wesker.

"There were big black music hits," he continues, "gimmicky disco records like 'Kung Fu Fighting' and some Jamaican records like 'Uptown Top Ranking,' but underneath that there was just so much stuff. So when KISS launched and our DJs started playing James Brown, people lost their minds. They were like, 'How much music has this guy made?' By the time KISS launched in 1985 there were, like, 40 James Brown albums and we'd never heard them. So when our DJs began playing, that's why there was so much excitement."

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No License for KISS FM, 'Written Word' magazine, 1989, image courtesy Gordon Mac.

Early 1980s pirate stations had benefitted from a legal loophole that prevented authorities from confiscating equipment without a court order, but the Telecommunications Act 1984 granted the Department of Trade and Industry's Radio Investigation Service power to enter properties without a license and detain equipment kept for the purpose of illegal broadcasting. Involvement with a pirate radio station could lead to fines of up to £2000 [$3100] and three months in jail, and the ensuing crackdown forced many stations off air.

Mac was a DJ on JFM until it lost its battle with the DTI following a raid in January 1985. Undeterred by advice not to pursue a career in broadcasting—as he didn't have a voice for radio, apparently—he decided to fill the new musical gap on the airwaves with a station more concerned with what the DJs played, rather than how they spoke. "The DJ had to bring something," Mac says. "Paul Anderson could mix—the man could mix oil and water. Norman Jay, Lindsay, Nicky Holloway, Paul Oakenfold, Jonathan More, and Matt Black [Coldcut]—they all brought a real musical knowledge to the table. That was my thing—it wasn't about whether they could speak properly or whether they could be really entertaining."

KISS was born in October 1985, broadcasting 24/7 from a mast in Charlton, but soon disappeared from the airwaves following sustained DTI raids before re-emerging in March 1986 as a weekend-only station. Engineers had to develop imaginative new strategies to outwit the authorities and began using complex systems of remote transmitters. This made it difficult for the DTI to locate studios and, if they found a transmitter, the station could often switch to a backup, minimizing its time off-air.

READ: Motherboard's article on the man who invented Stereo

Mac took further precautions, too, like banning DJs from bringing record boxes to the studio. But shifty men coming and going every few hours could still arouse suspicions. "I had the studio at my flat for while, when we got really stuck, up at Ernest Richards Tower in Walthamstow," he says. "We were up there for about three months or so and we had a visit from the social worker. He asked to talk to my wife in a separate room, and my wife came back in laughing, saying, 'They think you've got me on the game.'"

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Dancer in Nightclub, London, c.1985-89, courtesy Lindsay Wesker.

There was also a threat from rival pirates. "One morning I got there just before 6 AM," says Wesker, "and the engineer called me to say that someone had cut our wires and we couldn't even go on." Mac continues, "When [the pirate scene] first started up there was an unwritten rule: you don't come into our turf, we don't come into yours. That was 1985 to 86/7 and then more and more pirates came on and it became a bit of a battle ground."

"We used to have a team of security up on the roof waiting for other pirates. If it was the DTI, you'd tell them to take the transmitter and they'd look the other way, but if it was other pirates there would be a fight. It became a really heavy scene towards the end of it, which is why I was so pleased when we could go for the legal license because you can only do that for so long."

Related: Our documentary on pirate radio:

By 1987, KISS had a huge following. Audience estimates were as high as 500,000 and it finished second, above Radio One, in an Evening Standard readers' poll that year. KISS bolstered its reputation through close involvement with London's growing club culture, including a regular KISS night at the Wag Club.

In 1988, the government announced that stations could apply for one of 22 new community radio licenses, providing they were off air by January 1, 1988. KISS broadcast its final show as a pirate station from Camden club Dingwalls that New Year's Eve. Despite widespread support, KISS missed out on the first set of licenses, but successfully reapplied when the second round were offered and re-launched as a legal station on the September 1, 1990.

As is often the case when a subculture emerges above ground, KISS's move towards the mainstream was not without its critics. But Mac and Wesker believe that the move was an essential part of their mission to give exposure to the music they loved. "When we launched as a legal station, we had to create a playlist, we had to create a daytime sound, and a lot of people were like, 'This isn't the eclectic KISS that I've grown up with,'" Wesker says. "But we discovered that music policy and playlists actually served a fantastic purpose, because one of the things that we really enjoyed about doing radio was introducing new music and acts to the audience, and with a playlist, we could actually rotate songs by these new acts and turn them into hits.

"It was so exciting to take a dub dat tape of the first Jamiroquai song, 'Too Young To Die,' play the single 30 to 40 times in a week, and actually break a new artist. We did that with the Prodigy, we did that with Des-ree, 'Jump' by Kriss Kross, 'Finally' by Ce Ce Peniston, and Robyn S's 'Show Me Love.' 'Show Me Love' was on an import—we bought it, playlisted it when it wasn't even signed in the UK, and turned it into a hit. It was so thrilling and so rewarding."

Though many thought that KISS had swapped subversion for legitimacy, it's hard to argue with the impact that it and other 1980s pirate stations had on Britain's musical landscape. KISS proved that a black music station could be commercially viable and gave black music a prime time platform. Pirate radio had a direct impact on the musical direction of mainstream broadcasters, exemplified by Radio One poaching many KISS DJs like Trevor Nelson, Gilles Peterson, and Judge Jules.

The legacy of the 1980s pirate radio stations can be seen in the new generation that launched throughout the 1990s and 2000s, meeting a growing demand for hardcore, jungle, garage, and grime. Today, the influence of pirate radio lives on in stations such NTS, which adopt a similar model but are able to broadcast legally online while remaining firmly outside the mainstream.

Shout Out! is on at the ICA now and tours to the Phoenix in Leicester, from the July 23 to August 24, 2015.

Follow Matt on Twitter.

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Mia Khalifa. Image via Hot Gossip Italia

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Last year, BangBros released a threesome scene between a caucasian "biker," his "Middle Eastern girlfriend," and her "stepmom." The latter two are both wearing headscarves in the clip. Needless to say, they don't sit around the kitchen table and debate the merits of a one-state solution. They fuck.

The title is pretty revealing: Mia Khalifa Is Cumming for Dinner. A play on Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, the 1967 American comedy-drama exploring interracial marriage in a—for the time—pretty groundbreakingly positive portrayal. BangBros must have known their entirely different cross-culture interaction wasn't going to play well with everyone. In fact, they were probably banking on it.

Lebanon-born, US-based porn star Khalifa herself must have had an inkling the scene would shock. Was she consciously courting such controversy? I tried to reach out to Khalifa through various channels, but was told that she was in "lockdown with PornHub." The porn site also declined to comment.

In a matter of months, Khalifa went from a relative nobody to the poster girl of the US porn industry—overtaking the recently retired Lisa Ann as PornHub's highest-ranked adult star. In the age of internet porn, dominated by tube sites, there is no bigger accolade. And Khalifa owed it all to the fallout from that one hijab-featuring scene.

Predictably, the use of traditional female Muslim dress—which appears to be nothing more than an incendiary prop—sparked outrage. Trolls took to Twitter to call Khalifa "shameful." Others threatened to chop her head off. One guy even took the time to mock up Khalifa in an orange jump suit, on her knees, in what one can only imagine is supposed to depict the prelude to an ISIS beheading.

Even her family got on board. "We are probably paying the price of living away from our homeland; our kids had to adapt to societies that don't resemble our culture, traditions, and values... We hope that she comes back to her senses as her image does not honor her family or Lebanon," they said in a statement.

Khalifa took the whole thing in her stride, perhaps buoyed by her burgeoning fanbase (American duo Timeflies even recorded a song about her, now with over 1.4 million plays on SoundCloud). As she told one hater who threatened her with a beheading: "Long as it's not my tits. They were expensive." Another, who warned Khalifa that she'll be "the first person in Hellfire," was told: "I've been meaning to get a little tan recently."

She may have been making light of the matter, but through measured interviews, Khalifa—who is not a Muslim—said she wasn't ignorant to the cultural sensitivity of the scene. She told The Washington Post that scenes with a hijab are "satirical" and that "Hollywood movies depict Muslims in a much worse manner than any scene BangBros could produce."

Eventually, she vented on Twitter. "Doesn't the Middle East have more important things to worry about besides me?" she wrote. "How about finding a president? Or containing ISIS?"

Put in context, the outrage does rather seem a waste of cyberspace. But like it or not, hijab porn is Khalifa's fledgling legacy. Adult film director and writer Jacky St James, profiled in January by Salon as "The Woman Who Conquered Porn," believes Khalifa's scene has "all the makings of a publicity stunt," and one that "clearly succeeded in creating the controversy it was hoping for." But she's reluctant to assume the use of the hijab will create a new trend.

Related: For more on porn, watch our doc 'VICE Meets Larry Flynt':

"It will depend entirely on whether it sells," she says. "With all the online piracy happening to the industry today, so much of the content shot is reliant upon this."

Some sectors of the industry clearly think it will, as hinted at by the influx of studio-shot scenes. First came BangBros, then, in February, Texan Chloe Amour starred as a woman from Dubai in a scene for Fantasy Massage (insisting she wanted a female masseur, but getting a male one—go figure), and last month TeamSkeet released Cream Filled Middle Eastern Beauty.

Most of these scenes play on the notion of the Middle Eastern woman as the innocent yet obedient sexual object, subjugated to do anything a man asks of her. Which, in most cases, is giving a blow job. In these scenes, the hijab or headscarf is used as an insignia for "Middle Eastern girl," a way to tell the viewer (along with the bashful glances and often feigned Middle Eastern accents) that this girl is a sexually repressed "Arab" ready and willing to bow down to her Western master.

But can the hijab really be seen as nothing more than a prop, in the same way that thick-rimmed specs and a short skirt, or a cheerleader costume and pom-poms are props for naughty secretaries and school girls, respectively? Don't the enduring politics and wider conversations surrounding hijabs, religion, and women's rights across the Middle East make it difficult to see hijabs out of context?

Commentators on the Adult DVD Talk forum don't seem to think so. "There will always be a market for this kind of porn as long as Muslim people are so uptight about sex," says aptly-named user, "Bellend."

But what are Bellend and others' stereotypes about the Middle East being some kind of sexless wasteland actually based on?

"The supposed licentiousness of the West is forever being contrasted, to my mind, in wholly spurious ways, with a sexually barren Middle East," John R Bradley, author of Behind the Veil of Vice: The Business and Culture of Sex in the Middle East, told Salon in 2010, shortly before removing himself from public life due to ill health.

Behind the Veil of Vice, he continues, was an attempt to undermine "stereotypes about Arab sexualities that have become entrenched in the English-speaking world [and] it debunks the notion, promoted by the likes of Martin Amis, that terrorism carried out by Islamists can be explained away with reference to the repressed, envious Arab male who can only find release by flying airliners into phallic-shaped skyscrapers."

The book explored the idea that watching pornography is "no longer a big deal for young Arabs, any more than it is for young Americans," and that "just about anyone in the Middle East with a satellite dish has access to hardcore pornography channels," albeit illegal ones only accessed by satellite decoders. Statistics prove it. According to recent Google data, six of the top eight porn-searching countries are Muslim states (Pakistan, Egypt, Iran, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey). The most popular porn searches of 2014 by country reflect a trend for the "hijab"—the search term ranked number four in Morocco and number five in Algeria.

Clearly, demand for hijab porn is high. If you type the word into the search bar of Pornhub or xvideos, you'll see thumbnail after thumbnail of porn featuring the headscarf—some cam stuff, lots of homemade POV and the odd budget studio job. But if porn is illegal in most Middle Eastern countries and Muslim states, where does it all come from?

"Men and women all over the Arab world not only watch porn, they film themselves engaging in sexual relations or masturbating, and post the clips on the internet," Eyal Sagui Bizawe recently wrote in an article for Israeli website Haaretz. "These are watched by Arabs from various countries who want to hear sex talk in their own language, and by surfers everywhere who are tired of the rigid and monotonous Western model of beauty."

"The adult industry is more diverse than people may realize" – Jacky St. James

User-generated content of this kind, posted on platforms such as Vine and Periscope, is the antithesis of studio-produced adult video. There's no market, profit margins, or overheads. There is only content, created by one person for another person, and often shared secretly and involuntarily. As a result, it reflects a society's sexuality in its truest form. This is not subjugation. This is representation.

"Regardless of one's perspective on the hijab, there are many women in the world who wear them and, as such, the garment's presence in porn showcases yet another moment of human diversity," says Dr. Chauntelle Tibbals, sociologist and author of the upcoming book Exposure: A Sociologist Explores Sex, Society, and Adult Entertainment.

Can we honestly say, though, that the hijab appearing in adult content (even with the user-generated stuff) actually shines a positive light on the sexuality of women in the Middle East?

"Though not without controversy and definitely not without mixed reactions, I would say so, yes," says TIbbals. "As a finished product, porn cannot be considered a literal or 'real' reflection of anyone or anything. It's a contrived production, just like any other media or narrative."

Actual people, however, are present in porn.

"Yes, and if said actual existing people creating user-generated content are also women in the Middle East, for example, these representations must show some dimension of sexualities," she continues. "Even if it's just that there are people interested in producing erotic media in regions of the globe that we, as US people, don't generally think of as porn hubs."

It's probably fair to say that most of us in the West have only a very surface-level understanding of Middle Eastern sexuality. As another commentator on the Adult DVD Talk forum writes: "I think you might be missing the point of Mia Khalifa wearing a hijab. It's not just a political statement. This kind of thing is a turn-on for many guys in strict Muslim countries. I've spent a few years in such a country. And I know it for a fact that a woman wearing a hijab and covering everything except her eyes looks very sexy and attractive. It's a cultural kind of thing that perhaps people in the West don't understand."

The producers at BangBros may well have shot Mia Khalifa Is Cumming for Dinner to cash in on the West's stereotypical ideas of Arab girls. But by owning it, Khalifa—a woman with Middle Eastern roots making headway in mainstream Western pornography—has sparked a debate about the reverse of that very idea: the apparent and already occurring sexual liberation of such women.

"The adult industry is more diverse than people may realize," says St James. "There are lines glorifying a wide variety of types: body size, breast size, butt size, race, tatted women, older women, younger women." Porn is no longer just the bleach-blonde woman with gigantic breasts performing only the most extreme sex acts. As St. James says: "That model isn't an accurate representation of the industry any more."

Follow Gareth on Twitter.

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A Get the Guy seminar in LA (Image via Matthew Hussey's Facebook page)

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Whatever your views on pickup artists—harmless idiots in shitty hats or dangerous sexual deviants in shitty hats—it's safe to say the PUA scene is not for girls. Women, by and large, have little interest in milling around outside Minus5°, practicing NLP on passersby. Instead, we're the ones on the receiving end. We're the ones being warned that we better get some pet insurance, because you're planning to "smash our pussy in."

So when I saw a Groupon deal for an event called "Get the Guy," I wondered whether I'd stumbled across the rare female equivalent. Would this actually be what it sounded like—a PUA starter course for women, a gender-flipped version of the male "seduction community," complete with the jaunty scarves and fake palm-reading routines?

I emailed a member of the Get the Guy team to ask, and was told, "Get the Guy isn't a pickup artist tool or guide—we focus more on self-improvement and personal empowerment to achieve our goals." Still, when the advertised goal is "How to find, attract, and keep your ideal man," you can't help thinking there must be some common ground; both rely on the idea that successfully ensnaring your chosen person is something that can be bottled down to a four-step plan.

Since this "personal empowerment" only cost $10 with a Groupon deal, I decided to attend the event at the Holiday Inn Bloomsbury in London to find out if it could help me harpoon a man the next time I'm drinking alone in a TGI Fridays. As a result I found myself stuck in an airless seminar room for nine long hours, along with 200 other women who seemed much, much happier to be there than I was.

The brand's founder, Matthew Hussey, started out as a dating coach for men before moving on to women in 2008. Still in his 20s, he is something of a motivational speaking wunderkind, running a life coaching service in addition to Get the Guy. He has co-written a bestselling book; presided as "expert love resident" on the Today Show; made countless TV appearances and become the self-styled "new international guru of the dating and relationship-coaching scene."

In the words of fangirl Eva Longoria: "Matthew is a genius whose magic needs to be shared with the world."

Right now, his magic is being shared with Dallas and San Diego as part of his US tour, meaning he wasn't available to speak in London. But—somewhat surprisingly—Get the Guy is a family business, so his father, Steve Hussey, was there to take the reins.

I wanted to suss out what kind of women would attend this thing—whether there was a defining characteristic to look out for. But casting my eye around the room, they just seemed like a normal cross section of the female British population. There was a palpable sense of excitement and a scent of evaporating Dove deodorant, presumably because the website promises you can "have your love life transformed in one magical day."

Steve Hussey was an engaging and charismatic speaker who knew how to work the crowd. He was also fond of peculiar "energy boosting" gimmicks. Over the course of a few hours I found myself punching the air and shouting "Spartan!", awkwardly half-dancing in the aisle and participating in a 200-person shoulder massaging session to the sound of "Uptown Funk."

After detailing the three main relationship stumbling blocks for women (our ability to find, attract, or keep men), Steve instructed us to pair up and tell our partner what we thought our problem area was. My partner, Emily*, said keeping the man was the issue; her relationships all seemed to fizzle out after a couple of months. I contended that maybe they were just the wrong guys for her, rather than pointing toward a failing on her part, but she didn't seem convinced.

Once we had analyzed our personal defects, Hussey ran a diagnostic troubleshoot on certain members of the audience. Chloe wanted to know why guys went cold after the second date; Lucy said she'd had four marriage proposals but was yet to feel an emotional connection; and Anneka claimed the last guy she'd fancied had tried to burn her house down. Hussey summed up her problem by writing "ATTRACTED TO SHITS" on his notepad.

For all that "this isn't pickup artistry" bullshit, he did recommend we stand on Oxford Street and approach men with a set of canned lines. Getting the guy wasn't just about going to bars, he said. Something as mundane as a trip to Pret could be treated as an attraction opportunity.

Related: Watch our documentary about pickup artists, 'The Showstopper' :

In fact, we were advised to be on high alert and looking our best every time we went out in public. This sounds to me less like a recipe for success, and more like the precursor to a pretty severe anxiety disorder. But from Hussey's perspective, why would you go to Duane-Reade to buy sanitary pads in just your pajamas when you could spruce yourself up a bit and pick up a new boyfriend in the process?

By the time we reached the "sex and commitment" stage, it was no great surprise to learn that, according to the Hussey school of seduction, you were supposed to withhold the first one to get the other. In fairness, this tactic seemed like it might actually work, assuming the guy you wanted was desperately insecure, and that you had no problem purposefully manipulating him into staying with you by denying him physical contact.

Hussey gave plenty of good advice (mostly about projecting a strong sense of self worth), but it was all undercut with an uncomfortable strain of hardline gender essentialism. His words seemed pitched at a world I didn't recognize, one in which men and women socialize exclusively in single-sex groups, where guys only talk about Balotelli, beer, and birds, and girls about vino, vajazzles, and vegetable smoothies. In this universe, men don't have nearly enough in common with you to be your actual friend; they are your enemy—you must slay them and drag their carcasses to your bedroom, before chaining them there via a set of contrived emotional devices.

[body_image width='937' height='620' path='images/content-images/2015/05/13/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/13/' filename='i-went-to-a-creepy-london-seminar-aimed-at-teaching-women-body-image-1431519181.png' id='55632']Caroline, Vikki, and Harriet. Photo by the author.

Over lunch, I chatted with Caroline, Vikki, and Harriet, three friends in their 20s who were nowhere near as cynical as I was. Caroline had come to a Get the Guy event last year, shortly after breaking up with a boyfriend, and had met Vikki there. Vikki was new to London and had treated the event largely as a way to expand her female friendship group. Harriet was getting tired of internet dating, and had been dragged along on the back of Caroline's glowing testimonials.

I was struck by the amount of repeat business Get the Guy seems to generate—a lot of these people said they were here for a second or third time and looking for a refresher course. There's evidently a sizeable market for female-oriented dating advice and, as the brand leader, Get the Guy is taking full advantage.

It also took advantage of how attentive its audience was to squeeze in a sales pitch. I'd seen from the website that Get the Guy runs retreats: five days in Florida or San Diego that are designed to overhaul not just your dating prospects, but your life's very blueprint. What doesn't appear on the website is the price—£2,500 [$4,000] for the retreat itself, plus £63 [$100] a night for your room, a figure that I'd imagine seems less galling after the Husseys have poked around in the embers of your romantic dreams.

On leaving the event, I considered popping into Pret to use a line we'd been given about blueberry muffins. But then I remembered a) I wouldn't find this "empowering", b) I didn't want a muffin, and c) I wouldn't be interested in a guy who enjoyed inane chats about baked goods. So there went my chances. But if you're a man who happened to be hanging around the Bloomsbury area after the Holiday Inn emptied out, it's quite possible you had a very good night indeed.

*Some names have been changed.

Follow Abi on Twitter.

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Micki Pellerano. Portrait by Kelsey Henderson

If you've got even a passing interest in postmodern magical traditions, esoteric knowledge, Aleister Crowley, or The Craft, chances are that the work of Brooklyn artist Micki Pellerano will resonate with you in a very particular way. If you've got a bit more knowledge about those subjects, you're probably already aware of his incredible, otherworldly work. A multidisciplinarian by trade, he's worked in paintings, drawings, performance art, and music videos, all informed by his longtime interest in and experience with the occult. Just don't be nervous that his stuff will feel like Fisher Price: My First Demonic Invocation— he's the real deal, and his work reflects that seriousness.

Micki is constantly being bandied about by the vapid art press as an "occult scholar." This can get a little demeaning at times. "I'm a mystical person," he told me recently, "and my artwork is merely a symptom of that." He's not an academic when it comes to the occult. He's a lifer, a member of shadowy magical orders and a regular fixture among a certain subset of New York artists and intellectuals whose interests and wardrobes slant toward the obsidian. I know him from this world, and from his old band, Cult of Youth, and I've always admired his drawings.

Tonight, Micki's got a new show opening at American Medium in Brooklyn, to coincide with the gallery's one-year anniversary. He's named his show Celestial Love, and it focuses on the human body as it undergoes various states of decay and regeneration. The work is firmly planted in the zeitgeist while remaining patently indigestible, owing to a deep originality in form, technique, and subject. He suggests the Italian masters' inventive religious mythicism, but layers it onto a shadow world of crypto-religious rites and shadowy dreamscapes, all elegantly scrawled on coventry smooth paper. He's what you might call an artist's artist, but it's more accurate to say he's an artist's artist's artist.

Last week, Micki was kind enough to show me the work at his studio, a cozy second-floor walkup cluttered with odd decanters of strange herbs and ritualistic knives and goblets. I say it was kind, because he was losing his mind completing an inhuman amount of work—in addition to finishing up Celestial Love, Micki was shooting a video for my friends in the Brooklyn industrial two-piece Uniform, and packing for a trip back home to Miami. He sat me down in a heavy leather armchair—"the king's chair," he told me—to discuss his new show, how he makes work, and his recent interest in American transcendentalism.

VICE: Tell me a bit about your new show, Celestial Love.
Micki Pellerano : It's four large-scale graphite drawings dealing with a kind of poetry, two smaller images I call "Blonde Nails," and two other drawings I did from a series called Separation, which are all nudes suspended in voids enduring states of alchemical release. I started recently, when a friend of mine read me an Emerson poem called "Threnody." I was completely blown away—it had a major impact on my process for this show. After I heard it for the first time, something shattered in my brain, and I just sat on my bed and wept. It's the most beautiful thing, all about cosmic potential.

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Micki Pellerano. 'The Void,' 2015

Do you feel like you're moving closer to that potential?
I've been getting closer to it my whole life. I've studied the occult for a long time, not just because I like the books, but because it lends itself to personal experience and psychic evolution. It changes you. You think differently and see things differently and communicate with other realms of existence. There's no difference between art and magic. And that's why I'm interested in the concept of celestial love. For me, it's a shattering state where ecstasy and suffering are indistinguishable from each other.

What are you trying to do with this show?
It's about suffering and finding ways to prolong suffering. Suffering can be a great thing, and you can channel the energy. There's an amazing quote from Dostoevsky where he says, "Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart." Trying to escape suffering is crazy—it's a part of being alive. If you make a choice and attempt to master pain in such a way that it no longer has the power to paralyze you, then you can accept it and embrace it and channel it. That's what alchemy really is. I'm exploring alchemy in my drawings and in my spiritual studies, and I'd be a shitty alchemist if I didn't know how to transform pain and make it work for me.

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Micki Pellerano. 'The Veil,' 2015

How do you actually make work?
When I sit down to work, it's all about giving form to the grandiose ideas in my head. One of my favorite quotes is from Arthur Machen, a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the late 1800s and early 1900s. He says, "I dream in fire, but I work in clay." I have these massive inspirations, and then I'm forced to take my clumsy hands and give some sort of form to a formless idea.

Do you work without any other stimuli around? I read this thing once about how Basquiat worked with open magazines and the television on and whatnot.
I'm always looking at a bunch of things all at once. It's a total mess. Books open everywhere. I've got music blaring. I like audiobooks. Just stuff everywhere.

Do you have any routines or rituals that you come back to?
I'm a meditator. I meditate in the morning before I start working. I do three types of meditation: Pranayama, which is a breath-control meditation, then a mantra meditation, and then at night I do something called scrying, which is staring at an object.

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Micki Pellerano. 'Celestial Love,' 2015

Do you have any tricks to clear your head?
Baths. I love baths. And I listen to music in the bath. Lately it's been Alice Coltrane and Philip Glass. I use lots of epsom salts, and Japanese mint oil.

How do you interpret the art world's relationship with the occult?
I think our culture in general has this relationship to occultism where they find it fashionable and interesting, and yet they shy away from phenomena that are truly of an occult nature. They enjoy its mystery and imagery but are hesitant about genuine experience. In my work I try to make that relatable. To me, there are two main strands in the art world right now: The first is social or political commentary. This is ineffective if the artist's political notions are predictable and already shared by his colleagues and his audience. The other theme is popular culture. Artists are mocking pop culture while simultaneously drawing their inspiration from it, which I think this is an inverted dynamic. Historically, the art world has influenced pop culture by trickling down into it. Now it's the opposite, and I find that dangerous, and toxic to our culture.

Do you ever feel like you're boiled down into an occult artist, as if the term were a marketing tool?
My occultism has become more like my sexuality: It's simply an aspect of my being that touches everything I do, but doesn't predominate. It's like, I'm gay, sure. But really, who gives a shit?

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Micki Pellerano. 'In Solving Rite,' 2015

Celestial Love opens tonight at American Medium, at 7 PM, and runs through June 6. American Medium is located in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, at 424 Gates Avenue. You can find more information on their website.

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Bernard Valcourt is told to "shut up" in the House of Commons Wednesday night.

During a debate in the House of Commons Wednesday night, the Honourable Bernard Valcourt tried to shrug off youth suicide rates on First Nation reserves, an issue that has been haunting our country for decades.

Charlie Angus, NDP MP and ethics critic, raised the issue in a followup question to Aboriginal Affairs Minister Valcourt during a House debate.

"I'm not going to engage in silly rhetoric with the minister, I'm going to ask him: Given the horrific death rates that we have among children who don't have access to schools will he tell us what the national suicide rate is on reserves for young people under his watch?" he asked.

Valcourt responded: "Mr. Speaker, Mr. Chair, I mean, you know, the assertion of the honourable member that these children are under the minister's watch shows a great misunderstanding of that member, of the responsibility of the department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development."

Valcourt added that these children are "first and foremost the responsibility of their parents."

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/27S_84kpXfA' width='500' height='281']

Bernard Valcourt altercation via Youtube user Progressive Progress

This is not simply a rich, white, old man who forgot to check his privilege at the door—this is someone who has completely forgotten the people who he is meant to protect.

Spoiler alert: Valcourt never provides the suicide rate.

The RCMP has reported that suicide is the second leading cause of death for youth aged 15 to 34 and that "rates of suicide for Aboriginal youth are even higher, and are considered to be among the highest in the world."

In fact, they also reported that as many as 25 percent of accidental deaths may actually be unreported suicides. First Nation youth are also five to six times more likely to commit suicide than non-aboriginal youth.

These issues can be linked to the government itself: by the creation and use of residential schools, Canada arguably committed cultural genocide. The last residential school closed in 1996, not even 20 years ago. "Among youth who had one or more parents attend residential school were more likely to have had suicidal ideation than those whose parents had no residential school experience," reads a 2007 report about suicide rates from the Aboriginal Healing Foundation.

"Governmental policies of forced assimilation enacted through the residential school system and the child welfare system resulted in profound disruption in the transmission of culture and the maintenance of healthy communities," reads the same report.

And now the minister of aboriginal affairs claims that this grave, multi-generational issue is the responsibility of the parents who themselves were forced into these schools and horrific situations. While the government has officially apologized for residential schools, healing the individual and communal damage caused by years of oppression and abuse still requires much more time and far greater commitment from our government. Attitudes like Valcourt's are actively working against any positive efforts.

Valcourt also raised an unreleased RCMP statistic in March, saying that aboriginal men kill 70 percent of the country's murdered aboriginal women. Again, it seems he is trying to deflect responsibility away from the government on the issue and the steps necessary to fix what they originally started. And with no national inquiry to the cases of these missing and murdered women, the ethnicity of a murderer is the last thing that matters when innocent people are being killed.

About a week later, when he was confronted by Niki Ashton, NDP MP, about the existence and lack of support or public data for his claim, he said: "Indeed last week I did a tour of the prairies [... ] while I don't disclose specifics of closed-door meetings I can assure the honourable member that the discussions were productive and our government will continue to work with first nations to address these issues." Which sounds more like a long-winded empty promise.

Calls have already been made for Valcourt to step down, and in light of the recent events in House, these calls might only get louder.

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Mindy Lahiri and one of her many white boyfriends practice the whitest thing of all: a Marlon Brando impression

I should preface this by saying I don't want to hate Mindy Kaling. I want to adore and cherish the Indian-American comedian. I want to watch the TV shows and movies she stars in and think, "Isn't she great? She's great, right?" I want to ask a friend over text if they want to go watch the new thing she is in, and for them to say, "Fuck yes, I do."

Why? The true glee of watching the first Indian-American woman to have written and starred in her own television show is truly novel, and more importantly, historic.

But when I found out FOX cancelled The Mindy Project earlier this month, I let out a big, "HA! This is great news." To my chagrin, the streaming service Hulu announced it would "save" the show today, and has ordered 26 new episodes. Foiled again!

I've seen every single episode of the show, which ran a short three seasons, half hate-watching and half leaning in and enjoying the fact that I was witnessing a female lead who looked like me on a mainstream television network. It was a confusing three years.

The Mindy Project is the show on which Mindy Kaling plays Doctor Mindy Lahiri, and essentially, other than being a doctor, the plot hinges on her dating a ton of white dudes. The few times she addresses that fact, by having other characters call her out on her dating record, she recalls the time she dated a Korean guy: "His hands were so small, it made my boobs feel enormous!" Nice, Mindy. Here is why she sucks.

Reason 1: Kaling doesn't care about being Indian
Unfortunately, Kaling's inability to speak about race follows her outside of the alter ego she plays on television. Kaling has been asked on a number of occasions to comment on her presence in a predominantly white space and her status as a pioneer for South Asian women specifically. Like a grumpy old white man, Kaling counters, "I'm a fucking Indian woman who has her own fucking network television show, OK?"

Not only does she scoff at the racial identifier, but gender as well. In her first book Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? she preemptively asks, "Why didn't you talk about whether women are funny or not?" Her answer: "I just felt that by commenting on that in any real way, it would be tacit approval of it as a legitimate debate, which it isn't."

Reason 2: Kaling doesn't care about racial representation
I agree with Mindy. It shouldn't be a debate; women are funny. But why is the writing room for The Mindy Project made up of men (with the exception of Tracey Wigfield)? And why have most of her female co-stars on the show disappeared due to weak storylines (Anna Camp, Amanda Setton, Zoe Jarman, Kelen Coleman, and Mary Grill)?

Reason 3: Kaling's strange love for whiteness
I expect more intelligence from Kaling, especially since she is also a woman of colour in the West and her dual culture and bilingualism are realities for a lot of South Asians born and bred in North America. She has acknowledged that she has faced sexism in the industry, and yet refuses to comment on whether or not women are funny. I think part of the frustration lies in Kaling's less than intersectional feminism. Kaling seems to be more driven by traditional notions of success and heteronormative relationships. Viewers are bombarded by white ideals of beauty with every new love interest Mindy lands upon. Her pursuit of and desire for whiteness is reflected in the script on countless occasions. In the Season 2 episode "The Desert," Mindy is caught trespassing and hands her ID to an officer, saying, "OK, I know that my ID says that I'm 5'10" with blond hair, 110 pounds with crystal blue eyes. My philosophy is that an ID should be aspirational."

Reason 4: I need Kaling more than she needs me
OK, fine, I know, diversity is not an easy goal to achieve. It requires a lot of work from everyone involved. But just because Kaling is a person of colour who leads a show's cast, doesn't mean she gets a pass on the race issue. All of that work is undone when you avoid questions about a lack of representation and insert racially coy gags into your script, such as "... Mindy hates not being the only Asian in the room." These attempts to poke fun at race are lazy because they are not properly taken up in the show: they are simply inserted and forgotten about. Kaling uses race when it works, and conveniently avoids it when it does not. In an interview with EW she shares: "I was just born in this skin, so it's not something I think about while I'm writing." Just when it's funny, right?

I'm yearning for models like Kaling, because they are not readily available, which makes it ultra disappointing that she doesn't recognize her complexity as a non-white, female comedian. Kaling instead completely rejects these aspects of her identity, and chooses to implant visions of white ideals, in an industry that is already saturated with "Alexis Bledel Blue" eyes.

That is why I hate Mindy Kaling.

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The Samsung White 'League of Legends' team

Many a young gamer has thought about how cool it would be to grow up and actually make a living from their favorite hobby. And by now, you've almost certainly heard that this dream can turn into a reality if you're good enough—and the very best pro-gamers can make eye-watering money. Chinese Dota 2 team NewBee won over $5,000,000 at last year's The International 4 tournament. 2015's tournament is still a few months away, but the prize pool is over $8,000,000 at the time of writing.

Multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games like Dota 2 and League of Legends are where the money is at the moment. They attract millions of players—the reason behind the vast amounts of money that flow in and out of the games, and why their online viewing figures are so huge. It's through playing games like these that a great many pro-gamers pay their way, some extravagantly. But no newcomer to the scene should anticipate a long and healthy career, nor should they wait too long before entering the fray. In your early 20s? You've probably already missed the boat. Players in their mid-20s are ancient by pro-gaming standards. Looking at the professional LoL LCS leagues in North America and Europe, not one major competitor is anywhere close to turning 30.

Dr. Amine Issa published his findings last year about what, if anything, makes professional eSports players better at games than the rest of us. One thing he noted in a Reddit AMA was that he believes the age ceiling for players is much higher than people think: "As for League of Legends and the age ceiling, I think the game is more about good decisions." Our reflexes dull with age, but he believes that experience and intelligence can make up for that. All the same, other factors beyond physical fitness come into it, and the evidence is there that the pros simply don't play for that long.

Short-lived playing careers have become particularly apparent recently with the retirement of a few high profile players. Hai Du Lam, who featured briefly in VICE's recent eSports documentary (watch it below), is one of the most famous League of Legends players in the world. As the mid laner for Cloud 9, he would often go up against some of the best players from around North America, and would often win. On April 22, Jack Etienne, the founder and manager of Cloud 9, announced that Hai would be retiring from competitive LoL play. Hai is 22-years-old.

For more on gaming, watch our doc on the competitive world of eSports:

We're used to sports people not having careers that reach to traditional retirement age. Soccer players rarely play at the top level beyond their mid-30s, and they can call it quits sooner if they are particularly injury prone. But it might come as a surprise to learn that career-ending injuries are fairly commonplace in competitive gaming, too.

"My wrist injury is something that I simply cannot ignore," writes Hai in his retirement statement, referring to tendonitis. "It limits my ability to play as much as I need to and my ability to improve. I cannot keep up with the amount of Solo Queue games my teammates play and it's not fair to them. At best, my wrist injury would have only allowed me to play for another split and that wasn't even certain."

Similar injuries have forced many others out of the game. Wai "Toyz" Kin Lau won the second world championship with Taipei Assassins in 2012, but was forced to retire in 2013 after carpal tunnel syndrome became too much for him. An improvement in his condition allowed him to return to the game with the Hong Kong Esports team, but only time will tell how long that will last.

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"Promise," as seen in VICE's documentary on eSports

One player quit the game for a more heart-breaking reason. In March 2014, Cheon "Promise" Min-Ki attempted suicide by jumping off a 12-story building. Miraculously he survived, and is doing well today, even appearing for an interview in VICE's documentary. He had become embroiled in a match-fixing scandal in South Korea, which led to his drastic course of action. The owner of Promise's team, ahq, reportedly threatened his players if they tried to win. He also lied to them and withheld wages. For Promise, it all became too much.

This is an extreme case, but pressure forcing League of Legends players out of the game is not unheard of. Yu "Misaya" Jingxi was formerly captain and mid laner of World Elite, later Team WE. In an interview with onGamers after his 2013 retirement, he put the main reason down to stress: "I personally want to live a happier life and the issues our team has been having made my life suffer to some degree... Being a team captain for me personally is a huge responsibility and I still have to think about my personal life."

If it's not one thing, it's another. A big contributing factor to the retirement of League of Legends players is that they simply aren't good enough anymore. This was the case for Brian "TheOddOne" Wyllie and Peter "Yellowpete" Wüppen, who were each mainstays on their respective teams for several years. "There is no arguing about the fact that my performance within the last couple of months has not been what I want or the team needs it to be," Yellowpete said after his retirement. TheOddOne wrote: "I decided that we'd have a much better chance of winning if I were in a more supportive role such as coach and if we had someone even better jungling."

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Even Hai, at one time considered to be the best mid laner in North America, had people doubting his abilities: "Over time, my teammates started to lose confidence in my abilities as a player and a shotcaller. That's what really hit me hard. I don't think that is an obstacle I was able to overcome, and it really got to me." As the game evolved and the meta ever so gradually changed, it became harder for him to be successful: "My play style was not going to work anymore."

For most of these professionals, League of Legends is all they know. They live in a house with their teammates, practicing for many hours every day. And when they're not playing, they're in team meetings, discussing previous or upcoming matches. Some of them have to do work with sponsors; others have a live streaming schedule to stick to. It's a wonder that more of them don't simply burn out, which is what happened to Mitch "Krepo" Voorspoels, Lauri "Cyanide" Happonen, and Steve "Chauster" Chau. They represent the tip of an iceberg, as many others have retired citing reasons such as losing their love of the game and not being able to keep up with the amount of time needed to remain successful.

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It's not all doom and gloom for budding eSports professionals, however. While playing careers only last a handful of years, if you still love the game and don't mind moving into a more supportive role, there are options available to you. Hai is now the chief gaming officer for Cloud 9. It'll be his job to acquire new players for the organization across all of the games it has teams competing in, and bring in fresh business partners.

Krepo is hoping to pursue a career in shoutcasting, where he would be commentating on live games. He is already one step toward achieving this, making regular appearances on analysis panels for live shows he is not competing in. Michael "Imaqtpie" Santana retired from competition at the age of 22, but is still playing LoL—he now makes a living out of live streaming all day on Twitch. Wei "CaoMei" Han-Dong is doing something very similar, and now reportedly earns $800,000 per year. Riot Games, the developer behind League of Legends, has launched summits to help players and give them tips on how to maintain their personal brands after their competitive careers are over.

So yes, if you're young and seriously good, you can have a (short, stressful, but possibly very lucrative) career playing video games professionally. But if you'd rather play games for the rest of your life, you're better off sticking to the lottery and hoping your numbers come up—that, or that you've got such a wonderful way with words that a shoutcaster or streamer role works out for you. It's going to be interesting to see where someone like Hai is in another 22 years—will the professional gaming industry still be supporting him? Will eSports always be home to talents that burn brightly for only the briefest time? Or can it become a place for more mature competitors to coexist beside younger, hungrier rivals? Where careers can be prolonged, moving through roles within the same industry? The exciting thing is that, right now, we simply don't know.

Stills taken from VICE's documentary, eSports

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A younger Prince Charles, visiting the US in 1981. Photo by Tyle via

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Earlier this week, the Guardian published a batch of letters written by Prince Charles to various British ministers. The letters—sent between September of 2004 and April of 2005, and obtained after a decade-long freedom-of-information battle with the government—include a number sent to then prime minister Tony Blair, and cover a wide stretch of ground, including education, health, defense, farming, aircraft, and, crucially, Patagonian fish, whose overfishing Charles believes will lead to the final annihilation of the "poor old albatross, for which I shall continue to campaign."

There are no scandalous revelations in these documents, but the picture they paint of Charles is an interesting one. Already known as a mildly eccentric traditionalist with a love of old buildings and talking to plants, the prince emerges in these letters as a melancholy critic of capitalism and a deeply insecure, narcissistic communicator. It's as though he's aware of his reputation as a coddled ignoramus but just can't stop writing his letters. His position as prince means that he has spent his life in the most luxurious, entitled kind of purgatory. People have to at least pretend to listen to him, but he's smart enough to know that they're pretending—or insecure enough to fear it. He's like a rare breed of bear, alone in a large, well-appointed enclosure, turning tricks for an audience who will return to their smart phones after a couple of minutes gawping.

In missive after missive, Charles hedges his reasonably detailed thoughts with self-deprecation and apology. "I apologize for the length of this letter," he writes to Blair. To John Reid: "I have hesitated to bother you... but I feel now is the time to return to the fray... At the risk of being a complete bore about this... apologies for pestering you about so many things." To Paul Murphy: "As usual, I repeated myself—yet again." To Ruth Kelly: "If you can bear to receive a report on this year's Education Summer School from someone with such old-fashioned views (!)..." (In case you're wondering, the bracketed exclamation mark really is the prince's.) Later, he says, hoping for reassurance: "But perhaps I am now too dangerous to associate with!"

The prince hopes against hope that the fear he has of his own irrelevance is not true. He feels that he is a nuisance and just wants someone to put an arm around him and say, "No Charles, you are not a nuisance. Your views on Patagonian fish, summer schools, and homeopathy are deeply valuable."

He has told Jonathan Dimbleby, his official biographer, that he felt as though his parents' preoccupation with their royal duties and their traditional upper-class reserve meant that he had an emotionally starved childhood. The neediness that this may have created is evident on every page of these letters. Charles needs to be listened to, and this is where the narcissism of his rank comes in—he expects to be listened to, even if, as is always the case, those who are listening simply politely nod and bow before essentially ignoring him (a special shout-out here to the obsequious Charles Clarke, who signs off his letter in the Debrett's-approved style: "I have the honor to be, Sir, Your Royal Highness's most humble and obedient servant").

Neediness sometimes manifests itself in his sentimentality. Like many emotionally troubled or repressed members of the English upper class, he loves animals. And anyone who has seen his mother cooing over her corgis knows that animals can provide an easy, uncomplicated outlet for love where human relations are messy and complicated.

Politically, though, Charles might almost count as an "extremist" in Theresa May's Britain. He often comes across as a sort of feudal George Monbiot, with his letters revealing a deep concern for the environment and for farmers. He writes about a "cycle of despair and hopelessness" in upland farming communities, and calls the dominant position of supermarkets the "single biggest issue affecting British farmers and the food chain." He's a climate-change advocate, he's worried about the privatization of the NHS, and he's a champion of food sovereignty, all things that put him in opposition to the market-driven neo-liberalism of the current government.

Watch: Meeting Royal Baby-Loving Monarchists in London:

So is Charles Che Guevara in Wellington boots and a double-breasted suit? Not quite. After all, this is a farmer and a massive landowner who wants to sell his shortbread at extortionate rates. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels refer to those who criticize capitalism from a feudal point of view as often making points that are spot on. This seems to apply to Charles, whose paternalistic concern for the way in which people are being let down by market forces doesn't, on the evidence of these letters, extend to the abolition of him and the creation of a classless society based on common ownership.

What these letters might show, though, is that our society has moved so far to the right, in terms of free-market fundamentalism, that the old-fashioned forms of conservatism that Charles relates to—caring for one's environment, a responsibility to the lower orders, one-nation Toryism—have begun to look left-wing. And because of that shift in society, Charles's letters are infused with a sort of hopeless melancholia, a weary shrug that says, "Well, I suppose I'll be fine, but it does trouble one rather." And what does he do when that trouble visits him? Write a letter—in part, perhaps, to appease his conscience.

Since the Guardian sought access to these letters, exemptions from freedom-of-information requests have been extended by Parliament to correspondence from the monarch, the heir to the throne, and the second in line. That means we may not be able to read more from Charles. However, it seems unlikely that he has stopped putting pen to paper, that his sense of entitlement has been stripped away to the point where he will no longer dip into his weary, melancholy heart and bother some minister about whatever happens to be troubling him that day.

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Thumbnail image via WikiCommons

Today, basketball man Allen Iverson sat down with CBS This Morning to talk about his career and address rumors that he's broke after earning $200 million in the NBA. The Washington Post wrote about AI hitting rock bottom in 2013, and stories of him begging for change in Atlanta and contemplating playing Russian Roulette have been circulating for the past few years, but Iverson has not openly addressed the claims until now.

Tomorrow, Showtime will air Iverson, a documentary about the legendary shooting guard which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last year. Iverson was on CBS to promote the documentary, and was quick to shrug off questions about his money troubles.

"That's a myth," he said flatly. "That's a rumor."

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242 Main Street in Burlington, Vermont was originally the location of the city's water department. A nondescript building situated near the campus of the University of Vermont and across from a jewelry store, it would look more like an old middle school if not for the graffiti covering the front door and the sign next to it that reads, "Celebrating 25 Years of Art & Music."

It isn't a household name like the now-defunct CGBGs in New York City, and it doesn't get the same recognition in the punk rock history books as a spot like 924 Gilman Street in San Francisco. But 242 Main Street is special in its own way: Nearly 30 years after opening its doors, it is now one of the longest running all-ages music venue in the country, beginning as an offbeat government-funded effort to overturn a draconian city ban on live music that resulted in the transformation of an old administrative building into the municipal youth center that exists to this day.

The leader of that effort, and the person perhaps most responsible for the founding of 242 Main, was Jane O'Meara Sanders, the director of the Mayor's Youth Office who later became the president of Burlington College and now serves as a commissioner for the Vermont Economic Development Authority. As for the mayor who was partly responsible for this DIY, youth-run venue that played host to bands like Fugazi and opened the same month that Husker Du released Candy Apple Grey: It was her husband, Bernie Sanders, now a Vermont Senator and Democratic candidate for president in 2016.

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Fugazi at 242 Main Street, the city-sanctioned punk venue Bernie Sanders created as mayor of Burlington, Vermont. Photo courtesy of Fugazi Live

When Bernie Sanders was elected mayor of Burlington in 1981, after an upset win over a powerful six-term incumbent, he tasked his future wife—who at the time went by her maiden name Driscoll—and local youth organizers to find a way to improve communication between the city's politically active youth population and the municipal government.

"The first thing was that we wanted an office in City Hall," O'Meara Sanders said in an interview with VICE. "One that was empowered when decisions were being made. So we went before the City Council, a local principal and I, and we said we wanted a desk and a phone in City Hall. And they approved it."

Run by a mix of volunteers and public servants, the Mayor's Youth Office set about implementing new programs: launching a Burlington public access TV show run by kids; opening a sliding-fee scale daycare that's still running; helping the elderly with snow shoveling; and starting a newspaper run by teenagers that published stories on issues ranging from teen suicide to the school budget.

One of the main goals of the new office was to build a youth center in Burlington—and local teenagers made it clear that they wanted it to be an all-ages place where they could see and perform music. The problem was that a local ordinance passed during the previous administration prohibited live music performances on public property.

"We did a battle of the bands the first year and we got approval to do it that one time, and it was fantastic," O'Meara Sanders said. "We had hundreds and hundreds of kids coming out for six bands, and it's still going onto this day."

After the success of the first show, the Mayor's Youth Office started using a local auditorium for kids to play and watch music, but found that it wasn't an ideal spot. The solution was 242 Main Street, the vacated office of the Burlington Water Division.

Related: Bernie Sanders Dreams of a Revolution in 2016

Initially, O'Meara Sander said, there was some public opposition to the new center. "There were editorials saying, 'We don't need a center downtown, we should just participate with nonprofits and after-school centers,' but even in City Hall, when [the Mayor's Youth Office] grew we moved to the first floor of City Hall, and instead of walking up the steps, kids would walk in through the window... We had kids all the time in City Hall."

"When I went to City Hall for the first time as a community organizer, before Bernie was elected, it was gloomy and dark," she recalled. "But when we started, we did a performing arts program where we did Annie and Grease, and they'd practice for the plays every day in the City Hall auditorium where people worked, so finally the City Hall people were like, 'Yeah, we agree, they need their own place,'" she laughed.

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Local artists and teens transformed 242 Main Street, a vacant water meter building into an all-ages DIY music venue. Photo courtesy of Jane O'Meara Sanders

242 Main started out as an all-encompassing youth center, but by the end of Sanders's tenure as mayor in 1989, it had become renowned for its punk scene—a transformation that is all the more remarkable given that local police forces and large rock clubs in other cities at the time were doing anything they could to stop punk from happening. Not to mention that, in the Reagan era, with the federal government rapidly pulling funding from local governments, paying for a teen center with city dollars was no small feat.

Noisey: The Life Cycle of a Punk Band

Under the management of Burlington resident Kathy Lawrence, the space played host to local punk acts like Hollywood Indians as well as legends like Fugazi and Operation Ivy. To this day, it hosts independent music of all types: while most shows at the space are made up mostly of local bands and smaller touring acts, the venerable Boston hardcore band Bane, a stalwart of the scene, played a 30th anniversary show at the venue last October.

"The impact 242 Main has had on Burlington music is incalculable," said Dan Bolles, a music editor for Vermont alt-weekly Seven Days, who wrote a retrospective of the venue back in January. "You would be hard pressed to find any rock musician who grew up in the area that hasn't logged time on that stage at some point... It's where most of us played our first shows and learned how to be in bands. Most of us eventually age out of 242 Main. But it's a cornerstone in the musical upbringing of local youth to this day."

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Inside 242 Main Street. Photo courtesy of Jane O'Meara Sanders

After Sanders left office to run for Congress, 242 Main was bounced around between several city departments before falling under the jurisdiction of the Burlington Parks, Recreation, and Waterfront department. It remains an all-ages, substance-free venue, and for the most part, it still operates with the cooperation of the local government.

"I'm told that there have been times when the police and city officials have taken an interest in 242, probably because throngs of punky looking kids hanging around is apt to arouse suspicion," Bolles said. "But more often than not, the cops come to realize that 242 Main is pretty benign. Hell, half the kids who hang out there are straight edge."

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Image courtesy of Fugazi Live

When I asked why Burlington decided to start the youth center, in the face of what was considered common sense governing at the time, O'Meara Sanders was matter-of-fact. "It was something that the community of young people said that they wanted, needed, and were willing to take care of," she said. "They didn't ask us to give them anything—they asked us to provide the opportunity. Everyone was very well aware that they had to police it and make sure that there were no problems. For us, it was a belief that if kids feel that they're respected and needed and that they're a component of a greater good, then that's fantastic."

Now, as Bernie Sanders gears up for a 2016 presidential run, the formation of the Mayor's Youth Office and 242 Main provides interesting insight into the administrative style of Vermont's beloved Socialist senator—an offbeat yet tangible manifestation of Sanders' ideas about democracy, which almost radically encourage participation in government. With his work in Burlington, Sanders, whose anti-establishment politics have puzzled pundits and endeared him to liberals looking for an alternative to Hillary Clinton, staked his claim that government can be a positive force in people's lives. And for generations of kids in Burlington, 242 Main Street has been just that.

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Yesterday, Harry Shearer, the iconic voice behind characters such as Mr. Burns, Ned Flanders, Principal Skinner, Reverand Lovejoy, Kent Brockman, and many more on The Simpsons, announced he will be leaving the show. In an email sent to CNN Money, showrunner Al Jean said, "As The Simpsons continues its 27th and 28th seasons, Harry Shearer will not be within the show."

This situation is bad, like Sideshow Bob stepping on an endless procession of rakes. But, for now, the last rake has still yet to be struck. Reportedly, Shearer is leaving the show over a contract dispute—CNN Money states that he was offered $14 million over two years, with the option to pursue other projects. The exact terms of the deal offered to Shearer are not public. Though Jean's email carries with it a note of finality, this isn't the first time a contract dispute has threatened to trip up The Simpsons. In 1998, the showrunners went so far as to enlist casting directors to secure an entirely new Simpsons cast before a deal was reached with the show's principles.

Regardless of whether Shearer stays or goes, his work on The Simpsons is but a small drop in the considerable bucket that is Shearer's career. He was a member of Saturday Night Live's cast in its fifth season, appearing alongside other comedy greats such as Bill Murray, Jane Curtin, and Gilda Radner. Meanwhile, as a boy Shearer appeared in the pilot for Leave it to Beaver, then called House in Order, giving him the rare distinction of being part of three generations of iconic TV. Plus, he was the principal on Dawson's Creek, which is nothing to sneeze at.

In the film world, he played small roles in a dizzying array of classic movies, from Star Wars: A New Hope to The Right Stuff, to The Fisher King. He also turned up in both The Truman Show and EDtv, which is sort of baffling considering the fact that they were basically the same movie. And while the late-90s Godzilla remake transcended the plane of suck and dove into the depths of cinematic catastrophe, it did yield this sort of amazing short featuring Shearer (who also appeared in the film) hosting a news magazine-style segment in Japan about Godzilla's origins.

Shearer also delivers what might be the funniest joke from Wayne's World 2. In one scene, Wayne and Garth are listening to a radio host named Handsome Dan. "I bet he's totally studly and buffed," Wayne says. "With a voice like that," Garth says, "he's gotta be a babe magnet." When the pair go to meet Handsome Dan to appear on his show, he turns out to be, well, Harry Shearer at his most nebbish.

Shearer was also a non- Wayne's World force on radio, hosting the long-running public radio show Le Show, as well as appearing on the BBC program Not Today, Thank You, playing a man convinced he's too ugly to be seen in public. He also has written three books and directed the documentary The Big Uneasy, a critical look at the US government's handling of Hurricane Katrina (watch the full film on YouTube here).

My favorite iteration of Shearer, however, has been his status in Christopher Guest's loose repertory of improvisers in films like This Is Spinal Tap, A Mighty Wind, and For Your Consideration. As Spinal Tap's Derek Smalls, Shearer served as the (vaguely) dry foil for the completely out-there Nigel Tufnel and David St. Hubbins. He helped set the standard for caricatures of clueless rock dudes by getting flagged at airport security for stuffing a cucumber wrapped in tinfoil into his pants, getting stuck in the pod during "Rock N' Roll Creation," pointing out that "water is a drug," and interrupting a screaming match to raise the practical question of whether the band was going to do "Stonehenge" tomorrow.

In another scene, Shearer as Smalls reflected upon the untimely demise of Stumpy Joe, but one in an endless parade of deceased Spinal Tap drummers. "It's not a very pleasant story," he sputters, "but, uh, he died. He choked—the official explanation was he choked on vomit... he passed away. They can't prove whose vomit it was... they don't have the ability." Then Nigel cuts him off, and Smalls twiddles his thumbs, as if he'd been interrupted in a conversation about the weather.

Related on Motherboard: The Simpsons Will Soon Be Available for Online Streaming

In A Mighty Wind, Shearer plays Mark Shubb, something of Derek Smalls's long-lost spiritual cousin. Shubb's the bassist for the Folksmen, a Kingston Trio-esque group who, after a protracted period of minor fame, fell off the folk circuit. Their sole hit was "Old Joe's Place," an ode to a nonexistent road house whose punchline is Shearer singing in a basso profundo, "Ea... Ah... Oe's!" He delivers the insanely corny line at the Folksmen's reunion show with the earnestness of an old-time comic who knows his joke's going to land before he even finishes it. At the end of the film, Shearer's character discovers that he is a woman.

The point of all of this is when Shearer tweets that he values "the freedom to do other work," he's not just talking out his ass. If Shearer is indeed gone from The Simpsons, it's not like he's going to disappear. Besides, The Simpsons has sucked for years anyways, as VICE's own Joe Bish wrote yesterday. I'd rather have Harry Shearer out there, contributing more laughs to the world, than languishing on a show that might keep him from being great.

Drew Millard is on Twitter.