Photos by Cristina Dunlap

After Americans filed their income taxes earlier this year, a study was published that proved something was missing: About $2 trillion in unreported earnings. From gardeners to mechanics, to dog walkers and construction workers, more and more Americans are working for cash and keeping their earnings secret from Uncle Sam and the Internal Revenue Service. 

Lars Perner, an Assistant Professor of Clinical Marketing at the University of Southern California, says California's gray economy is huge compared to elsewhere in the country. As Americans lost their jobs in the recession, they started looking for alternate income streams, marketing themselves for a wide variety of services on Craigslist and through personal connections. "It's a much larger issue here in Los Angeles because you have this urban economy, and you have a lot of people from different ethnic and immigrant groups," he said. 

There is a fear that once one starts working in the shadows, it will be harder to get back into the light. Says Perner, "This is something that might start in a downturned economy, but one of the problems is, can you put this on your resume later on?" Other potential issues include security and safety—now and years down the line—not to mention the fear of an IRS audit. One thing is clear: This new American underground is pumping money into the mainstream economy and moving the country towards stability. We hit the streets of LA to see just who's raking in this cash. 

Wuilber, 25, ice cream push cart operator, $1,000/month

An undocumented Mexican immigrant who came to America when he was two, Wuilber has been in and out of both trouble and jail, but never convicted. After splitting a disc in his back working out five years ago, he could no longer continue working at the warehouse where he was on payroll with phony papers. Then, after slipping into a meth addiction, he lost his job as an oil lube technician. Now he's out pushing an ice cream cart up to nine hours straight. He makes $50 on a good day. 

"I just need money, and this is the way I earn it. Money goes, money comes," he says. "Transportation, food, sunblock… I wear a lot of sunblock. Shoes… This job, the bad thing about it is people get warts under their feet, so I spend every two weeks at least $20 worth of wart killers. Dr. Scholl's for the cushions under the feet, they wear out. Hopefully I'll just stick to this and not do drugs and alcohol. I'll be sober. I'll live sober. Because I do really want a house, a wife, and kids and stuff."

Steven, 23, costumed Batman, $10-$30/day

A couple months ago, Steven moved to Los Angeles from the Bay Area looking to break into film. He lives in Lake View Terrace with his aunt, who works at Warner Brothers. He's got hopes to start acting, writing, directing, and producing. He says he can "do it all." 

Having spent just a couple of weeks on the Hollywood Boulevard Walk of Fame, Steven says "Between me and the other Batmans out here, it's like mine is a Halloween store costume versus their Comic Con-quality costumes. There's no competition… It's really all in the way you approach people." 

Ana, 50, Tita, 44, bottle collectors, $20/day

A couple of days a week Ana and Tita collect bottles from the recycling bins that are brought out to the curbs around their neighborhood for city pickup. Respectively Mexican and El Salvadorian immigrants, they say it only takes about an hour and brings in a little extra income. 

It's not easy or glamorous though. Says Ana, "There's bacteria and broken bottles that will cut you." 

April, 29, club bottle service, $1,000 to $5,000 / night

After moving from Chicago to Las Vegas to work as an architect, April found the office environment too stuffy for her liking and entered the nightlife world after answering an ad to work at the Playboy Club. 

"I was making maybe $35,000 to start as an architect," she says. "I made that maybe in three months time in Vegas. What are you going to do? And it was so much fun."

She used to work five nights a week, but is now down to two and spends her days at auditions and acting gigs. About all of her income comes from tips, which the club pays out in cash at the end of each night. Twenty percent is a standard tip, she says, but high rollers tip more, sometimes up to $40,000 in a night. "But at most places you share with your co-workers," she says. "Otherwise it gets catty."

Daisy, 28, marijuana dealer and dispensary clerk, $4,000/month 

Aside from the 31 under-the-table hours Daisy puts in at a medical marijuana dispensary sales counter each week, she works to connect the dots between wholesale distributors and other shops around the city. If someone has an extra pound of pot to sell, she'll help broker that deal with another store and take a cut off the top. She also sells to a select few of her close friends from her home. 

"It's not something that I'm necessarily proud of," she says. "But I'm not ashamed of it either. This is what I do. I introduce people, just like an agent does. It's the same thing. It's just the fact that this is federally illegal."

Gina, 42, escort, $5,000/month

The first night Gina ever "hooked" she was 26 and working as a stripper in San Francisco. A client asked her how much for sex, and she threw out a large, random figure: $20,000. The john obliged and bought her a flight to meet him in Aspen to deliver about seven blowjobs a day as he called out her name. 

Since then, her rates have decreased to about $1,000 a night and she works mostly with several select clients with whom she gets very emotional, for better or worse. It's just a part of the outlandish saga she's putting together in a memoir titled Anything but a Wasted Life. She says, "If Larry David were a stripper for 20 years, this could be his memoir."

"Furry" Murray, 53, magician, $120/day

Murray, a former clinical laboratory scientist, following a divorce needed a change and saved up for two years to pursue his dream of becoming a full-time magician. With seven years of practicing magic to his credit, he also does kids and adult parties. 

"It's very up and down doing this," he says, as casual observers pass him on the street. "You get a lot of lookie-loos."

Pinky, 26, part-time nanny, $300/week

Pinky also owns her own business selling fashion accessories, and works display and sales at Anthropologie, both of which are taxed incomes. As a nanny, she works for one family about 13 hours a week and is mostly paid in checks. 

"I've been nannying 'illegally' since I was 12, so I guess I never really thought of it as being bad," she says. "It's never felt like it's a substantial enough income to worry about paying taxes on it."

Mauricio the "Snake God", 24, street spectacle, $1,200/week 

When he moved to Hollywood three years ago, the straight-edge LA-native Mauricio would take his pet snakes out for walks around the neighborhood. When tourists kept asking to have their picture taken with his reptile friends, he started collecting donations. 

Now he owns 13 snakes and aside from hanging out on Hollywood Boulevard with the imitation superheros and celebrity impersonators about four days a week, he's regularly hired for photo shoots, music videos, and fashion shows, and "anything people need snakes for."

Malice, 38, stripper, $0-$100/night 

Malice's main reason for stripping is simple: "I've never been good at hardly anything else," she says. "I couldn't have a normal job, especially now covered in tattoos. So I get to have freedom, and that's what I love. I get to have personal freedom in my identity."

After more than 10 years in the business, she moonlights in LA as a go-go dancer for live concerts and music videos. "Stripping is so bad in LA" she says. "In Portland we averaged $300 night dancing onstage, but here in LA, I'd be lucky if I make $100 in a night. And some nights it's zero."

Tom, 69, frontyard vinyl salesman, $2,000/month 

Selling records from his lawn is part of this former organizational development specialist's retirement plan. Aside from Social Security, this is his only source of income. 

"It's the best I can do without working hard," he says. "I decided when I retired that in order to make some money I would only do what I really wanted to do. This isn't the most lucrative work in the world but it keeps me happy."

More from VICE:

Cooking With Coolio

The Kindest Thing Jay Leno Ever Did for Me

Thirty Tons of Hash Set Ablaze? A Pothead’s Lament

The super special September issue of VICE was exclusively culled from the archives of Bob Guccione Sr.—the legendary magazine publisher who built a media empire that started with Penthouse. This portion of the issue features the sexy ladies that helped make Bob Guccione an icon—the Gucci Girls. 

Photos By: INDRANI; Producer: Rick Shwartz; Lingerie: Guccione Girls by GK Reid; Fur: Brandon Sun; Jewelry: Erickson Beamon; Hair: Lacy Redway; Makeup: Andie Markoe-Bryne; Retouching: Double Exposure Studios and Annie Rosen; Models: Alissa, Casie, Chantal, Dayana, Deana, Leanna, Stefani

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.

This seems a good time to gauge the filmic prospects of The Turner Diaries. I bought my copy—out of raw, morbid curiosity—at a Virginia gun show in the mid-90s. Back then, the novel’s Banana Time fanaticism seemed tailor-made for the antigovernment mania of the Clinton era. It even inspired a half-dozen real-life crime sprees, including the Oklahoma City bombing.

Written by Andrew Macdonald (the pen name of neo-Nazi activist William Pierce) in the late 70s, The Turner Diaries is a look back at the great global race war of the 90s, told from the perspective of a diary found in the far future. The book follows Earl Turner, a Joe Sixpack-type who gets radicalized after jackbooted government thugs bust into his house and confiscate his guns. Turner joins a shadowy organization (imaginatively called “the Organization”) and wages war on America.

It’s a genuinely reprehensible novel, one which uses blunt racism as wallpaper. The conspirators infiltrate the "cosmopolitan racial goulash" in wigs and disguises. When the Organization eventually captures Southern California, it stages "the Day of the Rope,” hanging race traitors from trees and telephone poles across the Southland. It's Hollywood imagery in the service of an unfilmable story.  

But is it unfilmable? Cinema has a long history showing us things we don't want to see. Just in the last ten years, audiences have championed trends both technical (3D-CGI, forays across the uncanny valley) and social (torture porn, Star Wars films that are sucky instead of fun) that would have baffled moviegoers of the 80s. Cultural goalposts only feel fixed in the moment: Lolita, Naked Lunch, and Lord Of The Rings were each considered unfilmable in their day.

Politically, what passed for far right in the 90s is basically centrist by today's standards. Tea Partiers are a demographic, not a fringe, one that could reward a Turner film handsomely at the box office or Netflix queue. Surely, somewhere deep in the bowels of Hollywood, shadowy executives are spitballing ways to bring Macdonald's work to the big screen.  

The fact that it’s an awful idea doesn’t mean it won’t happen—it just requires certain conditions. Here are five ways an adaptation of The Turner Diaries could go down.

Photo via

AMERICAN PSYCHO STYLE

Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho featured graphic sexual carnage every bit as repulsive as Turner. It also earned far more outrage than Macdonald's novel, which was banned instead of protested. A brave studio could score an elegant workaround by hiring Mary Harron, of I Shot Andy Warhol, to direct. One could view the hiring of a female director as either coincidental, pragmatic, or cynical (especially now that Christian Bale turned down $50 million to play Batman, while Harron just shot a TV biopic about Anna Nicole Smith). The feminine touch will spare the film the full brunt of the public’s outrage. Similarly, there'd be no shortage of non-Aryan directors to helm a possible Turner Diaries adaptation. Although the plot would need tweaking.

CASTING: Ethan Hawke as Turner, an FBI agent deep undercover in the Organization. Obviously, Morgan Freeman is the president. At this point, he could probably just be President Freeman.

ODDS OF A FILM: Plausible.

WORLD WAR Z STYLE

This option (formerly known as The Lawnmower Man Style) is deceptively simple: buy the rights, flush the plot. In The Diaries Of Turner, Turner is a divorced/widowed dad who's given up on love... Until Katherine Heigl walks into his life.

CASTING: Ben Affleck has to be Turner.

ODDS OF A FILM: Low, but seriously: much, much crazier shit has happened.

TRISTAM SHANDY STYLE

2005's Tristam Shandy: A Cock And Bull Story took the granddaddy of unfilmable novels—Laurence Sterne's 1760 gutbuster Tristam Shandy—and reworked it into a nimble Steve Coogan movie-within-a-movie. Likewise, such a version of The Turner Diaries could dress up its despicable core subject with so much black comedy, zippy dialogue, and ironic jabs that audiences won't know what the fuck they just watched.

CASTING: Willem Dafoe as both Turner, and a version of himself who spends most of the movie wondering aloud what he's doing with his life.

ODDS OF A FILM: Slim, not impossible.

ADAPTATION STYLE

Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief posed its own unfilmability issues, being a nonfiction peek into the world of horticulture enthusiasts. Director Spike Jonze jazzed up the narrative in 2002 with Adaptation, a story about the perils of adapting such a story into a film. This is one level more meta than Tristram Shandy style.

CASTING: Wesley Snipes as both Turner and Macdonald.

ODDS: This probably will not happen.

THE TURNER DIARIES STYLE

Target sells The Human Centipede on Blu-ray. Civilization is on the downslide, depravity is big business, and the antiguvmint far right doesn't even bother to speak in code anymore. Do you really think a Turner movie can't be made?

CASTING: Mel Gibson as Earl Turner (and director, producer, and financier).  

ODDS OF A FILM: This may happen.

Previously - Coppola Gets Dickslapped

After the dramatic antiregime protests that took place earlier this year, it seems the Turkish public have acquired a taste for resistance. This isn't something the country's police seem keen to encourage, and they're in the habit of violently cracking down on the first signs of civil unrest in Istanbul and Antakya.

Monday evening saw the latest flare-up, when 22-year-old demonstrator Ahmet Atakan died—allegedly at the hands of the police—at a protest against military intervention in Syria. It's the latest incident to reignite the spirit of rebellion the world first saw in the battle for Gezi Park.

Clashes took place throughout Tuesday night, after thousands gathered in Istanbul to oppose the police brutality that has left nine dead and thousands injured since June. Protesters planned to calmly march on Taksim Square, the center of the uprising in June, but the police had other ideas, blocking off all entrances to the square before opening fire on the peaceful crowd with tear gas and rubber bullets.

Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan's government, afraid of losing its grip on the country's economy and population, is trying to regain authority over its citizens by systematically attacking them in public. Every demonstration this summer has been met with the same response by the Turkish police: tear gas and violence. 

Protesters manning the barricades Tuesday night in Istanbul. Photo by Osman Nuri Iyem

As unrest spreads throughout Turkey, it's becoming clear that what started as a protest against the closing of a park has now turned into an extended public condemnation of Erdoğan's government. Another demonstration descended into violence last week was at Ankara's Middle East Technical University, where students gathered to march against plans to build a new road that would pass through the campus, destroying a nearby forest in the process. (Like Gezi Park, the campus's forest is regarded as one of the last green spaces in a city in the throes of a recent construction boom.)  Hundreds of protesters amassed at the planned building site on September 6 and were met with almost immediate police violence as the cops attacked with water cannons and tear-gas grenades.

Protesters in Tuzluçayır. Photo by Olcay Kabaktepe

On September 8, police in Ankara went on the offensive yet again, this time clamping down on Shias protesting against a joint Sunni-Shia mosque in the neighbourhood of Tuzluçayır. The demonstrators, enraged by what they saw as an assimilation of Shia religious traditions, appeared at the groundbreaking ceremony marking the beginning of construction of the mosque before police tried to clear the area, sparking running battles that ran into the night, with barricades being set up in the roads by the protesters in an effort to halt the police water cannons. 

A protester blocks a police water cannon in Ankara. Photo by Olcay Kabaktepe

My contact in Istanbul, who wished to remain anonymous, told me, “I think the government is very afraid, and that’s why they are putting so much pressure on the people. A couple of weeks ago, we were in Taksim, and suddenly fans of Kasımpaşa [a soccer team] poured in. They were protesting against Beşiktaş fans; there was a possibility Beşiktaş would play in Kasımpaşa’s stadium this season.

"Of course, the riot police confronted them and told them they couldn't protest. The leader of the fans shouted, 'Our stadium is called Recep Tayyip Erdoğan! [Kasımpaşa is Tayyip Erdoğan’s neighbourhood and the stadium was built in his name.] We are here to protest against the alcoholic Beşiktaş fans—we do not want them in our neighborhood!'

"The police donned their masks and readied themselves to fire tear gas at the Kasımpaşa fans, before turning on their heels and fleeing Taksim. This really shows the attitude of the government... They are scared. Whether you are a fan of Kasımpaşa who goes to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Stadium, or whether you're an Alawite, it doesn't matter—you have no right to mass protest."

Not surprisingly, the atmosphere in Turkey is tense. No matter how hard Erdoğan’s government tries to spin the unrest as the work of foreign agents, an anti-Muslim "deep state" or terrorists, the police violence is clearly the fault of the government. Unfortunately for the embattled prime minister, he doesn't seem to realize that it's not just unrest over greenery, mosques, and soccer stadiums that's prompting the protests in Turkey, but the aggressive police action he has endorsed and encouraged.

Follow Yiannis on Twitter: @YiannisBab

More from the unrest in Turkey:

The Brother of a Turkish Protester Murdered by the Police Speaks Out

Could the Turkish Uprising Be a Breakthrough for the Country's Kurds?

Talking to the Bulldozer-Hijacking Soccer Fans About Their Role in the Turkish Uprising

Swedish photographer Jan Henrik Engström is one of the reasons contemporary Scandinavian photography is acknowledged worldwide. If you were already aware of that, you probably know him better as 'JH' and came across him some time after his widely acclaimed 2004 photo book, Trying to Dance. Since that was released, he's had praise heaped upon him from people like Robert Frank, won prizes all over the place, released a bunch more photo books, and collaborated with people like Anders Petersen and his partner, Margot Wallard.     

JH's forthcoming book, Ende und Anfang, is coming out this October on André Frère Éditions, and is made up of photographs he took at the end of the 20th century while traveling around Europe and the US. Two more of his books, Sketch of Paris (Aperture) and Långt Från Stockholm (Mörel Books), will also be released this year. And, as some of his work will be included in Lost Home (Super Labo) alongside nine other photographers, that brings his number of photo book releases up to 15 by the end of 2013. Which is a lot of photo book releases.

With all this stuff coming out, I figured it was time to catch up for a chat.

VICE: Hey, Jan. You'll soon have released a total of 15 books—why so many?
JH Engström: A book is the ultimate photographic expression. Photography in painting, sculpture, or installations lose so much, and all you get is a poor reproduction. A photography book in high-quality print does the photograph 100 percent justice. As such, the photo book is what interests me, as opposed to catalogs with photographic art. It's an important component of the expression. What can be expressed in a book is often more interesting and complex than, for example, a photographic work hanging on a wall. A good photo book also implies a dimension of forward movement.

What does the title of your next book, Ende und Anfang [The End and the Beginning] refer to?
The title means what it says: the end and the beginning. It’s obviously a reference to time. Time fascinates me. A lot has happened since the photos in the book were taken, which has changed our image of the world—the terror attack on New York, for example. The title also poses an intriguing question: when does anything start or finish?

Photographers often have themes for their books, but you seem to avoid that. Why?
I have themes, too. Maybe they're just not that obvious. I'm aiming for a freer approach to communicating the photographic image. I believe the recipient’s capability of interpreting and drawing emotional and intellectual conclusions is generally underestimated. I have an aversion to overemphasis and pedagogy—I’m not even sure I want the recipient to 'understand' my books. But I do want the books to touch the observer.

Is it taxing to move from the intensity of photography to the quieter phase of editing? How do you handle the contrast?
It can be a strain, yeah, because of the enormous shifts in energy levels. But there’s also a hell of a buzz in the energy adjustment, so I’m not complaining. Anyway, I’m privileged to be doing what I’m doing, so I’m grateful for what I get.

You have published two books—Foreign Affair and 7 Days Athens November 2011—with your partner, Margot Wallard. You're both strongly grounded in documentary photography. What's it like sharing professional and personal lives? 
It works fine. And I’m not sure I even know what the word 'documentary' means. Of course, we have differences when we do projects together, but that’s how it should be. And Margot is a really blunt critic of my work. There is nothing of the admirer in her and she is ruthless in her honesty when I show her things I’ve done. That can hurt, but naturally I also appreciate it tremendously. At the moment we have separate projects that are still under wraps. Deciding on a common project is much harder than launching something on your own.

You also run Atelier Smedsby, a highly regarded workshop, together. How do you choose your participants?
We try to put together a group that is as dynamic as possible. This means a large age span and that the participants are from as widely different corners of the world as possible. It’s good to have different cultural takes. The consensus vibes disappear, which is damn liberating. We balance men and women 50/50. Plus, we obviously check out their photography skills.

Looking ahead, will photo books be the main way for you to express yourself, or do you think, after making A Film About/With Anders Petersen and Bertil and Maggan, that you'd like to make more documentaries?
I’d love to make more movies. Not necessarily documentaries, though. We’ll see.

Which contemporary photographers do you admire?
I think I admire specific photographers or artists to a lesser extent than I used to. It’s probably age. I tend to admire people for their bodies of work, created over time. And people who aren’t tendentious.

Are there any photographers you feel have been forgotten? Whose work you'd like to see a retrospective of?
There are many Swedes who haven’t had the international attention they deserve—Gerry Johansson, for example. Off the top of my head, I’d like to see everything Eva Klasson has done. As for foreign photographers, it’s a bit harder. Early photographers who fascinate me and who haven’t had much attention would be people like Claude Cahun, Stanislav Witkiewicz, Hans Bellmer, or Eli Lotar.

Great. Thanks, JH!

See more of JH Engström's work here.

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Unpublished Penthouse Pets

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By the time he received his calling from God, Václav Hálek was already firmly established as a concert pianist and composer in the Czechoslovakian classical music scene. Fortunately for Hálek, the Lord didn't want the fervently Catholic maestro to join the priesthood or lead his fellow papists in arms against the godless communist state. Hálek's calling was a simple, occupationally aligned act of devotion. Listen to the music that mushrooms make, and write it down for those of us who can't hear their songs. Which mushrooms, exactly? Every single damn one of them.

To date, Hálek has penned nearly 6,000 of these mushroom melodies, transcribed straight from the mushroom itself (or a picture of the mushroom itself when it's not growing season). This in addition to composing an entire "Mycocosmic Symphony"—which the Communist authorities dutifully banned under the "Louie Louie"-like suspicion that it must contain some secret subversive message they were missing. Because otherwise who the hell would write an entire symphony just for mushrooms? A man who spends every morning staring at one until it sings to him, that's who.

A handful of species from Hálek's fungal opus have been performed and recorded (archive.org has a nice selection of boletus and amaritas you can listen to here, but most of it sits in ever-growing stacks of score paper around the Hálek house, waiting as patiently as a dormant sclerotium to carve out a place for mushrooms in the plant-and-animal-glutted canon of Western music and seal their composer as the musical Lorax of the fungus kingdom.

Fungax.

Previously - The Mushroom Whisperer

For the second year in a row, I gladly skipped out on the first half of New York Fashion Week in order to screw up my internal clock by hauling ass across the globe to the tiny little county of New Zealand. When I received my invitation, I initially thought: Fuckkkkk that. But then I found out I'd have free Wi-Fi, which would allow me to afford to eat this time around. So I said OK, and before I could even think twice about what I was doing, I was on a 13-hour flight to the southern hemisphere, chugging as much red wine as I could before the plane left the gate. Then I gave out all the Ambien I'd brought for the trip to the passengers around me so they wouldn't hear me frantically chanting "4 8 15 16 23 42," Lost's Oceanic Flight 815 doomed number sequence under my breath out of fear our plane was destined to fall out of the sky. Who cares I wasn't going to Australia, same shit. Planes suck, and I'm not trying to die or end up stuck on an island where all of the native creatures could easily kill me.

And yet, despite my crippling fear of flying, earthquakes, and my nonexistent personal spending budget that prohibited me from purchasing items from the designers I'd seen and contributing to New Zealand's dwindling economy (Do you know how much a sweater can cost in a country full of sheep?) I actually had a good time... AGAIN. Everyone was friendly, treated me as if I were hot shit, and had me do all of these interviews for TV. They even let me sit front row at shows I’d totally trashed just a year before. Pretty epic. It’d be impossible to tell you about everything I saw as I’ve arrived home from the trip completely brain-dead with a mouth full of cavities from all of the free chocolates, but here is what I do remember vaguely and still feel comfortable saying nice/bad things about...

Crystal @ N Model Management

Best Models - Crystal and Kelvin, a.k.a. Ksenia

One of the unique things about seeing shows in a country as small as New Zealand is that they don’t have that many great models to work with. Everyone uses the same girls, which is wonderful if those girls are attractive. But the paucity of models can be a terrible thing that'll make you want to blow your brains out multiple times a day when you’re stuck seeing the same stupid faces at every presentation. Surprisingly this season I was blessed with seeing two faces I loved—the fact that I am choosing to bestow the title of Best Models on two completely different girls is extremely rare.

Sometimes all it takes to prove to people that you’re a good model is to show everyone your tits. Most girls fidget and try to fix a nip slip, and as a result end up drawing more attention to their wardrobe malfunction. However, a truly seasoned model just keeps on walking and smirks devilishly as she strides down the runway giving onlookers the kind of look that says, “Chill. I got this!” When I saw Crystal walk out in a dress reminiscent of the type of gown a classy Joan Chen might have worn on Twin Peaks not once but twice with a fully exposed nipple I literally had to hold back the applause. I loved it so damn much, and clearly I wasn’t the only fan of her boobies this past fashion week because designers kept putting her in outfits that showed them off. It was such a delight!


Kelvin, a.k.a. Ksenia @ Clyne

Another really amazing way for models to grab people’s attention is by having two different names. Double the points if you also look like you might not speak English and you were genetically manufactured in a test tube in a Russian science lab during the Cold War. Kelvin or Ksenia was by far the hottest girl I saw all week. Both tall, blond, and with sharp features that made me want to die and be reincarnated as a Barbie doll, she was the most beautiful thing to grace the runway. Also the fact that she’s 24 years old, much older than most models these days and still looks to amazing kind of made me hate myself but, just a littleeeeeee bit.



Worst Designer of All Time - Annah Stretton

Having seen Annah Stretton’s show the previous year I knew I was in for an annoying 15 minutes of the worst designs ever created. She’s one of those “kooky” designers who probably wishes she was as original and crazy as Betsey Johnson. But she simply fails to deliver. This year her show was a totally unoriginal homage to Alice in Wonderland complete with stupid performance art. Her designs are for sad woman who still collect books on fairies and own multiple Anne Geddes baby calendars. Her world is a world of unicorns, pastels, and watercolors; it truly makes me wish I were never born. I know people in New Zealand respect her and whatever but I really can’t stand people who constantly have their heads in the clouds. I hate designers who never seem to grow up or evolve artistically. I don’t care if writing this shit ensures I’m never allowed to step foot in the country again, the woman played Dido for crying out loud. I think my hatred is justified. Like the cupcakes that decorated the runway proclaimed... EAT ME!


Runway decorations at Annah Stretton...

Best Designers in New Zealand - Stolen Girlfriends Club

This is going to sound redundant (it is), or like I’ve been paid to say nice things about these guys (I haven’t), but Marc Moore and Dan Gosling’s label Stolen Girlfriends Club is easily the best label in New Zealand (they are). When I went down this season I promised myself I would be a much harsher critic, but I knew this was all going to be hell when I received the invite to their runway show called Dirty Magic.

Their presentation was the usual shit show you’d expect from the most anticipated show of the week, everyone wanted to get in, there wasn’t enough space, and they ran out of Dan Aykroyd alcohol shortly after the runway portion because that’s what happens when cool kids are allowed to attend a fashion show. But no complaints on my end because the show was magnificent as usual. They designers always cast the most attractive models each season, the styling is always perfect, and although I don’t typically dress as hot as the guys and girls they generally design for, I’d have worn all of it in a heartbeat. Would possibly even consider withholding sex from a significant other if they refused to let me dress them in their clothing as well.



Most Amateur Collection - Lela Jacobs

No Fashion Week would be complete without some kind of weird artistic interpretation of a young up-and-coming designer's deepest, darkest emotions. Lela Jacobs (who I'd heard a lot of really good things about) unfortunately ended up being this designer at NZFW. Although other attendees at the show were excited to see her new line of Winter attire, I immediatly could tell her collection was going to be a total disaster when the first drugged-out model wearing some bullshit Where The Wild Things Are gown awkwardly shuffled down the catwalk. All of the models had a painted-white index finger complete with an oddly manicured “coke nail” at the tip, and if that wasn’t terrible enough, they also sported old lady pantyhose on their heads. I couldn’t help but think of Nicolas Cage in Raising Arizona when he tries to steal baby diapers from the supermarket and the guy at the front desk screams, “Boy you’ve got a panty on your head!” Good job trying to be different Lela but go back to art school you’re not going to make any money in fashion.




Best Makeup - Trelise Cooper

One of the very few shows I went backstage for was Trelise Cooper's. I stood around in the back corner pounding Red Bull waiting to watch all of the girls get dressed. Then I heard that Trelise, who is notorious for being late, was missing an entire truck of clothing and it’d be awhile until anyone started getting naked. Before I threw my hands up in disappointment and ran back to my seat I spotted a girl with full-face piercings and asked to take her photo. I fanned out so hard and was extremely pleased with myself thinking I had just landed a pic of the coolest girl at New Zealand Fashion Week. But after a full hour of waiting crossing and uncrossing my legs because I had to go to the bathroom and couldn’t since “the show was about to start” the same girl came out along with 10 others in the exact same look. About 150 looks later, I had tears streaming down my face as I laughed in disbelief that models were STILL coming out, plus I still had to pee. Even though the show was so insanely long and that Trelise just said “Screw it, I’m going to rip off Vivienne Westwood and also make one of EVERYTHING this season because I don’t know what else to do,” it was all saved because she actually took a risk with the makeup. Shout out to the tiny girl who couldn’t walk in her shoes and was bleeding all over the runway. I prayed for you.

Best Runway Show - Zambesi

Designers Elisabeth and Neville Findlay probably could have sent models totally naked down a runway and I still would have said it was the best show of New Zealand Fashion Week. Thankfully for everyone’s sake and my journalistic integrity they actually put people in clothing. It’s really hard for me not to obsess over the duo. They run the kind of fashion house that’s so chic and well made that it reminds you why you love fashion in the first place. They’re so cool I seriously even sat there questioning myself as to whether or not I was cool enough to even be allowed at the show and if the outfit I was wearing looked stupid next to all of their designs. Did I wear enough black and leather? Am I lame for not wearing creepers? Surely their intention isn’t to make anyone feel inferior to their clothing, if anything their show this season which featured a slew of gorgeous models getting ready right on stage, was a tribute to their Kiwiana roots. Zambesi is the kind of brand that any country would be proud to call their own because they’re proud of their people and where they come from. But in all seriousness... Did my shoes look OK? I only hope I added to the live stream of your fashion show and didn’t fuck it up. Let me know.

Most New York Presentation - UNDERGROUND

Of course I’m not going to say anything bad about a young, edgy designer presentation that takes place in the basement of a building; that would be hypocritical. This “hipster showcase” that featured designs from Jimmy D. Maike, Underground Sundae, Otsu, Blue Blank, Jessica Grubisa, Eugnie, Kowtow, and Thistle Brown was just as everyone initially described to me, “So VICE!” That each of the designer's pieces displayed a more Bushwick-warehouse-afterhours vibe than the next was actually impressive. I was able to walk through the installation a full two times before the customary behavior at most fashion events kicked in, where my body is uncontrollably yanked toward the bar. I even took the time to take photos of every single designer booth, but I was so overstimulated by all of the glitter and coolness that I couldn’t pick proper photo filters. So only half of them made the ol' Instagram. Typical.

Thanks again to Anna Jobsz PR and the rest of the team at New Zealand Fashion Week for taking a risk and inviting me back!

@ABUNNY

More from Fashion Week:

Conor Lamb's NYFW Photo Blog

The Exploitation and Crushing Capiltalism of Fashion Week

Image via Flickr

There’s a goofy neurological trick you can play on your brain that makes you feel like you have a super long nose. It’s called the Pinocchio Illusion and all you need to make it happen is a vibrator and a friend.

Here’s how it works. Person A closes her eyes and places the tip of her finger on her nose. Person B applies a buzzing vibrator to the tendon that connects the bicep to the inner side of the elbow of the arm that’s touching the nose. The vibration on the tendon stimulates the muscle fibers in such a way that tricks Person A’s brain into thinking that her arm is extending, but since Person A’s index finger tells her brain that it’s still connected to the tip of her nose, the brain does a quick and dirty calculation (in the absence of visual data) and concludes that her nose must be growing super long. It’s fucking crazy. Try it.

According to Princeton University neuroscientist Michael Graziano, this phenomenon is indicative of the key aspect of the human mind. Our brains create models of the world around us, including our bodies, in order to be attentive to the various signals we get from our senses. So in the Pinocchio Illusion, your brain creates a model of what your body looks like and the model falls apart due to the conflicting stimuli. Our brains might be exceptionally good at making models, but they’re never perfect replicas of what’s happening in the world, just fast and loose sketches to make sense of things.

There’s a funny consequence to our brains’ proficiency in model-making, Professor Michael Graziano argues in his book Consciousness and the Social Brain, which came out this month. That consequence is what we call consciousness, the ineffable ungraspable “I,” the magic sauce of Being that defines our essential humanness. From Descartes’s “Cogito ergo sum,” to Kant’s theory of a priori forms, to Taoist, nondualist Vedantic whatever, the origin of consciousness has been, you know, a real head-scratcher. And Professor Graziano’s theory proposes an exceptionally clear explanation of what’s going on in our domes’ pieces every day of our short little lives.  

So to the question: Are we ordained by our divine creator or are we just delusional lumps of carbon and guts? Professor Graziano concludes something closer to latter. But it’s not delusion that makes our brains aware. It’s a highly functional adaptive strategy. What we think of as sentience can be explained by what he calls the Attention Schema Theory, and I talked to him on the phone this week to understand what his theory of a neurological basis for our consciousness means today and what it could mean in the future.

VICE: Can you describe what exactly your investigation into consciousness is?
Professor Michael Graziano: Here’s a quick background. I can be conscious that I am me and I am human. Whatever that consciousness is, is an experience. What I am asking is what set of information is that consciousness. What does it mean to have an actual subjective experience of something?

What’s unique about your method of inquiry? This question sounds like something a lot of people have tried to figure out.
To start off, many scientists are asking the wrong question. They’re asking, “What does it mean to have the magical inner feeling?” You start with the assumption that there’s magic and then you start experimenting. The better question is how and for what adaptive advantage do brains attribute that property to themselves? And right away that puts it into the domain of information processing, something that can, in principle, be understood.

How is it that the cognitive machinery in our brains accesses internal data and arrives at a conclusion and can sometimes report, “I have experienced, I am aware of something.” Not just “that is blue,” but “I am aware that that is blue.”

OK, so how do brains do that?
Brains construct models, informational models of all kinds of things, in fact it’s one of the things brains do best, make models of the external world and models of things going on inside your body.

The theory at heart, the reason why brains attribute the property of awareness to itself, is because the brain is essentially constructing a model to monitor the fact that it is paying attention to that object. So attention is a physically real data-handling method and awareness is the brain’s cartoon sketch that’s used to keep track of what it’s doing. That it can use to keep track of what it’s doing.

Wait, so that’s it, your brain creates a model, and therefore you are an aware, sentient, nonrobot?
So let’s think about what the physical project of attention is: there’s an agent, a brain, a being that’s focusing its processing power on a particular set of signals that neuroscientists call attention; the signals might pertain to the sandwich you’re holding. There’s an agent and there’s a sandwich, and there’s a relationship between the two: that is, the agent is focusing its resources on the sandwich. That’s attention.

So when you build a model of that it will have a large amount of information about the agent—who you are, where you are, your memories, your information about yourselves—that model should contain information about the sandwich, and it should contain information about the relationship between the two. And, crucially, the model will have information about what it means for an agent to focus attention on a thing. What I’m saying is that there is information in the brain, a large dossier with lots of descriptive information that there’s a you, and there’s a sandwich and a specific relationship: you are aware of the sandwich.

And there’s some recursion involved. In some sense, awareness of self and awareness of some object are kind of the same thing. The underlying formula is very similar. 

One thing that I’m surprised by is how similar and useful language is in conceiving these models and structures. Specifically the sentence “I see blue.” Three aspects of this cognitive function are the three essential aspects of the sentence: subject, verb, object. Is that an accident or something hardwired into our brains?
I think there is a deep connection between language and all these other issues. One aspect of this theory is that there’s a constant evolutionary change and what may have started out as a simple model to help control attention then evolved into a way of of keeping track of other people’s state of attention and then evolved into a key part of our social machinery. An outgrowth of our social capability is language capability, and in fact, the main language area of the brain—it’s called the Varneke’s area—is basically an evolutionary outgrowth of the same regions involved in social thinking that we think might be involved in attributing awareness in ourselves and others. So the actual brain mech[anics] of language have a very deep connection to all these issues of consiouness and awareness.

OK, well can we make robots self-aware? Can we turn Pinocchio into a real boy?
A robot can do a bunch of things, but it does not have the information to report: “I have experience, I have an inner experience.” It does not have that algorithm. But I think that’s programmable, and it think it’s coming.

Here’s another thing I suspect that will happen in 100 years: imagine a device that can scan your brain in enough molecular detail to simulate or recreate that data in artificial hardware. There is a you—your mind and memories that are now copied almost like a file on a computer system. Now you can live in a simulated world of your choose. The reason why I think this is likely [to] will happen is that people are obsessed with living as long as possible. this is essentially the invention of [an] electronic afterlife. Another reason I think this will happen is because if there’s one thing people spend the most money on, it's entertainment, and this is like putting yourself in a virtual playground. I think this is an inevitable consequence of understanding awareness. So forget about robots that are aware; imagine putting yourself into a simulated world and have it feel real. 

More Brain Stuff:

War in Our Heads: A Chat with Jonathan Moreno

The Science Behind Tripping Balls

Reading Brain Waves

The scene from a recent 'Critical Mass' bicycle demonstration in Toronto. via Flickr.

Toronto's Mayor Rob Ford is mostly famous for his (alleged) love of crack cocaine, but he's also well known for fearlessly fighting back against the “war on the car,” an imaginary battle he claimed to have won in 2010. This has taken the form of making sure all new public transit is built underground, so as to not offend the delicate sensibilities of motorists, and also taking a brave stance against the conventions of contemporary urban planning by ripping out bike lanes—instead of building new ones, like the rest of the civilized world.

Sure, the removal of those lanes might only save drivers two minutes in commuting time, and yes it cost the taxpayer $300,000, but the symbolism is the important part. How else will cyclists understand that it's their own fault when they get hit by cars if the city coddles them with luxurious bike lanes? Rob is just showing us cyclists some much-needed tough love.

Activist Taylor Flook didn't take Rob's life lessons to heart however, and after being sent to hospital following a bike accident, Taylor wrote ol’ Robbie an open letter, pleading with him to reconsider his apparent disdain for bike lanes and cyclists. The letter touched the mayor so much that he got one of his underlings to respond, helpfully explaining to Flook that if she thought the city was at fault for her accident that she should make an insurance claim. The staffer even ended the letter with “Best Wishes,” proof that Robbie really does care about everyone, even pinko bike-riding activists.

Of course it is possible that this was just another revolt by a Rob Ford staffer, and that the instructions on how to make a claim against the city were actually meant to embarrass our noble leader. That seems a little too nuanced though, considering that most of Ford's current staff appear to have been hired for their football skills.

It's not so surprising that Toronto is seemingly going in the opposite direction from the rest of the world when it comes to cycling infrastructure. Even bike-loving leftists like councilor Adam Vaughan seem to only love bike lanes when they don't infringe on their own pet projects (ie. his dream of a pedestrian mall in the middle of the entertainment district).

Elsewhere in Toronto, retailers are trying to stir up panic around how bike lanes might impact their businesses (because everyone knows cyclists don't shop). And when lanes actually do get built, the tend to disappear and reappear unpredictably to make room for parking, making some streets feel more dangerous than before they were improved.

At this point, the bike lanes in Toronto are so few and so badly designed that no experienced cyclists plan their routes around them, and they also do little to lure inexperienced urban cyclists onto the roads. If you're riding a bike in Toronto, it's been made very clear to you that you're on your own, which helps keep the myth of the war on the car alive by keeping the relationship between motorists and cyclists as antagonistic as possible.

When a car cuts me off in traffic, I think of the two people I've known who were crushed to death by trucks while cycling—and it's hard to keep the rage down. But then I remember Darcy Sheppard, who was dragged to his death after confronting a motorist who'd hit him from behind. Or Chris Kasztelewicz, who lost a leg after being deliberately rammed by a cab driver he'd yelled at following a more minor accident.

The war on the car is mostly a myth, but the war on cyclists feels tangibly real. Give the finger to someone who almost runs you off the road in their SUV, and there's a strong chance you’re going to end up in a fist-fight. Cyclists in Toronto have to learn how to keep their rage to themselves. I lost track of how many friends have been sent to the hospital after bike accidents (myself included) long ago.

Building more bike lanes wouldn't prevent all cycling accidents, but it might at least help change the mood on the streets a bit by reminding drivers that bikes actually do belong on the road too. On the other hand, some might argue that separated bike lanes send the opposite message. In NYC, at least one overzealous cop convinced himself that it's a crime for cyclists to ride anywhere but bike lanes. And just because there are nice separated lanes doesn't mean that they won't be blocked by garbage, construction, or parked cars.

Mayor Ford may slowly be changing his tune though. He did surprise everyone by showing up to cut the ribbon at an official opening of the new bike lanes on Sherbourne in June. This was especially shocking, given that the ceremony happened at 10:30 AM, and Robbie doesn't generally crawl into the office until noon on Mondays. Nevertheless, he still managed to emphasize that, in his mind, riding a bike is for the latte-sipping downtown elite, and not for the working class of the inner suburbs. Ford's whole genius is dividing the city into two factions, and claiming that he's fighting for the underdog. Everybody loves an underdog, and everyone wants to believe that they're the underdog worth fighting for.

But if bikes are just for big cities, why did I see so many separated lanes in the tiny Quebec mining town of Rouyn Noranda when visiting recently for a music festival? If a city of 40,000 people can justify the expense, surely Toronto can manage to add a few more kilometres to their network. Instead, plans made years ago remain uncompleted, and nothing new of substance is being proposed. Rather than standing up to Ford on this, the left wing of city council gets side tracked with battles over the details and make so many concessions to retailers over parking that any improvements are marginal at best.

Don't get me wrong, municipal political theatre is great fun, but this imaginary war on the car that’s supposedly being run by latte loving lefties is leading to actual casualties. Is shaving two minutes off your commute really worth killing cyclists? The answer to that question is obvious—and yet the city of Toronto’s pattern of urban development pretends like it’s not, time and time again.

Follow Ben on Twitter: @benjaminboles

Previously:

Rob Ford Arm-Wrestled Hulk Hogan, and Won

We Spoke to a Former Crack Addict about Rob Ford

The Facebook Comments Rob Ford's Staffers Don't Want You to See

Two women have mysteriously died here within a very short time period. Photos by David P. Ball.

A string of unexplained sex worker deaths in the same New Westminster, B.C. apartment building continues to shake the region's sex worker community, amidst outrage that drug toxicology reports for the women are still unavailable a full month after the first death.

The deaths of Jill Lyons, 45, and Karen Nabors, 48, come only a year after another escort was murdered in her home only six blocks away. Now, as the quaint, Gold Rush-era town (pop. 65,976) grapples with the mysterious deaths, sex workers are demanding answers to why police waited two weeks to warn them.

“These women ran acts next to me for years,” says Susan Davis, coordinator of the B.C. Coalition of Experiential Communities.“This really rocked us, especially those of us in that age demographic, working indoors.

“There's been a lot of emotional response to it. Many indoor workers don't associate ourselves with violence against women on the streets; we feel immune, because it doesn't happen to us often. But this rocks the cradle. People are feeling more vulnerable.”

Susan Davis.

In the absence of information from authorities, some are now speculating that deadly drugs or even a serial killer may be to blame.

The suspicious deaths, only one storey apart in the historic, one-time provincial capital's Elmwood Apartments last month, has brought back memories of murderer Robert Pickton whose notorious pig farm was less than half-an-hour away.

After his 2002 arrest, Pickton confessed to killing 49 sex workers over more than a decade. Last year, B.C.'s Missing Women Inquiry concluded that cops' “systemic bias” against mostly-aboriginal sex workers was behind the “colossal failure” to catch Canada's worst serial killer sooner.

Davis, an outspoken sex worker of 27 years, bristles when asked about the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team (IHIT)'s Aug. 28 warning: “We continue to ask those engaging in a high risk lifestyle to remain vigilant.”

Absolutely ludicrous, she says.

“It's victim-blaming, and puts the onus on the victims to protect themselves from their assailants, rather than openly saying, 'We're sorry this situation has arisen, but it is necessary to warn people that someone's preying on a demographic,'” she says. Imagine such a warning, she muses, if several cops or nurses died in the same building.

Advocates are blaming the police for once again, as with the Pickton murders, withholding essential safety information from an already marginalized population.

“Why did the police not let us—frontline workers or women in the sex trade—know about the first suspicious death?” asks sex trade outreach worker Lauren Gill, outside the angular grey Elmwood Apartments where both women died. “A memo would have been disseminated within a night. The women in this building could have known.”

Lauren Gill.

For the New Westminster resident, the delay releasing toxicology results is in stark contrast with the unusually swift reaction to the Vancouver overdose death of Glee star Cory Monteith on July 13. It took only two days for his autopsy, three for toxicology results, and four for two area police forces to issue bad heroin warnings.

Gill chalks such delays up to a lack of public pressure.

“People living in the margins are viewed as less-than,” Gill says. “That's what it comes down to. They're invisible, they're stigmatized, they're judged. People are living in silence, working indoors in secrecy, and people are getting hurt... We have to have a society overhaul to eliminate stigma and judgment.”

Despite inconclusive autopsies for both women, the province's Integrated Homicide Investigation Team (IHIT) is examining the deaths, and insists it delayed warning anyone because it had deemed the first death a suicide, despite no apparent cause. On Wednesday, one month after Lyons' death, an IHIT spokeswoman told me they still had “no update” on the case.

But Lyons and Nabors are not the only recent sex worker deaths in a small city known for its heritage charm, the world's tallest Tin Soldier, and seedy underbelly.

Gill remembers the murder of a childhood friend last year. Only six blocks from the Elmwood, January Marie Lapuz was stabbed to death in her home on Sept. 29, 2012. The 26-year-old sex worker was the first transgender executive member of Sher Vancouver, a South Asian queer support group. Police arrested a man for murder last December.

“It was heart-breaking,” Gill recalls. “I grew up with her. We went to a gay youth drop-in together when I was 13 or 14. I had seen her at a Safeway probably a month-and-a-half before she passed away—she said she was clean and sober, and had just moved out to New West and was doing really well.”

Most sex workers have horror stories. Davis recalls one client who threatened her with a medieval warhammer. She used a jiujitsu leg-hold and choked the man to the ground until her driver could batter down the door.

However, statistics suggest working indoors is still far safer than on the streets. Simon Fraser University criminologist John Lowman says street workers are up to 950 times more likely to be murdered than those indoors. Since 1980, nearly 150 street sex workers have been murdered in the province—but only two escorts, one at home.

In Canada, it's legal to buy or sell sex, but illegal to hire drivers or bodyguards, to work with others in the same place, or even communicate for business. The law, Lowman says, is a problem—not a solution—because it forces workers into isolation, underground.

A historic 2010 Supreme Court ruling pitted self-described feminists against each other—some pushing for legalization or decriminalization, others calling for Scandinavia's approach, where selling sex is legal, but buying it is not.

“We talk about violence against prostituted women—that they're being murdered—as if it just happens all on its own,” says Trisha Baptie, founder of Formerly Exploited Voices now Educating (EVE). “But really, there's a perpetrator who's doing that violence.”

A former sex worker of 15 years, Baptie rejects the notion that legalizing what she calls the “commodification of women's bodies” would reduce stigma. “That's like legalizing domestic violence,” she says, “and saying it'll be safer and less stigmatizing for women.”

I spoke with four indoor and outdoor sex workers, and all agreed they've been forced to rely on each other in the face of little action from authorities.

But sex workers also aren't waiting for police protection: They've formed dozens of collectives and advocacy groups; many check in with each other before and after dates and share “bad date” lists in online forums; some even demand new clients provide other women as references.

Despite revulsion at Pickton's crimes, a litany of new reports, inquiries and policies haven't much shifted what some see as society's indifference.

“People are pretty apathetic as soon as they hear the victim's a prostitute,” Baptie laments. “Automatically, the priority level goes to the bottom of the barrel. Even post-Pickton, after people stated they want to do everything they can for prostituted women, they're still not doing anything.”

In the face of the growing roster of deaths—like Lapuz, Lyons and Nabors—banding together for mutual support and activism is important for those who wish those in the sex trade could expect the same protection as any other profession.

“It's hard enough that we're struggling down here,” says DJ Joe, with Sex Workers United Against Violence. “We go through too much, already, out here working.

“It's hard to be a part of this community – to try to protect this community, and protect the girls. They should be protecting the women a lot better than what they do.”

David P. Ball is a freelance journalist in Vancouver. Follow him on Twitter: @davidpball

More stories about sex work in Canada:

First Nations Women Are Being Sold into the Sex Trade On Ships Along Lake Superior

The Exposure Project is Putting Cameras in the Hands of Sex Workers

A Sex Worker Breaks Down Why Ontario's New Prostitution Laws Still Suck

This year we tasked photographer Conor Lamb with documenting New York Fashion Week, so we wouldn't have to. On the eighth day of his coverage (the homestretch), Conor got his second wind and captured some of the week's most anticipated shows. Keep up with this column for more NYFW photo updates! 

BETSEY JOHNSON
Wednesday, September 11, 2013

ANNA SUI
Wednesday, September 11, 2013

OSKLEN
Wednesday, September 11, 2013

THE BLONDS
Wednesday, September 11, 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 Seven: Badgely Mischka, Diesel Black Gold, and Steven Alan

Want more stuff about NYFW? Check these out: 

Fashion Lips

NYFW Reviews: Nautica, You Disgust Us

Don't Do This at NYFW

Some of our favorite lady artists are going to be in a group show tonight at Martos gallery in Chelsea. The show, titled Lonely Girl, got its name from the YouTube web series LonelyGirl15, which trolled the entire internet in 2006 by presenting a scripted show disguised as a teenage girl's video diary. All of the girls in tonight's show incorporate the internet into their work in some way, and many of the artists themselves have the sort of gargantuan digital footprint that the NSA dreams about in their sloppiest of wet dreams. According to the press release, "The artists in this show represent an unprecedented moment in cultural history—where the artist themselves can be equally or sometimes more visible than their artworks themselves."

The show was organized by Asher Penn, the editor of Sex magazine, and features Al Baio, Petra Cortright, Maggie Lee, Greem Jellyfish, Bunny Rogers, Analisa Teachworth, and Amalia Ulman. You might recognize a couple of those names from this very website. Maggie Lee, for instance, has shot four magazine covers for us, which gives her the honor of Most VICE Covers Shot by a Single Photographer (probably…. we’ve never actually counted). And Petra is a crazy person who makes videos like this and was once the object of Teen Laqueefa’s lust. We asked Maggie to send us some photos of the show, but it seems they are doing this thing the old fashioned way and keeping all images of it off the internet, which seems a tad hypocrytical for a show that is at least partially inspired by the internet, but whatever. Just show up at 540 West 29 Street IRL tonight anytime between 6:00 and 8:00 PM and have your brain scrambled.

Actor Ali Suliman looking over Nablus, a city in northern Palestine, courtesy of the director

The lights turned on and Ziad Doueiri’s name appeared on the screen. I calmly gathered my things and then exited the theatre. I stress this is because “calm” isn’t usually the adjective most would use to describe coming into contact with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. This is the brilliance behind Doueiri’s film and precisely why I wanted speak with him about it.

Ziad’s film West Beirut is the most beautiful account of the Lebanese Civil War I have yet to encounter, so I assumed he would tackle The Attack in the same way. The film follows the story of Dr. Amin Ja’afari, a prominent Palestinian surgeon who has successfully integrated into Israeli society, and his wife who becomes a suicide bomber.

The film shifts the narrative of the conflict from journalists, politicians, and UN peacekeepers to the narrative of the people who deal with the everyday nuances of living between the two states. The story begins in Tel Aviv, with Amin Ja'afari accepting an award among his Israeli peers. The audience gets a glimpse of his daily life: Amin goes through his daily rounds, has lunch with his colleagues, and seems to lead a mundane life. Amin is first introduced as an individual before circumstances morph him into a Palestinian, a widower, and the husband of a dead suicide bomber. 

Ziad keeps the narrative on Amin’s search for truth, his navigation between the two states, and his struggle in conceiving how anyone—let alone his wife of 15 years–can commit such an act. One relates to the protagonists and almost empathizes with the antagonists. Ziad draws out individual details of life in Israel and Palestine, but more importantly, he draws out everything in between.

Ziad skips the political clout surrounding the conflict and presents a human story. The Western reaction to the film has been more or less positive. The reaction in the Arab world, however, has been put on pause, following a decision from the Arab league to ban the film. So I called Ziad in California and spoke with him about the film. The “Western” approach to Arab art, the political channels he had to go through to shoot it in Israel and Palestine, and how he can’t wait for his movie to be pirated in the Arab world, because he's itching to hear what they have to say. 

VICE: You’re dealing with an issue that’s quite polarized. How do you get people to focus on the human dimension of the Arab-Israeli conflict?
Ziad Doueiri: You just answered your own question, actually. We knew when we started writing the film that it's packed with tension. We don’t want it to be viewed as one-sided or as propaganda or as a slogan-shouting film. We want it to be viewed through the eyes of a main character that's just looking for the truth. This does not mean that the film will not create some talk after it. It's just the nature of things. You have to deal with it. But we don't want to repeat what we already know, what Arabs know, what Israelis know, what Jews know. Everybody knows! And everybody's taken a position. We're trying to see the subject from a different standpoint showing everybody has a perspective, and everybody does have a perspective

You had to get authorization from the Israeli municipalities to film in Israel, and from the Palestinian authority to film in Palestine. Did you have to talk to them about the subject matter of your film? How in depth did you have to go?
It was a pretty simple process. That was the easy part, actually. Nobody had asked to review the script, nobody had asked us to abide by this or that, we just applied for the permit and we got it, we drove to the Palestinian authorities and I sat down with the mayor, we chatted and he asked us to try not to portray Nablus in a negative light, because they're trying to encourage filmmakers to come and film there, and I said that's not the situation at all, we want to film in Nablus for the sake of authenticity.

I know that you went up to Hezbollah’s offices. Casually. They wanted to talk to you about the nature of your film and about the fact that you're filming in Israel. What was that encounter like?
I asked for a meeting with one of their officials, actually. I was simply wondering what the party's official stance was on the fact that the film was being shot by a Lebanese director in Israel with Israeli actors. Their reaction was, you know, they voiced their opinion. They cannot support the film because I have filmed—according to them on the land of a direct enemy—I told them that it's just a film, and for authenticity's sake I have to shoot in Israel and I also have to shoot with Israeli actors, because I'm not going to hire Egyptian actors to play Israeli roles. It had to be shot in Hebrew. He just says, “Look we understand your process, but we cannot voice our support but we're going to go after you, obviously, you have the right to do whatever you want.” So the meeting was diplomatic and I just wanted to find out what are they going to do when the film was released, but now the film was banned in the Arab world. So that issue is not going to come up any more.

I saw that. The only unanimous decision the Arab league has taken and it's on a movie.
[laughs] It’s a shame.

Did you have to hand in a script to the Lebanese authorities before shooting in Lebanon?
I did not. Because I did not film in Lebanon at all. After the film was over, we submitted it to the Raqabah, the Censorship Bureau of General Security, and they approved it. They said they didn't see this film as being anti-Palestinian, they gave us the permit to shoot, and I was very, very happily surprised. It was after that, when a committee in Lebanon called the Israel Boycott Committee, mounted a campaign against the film that started the whole thing. They lobbied the Arab league and the Lebanese government to pull back their decision so the Lebanese government abided and that’s how it is.

There is such little coverage on the Arab response. Most of the time “Arab art” is marketed as this existential cultural product that’s made to change the perception of the Middle East. In reality, we’re just making art, and couldn’t care less about “perception.”
Look, you know, you have interesting opinions coming out of the Arab world trying to change things. But when it comes to Israel, most of the time, among the press or even amongst the Arab liberal branch, they have the tendency to be very black and white. Even when I showed the slightest of the Israeli perspective, then there was too much. So, we have a long way to go. I mean, the Israelis are constantly making films that are very critical of their establishment, they’re are coming up with incredibly open films whereas the Arabs don't want to see it that way, they're stuck on their old, you know old—

Mentality.
Yeah, mentality. What they don't understand is that this film is probably going to be pirated and the people in the Arab world are going to see it either way, on their computers or TV, whether pirated or whatever.

Do you think the ban will be lifted, after people watch the film and voice their opinion about it?
No. I don't think the ban will be lifted. The subject of Israel is such a red line in the Arab world. But I still think people will end up seeing it. To tell you the truth, I even considered myself pirating the movie and sending it to Lebanon so everybody can see it and I called a friend of mine and I said would you consider pirating the film? He said look, I can sell you 100 copies for $100 but you won't see any profit because I can't guarantee you that pirated copy that I’ll be selling won't be replicated to 10,000 copies. But if you want me to do it just to screw the Lebanese government then I'd be more than happy to. So finally I told him look we're not going to pirate anything, let them do it, it's going to happen. You know? It really says a lot when a filmmaker would want to pirate his own film

Was their marriage fraud? Or were his wife’s feelings for him?
No, they were totally real. She loved him tremendously but she was also an ambiguous person; she was several things. We’re not sending one message, there's no one particular message, we're saying that she had her needs and he didn't see her needs. She had the conflict; her husband didn't see the conflict. He was very successful and he was well integrated. He had good intentions, good will; he wasn’t mysterious, or vicious, or manipulative. He was just blinded by where he was; he was so adamant in creating this perfect life in a very imperfect world.

In the book that the movie is based on, Siham—his wife—is Muslim, but you made her Christian in the movie, why?
That was actually an incident. I was scouting in Nablus and we found a church in the middle of Nablus, a very Muslim town. So I got this idea and I was like why don't we make her Christian? Which is unexpected and unpredictable. So we went back and changed her role and made her Christian. We’re trying to emphasize that the Palestinian Israeli struggle is not really a religious one like in Iraq or Syria, the issue is about nationhood, it's about two people struggling for a homeland, it's about two people claiming they own this homeland. Exclusively. It's not about being Muslim or Christian, and there are Christians in the Arab world and they are prominent and not everybody talks about them.

Near the end of the film, he goes to Nablus, where he feels alienated and he goes back to Israel where he is—or was—integrated and he’s being straddled by two extremes, each urging him to inch one step closer. It’s like his attempt to reach a balance is impossible.
Sometimes, like most of us, who come from the Arab world and live abroad, we always wonder where we belong, where we fit better. When I go to the Arab world, I feel I belong, but I don't fit in. Now I live in America, between America and Paris, where I feel I fit but I don't belong, it's a never-ending quest for me. I'm constantly juggling with these ideas. Where would I want to be buried or throw my anchor and settle down, and I never have the answers and Amin Ja'afari is the same way, you know. He's caught between one world and the other.

I’m sure that would resonate with a lot of Arabs in Diaspora.
It's my case. I'm all about the person rather than the collective. 

@r_aqrabawi

More about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

Israelis and Palestinians Think the Israel-Palestine Peace Talks Are Boring and Futile

A Brooklyn Grocery Store Solves the Israeli-Palestine Conflict

Gaza's Graveyards for the Living: Now Flooded with Sewage Water

Cry-Baby #1: Frances Hena

(via Gawker)

The incident: An 11-year-old girl twerked at her school dance. 

The appropriate response: Learning to deal with it, like previous generations of parents had to learn to deal with the waltz, hip shaking, grinding etc., etc.

The actual response: The girl's mother made her stand at the side of the road holding a sign to publicly shame her.

Last week, Frances Hena from Bakersfield, California told her 11-year-old daughter Jamie that she was not allowed to twerk at a school dance she was attending at Washington Junior High. 

She didn't want Jamie doing the dance as she feels it's inappropriate. "She is just a child and she can't do that. She just can't," she told ABC News. 

Undeterred, Jamie went to the dance and proceeded to move her "bottom in a very sexual and inappropriate way" (as the news anchor in the above report described twerking).

Frances found out about the illicit dance moves after a friend of hers got in touch and snitched on Jamie.  

As punishment, she forced Jamie to stand for two hours at a busy intersection, holding a sign that read, "I was disrespecting my parents by twerking at my school dance."

She also confiscated Jamie's iPod, because she believes Jamie used the device to access the internet to learn twerking moves. 

It's not just Jamie who Frances is mad at, she also thinks the school is at fault for allowing twerking at an official event. "I haven’t heard anything from the school still, and it’s just ridiculous to think that’s OK at a school dance," she said.

(via Angry People in Local News/screencap via Burton Mail)

The incident: A boy went into a store to buy Band-Aids for his friend who had fallen over. 

The appropriate response: Nothing. 

The actual response: The boy's mother contacted her local newspaper to complain that her son had been forced to pay for the Band-Aids. 

Some time last week, 12-year-old Charlie Rowlinson was out playing with his 13-year-old friend Ed in Stapenhill, England. At some point, Ed fell and gashed his knee. 

Charlie and Ed went to a local shop called Wendy's News to buy Band-Aids and a bottle of water to rinse the wound. As is standard practice at shops, they were charged a monetary amount ($1.50) in exchange for the goods. 

Outraged that her son had been made to take part in a system that has existed for the last 100,000 years or so, Charlie's mother, Michelle, contacted her local paper, The Burton Mail, to complain about what had happened. 

“In my opinion it’s disgraceful that they charged him to clean himself up when he went in hurt," she said. Adding, “If he had come to my house, I wouldn’t have charged him for water."

Somebody from the Burton Mail contacted the shop, and, for some reason, owner Karen Taylor felt she had to defend herself: “My mom was working at the time. She said the two boys came into the shop and asked if we had any plasters. 

She took them into the corner and showed them the plasters, so assumed they wanted to pay for them as they had already got the money out."

They didn’t ask for help. They came back in and asked for tissues, and she told him to help himself to some kitchen roll on the side. He then came back in and bought a bottle of water.”

Previously: A guy who threw a dog off a bridge because it got in his way Vs. A woman who really hates hot selfies

Winner: The mom who hates selfies!!!

@JLCT

Fashion Week has hit New York City again and big, fancy designers are showing their latest collections for spring/summer 2014. So, we went to a few shows to figure out what all the Tumblr goofballs, twinks, and trust-funders will be wearing when it's nice outside again. Enjoy!

At this point, everybody on the internet has already slobbed on Humberto Leon and Carol Lim's knobs for the amazing presentation they put together for Opening Ceremony's first ever runway show. So, I'm not going to bore you talking about the dope-ass clothes or the killer cars or Rihanna. The reason the OC show was the highlight of my NYFW experience was because it's the only one that got my rocks off. 

You get all kinds of free stuff at fashion shows, and most of it is useless. This year I got some nail polish, a pair of sunglasses that I regrettably lost, and a nifty key chain. But none of that swag even came close to the self-pleasuring device gifted to me by OC. The vacuum cup designed by Tenga with the sweet psychedelic packaging inspired by OC's latest collection was exactly what the doctor ordered after a long week of fashion-model-induced blue balls. I'm a creature of habit, so I've spanking my monkey the same way for the past 20-odd years. But now that I've had the pleasure of ejaculating into an oblong plastic tube with squishy cold stuff inside and a fancy designer label on the outside, I must say I am never going back. I'll be coping handfuls of OC-branded Tengas every time my girl goes on family vacation or I just need some "me time." Thank you, OC, for being amazing and giving me something that I'll remember long after all of the other brand's collections fade in my memory—a toe-curling nut buster. 

—By Wilbert L. Cooper

JUNK FOOD VINTAGE NFL CURATED BY KRISTIN CAVALLARI

“Confusing” doesn’t even begin to describe a collection of “NFL vintage” by a brand called Junk Food, curated by the (recently arrested) Kristin Cavallari. But here’s everything I witnessed within five minutes of walking into this carnival show: three break-dancing teenagers, a bitchy cat in a photo booth licking “gourmet cat food” from a silver spoon, an obscenely large disco ball, and a veritable tsunami of leopard-print skirts. And that’s just what was happening on the sidelines. The crowd was a teeming mass of bottle-blond The Hills rejects and potbellied creeps waiting anxiously for the kickoff. And when the clothes actually came streaming down the runway… Well, let’s just say that the only person who could work cropped jersey sweaters with glittery sleeves and golden-chain belts is Peyton Manning in drag. 

—By Michelle Lhooq

PUBLIC SCHOOL

ROBERT GELLER

When I grow up I want to be like Robert Geller—he’s got a gorgeous wife, he’s super talented, and he’s always the smartest dude in the room. Every time I go to one of his shows, I have to go home and do extensive googling to learn about the high-art and subversive allusions he instills in his garments. Weird shit about Russian cubists and constructivists just rolls off his tongue and leaves me puzzled and grappling for a textbook. This time around Geller broke me and a crowd full of eager men’s fashion nerds off with a taste of New Wave and punk style via Moscow’s youth during the 80s. I’m still trying to track down the music he played throughout the show, which sounded like Suicide, DNA, and Television had an orgy and gave birth to a noisy, snotty, sonic bastard. With the clothes, Geller somehow managed to make neoprene look tough, using it on collars, shorts, and vests. And I am definitely planning on getting my hand on the brimless Laszlo hats, which were sported in most of the looks, because it’s kind of like a cross between a bad-ass military beret and a baseball cap—two things I love dearly. 

—By Wilbert L. Cooper

HOOD BY AIR

Hood By Air is the Odd Future of the clothing game. HBA, like OF, came from a very authentic time and place, birthed out of genuine affection for their respective craft. Yet, neither should be held accountable for the prepubescent keyboard gangsters who tarnish their reputation. Hood By Air's appeal might not be clear to old-heads, and I can get that, but there's definitely not enough grounds for all the arrogant dismissal the brand gets. For spring/summer 2014,  Marilyn Manson replaced Sinéad O'Connor on it's portrait shirt and was paired with beaded necklaces and snowboard boots. The show had the amount of ridiculousness that you come to expect from the brand. Shayne Oliver didn't need to send 20-plus looks down the runway this season, he didn't need Yeezus to grace us with his presence, and he definitely didn't need to score it with a very goth Sade mix. But I'm glad he did. 

—By Bobby Viteri

ALEXANDER WANG

Chicks love Alexander Wang because he knows what he’s doing. Before the show started, he got all the girls primed and ready playing lady-bait like Mary J. Blige, Aaliyah, and TLC. Then the models took to the runway, which was a convoluted path that snaked around the audience inside of the cavernous pier where the show was held. The looks were really hot, and proved that Wang is going headfirst into the overt-branding trend that is being picked up by quite a few high-end designers right now. Most of the standout looks were plastered with Wang’s name in repeating, delirious patterns. I definitely dug it, if only because I am a child of gaudy, ostentatious, 90s-era hip-hop and R&B—the kind of music Wang played at the show’s outset. Sure it’s a little tacky having someone else’s name all over your body like you’re a fucking billboard. But if you do it with the right designer, and Alexander Wang is definitely a good one, no one will ever know how broke you are because they’ll see you wearing expensive shit. Fake it until you make it!

—By Wilbert L. Cooper

TELFAR

Taking a minimal approach in any medium can be polarizing. People will either revere your genius or shit on you for being lazy. I guess I'm in the latter camp, because when I saw the look above, all I could think was Where is this dude's pants? Like, this is a fashion show, where are the clothes? Some dudes were bare foot, some were only wearing aprons, and one guy was even sporting a halter-top Darth Maul look. I get that Telfar's is exploring pansexuality, but compared to the gender-bending of Hood By Air, this shit was straight boring. Telfar, next time yo have a fashion show, actually make some fashion.  

—By Bobby Viteri

PATRIK ERVELL

We’ve been dick-riding Patrik Ervell for years now. So you already know what we’re about to say. This collection was amazing and he is the best and you should go out and sell drugs or rob old people or invest in stock so you can afford his shit. This time around, like Robert Geller, he incorporated neoprene into his collection. Patrik doesn’t really do themes, because real men don’t play dress up. But this collection did have a nautical, sailing vibe. I don’t really fuck with the water all like that—I almost drowned once when I was a little kid because I got cramps from eating ice cream before I went in the pool—but I would totally sit on a boat or on the shore wearing these new digs. 

                                                                                                               —By Wilbert L. Cooper

HARLEM'S FASHION ROW

MARK McNAIRY

This is all to say that Mark McNairy’s latest collection was hillbilly chic and I loved every minute of it—from the guy models chugging beer at the end of the runway, to the girl models flashing switchblades. When every NYFW show is an exercise in abstraction, it’s awesome to see someone getting their inspiration from a class of fiercely independent yokels and nut jobs. 

—By Wilbert L. Cooper

NAUTICA

I missed this show. But I’m glad I did, because there was way more interesting things happening outside of it. When I arrived at Lincoln Center, I spotted hordes of cops with huge machine guns. I ran over to take a few photos and realized why they were there. There was a demonstration going on against Nautica protesting their horrid sweatshop factories. Nautica’s parent company is responsible for a series of factory fires and the awful factory collapse that happened back in April and killed 1,129 people in Bangladesh. Hearing the protesters talk about what happened brought tears to my eyes. The Nautica brand is worse than the yuppies who wear their shit. For some reason they aren’t willing to sign an agreement to improve the worker conditions even after all of those horrible incidents. Until something is done about this, all I can say is fuck off, Nautica, you disgust me.

—By Miyako Bellizzi

TIM COPPENS

Some people call old-ass luxury brands aspirational. I guess if you want to be an overweight, taco-meat sporting, slime ball with Cuban link gold chains and RLS, then sure, they’re totally aspirational. Personally, my aspiration is to do some crazy youthful shit, like race cars in Monte Carlo with a bad bitch in the passenger seat and a plume of exhaust and dust in my wake. I’m pretty sure I could do this in any brand or type of clothes—but I would look best in Tim Coppens’s latest collection, which is inspired by car culture, just like OC’s. Great minds think alike, but in terms of dude’s clothes, Tim Coppens had OC beat. His looks were just too ill: one-piece driving suits, shiny racing leather, and zippers in dope places.  

—By Wilbert L. Cooper

ALEXANDRE HERCHCOVITCH

I own a shirt by Alexander Herchovitch—it’s my favorite summer shirt. I bought it at a consignment shop. It’s got a zebra-type pattern on it, but instead of black-and-white, it is a vibrant green and white. I wear it almost once a week, and I was contemplating wearing it to the show. But I’m glad I didn’t because I tend to think that’s kind of tacky. When you wear a designer’s clothes in front of that designer, you’re putting them under a lot of pressure and it’s like a cry out for approval. What happens if the designer doesn’t like the way you are wearing his garment? Or what if that garment is like the one thing the designer made that they wishes they hadn’t. I wouldn’t want someone to come to VICE on the day I got a promotion waving an article I wrote for the college newspaper back in 2008 about the “best band in southern Ohio.” That would bum me out.  

—By Wilbert L. Cooper

N. HOOLYWOOD

Isn't it kind of fucked up that the Japanese can do American style better than Americans? While most swaggot American designers are making stupid shit like assless leather chaps and asymmetrical codpieces, Daisuke Obana dug deep into this country's history of the Wild West and came up with a collection that is gonna have me looking Django next summer. If white folks think a brother in a hoodie with some Skittles and an iced tea is threatening, wait until I come down the block with big red bandana around my neck and a tough-ass leather cowboy hat. Shit will get real.

—By Wilbert L. Cooper

TESS GIBERSON

Everyone looked so happy at this show, I think I was the only one there who didn’t pop a molly. Tess Giberson channeled a white-mesh-on-leather-mesh aesthetic that was amazing. And I fell in love with her mint-jumpsuit look—it sealed the deal for me. This was a great show. I even made a new friend who was the cutest Japanese girl I saw all day. It was good vibes all around.

—By Miyako Bellizzi

DUCKIE BROWN

My experience at this show started out as a complete a mess. Waiting in line, I felt like a black sheep in a herd of ugly cows. Not to mention, people were having the dumbest conversations. I was tempted to punch the screeching fashionista behind me in the face just to get them to shut the fuck up. Then I saw Jay from American’s Next Top Model walk by and I had to hold back the vomit retching itself from the bowels of my stomach. The vibe was so shitty, I almost had an anxiety attack. 

But once I was inside I was able to take a breather. I found the chillest spot on top of a giant speaker. The show started and my frown turned upside down when the first look hit the runway. It was a beautiful white, tailored, work-wear-inspired blazer. Pieces of the ceiling kept falling on my head but I didn’t give a shit. I was too preoccupied trying to figure out the burlap-sack-type skorts the model boys were wearing. It was weird and super feminine, but it actually turned me on.

—By Miyako Bellizzi

CUSHNIE ET OCHS

I was really excited to see this show because I usually love this designer. Unfortunately, it was hella wack. There was one leather pencil skirt that was nice, but that was it. The cut-out, body-con dresses that came out over and over looked like something straight out of the Slauson Swap Meet in East LA. I used to steal clothes at Clothestime in the 90s that looked better than this shit. Ugh, and those buckles... Every look made me ask myself, Why? Cusnie Et Ochs, I don’t mean to hate, but damn girls, get your shit together! 

—By Miyako Bellizzi

GENERAL IDEA

I love General Idea and have for a long time—however, this was not his best show. That's not to say it was bad, it was just awkward—like having sex with someone who is way taller than you. At the end of the day, you're still getting some, but all the extra elbows and strategic maneuvering you have to do take you out of the moment. So basically, I liked the clothes, but the overall presentation just wasn't as dope as his last two seasons. The music sounded like a dude was scrolling through tracks on his iPod and the show started like a half-hour late. But at the end of the day, just like I'd take oversized sex over no sex, I'll take an off-game General Idea over almost anything out there for men—especially when he's doing stark black-and-white color-blocking. That shit looks ill. 

—By Wilbert L. Cooper

KYE

This show was bourgeois, but only by my standards. The venue had a pitch-perfect amount of class for a miscreant like me and the same can be said about their newest collection, which had some edgy-but-practical shit you can get away with wearing on the street. There were some awkward nuances, like the brand's gang-sign logo being plastered onto snapbacks, but we’ll chalk that up to a cultural-ignorance thing. Plus, we spiked our Moët with Xanax as soon as we got there, so who really knows what happened during this show.

—By Bobby Viteri

Rocking beach motifs in an urban setting is pretty played out. It’s never a good look to be a poser, you know? I did manage to overlook this eternal truth and enjoy Third Floor's presentation, if only because I want a reason to wear neoprene when I’m at the bar and I think more men should oil-slick their loins. One model had a fresh basketball tattoo and although there was a plethora of bucket hats (like everyone else) at least they had the balls to make them bottomless, along with the booze.

—By Bobby Viteri

ØDD

If the name wasn’t convincing enough, let me tell you why this was the most pretentious show: it took place in what seemed like a castle, someone took a selfie with an iPad, they were playing rapey “music” that sounded like some dude was sucking on a hookah with a vibrator for a handle, and a bunch of other crap that equated to smoke and mirrors. When the dust settled it felt as vacuous as the venue, a void that even the clothing couldn’t fill. Between the androgynous neogothic-avant-garde thing and all the snobby little cunts that attended, the mood was high brow, yet there wasn’t anything to justify all the bullshit.

—By Bobby Viteri

VFILES (SAM MCLONDON, STEVEN TAI, GYPSY SPORT, AMMERMAN SCHLOSBERG)

With e-commerce intermediaries, the idea is to stock your store in the same manner that you would curate an art show. And if that’s the case, VFiles' latest offering would be titled Self-Awareness, and the Pains of Living in the Matrix. Let’s face it, no one really wants to wear assless tweed boxer shorts or pull a ghetto Ghandi and wear a curtain cloth sash with a du-rag to top it off, but all this exists because we’re being so ass-fucked in the “real” world, that this internet shit is all we got. And it’s in this cognitive dissonance that Vfiles’ aesthetic works. They just don’t give a shit, and hey man, I totally get it. I don’t give a shit either.

—By Bobby Viteri

All photos by Conor Lamb. Want to see more pics from these shows? Check out his photoblog. 

Want more NYFW? Check these out:

Dont Do This at NYFW

I Almost Died Trying to See En Noir, But You Don't Have To

Lele Saveri Saw Some Weird Stuff Last Week at NYFW

The super special September issue of VICE was exclusively culled from the archives of Bob Guccione Sr.—the legendary magazine publisher who built a media empire that started with Penthouse. This portion of the issue features the introduction to an unpublished memoir of Bob Guccione.

For more previously unpublished documents visit the Guccione Archives Issue page. 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.

Ladies? Who wants a ride? via Wikicommons.

Dating is hard for everybody, but dating with cerebral palsy is harder.

Not that I have much to complain about. I'm not, what the media likes to call, “confined to a wheelchair.” I walk with a cane like Dr. House and though I'm no Hugh Laurie, I think I'm pretty decent looking. Sure, I use a mobility scooter to get around on the street, but people have cars, right?

Yeah, if you were a woman who decided to try dating men with disabilities tomorrow, but wanted to ease into it—I'm practically training wheels.

But the fact that I'm physically higher functioning than a lot of other guys with disabilities doesn't seem to move my dating life past anything more than sporadic. I'm intimately familiar with what comedy band Garfunkel and Oates call, “The Fade Away,” where you think things are going well and then suddenly, radio silence. Some girls sell themselves as open-minded, assuring me that the disability doesn't matter. They hang around longer, trying to reconcile their words with the reality in front of them, before eventually being overwhelmed by temptation from other able-bodied human beings and caving to the pressure.

Perhaps I have some massive character flaw I am unaware of that has nothing to do with my disability, but if Paul Bernardo can find Karla Homolka, (and I'm a few thousand rungs below that) I wonder what else about me could be considered so unworkable?

If it is the disability, I don't blame them. I have yet to meet a woman with a disability who I'm truly, sexually attracted to myself, so I know that you can't help who you like. Still, given the reality of my situation, I knew it was time to change my strategy if I wanted to get laid on the regular. That's when I heard about Devotees—people with a sexual fetish for disability.

At an estimated 50,000 strong, this underground internet community sounded like pay dirt to me. Suddenly, what could be my biggest obstacle to a healthy sex life turned into my biggest asset towards one. Finally, I was at the top of the natural selection pecking order. Forget women dating me in spite of my disability, now they would date me because of it. Now, Cerebral Palsy wouldn't just be an attractive quality—it would be necessary for orgasm.

Open the floodgates! I had to find these women. It didn't matter how long it took, I was exactly what they were looking for... or at least, I thought I was, until I talked to a devotee named Sharon:

“I still have an attraction to men who are successful and accomplished despite any disability, and also an attraction to men in wheelchairs... but the sexual connection and arousal only seems to kick in when an amputation is included in the picture.”

Unfortunately, Sharon isn't the only one. Most devotees are only into amputees and, to pour salt in my already gaping wounds, female devotees are rare. Most of them are men, ashamed of their kink and hiding behind computer screens.

Take “Mark,” (not his real name) a man living a double life. On the one hand, he’s a professional artist, with an able-bodied wife and a couple of kids, living in a Toronto suburb, and on the other, he’s playing out a fantasy by the light of his monitor, sneaking around and looking at photos of female amputees. His only other interaction comes anonymously with the other devotees online. Mark says if he had more courage he would’ve married an amputee in the first place, but the able-bodied route is easier and avoids the social stigma.

“Able-bodied women are perfect creatures. I don't hate them, but amputee women are even more beautiful. The most sexually pleasurable parts about being a devotee that I just can't get with able-bodied women are watching them walk or move around and touch their cute soft stumps. For me, their stumps are same as their breasts, but missing a limb doesn't take away anything from that individual. It's a giant sexual symbol to me. Less is more.”

In case you were wondering, Mark's wife knows his secret and she's disgusted by it—far removed from the understanding and compassion he thought he'd get by admitting it—not that she needs to be concerned.  He says the repression instilled in him by his upbringing in communist China and his love for their children virtually guarantees that his devoteeism will stay in the closet. It’s highly unlikely that Mark will leave his wife for an amputee.

A screenshot from one of the internet's many devotee forums.

So, I wish them luck, but where does that leave me? For a while it looked like I wouldn't be able to convince these women to sleep with me unless I lost a limb. They were all so specific about their requirements (single-leg above the knee being the most desirable) that I put my hopes of ever finding a female cerebral palsy devotee on the shelf for a few years. I was even told by a Toronto devotee calling herself Brystal that I wasn't disabled enough.

It seemed I was doomed to slog it out in “normal” dating society for my entire life, until I read this:

“I have a strong desire to be with men with all types of disabilities, but I mostly gravitate towards severe C.P. and quadriplegics. But, my passions involve travel, sports, my bike, overseas disaster aid and a whole lot of other things made difficult, if not impossible, when you can't walk. I've always dated able-bodied men as a result. I would feel guilty fucking a disabled guy. I would see an  'expiration date' on our relationship. Would it be wrong for me to seek out disabled guys just for sex?”

That's a self-described 23-year-old female devotee writing in to Dan Savage for advice. Of course, if you're me, the answer to her question is somewhat of a two-parter: yes it would be kind of wrong, but with that said, where can I sign up? Unfortunately, Savage Love contributors are always anonymous, but reading that gave me hope and renewed my search for the Holy Grail—a cerebral palsy devotee.

At this point you're probably asking, “Wouldn't you be concerned about being exploited?” Don't worry, a woman named France warned me about this.

France is a double above the knee amputee from Montreal who also didn't date much and saw the same opportunity in the devotee scene I did. Initially weary that she’d be treated like a piece of meat, valued only for her amputation, she thought she could weed out the guys who asked too many direct questions about her stumps: “Where are they? How smooth are they? How did you get them?”  She thought, as do I, that devotees could care about her whole self even if the initial spark was physical.

At first it worked and she started a long-term relationship with a devotee boyfriend, but after a while she began to feel like his dirty little secret. He was too concerned about the potential consequences of being out as a devotee, which forced France into the closet with him.

“I’m not someone who wants to hide, I want to be like everyone else, I want to be sexually active, I want to have relationships, give back to society and get out there,” she said.  It was this treatment that made France swear off devotees for good. “How could a devotee accept all of you [as a person] when he doesn't fully accept his own choices?” she asked. “For many devotees they see us as being only half of what they want us to be. Meaning, they often see the disability first, and then the person. The disability is attractive, but quickly becomes mundane with time.”

Still, I remained undeterred. Now, no amount of warning would keep me from my search. Instead, I joined a number of devotee message boards asking if they knew of a twentysomething female C.P. devotee who lived in Toronto. Responses came fast, there was such a person. Her name was Sarah, she was 28, and worked as an accountant for a construction company. Though they didn't know where she lived, the moderator told me she had already told her about me, so I might as well make her acquaintance via Facebook.

We exchanged photos, she was certainly entrancing and a little more probing told me the origin of her fetish for dudes like me: “A kid in my class had C.P. and just watching him walk made me excited, it's hard to explain.” So, what is it about cerebral palsy that turns her all the way on?

“I like struggling,” she said. “I like to watch a guy with C.P. struggle to physically accomplish something.”

“Like those days when I'm trying to put on my shoe and I try and I try, but I just can't quite get it?” I ask, making sure to take my time before adding, “But I'll never ask you for help because I need nothing from nobody and then finally with… one...last...push and grimace, it slips in? That kind of struggle?”

“Mmmm... yes, tell me more,” her immediate response.

From then on, it seemed we were off to the races.  Apparently, I had achieved my goal and finally found what I was searching for from the very beginning...sort of.

“I'm from Florida,” she said. “But, I have always wanted to move.”

And I've always wanted to get away from the Canadian winter! Hopefully I'll be able to struggle for Sarah in the very near future.

Aaron would like to thank Kent Cadogan Loftsgard for his help with this article. You should follow Aaron on Twitter: @broverman

More about the disabled:

Rollin', Rollin', Rollin': Pretending to Be Disabled for a Day

Frenching the Disabled

Disabling Opinions