Jim Mangan is an old friend of ours whose work has graced the pages of VICE over the years. While he usually spends his time wandering the dunes of the American desert, he was recently in New York City and stopped by the offices to say hi and give us a copy of his new self-published book, Bastard Child. We were like, "Hey, thanks, Jim Mangan! We really enjoy this book and your related series of photos from the Southwest, Time of Nothing. Say, could we ask you a few questions about them, then write down the answers, and then put it all on the internet so people can read what you have to say?" He said yes, so we did just that.

VICE: Your previous work featured humans in landscapes, but now you seem to have moved more toward documenting the landscape itself.
Jim Mangan: Almost all the images (three images represent California, Wyoming, and Nevada) were shot in the Utah desert, which to me, strictly from a landscape standpoint, is the most interesting place on Earth. I've spent so much time exploring these different areas in the southern portion of Utah—each has its own very unique qualities and aesthetics, and, ultimately, sort of present themselves as separate planets even though they're only 30 to 40 minutes away from one another. The imagery you see in the photos represents the places I kept getting drawn back to. Initially, I wanted to only see new locations, but as I searched I realized how special certain ones are. The more I kept going back to the same ones the more of connection I developed. I think if I was stripped of the privilege to spend time in these magical places it would be sort of like a girl I was totally in love with breaking up with me and never wanting to see me again—I would be totally devastated! 

I definitely have over the past few months been presenting more of my landscape images, but there are still more human/figurative projects on the horizon. Many of these photos are what inspired my Time of Nothing project, which is abstract landscapes shot over and around the Great Salt Lake, but there are quit a few that were used as inspiration shots for some of my figurative projects such as "Color'd" and "Bedu."

These images seem to show the effects of people imposing their will on the landscape by building roads, bridges, houses, etc. How do these actions by humans in nature play a role in the work? Is there an implied message?
First and foremost I wanted to emphasize the different layers and colors in these relatively desolate places, but, also, as I began to edit that image, I realized I wanted to emphasize that man is lurking and he's always ready to fuck shit up. Hopefully, this is a subtle reminder of that.

There's one photo were you see a man standing in a shelter with polarized windows and he's looking out at the desert mountains in front of him. It speaks metaphorically to how many of us view the world from our computers, TVs, and phones.

How did the work in Bastard Child inform the work in Time of Nothing?
I started shooting Bastard Child from the ground, and as I mentioned before I was really trying to capture all the layers that exist within the Utah desert. I decided I wanted to shoot some of my favorite locations from the air and I went up in a Cessna with a friend of a friend who pilots and owns one. As we took off from Salt Lake City we were flying at a really low level over the Great Salt Lake and I snapped off some shots with the intention of them being abstract. When I got them back I sort of freaked out and realized I had something I felt was pretty special and wanted to create a project out of it that delved into these layers in a more abstract and painterly kind of way. 

Many of the pictures, while visually very beautiful and interesting, confuse the eye in terms of depth and distance. Was that purposeful?
That was definitely the intention with some of the images, but not initially. As I shot from the ground everything just began to evolve and certain landscapes called for being more abstract. I just went with what I was feeling, but felt very confident about it. 

Looking through the photos, I kept thinking about both land art of the 70s, as well as satellite images. Did either of these aesthetics have a space in your mind, or am I just weird?
I am sort of defining what this project is all about throughout this interview, but really I want people to interpret it in their own way and hopefully take something away from it that inspires them. So however you interpret it is OK with me. I shot probably 95 percent of the images on an old Leica R3 SLR from 1976. In that sense, you are dead on!

Could you have made this work anywhere else but the American Southwest?
At the time, no. I already had a feel for this area and a relationship with it. I've lived in Utah for over 11 years and really developed a strong connection to my surroundings, which is important. That being said, I think with my experience in Utah and nature within my projects I could shoot in another region, hopefully, and connect with it in a lot of the same ways. It definitely is something I think about. 

Why the name Bastard Child? 
Once I shot Time of Nothing I felt as though that was the project that I was trying to achieve all along and I definitely cast aside the Bastard Child images, hence the name. Obviously, they're not born out of wedlock; they just became the photos that I didn't want to show and in a way deemed them unworthy, which is kind of what happened to bastards back in the day. Anyway, I realized as I stepped away from the images and came back to them that they have meaning and beauty and reflect something that I truly love.  

Jim's work is currently showing at Deichtorhallen House of Photography in Hamburg, Germany and the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art in Salt Lake City. Bastard Child is available for purchase at Dashwood Books in NYC of by contacting Jim directly. 

@christianstorm

More from Jim Mangan:

Color'd

Bedu

Terram Tenebrosam

Have you ever stared at the tray disposal in a cafeteria, watching as person after person dumps perfectly good, uneaten food into a giant bucket? Unless you're an ungrateful prick the first thought that should come to mind is, "What a waste. It's so sad that there are people all over the world, scores of starving children, who would love to eat that food so that they don't die." Now that I've invoked a bit of sympathy with that image, I'd like you to consider how I, an unrepentant pothead, felt when I saw the video above. 

Thirty metric tons of perfectly good hash hidden in a cargo ship were set ablaze this weekend by a crew of smugglers off the coast of Sicily. THIRTY. FUCKING. TONS. The ship had been tracked for at least three days by authorities. When boats and aircraft were sent in to make the arrest, the Syrian and Egyptian crew members manning the vessel threw themselves into the Mediterranean but not before attempting to destroy their cargo first. The police that boarded the ship had to wear gas masks, and I bet it was the best goddamn assignment of those Italian policemen’s lives!

But back to the crew. It's amazing to me that a collective of grown, criminal-minded men resorted to the same strategem as a 14-year-old kid whose dad catches him smoking on the roof. But these guys weren't flushing an eighth down the toilet and cringing at the $50 loss. The estimated value of their 30 metric ton haul, as reported by most, is $400 million. That breaks down to about $13.33 a gram. Based on my experience, a gram of hash in most major European cities goes for about 10 Euros, which is currently worth $13.26. I'm telling you this because, for one thing, I'm kind of amazed that the authorities actually made a reasonable estimate without inflating it. Also, I always just assume that they are inflating the costs and I've never before done the math, so maybe I am the asshole. 

But really, aren't we all the asshole? When you take a step back and look at it, these guys were just chugging along on a happy little boat filled with sticky goo that makes people good and dizzy. The vibe only went sour when the cops showed up, and now all that weed, extracted from thousands of plants that existed only to make people and domesticated animals high, has been confiscated. Thankfully, the crew members' efforts to torch their goods was a bust and authorities found the mind-boggling stash onboard. 

Alright, now I'm just upset. This reminds me of when I lost my big fucking bag of weed. For the love of god, cherish the things you have. Finish that burrito. Smoke that roach. Use those colored pencils to their very nubs. Weep not for the weed that has been wasted, but hope for the weed that is to come. 

@ImyYourKid

More Weed:

Every Weed Smoker's Fantasy Is About to Come True in Uruguay

Kings of Cannabis

Life's Weed Bonuses
 

Day six of NYFW was when everyone took a breather to recover from all the exhausting parties of the weekend. While we were still in bed with major hangovers, photographer Conor Lamb  made it out to the Concept Korea showcase that featured up-and-coming—you guessed it—Korean designers. Keep up with this column throughout the week for more NYFW photo updates!

KAAL E.SUKTAE
Monday, September 9, 2013

CHOIBOKO
Monday, September 9 2013

BEYOND CLOSET
Monday, September 9 2013

Conor Lamb is a freelance photographer who hails from the Midwest where he studied lightning and photography. He's exhausted from all the shitty parties he used to document when night-life photography was still a thing. He has a penchant for shooting hip-hop artists, and he's covered fashion stuff for us in the past. He has a Joy Division tattoo and, according to a very good source, he and his girlfriend like to dress up as juggalos. His work can be found here.

Previously - The Weekend: Opening Ceremony, Hood By Air, Robert Geller, and More

Want more stuff about NYFW? Check these out: 

Fashion Lips

NYFW Reviews: Nautica, You Disgust Us

Don't Do This at NYFW

In 1999 the drug Ambien was discovered to have the extremely unexpected ability of rejuvenating dead neurological tissue. This effect was first demonstrated in a South African man named Louis Viljoen, who was roused from what was thought to be a persistent vegetative state after receiving an injection of the drug. To learn more about this strange side effect, we spent some time with Louis and a voiceover artist named Tom Rohe who needs Ambien in order to speak clearly.

The Ambien Effect is coming soon to VICE.com.

By now, you've probably heard we got nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series for our HBO series, VICE. The awards ceremony is on September 22, and we're all pretty stoked. Our buddy, the esteemed Spike Jonze sent this letter to our office and it's all starting to feel more real. This is actually happening. Excuse us for blushing.

While we wait to see if we get to take home a fancy gold statue, why not check out our HBO site, watch outtakes and clips from the show, and write VICE in hearts all over your high school notebook. I guess we're going to have to get tuxedos.

A sad, sad scene that's bound to be repeated time and time again once GTAV comes out.

Grand Theft Auto IV came out in the same week as my first and only (thus far) root canal. I had been prescribed Tylenol 3s, which I rationally mixed into my diet of purple kush and takeout. At the time I had a roommate, whose freeloader brother was sleeping on a couch in our basement while I was up all night playing GTAIV, one level above him. At one point, probably around five in the mo­­rning, he yelled up at me to keep it down and go to bed. So after hearing this complaint from a virtual stranger—who was couchsurfing at my house in the middle of one of my precious GTAIV sessions—I told him to fuck off. And that’s when I understood GTA’s grip on me.

If you’ve never played a Grand Theft Auto game, they are infinitely more addictive than basically any other video game that purports to have unlimited boundaries. While The Sims is a fun, family-friendly time where you can build yourself an in-ground pool, install a bar beside the diving board, get your Sims drunk, then send them for a drunken swim right before you remove the ladder and watch them drown in their own alcoholic misery—Grand Theft Auto provides an exponentially more insane set of circumstances for someone to cause digital mayhem.

Even in its most primitive iterations—like say the top-down style, “mission pack” add-on for Grand Theft Auto II that placed you in 1960s London—the GTA series has always allowed its players to cause the most obscene urban mayhem imaginable, wherever they want, whenever they want.

And it’s because the franchise allows for such insane, creative, violent destruction to be played out on its video game streets, every time the series appears on a new, more advanced hardware platform, it’s cause for mass excitement.

The jump from GTAII to GTAIII—which was, most importantly, the first jump from a 2D GTA to a 3D one—was absolutely monumental. I can literally remember the first time I saw screenshots of GTAIII (on lunch break in Grade 8)—but if you ask me when the first time I met most of my friends was, I might not be able to tell you.

So, the fact that Grand Theft Auto V is—for the first time—allowing the player to explore its streets as three different protagonists, who have access to a complete underwater world (early iterations of GTA did not even let you swim), in modern Los Angeles (known in the GTA world as Los Santos), with the option to buy real estate, shoot a minigun in public, and take part in a massively interactive online world with friends, is deeply fucking troubling for the health of my social life.

I have a lot of shit to do on a day-to-day basis. My job is quite hectic most of the time, and I’m really not the type of person to stay indoors on a weekday night, pruning my orchid collection and reading a detective novel. I love to be around people. But all that is going to change in about six days, when Grand Theft Auto V is unleashed.

What essentially is going to happen, once I have my own copy of GTAV, is that I will be trading my real life for a virtual one. Instead of heading over to my friend’s house for a BBQ and a few beers on a Tuesday night (it’ll be too fucking cold for that anyway), I’ll be spending my time living in Los Santos, stealing cars, robbing banks, buying property, and jumping stolen cars off of sweet ramps, before hopping online and murdering the virtual avatars of my real life friends in merciless, urban combat.

The official gameplay video for Grand Theft Auto: Online does a great job of portraying the severity of how this game will destroy lives.

This kind of intense digital immersion can’t possibly be healthy for the cleanliness of one’s mind, and yet the experience is incredibly fucking enjoyable. Despite GTAV not actually being available for purchase yet, the game has already begun to consume people’s lives—who have been obsessing over the game’s trailers for well over a year.

I have friends who have already booked time off work to play GTAV. Other friends of mine have been tweeting and talking for months about how late September and October of this year will be spent entirely indoors. And, all you need to do is check out the internet’s most popular GTA message board, GTAForums, to read about people who plan on using GTAV to kick their booze habit, others who are spending time playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas’s version of Los Santos to get ready for GTAV, and those who are concerned about people taking the online mode of GTAV “too serious[ly].”

Personally, I’ve been preparing for GTAV by playing GTAIV again—specifically as Luis Lopez, the hero of the Ballad of Gay Tony expansion. Just the other day, I was texting a friend who asked me what I was up to, while I was in the middle of driving a stolen garbage truck around Liberty City in the middle of a police chase. I unloaded my sub-machine gun out of the driver’s side window at the cops who were chasing me. Then I hid, with an assault rifle, in a hospital and waited for the police to find me. It took them a while.

Anyway, I described this Liberty City rampage to my friend as if it were happening in real life. She told me I sounded crazy—and that’s fine, I guess. But it’s that kind of adverse social reaction which makes me somewhat worried about the release of what sounds like history’s most immersive and exciting video game of all time—because I do really love the real world.

We live in a sad, weird time where people would rather put their brains to work navigating a massively criminal and violent urban wasteland, like GTAV, instead of living within—and trying to repair—our existing violent global wasteland; and that’s a strange thing to think about.

As Jane McGonigal points out in her excellent book about video games and how they could potentially improve society, Reality Is Broken, the amount of manpower spent playing video games is staggering. She discusses the sheer manpower that went into creating WoWWiki, the World of Warcraft Wiki, as an example:

“There are still more than 65,000 WoW players who are registered contributors to WoWWiki, currently the world’s second largest wiki after Wikipedia. Even if you managed to successfully engage only that group, it would still take them only two months of channeling their usual WoW playing time to a crowdsourcing project to collectively create a resource on the scale of Wikipedia. By comparison, Wikipedia took eight years to collect 100 million hours of cognitive effort.”

So basically if it were possible to unite them, contributors to the WoWWiki could create a Wiki the same size as Wikipedia, every two months, if they really wanted to. McGonigal refers to this massive amount of attention and effort that 65,000 orc-loving nerds have put into cataloging the history of World of Warcraft as “participation bandwidth.” Can you imagine a world where people had the same talent and interest for conquering issues, like the cure for cancer or the way to eradicate world hunger, instead of slaying fake dragons and collecting fake gold to upgrade their fake swords? It would be dizzyingly remarkable. I wonder which massive global issues could be solved using the hours humans are about to spend playing GTAV…

But, who cares about that “what if” utopian mumbo-jumbo, right? GTAV is going to have a bigger map than GTAIV, Red Dead Redemption, and San Andreas combined, you can yell, in real life, into your headset to scare virtual liquor store attendants you may end robbing, or if you feel like having a lazy Sunday, you could just race around Hollywood in a stolen sports car, before retiring to the woods for a deer hunting session just to collect your thoughts.

All of that is much more rewarding, fun, and important than hanging out with the friends and family members who love you—let alone trying to actually repair or even slightly improve the real world we live in. GTAV is a safe, but highly chaotic, environment where you don’t have to worry about Barack Obama setting off World War III by stumbling into Syria with a reign of hellfire missiles and misguidedly relentless military striking. All you need to do is prevent the army from murdering you once you hit the 5-star wanted level for massacring dozens and dozens of civilians on your way to eat at Los Santos’ best taco franchise.

Follow Patrick on Twitter: @patrickmcguire

Previously:

My Name Is Tom and I'm a Video Game Addict

Perverted Video Games from the 80s

North Korea's First Racing Game Is Terrible

American missile ships fire a volley of (very expensive) weapons. Photo via

Even as diplomats work on a last-ditch effort to get Syria to hand over its chemical weapons to international authorities, the US gearing up to do what it does best: bomb a distant country. At this moment, six American warships are sitting in the Mediterranean, loaded with hundreds of missiles waiting to attack Syria should they get the order. If the complex, involved effort to get Bashar al-Assad to give up his chemical weapons fails and Barack Obama gives the go-ahead for a “limited” strike against his regime, those ships will let fly with hundreds of missiles—and that means the Pentagon will have to replace those weapons by purchasing them from defense contractors like Raytheon, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman. How much is that going to cost?

To begin with, the US will likely want to target Syria's air force. To do that, according to a report by Christopher Harmer, a senior analyst at the Institute for the Study of War think tank, three types of missiles would likely be involved: Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles (TLAMs), Joint Air to Surface Standoff Missiles (JASSMs), and Joint Standoff Weapons (JSOWs).

Those kinds of missiles are a big part of what makes the US defense budget so massive. According to DefenseNews, the first few weeks of America’s intervention in Libya cost about $600 million, and more than half of that ($340 million) was spent on replacing munitions, in particular the hundreds of Tomahawk missiles it unloaded on the North African country at $1.4 million a pop. JASSMs and JSOWs are less expensive, but at about $900,000 and $285,000 apiece, respectively, they aren’t exactly a bargain.

The number of missiles expended in an attack on Syria will depend on how many targets the US decides to bomb—potentially, it could be more extensive than the air strikes against Libya. A report about the potential costs and risks of striking Syria from the RAND Corporation, a government think tank, says “hundreds of sea- and air-launched cruise missiles” would be needed for an attack if the aim was to take out Assad’s air force, and General Martin Dempsey, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has written that the military could “strike hundreds of targets at a tempo of our choosing.”

An attack on the scale that Dempsey describes would likely mean hundreds of millions in new revenue for defense contractors.

Two companies are primarily responsible for the manufacture of the missiles that would be used—Raytheon makes the Tomahawks and JSOWs, while Lockheed Martin makes the JASSMs. The past year has seen both companies win several contracts from the government.

In December, the Pentagon paid Raytheon $254.6 million contract for some fresh Tomahawks, just six months after the company had gotten a $337.8 million contract for yet more missiles. That’s nearly $600 million of government moolah in just the past 15 months, and with Tomahawks expected to be the weapon of choice in Syria, Raytheon could to turn even bigger profits.

In fact, there could be a permanent increase in Tomahawk orders, which would mean an even higher payday for the world's top missile manufacturer, according to Politico.

And then there's JSOWs. Raytheon’s website describes JSOWs as “low-cost, air-to-ground weapons that employ an integrated GPS-inertial navigation system and terminal imaging infrared seeker.” By “low-cost,” the company means $285,000 per missile. In July, the Pentagon wrote Raytheon a $80 million check for more of the little guys; depending on their effectiveness, Raytheon will probably get another order for more next year.

In June of 2012, Lockheed Martin, proud maker of the JASSM, got $241 million for 221 of the long-range missiles, which are “designed to destroy high-value, well-defended, fixed and relocatable targets,” One year later, just before talk of intervening in Syria began in earnest, the Air Force said they needed a few more, paying Lockheed Martin just under $10 million for more JASSMs.

The missiles cost more than their price tags would suggest. In addition to transporting the missiles and paying service members to maintain and deploy them, the military has to invest in the extensive and expensive tech support these weapons require. That could be the part of the reason that on August 28, one week after US intelligence claimed Assad’s regime used Sarin gas on civilians, the Pentagon awarded a one-year $24.8 million contract to Northrop Grumman to provide some military tech-support services, including handling “steering and scalable integrated bridge systems for guided missile destroyers.”

I spoke with James Jay Carafano, the Vice President of Foreign and Defense Studies at the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, about what other kinds of weapons would be used in a conflict with Syria, and he said he expects a lot of cyber warfare, and also a lot of bombs.

“I think you could see some of the more exotic types of bombs used, such as microwave bombs that use electromagnetic pulses to take out electric grids and take computer systems offline,” he said.

Microwave bombs, which are designed be nonlethal, have been in development for years; in October, after three years and $40 million worth of government funded-testing, Boeing announced it had successfully tested the Counter-electronics High-powered Microwave Advanced Missile Project (CHAMP), and the weapon was ready for use. In a press release, Keith Coleman, the CHAMP program manager for Boeing Phantom Works, said, “In the near future, this technology may be used to render an enemy’s electronic and data systems useless even before the first troops or aircraft arrive.”

With a chance to use these weapons looming, the future could come sooner rather than later. And if these new weapons work the way they're supposed to, the result will undoubtedly be another lucrative contract for Boeing.

You may be wondering about the sequestration, the series of across-the-board cuts that began going into effect earlier this year—weren’t those supposed to slash the Pentagon’s budget, and by extension, the revenues of defense contractors? They were, but Christopher Preble of the Cato Institute, a libertarian-leaning think tank, tells me a war in Syria would be a way to get around the budget limitations.

“A war would qualify as an 'emergency,' which would allow the Pentagon to ask for supplemental funds if they wanted to,” he said.

Actually, sequester or no sequester, the defense industry is going through a “blockbuster” financial quarter according to Todd Harrison, a senior fellow for at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. In an interview with Bloomberg, he said layoffs combined with a steady flow of contracts has allowed top defense companies to take in the same amount of revenue while paying out less to workers.

So even if the US avoids bombing Syria—as of this writing it was still unclear if a deal to dispose of the regime’s chemical weapons would be made—don’t worry about the defense contractors. They’ll do fine, and likely continue donating large amounts to candidates from both parties. And there will always be another war.

Follow Ray on Twitter: @RayDowns

A Munitions Expert Weighs in on Last Month's Chemical Attacks in Damascus

Are Chemical Weapons Actually Useful in a War?

More and More Journalists Are Being Kidnapped in Syria

Swedish photographer Lina Scheynius used to be the queen of Flickr in the early 00s. Back then, she posted pictures of her life, her friends, and self-portraits. Her photos received attention for their extremely intimate and sincere nature—or, to put it another way, many of them were pictures of her naked.

Today, although not much has changed in her subject matter, Lina regularly photographs for magazines like Vogue, Dazed and Cofused, and Oyster. For her personal work, Lina publishes small, private volumes of her pictures, with the fifth volume, titled simply 05, just released. I caught up with her for a chat.



VICE: Hey, Lina. In your new book, are you focusing on the same body of work as in your other personal photographic diaries?
Lina Scheynius: Yes, though naturally it keeps evolving over time. But there are still only pictures of what is right in front of me and part of my life. This book is also full of self-portraits, something I have gone back to focusing on lately.



Do you make a distinction between personal work made for yourself and personal work with publishing in mind?
Not really. It's a bit of a mess on my hard drive, to be honest. I don't really know what is what until I end up publishing it. I don't take a lot of straight up and down personal pictures, such as family pictures at fun fairs and Christmas dinners, but if I do you never know what you might end up using them for.



What about work—do you approach your commercial work differently than your personal?
Yes, definitely. I wish I could say no to this question. On some amazing, but rare occasions I do have a ton of freedom, but most of the time I am expected to deliver something specific. With my own work it's an endless experiment, and with the commercial work I have to play it a little safer and listen to the client. I still use the same equipment though, and I try to make sure there is room to play and that it's always as light and fun as possible.



Are some images ever too personal for you to publish?
Yes, and then sometimes I end up publishing them anyway. My next book is going to be old pictures from my archive that at the time I thought I couldn't publish, for different reasons.



Why do you think so many people relate to your work?
The process is very simple. It's snapshots taken with a portable 35 mm camera just like photos from people's old family albums. I think that helps. And I just read this question to my mom over Skype now and her response was, "They have all been naked at one time or another." At first I was terrified of showing my mom my work, but now she just laughs about it.

That's sweet. Thanks, Lina!

Lina's ongoing exhibition, Exhibition 01, is currently at Christophe Guye Galerie, Dufourstrasse 31, Zürich, Switzerland, and will run until October 19. See more of Lina's work here.

More photographers we like:

Alex Sturrock Shoots Foxes

JH Engström Is Releasing His Fifteenth Photo Book at the End of the Year

WATCH – The Art of Taboo - Ren Hang

In Fresh Off the Boat season two, Eddie takes you on a global excursion examining cities in transition. From the abandoned Packard Plant in Detroit to migrant Kyrgyz workers in Moscow to the yurts of the Gobi Desert, we see the wreckage that global capitalism has left behind and get a glimpse of what could be its next meal in the Mongolian steppes. From high-powered meetings with the pandas of Chengdu and pasta with self-proclaimed celebrity gangster Dave Courtney, we ask the people on the ground whether the changes we're seeing and the progress we've been promised are actually helping the every day man in his pursuit of happiness. Of course, this all happens through the lens of food, across a table, on a plate. Fuck with the kid.

The premiere episode of Fresh Off the Boat season two will air September 30 on VICE.com.

Go way back in the archives and watch the first episode of season one.                                      

Day seven of NYFW is the day when you realize New York Fashion Week is actually New York Fashion Week and a Half. We went to Badgely Mischka (no relation to our fav streetwear brand), then headed to Steven Alan, and ended the day at a packed house at Diesel's Black Gold show inside Grand Central Terminal. Keep up with this column throughout the week for more NYFW photo updates! 

BADGELY MISCHKA
Tuesday, September 10, 2013

DIESEL BLACK GOLD
Tuesday, September 10, 2013

STEVEN ALAN
Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Conor Lamb is a freelance photographer who hails from the Midwest where he studied lighting and photography. He's exhausted from all the shitty parties he used to document when night-life photography was still a thing. He has a penchant for shooting hip-hop artists, and he's covered fashion stuff for us in the past. He has a Joy Division tattoo and, according to a very good source, he and his girlfriend like to dress up as juggalos. His work can be found here.

Previously - Day Six: Kaal E. Suktae, Choiboko, and Beyond Closet at the Concept Korea Showcase

Want more stuff about NYFW? Check these out: 

Fashion Lips

NYFW Reviews: Nautica, You Disgust Us

Don't Do This at NYFW

The Quebec government's guide to reducing ostentatiousness amongst its rank and file.

You know by now that whenever Quebec makes international headlines, it’s never for anything the rest of the civilized world thinks is good. So thanks again, Pauline Marois, for thrusting this province into the limelight of the absurd. After pastagate and the turban affair, Quebec in 2013 is now synonymous with clueless, paranoid dumbasses who are afraid of people with weird names and brown skin. Bravo!

Except, it should be noted, in Montreal. In lovely, crumbling, corrupt, traffic-congested Montreal, a lot of people pretty much hate the Quebec Charter of Values. And with good reason: Montreal, as opposed to the rest of the province, is multicultural. It’s cosmopolitan. It’s chock full of people with unpronounceable names (see this article’s byline—silent j!), many of whom wear all kinds of silly things on their bodies.

In a rare display of ecumenical harmony, Montreal’s city council unanimously denounced the charter, this just a few months before this November’s city elections, when passions should be whipped up into a frenzy. City councillor Alex Norris said that other than some discussion on the wording of the resolution, the motion calling for an “open secularism” passed fairly easily. “In Montreal, we see diversity as a strength, something to be celebrated and not seen as a threat. Inclusion in the workplace is the best way to integrate newcomers to society.”

In Montreal, where over a third of the population are immigrants, the charter is arguably deepening the social divisions it was supposed to smooth over. If you believe Pauline Marois’s government, the charter’s main goal is to ensure that no one faith gets preferential treatment and that social cohesion, based on strict state neutrality when it comes to religion, is maintained.

What the charter will do, if passed—and there’s still no guarantee that it will—is, first, ban state employees from wearing overt religious symbols. So don’t look for a bus driver wearing a yarmulke, a daycare worker wearing a headscarf, a bureaucrat with a big-ass cross (a small one is okay though), or a doctor wearing a turban.

That’s probably not a problem in some smaller town like Trois-Rivières or Drummondville or Quebec City or anywhere else outside Montreal, where 80 percent of the population is francophone and maybe 10 percent is anglophone (who tend to live in isolated enclaves like the Eastern Townships or in some pockets of the Gaspe). But in Montreal, where just only over a third of people are unilingual francophone, it comes across as big-time nanny-state overreach.

Second, it panders to the fears of small-town Quebec, where the PQ gets the majority of its seats in the National Assembly. Xenophobic places like Hérouxville, where 6 years ago they tried to enact an immigrant code of conduct that initially included "no stoning of women in public" and "no female circumcision" are, presumably, where much of the charter’s support comes from—two-thirds of Quebec’s population dig it (a more scientific poll by Leger Marketing late last month showed 57 percent of Quebecers support it). And whaddaya know, the split comes down largely to language, as do all things in Quebec: 65 percent of francophones, and only 25 percent of anglos, like the charter.

And third, it’s ginned up yet another confrontation with the feds. The NDP and the Liberals, both headed by bilingual Quebecers, hate it, and so does the Harper government. Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney said Ottawa will challenge the charter’s constitutionality, so get ready for a possible us-versus-them showdown that will get everyone across the country all riled up, to the PQ’s likely benefit.

In some ways, the PQ’s push for a secularist charter is understandable. It’s been half a century since the nascent francophone Quebec awakening threw off the overarching hegemony the Catholic Church wielded over the population. At 64, Pauline Marois is a child of the Quiet Revolution and church attendance in Quebec is already very low.

There is a deep-seated antipathy to religion here—and why shouldn’t there be? There’s plenty to criticize about organized religion, from its inherent sexism and homophobia to the ultimate absurdity of believing in a make-believe man in the sky laying down a bunch of dumb rules. But in reality the threat religious adherents pose to Quebec secularism is pretty low. So why the dickish behaviour PQ? Clearly this is another move by the Parti to drive the wedge between Quebec and the ROC, and while Montreal isn’t having it, everyone here is nervous how this will all play out.


Follow Patrick on Twitter: @patricklejtenyi

Previously:

The Quebec Government's Plan to Ban Religious Symbols May Be a Stroke of Political Genius

As a person who grew up playing text-based roleplaying games and trolling BBS sites, I’ve always been obsessed with language generated by computers. I remember spending hours and hours scouring the garbled junk text our printer would spit out when it malfunctioned; I felt certain that somewhere in those hordes of symbols and fragments and numbers smashed together, there was a secret underneath, some kind of impossible text hidden from the rest of the world.

Untangling that strange mystery of what machines might be trying to say is an ongoing investigation helmed by literary weirdos. From oulipean concepts that fuse random alterations to human generated language, to flarf poetry, where a writer mines the internet for errors and random speech, there continues to be a widening array of ways to build something mind-boggling out of the most basic elements.

Darby Larson’s new novel, Irritant, takes the utilization of computer generated speech to the next level. Or circuit board. Whatever. The book consists of a single 624-page paragraph, built out of sentences that seem to morph and mangle themselves as they go forward. It seems at first immediately impenetrable, but then surprisingly and continuously opens up into places normal fictions would never have the balls to approach.

“In something of red lived an irritant,” it begins. “Safe from the blue from the irr. And this truck went in it. Safe. Something of red in it back to the blue to the red. This truck and something extra. Listen. The nearby something extras in front of the truck. The man in front of the truck trampled from front to back safe from the blue. And all this while the man scooped shovels of dirt and trampled from front to back front to back. The other and the clay sighed for something of red. The irritant lay in something of red and laughed.”

If this sounds insane, that’s because it is. But it is also rare, an impossible object given flesh. Its existence is as much of a relief as it is provocative, dense, an irritant in spirit.

Darby was kind enough to answer some questions about his programming and compiling methods for building his computer-related work.

VICE: How did you get into using computer-generated text as a method for writing fiction?
Darby: I do a lot of text manipulation using code as part of my day job, so I guess I've always been aware that certain basic functions exist and are simple to employ if I ever wanted to use them. I'm not interested in using complex code to manipulate text for its own sake, or trying to make a computer be the author of a work. I'm simply interested in tools that can help a writer achieve something that is meaningful for them. My mindset is not that much different from using functions like cut and paste during revision, or using an MS Word search/replace function to change the name of a character everywhere it occurs. We all do these sorts of things without thinking of it as text manipulation. Modern programming languages provide a few more of these sorts of basic functions, such as randomizers (input sentences in order, output sentences in a random order) or reveresers (input sentences in order, output sentences in reverse order). Granted, these sorts of functions aren't useful for most writers. They only became useful for me when I started becoming interested in more experimental literature and the oulipo movement. It provided a method of restriction where textual atmosphere could remain constant, where my creative control of a work could be pushed outside the realm of content, and into the realm of that content's structure.

Can you give me some examples of constraints or rules you wanted to use, and then the gist of how you went about writing the code to generate it?
Sure. Here is the process I went through to create the work “Pigs.” The first constraint was that I only allow myself one sentence structure: [the noun/nouns] [verbed] [with/through/in/on] [the noun/nouns]. So a sentence like "The woman danced through hoops." is valid. The next constraint was to only allow myself a finite set of nouns and verbs to plug into this structure. The sets I came up with were:

- First noun: [Unicorns, Children, The man, The woman, Birds, Umbrellas]

- Verb: [jumped, laughed, danced, slept, fell]

- Preposition + last noun: [through hoops, with unicorns, on tables, in bed]

So now I have a situation where there are only a finite set of possible permutations of this sentence. I wrote this procedure in PERL to extract all possible permutations:

@one = ("Unicorns," "Children," "The man," "The woman," "Birds," "Umbrellas") ;
@two = ("jumped," "laughed," "danced," "slept," "fell");
@three = ("through hoops," "with unicorns," "on tables," "in bed");

for ($a = 0; $a<=$#one; $a++) {
    for ($b = 0; $b<=$#two; $b++) {
         for ($c = 0; $c<=$#three; $c++) {

                 print "$one[$a] $two[$b] $three[$c]\n" ;
         }
    }
}

Looking at the output of this, it became obvious what I was doing because each sentence changes a word in order of the next permutation. I wanted to mix all these sentences up so it would have a flow that didn't sound like a computer just spit it out. I wrote this wrapper for the randomizer function in PERL to spit out all sentences in a random order:

my @templist = ();
while(@list) {
   push(@templist, splice(@list, rand(@list), 1))
}
@list = @templist ;

for ($df = 0; $df<=$#list; $df++)
   {
     print $list[$df] ;
   }

So now the work feels better, but still kind of static. I felt like the piece should do something other than just be a list of permutations. I thought it would be interesting to see it all move toward an even tighter constraint, like slowly change all the words in the original set to eventually be just one word. To do this, I just copy/pasted the entire list over and over, each time re-randomizing and search/replacing one word from the set to a variation of [Pig].

Now the work feels good to me, albeit quite long. It is basically moving from sentences like "The man danced with unicorns." to sentences like "The pig pigged with pigs." For me, what's happening is there is a tightening of constraint as the piece moves forward. Like it's closing in on itself. A pig virus that is slowly eating up all the original sentences. But I wanted to see the reverse, or an opening up. To begin with this pig virus but slowly shed it to eventually reveal the original set. I wrote this wrapper for the reverser function in PERL to spit the whole thing out in reversed order:

@reversed = reverse(@list);
for ($df = 0; $df<=$#reversed; $df++)
   {
     print $reversed[$df] ;
   }

And that's how I wrote “Pigs.”

So you kind of set up a system that will spit out a mass of text, and then, almost more as an editor or puzzle-worker than a writer, look for ways to bend that text further? Are you thinking at all of narrative or story building, in any sense, or is it purely sound and image and juxtaposition?
In earlier works like “Pigs,” I was more concerned with developing technique than creating something with plot. The more I played around with these kinds of works though, the more I asked myself, like how can I bend this thing in such a way where characters can develop or a narrative plot can rise out of it. It's tricky because I'm setting constraints so tightly. The relationship between code and language is strange. You have to apply a very tight constraint in order for code to work on it. It becomes formal language. Chomsky has done tons of research on this relationship and “Pigs” is maybe a primitive actualization of his theories.

At some point I began to move away from formal sentence structure because it's just so rigid. The more complex a sentence is, the more complex a code needs to be in order to handle the problems that creep up with conjunctions and prepositions. I hung on to using word sets that slowly change over time as a primary constraint. So now I can inject narrative via the word choices in the sets I use, so I spend a long time just coming up with a word set that I think characters may develop within whatever system I decide to shove everything through later. Works like “Pulse” and “Sack of Oranges” were written without the aid of any code. With those I was relying on my own ability to write in a sort of constrained stream of conscious, continually referring back to a predetermined word set while writing. It loosened everything up a bit so that a plot could begin to surface.

How about Irritant? Did you set out knowing it would end up as a 600+ page novel? Were there constraints you began with that changed as you went on?
Yeah. I wanted to see these kinds of rules applied on a much larger scale. Because of the parameters I'm setting, I always know roughly how long the finished thing will be. My original idea for Irritant was to use a 70-word initial set that slowly changes to a completely different 70-word final set with a one-word change occurring every 4000 words. So 4000 x 70 is 280,000 words total. Irritant ended up being quite less than 280k, I can't remember why. I think I may have decided to quicken the pace a little. If you set parameters too high, at some point the word count becomes impractical. But theoretically, I could build something like Irritant with a word count in the millions.

Irritant's constraints were similar to “Pigs”'s constraints. I wrote the first 4000 words on my own, just stream of consciousness while referring to the word set. Then I randomized that and concatenated it to the original (so now 8000 words) and did one-word substitution on the new 4000, and so on and so on until all 70 words had been substituted. The big difference between Irritant and “Pigs” is that I wasn't starting with a list of permutated formal sentences so word substitution was a bit more painstaking in Irritant. I had to watch everywhere a new substitution took place and clean it up if need be.

What do you find most pleasing about this process of using coding to generate meaning? Is there meaning? Do computers know something we don't?
Using these processes gave me the opportunity to edit from a top-down perspective, as well as bottom-up. It allowed me to consider literature as almost a different medium, one where I'm so distant from the work that my control of it becomes holistic. I become less concerned with sentence level goings-on, which I can leave to code to figure out, and more concerned with how a mass of sentences are flowing and relating to another mass of sentences. So I don't know, maybe I'm just a control freak?

As much as it provides a measure of unpredictability, I don't think of meaning as being intrinsically wound up with the code or living inside the computer somehow. The result is still a work of literature that a human author intentioned and I think the burden of extracting meaning is still on the reader. If a reader discovers meaning in the relationship between two sentences that a code decided to put next to each other, then I think it's meaningful. And extraordinary.

Previously by Blake Butler - Windows that Lead to More Windows: An Interview with Gary Lutz

@blakebutler

Photo via Flickr user marada

On September 11, 2001, I didn’t really know what to do. I didn’t actually need to do anything—when the planes hit, I was on way to my high school in Seattle, Washington, 3,000 miles and three time zones away from the attack—but I remember feeling odd and disconnected and powerless. History was happenening, everyone knew that, yet unless you were in lower Manhattan you couldn’t do anything other than pray, watch TV, and wait for the next morning’s newspaper to come out. (In 2001, I’m pretty sure my parents still had dial-up internet, and I don’t think I knew anyone with a smartphone that could bring up the news instantaneously.)   

Now September 11 is officially Patriot Day and National Day of Service and Remembrance, because America needs another excuse to wave the flag and act serious and angry and pious. The problem is, we still don’t know what to do. Volunteering someplace seems like a good idea, though not everyone has the time to do that in the middle of the week. Spending a few minutes of thoughtful silence contemplating our mortality and our place in the world also couldn’t hurt. In the past, people have gathered together for rallies, some of which were basically excuses to bash Muslims. Hopefully fewer people are doing that.

But as the day becomes less and less connected to historical events—Osama bin Laden is dead, the US is finally, little by little, pulling troops out of Afghanistan—it’s a little unclear what the socially acceptable way to commemorate Patriot Day is.

The most visible way you can honor the dead and respect the tragedy is to tell every single person on the planet that you’re honoring the dead and respecting the tragedy. Thousands of people have taken to Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to show how they’re spending Patriot Day, because we can no longer live without performing for others at all times. Here’s one representative dude who has decided that RON PAUL + CAPTAIN AMERICA + MORE STARS AND STRIPES + TWITTER = 9/11:

Another common tack was to show everyone a nice-looking photo of the World Trade Center and couple it with an inspirational quote, as the official Twitter account of a couple lovely young professional wrestlers did:  

"You can be sure that the American spirit will prevail over this tragedy" Colin Powell #NeverForget #Remember911 pic.twitter.com/WHipfUtpVY

— The Bella Twins (@nicoleandbri) September 11, 2013

Makes you feel good, right? I mean, it’s a bit odd to quote the dude who lied to the UN and helped lead the US into the Iraq war, but diff’rent strokes, I guess.

Another, less sentimental way to mark the passing of the day on Twitter was to send out a joke that let everyone know you weren’t forgetting what day it was, you just didn’t want to turn into a cornball over it. The Iron Sheik went topical:

Osama Bin Laden Miley Cyrus same thing #Remember911

— The Iron Sheik (@the_ironsheik) September 11, 2013

Tweeting a performance of your feelings on a day of remembrance can be hokey and look dumb, but it also serves as an outlet for maybe confusing feelings—if you’re walking around with thoughts of this strange, horrible day in your head, maybe an emoticon-laden #NeverForget Instagram post of a flag is a good way to release them. But brands and organizations got involved today as well, and that’s a stranger response. Do I need to know that the Walmart social media team is remembering 9/11?

Or the Dunkin’ Donuts social media team?

Do I need Epic Records to make their collective feelings known via an odd, borderline-inappropriate graphic? (And did they just call 9/11 “epic”?)

Then there are the sports teams and leagues, and while I know why these institutions, which are uber patriotic even when it’s not Patriot Day, want to break out the flag, it sometimes seems like they are trying to connect themselves to something that really has nothing to do with them.

… Especially when they use the occasion to announce out a new uniform variant.

And of course any time a brand sends a message out that’s not just simply, “Buy our shit! Our shit is not just shit but a whole lifestyle!” there’s ample room for things to go horribly wrong. JR Smith mistakenly told people to “Celebrate the deaths of the people in 9/11!” but that’s more or less fine since he’s just a single basketball player and people will excuse him. But when the Lakers tweeted a photo of Kobe Bryant under the #NeverForget hashtag, people got pissed at them, and for good reason. What the hell does Kobe have to do with 9/11, guys?

And the Phoenix Suns tweeted this photo, I imagine in a effort to be like, “YES FUCK YES AMERICA WE ARE AWESOME!” but it came off as more of an oddly-timed salute to space travel than anything:

Even less comprehensible were tweets from nonreal people, like Goku from Dragonball Z:

Let us remember the fallen, and cherish the protected. #Remember911

— Goku (@Goku) September 11, 2013

Or Bane from Batman—and I guess this is a fake account devoted to promoting The Dark Knight Rises? Only it has now achieved independence and now is devoted to promoting Bane the villain and the Batman franchise generally, when it’s not honoring the heroes of 9/11? I’ve got no idea, honestly.

#Remember911 as a day we all could have used a real superhero.

— BANE (@BaneTheBOSS) September 11, 2013

One thing you learn scanning Twitter hashtags devoted to 9/11 is that religious figures, who are used to dealing with tragedy in public, are good at honoring the dead in respectful, straightforward ways…

Today we remember #NeverForget #Remember911 [PIC] pic.twitter.com/W2C5Ey1ck3

— TD Jakes (@BishopJakes) September 11, 2013

… While accounts devoted to weed humor and pics of hot babes are way, way less well equipped to honor 9/11:

Gone, but not forgotten. #Remember911 #OneLove

— Weed Tweets ™ (@stillblazingtho) September 11, 2013

There’s a certain point at which another tweet or status update—no matter how iconic the photo linked to, no matter how powerful the accompanying half-mangled Gandhi or MLK or Rudy Giuliani—is not going to help anyone. It’s just holding up a giant sign that says “I FEEL SAD LIKE I’M SUPPOSED TO,” or, at worst, it’s an attempt to get retweets or likes (or traffic) by letting everyone know you still remember 9/11.

Someday, September 11 is going to feel less immediate. It’ll be something we tell our grandchildren about, and maybe people will have the day off and people will put on American-flag shirts or something. Maybe it’ll be another holiday that a bunch of people use as an excuse to drink. Maybe there’ll be a special football game or something where everyone gets real patriotic and a bunch of genetically modified bald eagles will fly over the stadium barfing red, white, and blue ribbon onto a cheering crowd of police officers and firefighters. Someday, there may be a bunch of “Patriot Day Sale” ads that don’t even reference the WTC or Osama bin Laden.

By then, the way we commemorate the occasion will be more ingrained in all of us. September 11 will be just another spot on the calendar when we do things slightly differently, and we’ll be able to handle it without feeling strange or worrying that we’re handling it wrong. We’ll watch the Patriot Day fireworks or sing the Patriot Day songs, and it’ll be a relief, because we'll know what to do.

@HCheadle  

More on 9/11:

Ground Zero – Still Crazy After All These Years

Alex Jones Thinks We Predicted 9/11

Jonathan Hobin Recreates the World’s Most Infamous Tragedies with Children

Image by Courtney Nicholas

It is Cormac McCarthy’s m.o. to uncover the underbelly of American history and explore some of the most violent and immoral acts swept under the façade of progress and civilization. The cyclical recurrence of violence is his bass beat. I find that the epigraph for Blood Meridian says everything about the endless conflict between men that is ever-present in his writing:

Clark, who led last year's expedition to the Afar region of northern Ethiopia, and UC Berkeley colleague Tim D. White, also said that a re-examination of a 300,000-year-old fossil skull found in the same region earlier shows evidence of having been scalped.

THE YUMA DAILY SUN June 13,1982

But even though violence, depravity, and unending inhumanity are in ALL of Cormac McCarthy’s books, he is also a writer who has won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and is part of the Oprah Book Club. After his Tennessee Gothic period culminated with Suttre and he moved to Texas to write Blood Meridian, he began to nestle bits of humanity in between acts of chilling violence, offering a chord of hope that was rarely found in his earlier books. Take No Country for Old Men, which features the lamenting officer who makes us feel that at least someone is trying to do what’s right. Or look at The Road, which plants a tender relationship between a father and a son in the midst of a blasted, postapocalyptic landscape. With The Road, it was the book’s glimmer of hope—something McCarthy has attributed to the birth of his son—that contributed to the novel’s popularity, caught Oprah’s interest, and made it transcend the postapocalyptic genre.

However, unlike the books of The Border Trilogy or The Road, McCarthy’s early work have no room for hope. They are immersed in darkness and violence, and then silence before they erupt in more pain. This bleak quality is certainly characteristic of Child of God, McCarthy’s third book after The Orchard Keeper and Outer Dark. Last year I directed an adaptation of Child of God. It just premiered at the Venice and Toronto film festivals to what I’m told are great reviews especially for my lead actor, Scott Haze. (Sadly, I can’t read any reviews about myself, even the good ones in the best outlets, because it’s like a drink for an alcoholic. I read one review about myself in The New York Times and the next thing I know I’m wondering what Perez Hilton thinks about my love life or what Just Jared thinks about my latest jacket.)

Child of God follows a man named Lester Ballard as he is evicted form his family home, goes to live in a hunting cabin, survives off the land, and eventually starts sleeping with dead people—as in having sex with them. Finally, after his cabin burns down, he moves to a cave and is hunted down by the locals. Despite its grisly subject matter (the corpse-fucking) it is a great read and the movie is, I think, also strangely moving and entertaining. But there is that tough lump to swallow—sex with dead people. When I finally got to talk to my favorite living writer, Cormac McCarthy, I said, “I am going to be asked why I wanted to make a movie about this subject, so I’m going to ask you why you wrote a book about this subject.”

In a high, slow moving Southern drawl, he said, “Oh, I don’t know James, probably some dumbass reason [chuckle].”

I knew he was famous for not talking about his work, but I hate not getting answers. In art school, for better or worse, you learn to talk about your work, at least with other artists. “Well, I see it as a metaphor for, or an extreme example of isolation and someone who is pushed outside of civilized society. Lester just wants to connect, he wants to love and be loved, but he is incapable of being intimate with another (living) person because he’s a creep. But with dead bodies he gets to control both sides of the relationship. The fact that there is an actual body aids his imagination in the creation of another outside of himself. It all helps him believe that it is not just a solitary enterprise. He gets the best of both worlds: he gets to be in control of both sides of the relationship and he gets to trick himself into thinking that he is interacting with someone else.”

“Oh, I don’t know, James. I just know that there are people like him all around us.”

“Yeah.”

I guess what McCarthy meant on the phone is that Lester is a manifestation of the recurrent violence that flows through McCarthy’s oeuvre. But recurrent violence, or the portrait of a killer isn’t the only thing I read in the book, and it isn’t the only thing I tried to do with the film. For me it was a way to use shocking material (presented in a considered way) in order to talk about the human condition. There are no actual images in our film that are any more disturbing that seeing a city decimated in Transformers, innocent people being run over by the Rock in Fast and Furious 6, or hundreds of people destroyed from afar by General Zod in Superman—what is disturbing about our film is the context. But I want that disturbance, because it enables me to talk about the universal theme of needing love in a fresh way. And as Ezra Pound said, “make it new.”

Previously - 'Salò' Revisited

Photos by Rhea Butcher

After a lot of hard work coming up as a stand-up comic in Los Angeles, I got a call late in the evening on Labor Day telling me that I’d be appearing on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson the following night. This would be my network TV debut. I actually appreciate that I didn’t know sooner than the night before. I didn't have that one last time to run my jokes and eat shit because I was too hopped up on making them perfect to properly tell them. As it was, the Friday before Labor Day I went up to San Francisco to do two shows at Lost Weekend Video, an actual video store! With videos! Lost Weekend built an awesome twenty seat room into their basement for movie screenings and comedy and such. The last sets I got in before taping Late Late were there—loose and low pressure and literally in a basement. 

Walking into CBS Studios, a producer on the show introduced me to another gal taping a segment for a later episode of Late Late. She was wearing some sheath dress that looked completely perfect and was gliding around in heels—the heel of which basically had the same diameter of a single human hair. I was wearing an old shirt I had picked out to sweat through during the drive over and then arrive in. I love to make a sweaty entrance.

While she was running through talking points I found out that Elettra—that lovely heeled lady—is not only a model with a successful cooking show, she also happens to be Isabella Rossellini’s daughter which means she is also Ingrid's Bergman's grandkid. That’s some serious royal Hollywood blood. I am, however, Brenda Esposito’s daughter, and my mom's a rocking lady from Ohio. 

I was standing next to Elettra, trying to comprehend her ankle bones, when the other guest on my episode walked in. He was beautifully clad in denim, like a patriot, and also, he was Jay Leno. It’s pretty rare that late night hosts have an opportunity to guest on one another’s shows. They all work similar hours, often for different networks, and usually, they don’t overlap. Jay Leno being the other guest on my particular episode of Craig’s show was like a Jetsons/Flintstones crossover movie with less time travel. I introduced myself to Jay and then began pacing around near the craft service table's sandwich platter, staring at my joke notes as if they might become sentient and just do the set for me. I was giving those notes some eye loving partially because I hadn't run my set in a few days and partially because I always imagine I'll go blank on everything I've ever written and then have to say, "Well, I forgot to know anything. Goodnight!" before walking directly out of the room and quitting standup forever. And I was nervous as hell.

Jay went into his dressing room to change from his denim to his suit. Why he did this I will never understand. Can't get a sharper look than denim. When he returned to the green room, I was still pacing around. He walked over and said to me, “I could tell you were the comic when I walked in. You don’t need to look at that. Put it away. It’s your act—you know it. You'll be great.” Jay Leno said this to me. Not only was that stellar, stellar advice given at the perfect moment, but also, he didn't have to be talking to me. Who am I? (I'm Cameron Esposito.) He could have sat in his dressing room, or he could have ignored me. Instead, I got the stand-up equivalent of a coach's butt slap to his star player from late night TV's most-watched host. 

A few minutes later, as I waited backstage to go on, Craig came over to meet me. He was charming and friendly and told me, “Jay’s gonna stay and watch you.” In fact, they both did. As I walked out of the curtain to hit my mark, I was facing the audience. But really, I was focused on Jay and Craig sitting off to my right, about 20 feet away, watching me. Comics always play to the other comics in the room—that's who we want to laugh. So for some reason, either because I love crowd work or because I wanted to play to the comics in the room, I decided to refer to Jay directly in my act. It was improvised—I mentioned that like me and all lesbians everywhere, Jay loves denim. Craig called over to me, asking if I was calling Jay a lesbian. I pointed out Jay’s pompadour. We went back and forth. It was loose and fun and wildly unexpected.

It’s an honor for a comic to be invited to the couch to sit with the host after a late night set. Not all comics are invited, and certainly not all comics are invited to sit after their debut. But, after our back and forth, Craig invited me over. To be invited to sit between two late night hosts? I honestly don't know if that has happened before. And what did they say to me when I sat there? They said: "White men are on their way out. You're the future." Final words spoken on the show? Jay yelled into the air, "Lesbians rule!" As my friend and fellow comic John Roy wrote to me after seeing the set, “Who would even think to ask a genie lamp for a first TV appearance where you do panel with two hosts at once, make fun of Leno and then he literally says ‘you’re the future?’” Not anyone.

For me, there was one more element to that moment. Like most comics, I draw material from my life. I am a lesbian, so when I talk about my relationship, I talk about being with a woman, and when I talk about politics I talk about it from the perspective of someone who is still fighting for equal rights. It's not an act—it's my life, which I've turned into my act. I am very comfortable with myself and my act, but I have read some comments [DON'T READ THE COMMENTS] below videos of mine on the internet. My Late Late set centered around my recent engagement and I did wonder what CBS's middle of the road audience would think of my really gay, really normal marriage to another human who is a woman. Turns out, they were on board with it, just as they absolutely should have been. People can be shitty in faceless internet comments. In person, most audiences I've dealt with are open, interested, and pretty chill. Jay and Craig were more than that—they were an audience of comics, ready to step in and joke along with me and ready to improve the show together.

Listen, I know those things happened with The Tonight Show and Conan. Those of us who are not Conan O'Brien or Jay Leno won't ever really know that full story. At the time, alternative comics like myself tended to be pretty invested in Conan's side of things. A few years later, Conan's show is going strong and Jay's about to retire again. Television is one of those industries without a ton of job security. It's a lot of up and downs and a lot of public failures and quiet successes. So I'd like to weigh in now, before he leaves late night, as saying, "Hey thanks, Mr. Leno." You were kind when you didn't have to be, quick on your feet, and genuinely funny. That stuff matters. Now, take this butt slap, get out there and finish strong. And then imagine the sound of a butt slap.

Cameron Esposito is an LA-based comic and the host of Put Your Hands Together. Follow her on Twitter at @cameronesposito.

More on Jay Leno (yes, we actually have more on Jay Leno):

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The super special September issue of VICE was exclusively culled from the archives of Bob Guccione Sr.—the legendary magazine publisher, provocateur, and entrepreneur who built a media empire that started with Penthouse. At its inception in 1965, Penthouse was a magazine like none other that championed the First Amendment to the extreme with dreamy, tastefully shot spreads of nude women and investigative journalism that aimed its sights squarely on the hypocrisy of big government, religion, and all other means of authority. Guccione’s empire soon grew to include dozens of magazines, most notably the now-defunct but soon-to-return science and science-fiction magazine OMNI, and later came to encompass such exotic ventures as investments in an Atlantic City casino and a nuclear-fusion power plant. Unfortunately, these last two projects failed spectacularly—as if Guccione would fail any other way—and he went bankrupt in the early 2000s before dying of cancer in 2010 with hardly a penny to his name.

Recently his legacy was resurrected thanks to entrepreneur Jeremy Frommer, who randomly discovered a portion of Guccione’s archives last year within a lot of storage units he purchased in Arizona. From there, he teamed up with childhood friend and film producer Rick Schwartz to buy the entirety of Guccione's life-spanning archives from the former mogul's bankruptcy liquidators. It was a treasure trove that included thousands of unpublished photos, art, illustrations, and articles in various stages of completion, as well as dozens of Guccione’s paintings. (Before starting Penthouse at age 35, he worked as a struggling oil painter in Europe.)

The Guccione Archives Issue—"guest edited" by Bob Guccione himself—barely scratches the surface of a collection that took VICE's editors months to go through, carefully whittling down a selection that best represented the legacy of a man who was misunderstood by the public at large during his lifetime. The issue harkens back to an era when magazines were published using an entirely analog process, presenting what a mock-up might've looked like halfway through completion. 

Want more specifics on how VICE gained access to the archives? Read Claire Evans’s piece here.

No idea who Bob Guccione even was? Read the summary of his unpublished autobiography here for a good overview of what made the man tick.

Want to see some gorgeous illustrations from some of the best sci-fi artists of all time? Yes, you do.

Wondering what a disgruntled employee thought of the Playboy Mansion in the 1980s? Here’s a transcript of an unpublished interview that a scorn butler gave to a Penthouse reporter in the 70s.

Or maybe you're more into the skin?

Unpublished Penthouse Pets

The Gucci Girls, Then and Now

Rejected Penthouse Pets

For even more unpublished archival material, please visit The Guccione Collection website, which is devoted to illuminating all the varied corners of Bob's legacy and creating new content in the spirit of the Guccione empire.