Internally displaced persons in the gymnasium that has become their home in the "district playground" IDP camp.

Last month, United Nations human rights worker Tomas Quintana was set upon by a mob as he tried to visit a camp for Muslim refugees in the central Burmese city of Meiktila. “My car was descended upon by a crowd of around 200 people, who proceeded to punch and kick the windows and doors of the car while shouting abuse,” Quintana said in a statement.

Yet Burma's government seemed relatively untroubled by the incident. Ye Hut, a presidential spokesman, told members of the media that Quintana had simply misinterpreted the situation. Apparently, the mob wasn't a mob at all, but a welcoming party of peaceful protesters who were trying to give him a letter and a T-shirt. A few days earlier, through no small amount of bureaucratic wrangling, the photographer Andrew Stanbridge and I were able to visit the camp Quintana had been headed towards, as well as a few others nearby. I guess we weren't as welcome there as the big UN hotshots, however, because we weren't greeted by hundreds of people battering our car while trying to pass notes through the window. 

The internally displaced persons (IDP) camp in question has housed 1,600 Muslims since they lost their homes during Buddhist riots in Meiktila earlier this year. The violent anti-Muslim demonstrations started after an argument in a gold shop between a Muslim owner and a Buddhist customer spilled out into the street. Things escalated quickly: Muslims allegedly pulled a monk from his motorbike and set him on fire before Buddhists retaliated by burning down Muslim businesses and homes and hacking and burning Muslims to death as police stood by, either unwilling or unable to help.

Estimates put the number of those displaced by the riots at anywhere between 10,000 and 18,000, with at least 43 killed. According to officials in Meiktila, there are currently 4,000 people split among four IDP camps—three for Muslims and one for Buddhists. 

A man sits among the wreckage of one of the Muslim neighborhoods in Meiktila that was destroyed by rioting Buddhists.

Confrontations between Buddhists and Muslims have been causing chaos in Burma—the Southeast Asian country formally known as Myanmar—since 2007, when the country began its so-called transition to democracy and freedom after an uprising against the military-led government in the Saffron revolution.

Violence in Rakhine, a state on Burma's western coast, started in mid-2012 when fights broke out between Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims, an ethnic minority that many Burmese Buddhists refuse to accept as citizens. But while there's a long history of tension between Buddhists and Muslims in Rakhine, the situation is different in Meiktila, where the lineage and citizenship of Muslims is not in dispute and there's no real history of conflict except for a few minor incidents over the years. Many Muslims from the area claim to have lived in harmony with Buddhists.

Aung Thein, a lawyer and Muslim community leader, confirmed those claims when we met with him in one of the only mosques in Meiktila that wasn't destroyed during the riots. Thein echoed a number of Muslims we spoke to who didn't wish to be identified when he told us that prior to the attacks Muslims and Buddhists had maintained good relations, doing business and eating and sitting at tea shops together. He blamed the prolific spread of hate speech for inflaming the hostility. Much of this anti-Islam vitriol has been perpetuated by the extremist monk Ashin Wirathu and his followers in 969, a Buddhist nationalist group.

Ashin Wirathu sitting at his desk at the headquarters of the 969 movement, in the Masoeyein monastery in Mandalay, Burma. 

When I went to visit Wirathu at his monastery, he told me it was Muslims who had been initiating the sectarian clashes. According to him, his people, the rioters, were merely defending themselves. “Most of the Muslim people are aggressive… They are the reason for this racial conflict," he said. "When Buddhist Burmese people feel it’s unbearable, they counterattack them and [take] the law into their own hands, like vigilantes."

Despite his frequent sermons about the scourge of Muslims infiltrating Burma, Wirathu claimed that he was now trying to avoid more disorder: "I’m trying to encourage all the people to live in harmony and peace with people of different faiths. I’m starting to lay out the plans of how to live in peace and harmony with the local people."

Thein dismissed Wirathu's statements, telling us that following sermons by the 969 leader, pamphlets and DVDs featuring virulent anti-Muslim rhetoric were distributed all across Meiktila. "After the Rakhine violence, I found the hate speeches were spreading here and the local authorities did nothing to stop it," he said. 

He went on to explain how local police now refuse to let Muslims gather in groups—"The authorities are always pressuring us that it could happen again if we don’t listen to their orders"—and that while a lot of the hatred and anger had died down, he still didn’t feel safe. He also said that the authorities were making excuses to not allow the Muslim IDPs back to their homes.

The tension in the city remains, and it’s clear that many Muslims are still on edge. Many of those who haven't been displaced may be living alongside Buddhist neighbors who killed their friends or family members, Thein told us. "There are some people walking around [who were involved in the riots]. A woman had her husband killed. She knows who did it and she told the government, but they haven't done anything."

A Physicians for Human Rights report on the persecution of Muslims in Burma was released at the end of last month. It noted that there are still elements in place that could lead to "potential catastrophic violence in the future, including potential crimes against humanity and/or genocide".

A Muslim IDP, who withheld his name for safety reasons.

The report also stated that many of those who had been responsible for the conflict had not been brought to justice, including police who facilitated some of the aggression. "Police in some cases were involved in direct attacks… in other cases, the police stood by and watched and did nothing to stop it," it reads.

When the report was released at the Bangkok Foreign Correspondents Club, its author, Bill Davis, said that though the clashes had stopped for now, the atmosphere of violence was still present. "It’s creating a culture of hatred and a culture that it’s kind of OK for this to go on," he said.

The latest reports say that 87 people have been arrested, and that only 38 of them were Buddhists. "Most of the people really involved in the planning are still free," a Muslim IDP told us. "It’s just the followers [who have been arrested], not the leaders."

While many hold Wirathu and his followers responsible for instigating the Buddhist rampage, theories abound as to what’s really behind it. Many see the violence as the product of manipulations by certain elements of the government who want to push the country back towards the military and away from democracy. Others think that it’s a simple land grab to push the Muslims off Meiktila's prime real estate and open up the area for development.

The word "cronies" is often thrown around, referring to members and friends of the old military junta who either want to maintain their grip on power or use it to get rich now that the country is opening up for business. "These cronies and the government want to move the country backward, and they create this Meiktila violence very systematically," said a trader who spoke with us at the mosque.

One of the Muslim neighborhoods in Meiktila that was destroyed by rioting Buddhists.

Punya Wontha, a monk who was one of the leaders of the Saffron revolution, agreed that "cronies" were behind the violence. But he saw the disorder as being motivated more by financial greed than an attempt by the displaced military junta to win back political power. "The problem here is about land ownership and corruption," he said, before pointing out another example of how Muslims are being persecuted in the country: Apparently it's now common for government officials to refuse to give Muslims their land back because they lack the correct "documentation." In many cases, the documentation never existed—and the land they're refusing to return could make a lot of members of Burma's former government very rich if they were to develop it.

"There are orders that they’re not allowed to go home," said Bill Davis. "These guys said they have to provide documents to prove that they actually own this land, which, first of all, nobody in Burma has, because that hasn’t been the system. And second, their houses have been destroyed, so even if they did have documents, they probably don’t have them any more."

He admitted that he could not confirm this theory and said there was no conclusive proof, but added, "A lot of the land is along the main road, which is very valuable for business and trading. Especially with the economy taking off, people want that land." Davis also mentioned that there have been similar situations of the government seizing land through nefarious means in other Burmese states, like Kachin and Karen.

Goats grazing in one of the Muslim neighborhoods destroyed by rioting Buddhists.

Parts of the city look like they had been hit by an airstrike. As we wandered through the affected areas we saw scavengers digging up what could be salvaged and, in one burned-down neighborhood, goat herders and their flocks wandered through what used to be someone’s living room, grazing over shattered tea plates.

Sometime shortly after we had lunch, our fixer pointed out a comically obvious secret police officer who had tailed us as we drove to interview some of the IDPs at a location far from downtown. When we pulled up outside a house to meet the IDPs, our fixer invited the policeman into the house where we would be conducting interviews. I offered him a deal: if he could defeat Andrew in an arm wrestle (using both hands), he could stay. But if Andrew won, he would have to leave. After ten or so minutes of awkward loitering, he eventually left.

Though he seemed bumbling and inept and didn't pose any threat to us Western journalists, his presence was more ominous for our interview subjects and fixer. Despite the “Burmese Spring” and President Thein Sein’s constant assurance that he will free political prisoners, Muslims and human rights activists all over Burma told us they feared the consequences of being seen speaking to Western journalists by secret police and informers.

In July, an elderly Rohingya activist who frequently spoke out against the government was jailed on trumped-up charges, despite the fact he is in poor health and cannot access proper medical attention in prison. Another activist was arrested a few weeks later after sharing photos on Facebook of a police crackdown in the IDP camps in Rakhine.

The secret police officer who followed us to an IDP camp.

The men we met who were living in the IDP camps all told a similar tale of their experiences since the violence began. They had lived in peace with the Buddhists for a long time, but had noticed tensions slowly rising. One, a retired police captain who had his house burned down, said, "I don’t know why this [happened]—our community did nothing wrong." Another said that Buddhists in his quarter were very familiar with him and that he had cooked for them before.

All of them blamed Wirathu for the attacks and said that the military and government were complicit. "In former times, we had peace, but the hate speeches spread systematically, and—slowly, slowly—they got into people," said one.

They told us there was no longer trust between the communities, and told us that the government needed to "make a policy" to ensure their safety. For now, though, their main concern is getting out of the camps.

The gymnasium in the "district playground" IDP camp.

The first camp we visited is called "the district playground"—an abandoned sports complex where 600 of the 900 residents lived in a small gym.

They’d been stuck like that for five months, since March 21. There was no privacy, no dividers between the plots of gym floor. Instead, there were just carpets or mats laid down, with a person’s possessions and bags of clothes serving as a perimeter marking the boundaries of their home. The floor was so crowded that two people couldn’t walk down the pathways side by side. One man said that he stayed on his piece of carpet with seven relatives.

No one seemed sure what their future held or what their best option was. "We have to go back to our houses. We don’t feel free here," one man said. Another chimed in to say that if he could go back tomorrow, he would.

Others said they didn’t feel safe out in the streets. "We have no future," said a woman whose house had been burned down. "We don’t want to go back."

Unlike our experience in IDP camps in other parts of Burma, in Meiktila, we were followed everywhere by an entourage of police—some uniformed, some not. It was hard to get a question in before a police officer or official inserted himself into the conversation, and once that happened, there was no point in continuing.

Outside the gym, other IDPs had set up bamboo shelters. Some cooked, some had little shops selling snacks and vegetables. There was a football field, and some had decided to use the concrete stands as shelter.

Police officers outside an IDP camp.

After leaving the district playground, we stopped at a Buddhist IDP camp closer to town. Conditions there weren’t much better. People were crammed into dark, dingy shelters, though there was fewer police present.

At the other Muslim camp that Quintana had intended to visit, IDPs live in a water supply plant. Some mingled outside, chopping firewood, while others played chinlone, a sport similar to volleyball, only you use your feet to kick a rattan ball. Bamboo shelters and single-story administrative buildings were divided up into approximately ten by ten-foot spaces for each family. Conditions seemed better in this camp, if not extremely cramped, even though our fixer had told us that it was viewed as the worst place to find yourself housed in.

At this camp, our entourage picked up even more cops and nameless intelligence officials. They joked among themselves, nipping at our heels as we walked around trying to find space to conduct interviews, our efforts mostly in vain. The stifling heat, cramped quarters, and fetid conditions—paired with the uncomfortable feeling of leading a veritable security brigade around the camp—left me feeling nauseous. We left after a brief walk through, exchanging pleasant farewells with our escorts outside the police-manned gate.

The security entourage that followed us around the water supply IDP camp.

The IDP camps remain open with no clear date in sight for when the residents will be allowed to return to their homes, or what’s left of them. There doesn’t appear to be a plan in place for reconciliation among communities, or even a policy geared towards mitigating a chance of further violence.

Speaking of the mob attack in Meiktila, Quintana said, "The fear that I felt during this incident, being left totally unprotected by the nearby police, gave me an insight into the fear residents would have felt when being chased down by violent mobs during the violence last March, as police allegedly stood by as angry mobs beat, stabbed and burned to death some 43 people."

When authorities are either unable or unwilling to protect a UN envoy, it doesn’t bode well for the future of Muslims in Meiktila. 

Follow Danny on Twitter: @DGisSERIOUS

See more of Andrew's work on his website.

Danny Gold's reporting was made possible by a grant from the International Center for Journalists.

More stories from Burma:

Is the Burmese Military Keeping Rohingya Women As Sex Slaves?

Anonymous Taught Twitter About the Rohingya Genocide

The Frustrated Punks of Burma

Photos by Mircea Topoleanu, Cristian Munteanu, and Radu Ciocan

Since the beginning of this month, tens of thousands of Romanians have been regularly protesting plans to destroy four of the country's mountains. The Transylvanian region of Roșia Montană, where the mountains are situated, is rich in gold and silver, which unfortunately means that the people who make their money in precious metals want to raze the area to the ground, destroying the first documented human settlement in the country (which dates back to 131 BC) and over four miles of subterranean Roman galleries in the process.  

The original plans to obliterate the mountain range were actually conceived over 15 years ago, but it was only this August that the Romanian government passed a bill in favor of Canadian-owned mining company Roșia Montană Gold Corporation (RMGC)—also known for their mad corpse-trafficking skills—using cyanide to extract 314 tons of gold and 1,500 tons of silver from the ore below the mountains.  

Parliament is scheduled to vote on the matter on September 17 and, in the event that the proposal is approved, the operation is due to begin in 2016, demolishing three villages along the way. In case the prospect of rich people making an extra buck out of expropriating hundreds of families with the use of highly poisonous chemicals wasn't depressing enough, it's not even like Romania as a whole is going to benefit much from the deal.

As it stands, the project will produce just 200 jobs for locals, the country will only be paid 6 percent of the value of the gold and silver extracted, and the chemicals used to extract gold from the ore will produce 214 million cubic meters of toxic cyanide waste.

None of this is good news, which is maybe why it's been met with such overwhelming opposition from the Romanian public. Around 2,000 protesters have been meeting daily at Regina Elisabeta, one of Bucharest's main shopping boulevards, to demonstrate against RMCG's plans, and numbers often spike on the weekends, with more than 8,000 people gathering in the capital last Sunday. The protesters are also gathering support from environmentalists all over the world, from Germany and London, to Moldova and Turkey.     

The tenth day of protests, with over 15,000 people marching in Bucharest.

Compared to the severity of the situation, however, the protests have been some of the most peaceful public actions I've ever participated in. The rowdiest it gets is when demonstrators fill plastic bottles with coins or pebbles and bang them against the asphalt to accompany those who've brought along bongos or pots and pans. Then, of course, there was the time a string quartet turned up to serenade the hushed, appreciative crowd, which seemed a little at odds with the footage I've seen this year from other protests around the globe.

The first few days of the protests were largely ignored by the mainstream Romanian media, which isn't particularly surprising, given the fact that RMCG has taken out ads on the majority of TV stations. Anyone who did decide to cover the demonstrations was quick to dismiss them by labeling everyone in attendance "hipsters"—presumably either a misguided stab at demonstrating how they're still totally in touch with the youth audience, or an embarrassing mixup with the word hippie.

Extraordinarily, on the political front most MPs have begun to have a change of heart since the opposition made itself known. President Traian Băsescu, one of the main supporters of the project, is now claiming neutrality, and Prime Minister Victor Ponta—the man who approved the plans in the first place—has said that he will vote against the project as a member of parliament. Then again, right after winning last year's elections, he pledged that he wouldn't authorize the project, so we maybe shouldn't take him at his word.

Regardless of what the country's leaders say, the protests are still going strong and spirits are high. For the moment, there's every hope that our mountains will remain intact for much longer than RMCG want them to.  

More stories from Romania:

Gold Miners Are Exhuming and Trafficking Corpses in Romania

Photos of Romanian Workers Beating Up Their Fellow Citizens

Romania's Fish Aren't Being Asphyxiated, Just Poisoned

Romanian Immigrants and Their Magnificent Mansions

Welcome to another edition of This Week in Racism. I’ll be ranking news stories on a scale of 1 to RACIST, with “1” being the least racist and “RACIST” being the most racist.

- A Red Lobster in Franklin, Tennessee, suspended an African American employee for posting a photo on Facebook of a receipt she received during the course of her work. This is apparently in violation of the seafood chain’s policy against employees taking pictures of customer receipts.

The receipt in question, seen above, indicated that the employee received no tip, but was offered a fabulous parting gift of racism. A spokesperson for Red Lobster said that while the employee, Tori Christina Jenkins, has been suspended, she hasn't missed a single day of work yet. I guess Red Lobster suspensions work similarly to Major League Baseball suspensions for steroid use. They'll get around to the whole "actually being suspended" part later.

Until the crack investigative team at Red Lobster gets to the bottom of this incident, this has to be classified as an alleged case of racism, but it certainly is a case of some crustacean chomper being a bad tipper. Regardless of the veracity of her claim, this case seems like good fodder for my upcoming web comic, "The Niggardly White Supremacist," coming soon to my GeoCities page. RACIST (MAYBE?)

- The New York City Democratic mayoral primary campaign (and with it dick-pic king Anthony Weiner’s political career) is mercifully over. Underdog candidate Bill de Blasio emerged the winner in a hard-fought, tabloid-friendly race to succeed current mayor and real-life Scrooge McDuck, Michael Bloomberg.

Despite the Independent, conservative Bloomberg having no dog in the Democratic contest, he saw fit to take a break from swimming in his mountain of gold coins and chastising his nephews, Huey, Dewey, and Louie, to accuse de Blasio, whose wife is black, of being a racist a few days before the election.

Bloomberg told New York magazine, "I mean he’s making an appeal using his family to gain support. I think it’s pretty obvious to anyone watching what he’s been doing. I do not think he himself is racist. It’s comparable to me pointing out I’m Jewish in attracting the Jewish vote." If your name is Michael Bloomberg, you probably don’t have to point out you’re Jewish to many people.

Merriam-Webster defines racism as “poor treatment of or violence against people because of their race,” or, “the belief that some races of people are better than others.” Identity politics, pandering, and opportunism? Sure. Racism? Absolutely not. Maybe Mayor Bloomberg would be better served stopping and frisking a sociology professor. NOT RACIST, JUST STUPID

- Television host Julie Chen shocked practically no one when she admitted she was forced to get surgery to eliminate her "Asian eyes" in order to advance in the TV news industry. On CBS's The Talk, Chen revealed she was passed up for a fill-in anchor slot by her boss at a Dayton, Ohio, television station because she had eyes that made her look "disinterested and bored." Also, it was pointed out to her that Dayton didn't have a particularly large Asian community, so it was unlikely viewers would be able to relate to her. Upon receiving advice from her agent, she proceeded to undergo the surgery. From there, Chen became a hugely successful news anchor and television host.

If you're curious to my personal feelings about this story, here's the ladies of The Talk to explain it to you through their always expressive faces:

First of all, like this screenshot of Sara Gilbert, I am very concerned that racism is so prevalent in American media.

But I'm also casually indifferent to Julie's plight, considering she chose not to take a stand, and made countless millions of dollars from her decision to drastically alter her appearance. Who does casually indifference better than Sharon Osbourne?

In conclusion: hell nah, girl, that shit is fuckin' RACIST

- As someone who prides himself on finding the most racist rhetoric on Twitter, I hate to admit that Business Insider Chief Technology Officer Pax Dickinson's work has, up until now, flown under my prodigious hate-dar. The Valleywag blog reported that Dickinson was recently fired for posting a few choice words on such relevant pop-culture topics as Mel Gibson's 2004 movie The Passion of the Christ and Kobe Bryant's alleged rape of a hotel employee in Colorado in 2003. 

In The Passion Of The Christ 2, Jesus gets raped by a pack of niggers. It's his own fault for dressing like a whore though.

— Pax Dickinson (@paxdickinson) July 14, 2010

Who has more dedication, ambition, and drive? Kobe only raped one girl, Lebron raped an entire city. +1 for Lebron.

— Pax Dickinson (@paxdickinson) July 13, 2010

Some say Dickinson is a misogynist. Some say he's a racist. Dickinson claims he was making jokes. Specifically, the Passion tweet was in reference to Mel Gibson's infamous voicemail tirade at his estranged wife. I understand that it's a joke and got the reference immediately. I happen to listen to those voicemails every night to fall asleep, so I can recite them from memory. Pretty much everything on Dickinson's Twitter page is unfunny and in bad taste, but the tweets are not racist. Let's leave Pax Dickinson alone. He has enough to worry about, considering he goes through life with the name "Pax." Let's move on from this and look forward to more of Pax Dickinson's topical material about Paris Hilton's sex tape, Lou Bega's "Mambo Number Five," and Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton's divorce. 6

The Most Racist Tweets of the Week:

@georgeworgan its called the bullring bc it has a bull infront of it made of marble n all te chink tourists take pictures with it

— amy (@amyandpizza) September 12, 2013

I'm not a racist or anything, but why are white girls so much more nicer than black girls???????

— BROKN MYND Clothing (@BROKN_MYND) September 12, 2013

I'm not racist but Indians can't fuckin drive....

— Zach Bundy (@Bundlesofjoyy) September 12, 2013

Mowing my lawn like a mexican

— Alex Skinner (@Alexskinner253) September 12, 2013

Don't be fucking stupid around me and I won't call you a stupid nigger

— Bridgeeeeeett✌ (@Bridgeeeettt) September 12, 2013

This paki keeps ringing me so I told him allahs dead and he put phone down don't think he'll be ringing me again hahaha smelly curry muncher

— Leah Place (@leahplacexxx) September 8, 2013

Last Week in Racism: Apparently if You Make a “Ghetto Tracker” App, People Will Get Really Angry

@dave_schilling

☐☐☐☐☐☐☐

I first came across Thomas Pynchon in Santa Cruz, at a girl who I liked's apartment. She was sort of seeing a guy—a guy who made no effort to be ‘nice’ to me, which per my reactionary sensibilities I considered ‘mean,’ though looking back I guess he was rather absent about the whole matter, and it was I who was the neurotic prick. That we both liked the girl at whose apartment we kept crossing paths didn't help. He was always smugly carrying around the Penguin Classics edition of Gravity's Rainbow, with the rocket blueprint design on the cover. Sometimes he left it at her apartment, the subliminal used condom tucked away as an ego bomb, the mysterious thickness (of the book) pulling me in. I flipped through it and had no idea what I was reading. Each sentence was straight up ‘off,’ a language that—while comprised of familiar pieces—felt completely foreign, like I had been lobotomized and was greeting my semblance for the first time in the mirror. I felt both intimidated and annoyed. The guy who was banging the girl I liked and Thomas Pynchon seemed to belong to some secret society of assholes. And I wanted in.

I bought a yellow legal pad and a regular pencil, even though Thomas used graph paper and a mechanical one. I took notes, writing down each character and the page they were either described or invoked on, annotating their relationship to entities, plots, agencies, other characters, etc. I also came up with a loose timeline using assumptions gathered from what I considered hints. Faulkner, Joyce, and Gaddis already did this, but this guy was violent about it. Over time the pad evolved from a single list to amoeba-like structures circling relationships interwoven with threads tying orbs of fragmented plot together. The world at large became co-conspirators who wouldn't look me in the eye. Pynchon's fiction, despite its glad artifice, had become reality. The pages had been tussled, flipped, consulted, and listlessly flicked so many times that each one curled and softened into a petal. My pad had turned into a yellow rose. My mind was mush.

Pynchon’s newest novel, The Bleeding Edge, comes out next week. Penguin released a teaser, which I skeptically read up to the point, a few paragraphs in, where a boy named Ziggy tells his mom that a tree "doesn't suck." Pynchon detractors, especially since Inherent Vice, have noted how he seems to be inadvertently parodying himself, swinging from affected hipness to solemn dry prose. When Against the Day came out, my roommate at the time—who eventually dropped out of law school due to a crippling World of Warcraft addiction—could be heard in his room hypnotically flapping the wings of a dragon, on which he was flying to another island, with speakers on, past 2:00 AM, as I quietly freaked out in bed.

I suffer from anxiety and catastrophic thinking, and while such roommate ‘kookiness’ may see mild to some, I became near suicidal. Instead of confronting him, I imagined myself jumping off the Golden Gate bridge to escape the torture of an unrelenting roommate. I bought Pynchon's massive tome because I wanted to hide inside it. Maybe it was unfair to hold the book liable for my happiness, or sanity, but I was let down. The Nixonian paranoia of the 70s felt urgent, haunting—particularly in the Bush era, when the novel came out, at a time when we knew we were being fucked. And so, I left the Chums of Chance in the sky and sold the book to Green Apple, a used bookstore furnished out of a house, took the cash, and headed for a bar.

By the time I finished his other books, a year later and wigged out as fuck, the girl I liked had moved to Italy. The jerk Pynchon fan had joined one of those bands, languid and talented, that enjoy taking their sweet ass time between sets. Should I ever find a guy with a W.A.S.T.E tattoo I'm going to ask him how it was, banging my beautiful girl. Faith makes fiction possible. Delusion makes reality possible.

Oedipa Maas winds up in North Beach, and I found myself café-hopping down Columbus Avenue, tracing her steps. A significant chunk of the North Beach population is made up of residents who went insane in the 60s and never left. Instead of searching for the apparitions of Ginsberg and Kerouac in City Lights, you can just buy a postcard. My friend, who desperately moved into a low-rent boarding house on Grant Street for a month or so after graduation, told me about a neighbor who did nothing but jerk off all day, and never cleaned up after himself. "It smells like cum," he said, pointing to his window from the alleyway. This friend eventually got a Master's degree and is now in finance. Beautiful women cling to him in pictures taken at vista points at the ends of long but pleasurable hikes. He emails me when he's in town on business and we eat bloody steaks on his per diem. On the whole we were both kind of sad back then. We didn't have money, but we had our art. I wasn't liked back, he lived near cum. I'm glad he's better.

Enter V., the mysterious woman whose initials serve as plot outline for the novel: two lines entropically yet irrevocably converging to one point. Some wonder if it's Vera Nabokov, to whom Vladimir's novels were all dedicated, who helped grade Pynchon's papers when he was a student at Cornell. V. would become a blueprint for his own invisible omnipresence, an idea of somebody ‘out there’ which I often, in my young loneliness, mistook for random women on the bus. I used to take bus lines through their entire routes, the long doughnuting inbound-to-outbound, reading Mason & Dixon placed on my lap like a square newborn. May this essay serve as an embarrassed confession of who I was and still am. I watch the eyes of passerbys, wondering if they notice my relatively obscure novel, judging them for not. Put cynically, Pynchon fans may have indeed found a conspiracy: their own literary hubris. A girl sat next to me as Jeremiah Dixon sat on a roof looking at the constellations. I would never ask her for her name, or where she was headed that night, we in the back of the bus like the ghost of Rosa Parks, in some meek alternate universe. I focused in on the paragraph I feigned to read, some blurry rectangle comprised of small marks. It always happened the same way: she'd reach over me, pulling the line for her stop with an aristocratically forced smile. I'd take that smile home with me, on the Polaroid of my mind, slowly disappearing like Marty McFly's siblings, back to the future of doing the same route again, the following Saturday night, looking for her. Thomas Pynchon was never my pimp, however much I tried to get laid by him.

Missing the masochistic dedication of reading novels over 1,000 pages, I recently acquired Against the Day again. In the endless auto-fellatio of serpent eats tail, I rode my bike to Green Apple for a used copy. There was one first edition hard copy, pages not even touched past the first 40. A disappointing yet reasonable thought occurred to me. Was this the same book? Had seven years passed with this major buzzkill on the shelf, perennially dropping in value? As bookstores become mausoleums, each urn honoring the ashes within, we are free to send our bouquets elsewhere: Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Hulu, Netflix. Every fresh MFA wants to perform CPR on the dead novel, forcing hot air into used lungs. Some come close, others get on the cover of TIME, others hang themselves. It's a somber thought, but when a genius stays alive he tends to become Paul McCartney. I'm glad John died.

In Italy, the girl who once lived in Santa Cruz would now gather fallen leaves by lakes, dry them at home, place them inside cards, and mail them to me using ornate postage stamps wetted by a tongue I still wonder about. Email killed sentiment; texting killed our plans. I feel like an old man trying to keep up with these kids, mourning a time when novels were devastating. "She really likes you, you know?" said her roommate, an art student who was saving up used tissues and tampons for an undisclosed art project. "Really?" I asked, the sincerity courtesy of my self-hatred. The world would be simpler if she just went away. The leaves I found inside the card cracked in my hands, baring their spines, fractaling outward in the obstinance of life, reaching out for the sun, conceding to dusk. Pieces of leaves fell to the floor next to my toes like a dirty hermit's nail clippings. I placed the book face down, flayed open, using the world as a bookmark. There I was, crying alone in my room that occasionally smelled like cum. Where did that guy wind up?

Jimmy Chen is 70 percent water and 30 percent internet.

jimmychenchen.tumblr.com

Riding in the back seat with Santa. A frame from 'Asphalt Watches.'

Toronto artists Seth Scriver and Shayne Ehman went on a hitchhiking trek 13 years ago from a 7-11 in Chilliwack BC to downtown Toronto, and I guess it really impacted them, because they co-directed a feature-length Flash animation called Asphalt Watches, based on that presumably insane adventure that made its world premiere at the Vanguard selection of the Toronto International Film Festival this week.

A trip between two friends, Skeleton Hat (Scriver) and Bucktooth Cloud (Ehman) go on a no-budget, lo-fi adventure to meet Santa Claus in Calgary that’s nearly ruined by a near-death experience in Regina. They dodge creepy ex-convicts and rap with dogs, all set to a deep, bassy synth.

Based on a true story, the film is a colourful flashback to the pre-cell phone, pre- 9-11 world of 2000. They claim all of it happened. There is something South Park about this... but trippier.

On their cross-country ride, the duo kept journals and sketched out people they hung out with along the way. Initially, they were going to make a zine. Ehman turned it into a story board which became the basis of the animation and foreight years (more or less), the artists sat in front of a screen and edited their journey into an animated masterpiece after crowdfunding $10,000 in three months last fall. The voiceover cast includes Toronto art luminaries like Jon McCurley, Amy Lam, and Erin Zimmermann.

Scriver and Ehman took some time out of their TIFF schedule for a quick interview about the film, west coast train cops, and the great Canadian landscape. They also gave us an exclusive clip from the film, a rap track called “Come Over for Some Boiled Hot Dogs.” The track is based on an encounter with two women in Chilliwack who tied up their dog with an extension cord to go inside a 7-11 and shoplift hot dogs. Of course, they invited the boys over for some hot dogs afterwards.

A rap song about boiled hot dogs at a 7-11 with bubble gum-chewing characters who have Tasmanian Devil tattoos? It’s just the beginning of how weird this film gets.

VICE: How the hell did you end up in Chilliwack, British Columbia? So curious to know why the journey started there.
Seth Scriver: Well, a friend Dilly suggested we hop out from there. At the time, we had a fantasy of finding a couch and putting it on a boxcar and riding in comfort out east, and right when we made it to Chilliwack we found a couch and carried it down the tracks for a long while, but it was quite heavy being a hideaway so we abandoned that plan.

Shayne Ehman: Yes, just to add a little note, it is nearly impossible to hitchhike out of the downtown of a city like Vancouver or Montreal, so we took public transit out to Chilliwack... The train cops are gnarlier in Surrey and so we figured it would be easier to get on a train at a small crew change point where we could easily guess which way the trains were headed. 

Tell us about your trip. What was it like hitchhiking across Canada in 2000?
Ehman: Hitchhiking across Canada was the best! Of course, 9/11 changed things... but prior to 9/11, hitchhiking was a normal summertime plan. To put trust in the void and step out there... now that’s real!

Scriver: It was a weird time 2000 lots of people were going nuts with apocalyptic fears of Y2K. I feel like we could get away with a lot more though in a pre-cell, phone pre 9/11 world. We made a pact to finish the animation before the next apocalyptic blow out in 2013. And now that it’s after the end of the world, getting into TIFF was no problem.

The filename of this one is santaparade.jpg...

Was acid involved? It feels a bit inspired by Gonzo journalism and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Ehman: Of course it was! I had a great teacher in school named LSD. The quest for fire spark puppeteer in the park... Mutants of the glowing racetrack... Exploration of consciousness... Exploration of storytelling styles... Experiments in seeking shared reality through art... It seems reasonable to concede that acid was involved in some way... But, honestly, as far as I can recall, we weren't high on the actual trip nor were we high while creating the movie!

Scriver: I've actually never done acid, my dad would always tell me acid stories as a kid and I would always get paranoid about looking into a mirror and becoming the reflection.

What was the most memorable moment Skeleton Hat and Bucktooth had together?
Ehman: We were just talking about this and agree that there was a moment when Santa passed us some Green Death smokes. He had just picked us up and hadn't revealed his true identity yet, but we were in the back of the car smoking Green Death just looking at each other amidst all this rubble and we both knew something was up.

...and this one was crustcopy.jpg

The Canadian landscape can be boring. Do you hope Asphalt Watches offers it in a more psychedelic light?
Ehman: Fuck that! I do not agree. The Canadian landscape always rules! Every pebble zoomed in on. Every weed on the roadside... dusted and blown...

Scriver: I love the landscape across Canada minus certain parts of New Brunswick, just joking I bet the trees have grown back there and it's beautiful again.

Your visit to Saskatchewan seemed sketchy. Would you go on the same adventure today?
Ehman: [Laughs] Sure! I will bring my wife and son! No, we are into different things now... healthier adventures involving food security and wildlife habitat conservation.

Scriver: It's hard to say cause at that time we were really desperate for a ride and it was exciting that a car even stopped so we jumped in but if I had a choice of cars to get in, I think I would have choose something else, it's amazing that we jumped in that ride I'm glad we got out in the nick of time.

Well, I'm glad you both survived.


Follow Nadja on Twitter: @nadjasayej

More Canadian artist interviews:

A JPEG Interview with Douglas Coupland

Don't Tell Niall McClelland His Drawings Are Paintings

Kickstarter Superheroes: The Less Important Portraits of Jeremy Bailey

The Cow-Pock—or—the Wonderful Effects of the New Inoculation by James Gilray, 1802. Image via

I’ve never really understood the fear of vaccines, mostly because there's no real, hard evidence linking them to autism, autoimmune disorders, sudden infant death syndrome, or anything else. The only thing you can really like it to is making sure you don’t get sick. But, like abortion, evangelical Christians have been using anti-vaccination hysteria as a way to galvanize support, even after Dr. Andrew Wakefield's landmark 1998 paper linking vaccines to autism and bowel dysfunction was roundly debunked as bad science. 

To be honest, I get the religious argument against inoculation way more than the scientific one. I think it goes like this: even if vaccination is not compulsory, it is a sin to thwart God’s will—if He would strike me down, I would be stricken. If I believed in a pissed-off white-bearded dude in robes up in heaven with a lightning-bolt gun, I wouldn't want to anger him or her either. It certainly makes more sense than the new-age version of vaccine refusal, where suburban yuppies just slide their kids another kombucha instead of bringing them to the pediatrician.

If Fred Phelps wants to believe that vaccines violate the word of God, thats fine. It's no skin off my back if the evangelical community wants to believe that God doesn't trust them with their own bodies. The problem for me is that someday I plan on impregnating a woman with my penis. Nine months later, we’ll be blessed with a little wriggly child (preferably a boy), and I want to make sure that he grows up big and strong and doesn’t accidently contract an old disease—especially one that most doctors don’t know how to treat anymore—because my neighbors decide not to vaccinate their child.

Remember measles? That old-timey disease we officially eliminated in the United States 13 years ago? Thanks to the wonder of inoculation, measles should be entirely nonexistent in this country, but yesterday the Center for Disease Control reported 159 cases from January through August of this year. This puts our country on track for the worst measles year since 1996, when there were 500 reported cases—which is disturbing, especially because doctors and nurses aren't really trained to look out for measles anymore, because of the whole "elimination" thing.

Measles and scarlet fever. Image via

This might be a good moment to remind everyone what measles does to humans. In adults, it's a respiratory infection that leads to a four-day fever and a stain-like reddish rash that will keep you home from work watching Netflix and checking your temperature. It’s not usually fatal, but it’s pretty hard on kids. Even with the best care, about three of every 1,000 kids who get measles will die from it. 

Studying the patterns and causes of health and disease is one of those jobs where you’re forced to admire the perfection of fatal diseases, which is why most epidemiologists and infectious-disease doctors remind me of Ash in Alien. Diseases grow and change in ways that doctors simply can’t predict, and looking closely at these "perfect organisms" can quickly turn into admiring their destructive power. Look, my friend's dad was an infectious-disease doctor, and he really freaked us out with old medical books.

What’s unique about this year's outbreak is that the CDC has finally admitted the spread of this “eliminated” disease is based on religious communities’ philosophical aversion to vaccines and reliance on divine healing through the Word of God. According to the report, 91 percent of the reported cases were in people who were unvaccinated, or didn’t know their vaccination status, and “of those who were unvaccinated, 79 percent had philosophical objections to vaccination.”

These cases began in religious communities, but eventually spread out of them and infected infants who couldn't legally be vaccinated yet. This August, epidemiologists in Texas began investigating the Eagle Mountain International Church in Newark, Texas. The megachurch, which believes in faith healing, had become an open breeding ground for measles after a member of the congregation returned from Indonesia and infected 21 people in and around Newark. It was widely reported that Terri Pearsons, the church’s senior pastor, had encouraged her followers to avoid vaccinations at all costs. The church has defensively denied this claim, which contradicts Pearsons’s continued reservations about vaccines.

Once babies started getting all rashy, Pearsons reversed her position in an August 15 statement encouraging her flock to get immunized. Here, she limited her concerns to “very young children with a family history of autism,” again suggesting a belief that vaccines can turn your kids retarded. Eagle Mountain’s basic point is contradictory: you should vaccinate your kids, but they might end up like Rain Man.

Terri Pearsons and her husband, George. Image via

Things are even worse in Northern Europe. Since May, there’s been a “large, ongoing measles outbreak” in an orthodox Protestant community in the Netherlands. As of September 5, the Center for Infectious Disease Control in Netherlands had reported some 1,226 cases. Ninety-one percent of those cases were unvaccinated members of orthodox Protestant communities in the country's Bible belt.

Doesn’t all this qualify as reckless endangerment? Why are we still even talking about vaccines as if they had any negative effect on our society? Could it have something to do with the fact that, outside of the high-level demagogues, the bread and butter of the religious right is often referred to as a medieval sect of antidoctor serpent handlers, speaking in tongues behind the closed walls of their megachurches? I certainly think of them like that, and it’s nice to imagine the religious right as a self-contained, isolated community. What's alarming is that their diseases are smarter than they are, and do much quicker missionary work.

More health stuff:

Uninsured Americans are Crowdsourcing Healthcare Costs

How We Lost a Lyme Disease Vaccine

Big Surprise: Henry Rollins Can Reform Healthcare

Bill Ellis recently moved to New York City from the depths of Florida, which is generally regarded as the strangest, most violent state in the union. To be sure, there's a ton of odd stuff going on down there in America's wang, but as Bill's photos document, NYC is equally chock-full of the ugly, the beautiful, and the depraved—people are just used to ignoring it here. Bill is the type of dude to walk his ferret in the nude or shave his own name into his head so he can photograph himself and slap the image on his business card. If you see him on the street, say hi. He'll be the one with "BILL ELLIS!!" shaved into his head.

http://billellis.tumblr.com/

Desperation is mostly inseparable from masculinity. Men strain for fame, for female attention, for sad, trivial triumphs over one another. We are a people perpetually trying to figure it all out—flexing in the mirror, using lines we've heard before, trying to seem bold and dignified. We're not cowboys or poets. If we are, we wear it as a disguise. Mostly, we are vulnerable and self-conscious and probably masturbating for the third time on a Tuesday afternoon, because we're off work and that Lea Thompson scene in All the Right Moves just came on. We are not men, but almost. Note: columns may also contain William Holden hero worship and meditations on cured meats.

There he is, like he’s always been, perpetually on the brink of breakdown, hands grasping for nothing in particular, eyes twitching, voice abruptly fluctuating in and out of that cartoon squeal of his. It is late August and Mike Tyson is at a press conference discussing his new life as a boxing promoter. His sentences occasionally veer into barely-coherent memories that grip him so tightly he almost can't breathe. But mostly he spends 15 minutes dispensing how-great-it-is-to-be-here platitudes about boxers you’ve never heard of.

He has been enthusiastic and hyperbolic. It has been a very encouraging Fresh Start and now he is ready to leave. But someone has one more question, about Tyson reconciling with Teddy Atlas. Atlas helped train him when Tyson was 16, but was dismissed when he threatened to shoot the teenage boxer in the head after he grabbed Atlas’s 11-year-old sister-in-law’s ass. They didn’t speak to each other for the next 30 years.

This is how Tyson responds:

“I'm a motherfucker. I'm a bad guy sometimes. I did a lot of bad things, and I want to be forgiven. So in order for me to be forgiven, I hope they can forgive me. I wanna change my life, I wanna live a different life now. I wanna live my sober life. I don't wanna die. I'm on the verge of dying, because I'm a vicious alcoholic. Wow. God, this is some interesting stuff. I haven't drank or took drugs in six days, and for me that's a miracle. I've been lying to everybody else that think I was sober, but I'm not. This is my sixth day. I'm never gonna use again.”

>He turned a fight into a press conference, a press conference into a confession, a confession into a suicide note, a suicide note into his own eulogy. 

Look at that man. It is not an entrance but an uprising, something volcanic. It is as if the apocalypse was happening all around you and you prayed to God and asked him what to do and he answered—confirming in that moment that He was out there, that He was real, that all the chaos, all the pain, had an architect, that there was a design—and then He told you to run for your life; there was no one who could save you from this man.

“It’s interesting to note that Mike Tyson selected his prefight music to be just noise.”

He is a breathing, seething rebuttal to every justification you’ve ever had for giving up. Were he not a borderline schizophrenic convicted rapist Nike would have cracked his chest open and carved his heart into a swoosh. He is anarchy. He is an ideology, a seismic event, a force to be measured like a colorful blob on a Doppler radar screen. There’s no way to stop it. All you can do is stand and gaze at its stupendous might. He is a motherfucker. No, really, look at that man. He is the distillation of every bad thing that has ever happened in his life; he’s ejecting all his pains from his body every instant, over and over again. When he was a boy and they called him fat and ugly and kicked him till he ran home. His mother the whore. His father who wasn't there. The boys who snapped his pigeons’ heads off. No heat, no hot water. Walking home in the dark with chapped lips.

For a year, I maintained a Tumblr on which I posted a picture of Mike Tyson every day. The people who followed me filled their own Tumblrs almost exclusively with pictures of Notorious BIG and girls with meaty, glistening tits. I think there was such a distinct correlation between those things mainly because they're all awesome. But I think it’s also because they speak to something primal, something honest and irresistible and essential about human nature, something that remains after you chisel away our pretentiousness: to fight, to fuck, to shout ominous lines. 

Mike Tyson thought these things before he entered the ring: I’m scared to death. I’m totally afraid. I’m afraid of everything. I’m a God. He feels both above everything and beneath everything. There is just a need to destroy. It is the blueprints underlying everything we do and feel—charming a girl, getting a job, intimidating a brutish man who snarls at you. 

Boxing prizes patience and elegance and harnessed fury. The sweet science, they call it. Mike Tyson is a scientist the way a Tyrannosaurus is a dinner guest. He does this. When Tyson knocked out Eddie Richardson 77 seconds into the first round, Richardson was asked if anyone had ever hit him that hard. Richardson paused and then replied, "Yeah, about a year ago I was hit by a truck.”

Tyson hit like he was trying to transfer his every wound, every calamitous decision, every regret, every sleepless night, every night where his sleep was ravaged by nightmares, onto his opponent. Tyson talks about fear like someone who has been consumed by it and now lives in its belly, as if Fear were a monster with six frothing mouths and a flaming tail. He can identify fear in others. He recognizes imperceptible body ticks because he has felt them in himself, years ago, running, hiding, trying to disappear in some abandoned tenement in Brooklyn. He sees it in someone briefly breaking eye contact, the way they slouch after absorbing his punch.

In interviews he can be both unhinged and catatonically docile, dissolving into a couch cushion with his arm around Robin Givens while she burns his identity to ash. When he confronts reporters during a press conference to promote his fight with Lennox Lewis he tries so hard to suppress his tears it’s as if they’re going to come spurting out of his ears and from under his fingernails.  

He has spent his life saying things like this: “I just have this thing inside me that wants to eat and conquer. Maybe it's egotistical, but I have it in me. I don't want to be a tycoon. I just want to conquer people and their souls.” And this: “I want to kill people. I want to rip their stomachs out and eat their children.” He said he no longer had interest in becoming the world champion—“I just want them to keep bringing guys on and I’m going to strip them of their health. I bring pain, a lot of pain.” He said, as a 21-year-old, “When I fight someone, I want to break his will. I want to take his manhood. I want to rip out his heart and show it to him.” He said he wanted to take a bath in Francois Botha’s blood.

Violence is his medium, his field of study. It is more than just a menacing gesture. It propels him and then it paralyzes him. When he was little, he and a friend stole a young man’s pigeons. The young man and his friends found Mike’s friend. They tied a rope around Mike’s friend’s neck and threw him off a fire escape. No wonder he only knows humans as disposable entities who are tormented by everything that surrounds them and then discarded with no explanation. They either suffer or triumph. Triumphs are brief; suffering is eternal. These are the laws of his universe. He accepts this and climbs to a rooftop to play with his pigeons till the sun goes down.

We build narratives with absolutes so that we can understand things: the villain and the hero, the jester, and the sage. Mike plays the most reviled role in the celebrity drama—his only redemption has been in turning his disorders into contrivances, parodying his nihilism in some PG reenactment on basic cable. He is more than a cartoon monster, though. He quotes Machiavelli and spent the weeks leading up to his fight with Trevor Berbick watching cartoons and kung fu movies. He is explosive and fragile. He vibrates with rage. He grunts and stammers. When he knocked out Sterling Benjamin he turned to the crowd while the referee counted him out and waved for them to rise to their feet. And when the referee signalled the fight was over, Tyson turned around and helped pick Benjamin off the ground. It’s nothing personal. I have to do this to survive.

After he beat Larry Holmes, Tyson returned to his dressing room and found Barbra Streisand waiting for him. Tyson smiled at Streisand and said, “I think your nose is very sexy, Barbra.” When he was released from prison in 1995, he called Roseanne Barr and told her, “You're the only person that I wanna tell my story to.” They went to the mall and he spent $25,000 on Versace towels. When Tyson walked in on Givens, who he was divorcing, having sex with Brad Pitt, his response was not anger but sadness: “I was just depressed I couldn’t bone her no more.” Who has ever been so explicitly real, amplifying our basest impulses?

In 1988, Mike Tyson was riding through Brownsville, Brooklyn, in the back of a limousine with Givens and a reporter from Sports Illustrated. They turned down Rockaway Avenue and Tyson lowered his window. He smiled and began to reminisce about the years he spent there, when he’d rub the drunks’ fingers in the snow so their rings would be easier to slide off. About reaching into bus windows and snatching women’s necklaces. He said this: “There's Lincoln Terrace Park. We'd see dead whores there in the morning. What memories. Good memories. Beautiful memories. I was happier then. I had pure fun here. Every day I was living on the edge. I was wild and free. I love coming back. Do you understand? When I'm here, I feel like a warrior.”

A decade later, Don DeLillo’s massive, America-spanning novel Underworld was published. In it, DeLillo writes: “I long for the days of disorder. I want them back, the days when I was alive on the earth, rippling in the quick of my skin, heedless and real. I was dumb-muscled and angry and real. This is what I long for, the breach of peace, the days of disarray when I walked real streets and did things slap-bang and felt angry and ready all the time, a danger to others and a distant mystery to myself.”

There he is. Somewhere, Tyson, that force, is in the work of everyone. In that last quarter mile; at closing time, as you look at her and try to find the nerve to walk over; in the pursuit of every dream you’ve ever hard. He is screaming and sobbing and pounding his fists. He is grabbing his dick and smiling for the cameras. He is nothing and he is everything. A peasant and a king, rubble and a monument. He is terrified, he is in the ring in his black trunks, he is standing over a corpse with his arms in the air. He is ready to die and he is desperate to live.

Previously – Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

John Saward likes O.V. Wright and eating guacamole with no pants on. He lives in Connecticut. Follow him on Twitter @RBUAS.

Photo via

The world's consistently highest paid athletes have always been American boxers, though it does not follow that boxers as a subset are the highest paid athletes. In 2013, one of the fortunate few on the sunny side of the fight game’s shrinking middle class is Floyd Mayweather, Jr., who on Saturday will earn a guaranteed $41.5 million for less than an hour’s work—his much-anticipated super welterweight title unification fight with Saul “Canelo” Alvarez at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas—a figure nearly certain to balloon to more than $50 million once the pay-per-view and closed-circuit receipts are tallied.

The business of boxing has conspired to exploit and defraud fighters for as long as anyone can remember, but the 36-year-old Mayweather—who in 44 pro fights has never been in serious trouble, much less been defeated—has leveraged his success to rewrite the rules for himself. He controls every aspect of a promotion, teaming with enigmatic advisor Al Haymon—a Harvard-educated former concert promoter who obsessively keeps to the shadows—to develop a unique financial structure predicated on the exchange of upfront risk for back-end profit. That means Mayweather gets points on every beer, every T-shirt, every hot dog sold. This for a fighter is unheard of. The $5 million base pay that Alvarez will receive in addition to his own pay-per-view bonus? Mayweather will essentially cut the check himself and write it off as a business expense.

Stephen Espinoza, the executive vice president and general manager of Showtime Sports who this year signed Mayweather to a six-fight, 30-month contract worth a potential $250 million, says he’s never been around a fighter so hands-on with every minute detail of a promotion. “Floyd and his team are experts in what they’ve done, which is building his brand,” he said Thursday while inspecting the interior of the MGM Grand Garden Arena, where more than 10,000 are expected to turn out for Friday’s weigh-ins. “They know it better than anyone else. They’ve been more successful at it than any other modern fighter. So he’s got very clear and strong opinions on certain things, down to how things are shot and what gets shot and the way it’s presented, from wardrobe to camera angles to the DJ for the event.”

The raw numbers here are intimidating. Mayweather has generated 10.5 million buys in his 10 pay-per-view fights, representing nearly $600 million in revenue—greater than the GDP of some small countries. Saturday’s fight at the world’s largest single-building hotel has been sold out for months, producing a record-breaking live gate upwards of $20 million. The cheapest ticket on the secondary market Thursday afternoon, for a single nosebleed seat in the 17,157-seat arena, was selling for $1,857.

So much of this drawing power is dependent on the all-important zero in Mayweather’s loss ledger, which is the real trick. Not until the best pure boxer of his generation turned heel eight years ago—his fulcrumatic move from the polite and humble Pretty Boy Floyd to the bumptious and grotesque Money Mayweather—did the eight-figure paydays become the norm. Truth is, more fans will plunk down $69.95 on Saturday night to watch him lose than to watch him win.

Even more remarkable is the fact that Mayweather, who for the second straight year topped Forbes’s list of the world’s richest athletes, generated $85 million in earnings last year without a single penny coming from endorsements. Think about it: One of the most recognizable athletes on the planet, on the level of a LeBron James or Lionel Messi in prestige, has thus far proven one of the least marketable from an endorsement standpoint. Never has an athlete of Mayweather’s caliber been unable to parlay his Q score into an easy paycheck. And he could not care less: It empowers him with an authenticity and candor that, for an athlete of Mayweather’s particular temperament, you can’t put a price on. He is beholden to no one.

“He enjoys being the villain, he doesn’t shy away from it,” Espinoza says, “and there are a lot of brands who that turns off, that are very traditional and conservative in their thinking. There are plenty of brands that will do business with him. Reebok has done business with him several times. It’s a question of getting what he believes is the value for it. And I know Reebok is not part of this event because he didn’t think they were stepping up.”

Mayweather espouses a lavish lifestyle, careening through his 22,000-square-foot mansion on Segways, tweeting six-figure betting slips, and collecting Maybachs like they were Silly Bandz. Maintaining it is extremely important to how he is able to differentiate himself as a brand from other athletes and entertainers. It’s almost like a weird Ponzi scheme, where the more money he has and the more he flaunts, the more he is able to get. That house of cards is bound to collapse at some point. There are signs that time is approaching: Mayweather’s failed negotiations with HBO before moving to Showtime and the underwhelming buy rate for his May whitewash of Robert Guerrero intimated a decline, however slight, in his pricing power. But no one can expedite the process like Alvarez, the 23-year-old from Guadalajara who’s been breathlessly sold as Mayweather’s sternest threat in years, who’s already transcended the sport in Mexico, whose multi-year sponsorship deal with Under Armour gives him one stripe Floyd doesn’t have.

For Mayweather, a 2.5-to-1 favorite, the winter of his career offers the promise of cashing out. He’s weathered most glaring hits about the fight that never happened with Manny Pacquiao like so many of his instinctive shoulder rolls. Seldom do two boxers considered the best in the sport come from the same weight class—and rarer still are both roughly the same age. That was no dream fight, it was an obligation: a fight the public had made. The details of why it never came together—e.g. ego, politics, fear—are not worth recounting here. Suffice it to say Mayweather-Pacquiao certainly would have been the richest fight in history, and its failure to materialize remains the tragicomic nadir of boxing's institutional dysfunction.

But sober retrospect might convince you Floyd was onto something: Why take on undue risk when the money kept flowing? “You know what,” Floyd said this week, “if they say Mayweather has handpicked his opponents, you know what, my team has done a good job," he ranted in character. Or caricature. Doesn't matter. “If I'm able to handpick opponents and make $60, $70, $80 and $100 million dollars, keep doing it. Keep doing it. Make it easy on me so I can retire healthy and feeling good."

Which brings us to Canelo, who, we’ve been assured, is different from every previous overmatched Mayweather opponent. The red-haired Mexican heartthrob who’s drawn female fans like no fighter since Oscar De La Hoya is “The One,” as the promotion has been exhaustively subtitled and hashtagged, who can do the unthinkable and deliver Mayweather the comeuppance he deserves.

What you won’t hear is the simple, inconvenient truth: Floyd is just a difficult fighter to match. He’s so far ahead of everyone else it's embarrassing, so he does what he can with what's out there. Mayweather doesn’t fight guys who show they can be clearly beaten. Rather, and this is key, he fights guys that look like they can beat him. That’s how you sell tickets. And that’s what Floyd’s done better than anyone in a generation.

The fight will be elementary. They’ll tell you about Canelo’s youth and hunger and punching power. Or how the lusty spirit of a heavily partisan crowd on Mexican Independence Day weekend will stir his warrior spirit and raise his game. Or about how the naturally bigger Canelo will be as many as 20 pounds heavier when they step in the ring, which is true. Or how Alvarez will use that bulk to pressure Mayweather (though notably less about how Canelo has never been a pressure fighter).

And then you’ll watch the most technically sound and mentally agile fighter of his generation take just two rounds to analyze and dissect his green opponent, measure his abilities, make the necessary adjustments, and pepper the Mexican with counter rights on his way to an easy victory. Mayweather, whose monastic approach to fitness betrays his profligate made-for-TV persona, has been here before. He is too sharp and too experienced—and has too much invested in that zero—for it to happen any other way.

And then in six months he’ll do it again, as long as the checks keep clearing.

More about boxing: 

Waiting for Pacquiao v. Mayweather

Proposal for Miss Nancy Kerrigan 

The Nine-Year-Old Russian Strongman and His Pissed Off Dad

Tepito, Mexico City, Mexico.

The great thing about Google Street View (aside from generating the occasional murder scare,) is that it allows you to visit parts of your town that you would usually be too terrified to set foot in. The “bad part of town.”

Below is a collection of Street View images taken in the worst parts of a bunch of cities around the globe. 

I wish I had some kind of scientific method for finding these places, but I just contacted people I knew in cities that have Google Street View, asked them what they consider to be the sketchiest part of where they live, then dragged the little orange Street View guy down at a random spot in that neighborhood. This is what I saw:

Aylesbury Estate, London, United Kingdom. 

Klongtoey, Bangkok, Thailand. 

Ciudad Bolívar, Bogota, Colombia. 

Ferentari, Bucharest, Romania.

Józsefváros, Budapest, Hungary. 

Auburn Gresham, Chicago, USA. 

Jane & Finch, Toronto, Canada.

Golyanovo District, Moscow, Russia. 

Fifth Ward, Houston, USA. 

Troeshina, Kiev, Ukraine. 

Neukölln, Berlin, Germany. 

Calle del Desengaño, Madrid, Spain. 

Moss Side, Manchester, United Kingdom. 

Rocinha, Rio De Janeiro, Brazil.

Redfern, Sydney, Australia.

Liberty City, Miami, USA

San'ya (technically no longer an area), Tokyo, Japan. 

More photos: 

Unpublished Penthouse Pets

Bill Ellis's Weird New York

Lina Scheynius Pictures Everybody Naked

During NYFW, the best looks come from kids on the street. Without them there wouldn't be anyone to perpetuate the delusion that fashion actually has any inherent value. In between shows, amidst the snobby bullshit, Conor photographed some of those people off the runway who piqued his interest. 

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 Eight: Betsey Johnson, Anna Sui, Osklen, and the Blonds

Want more stuff about NYFW? Check these out: 

Fashion Lips

NYFW Reviews: Nautica, You Disgust Us

Don't Do This at NYFW

Photo of Clayton Patterson and two artists by the author.

For this week's Mahal, I headed to the Lower East Side to check out Clayton Patterson's newly painted front door. After decades of taking portraits outside the door and decorating it with graffiti, Clayton has let two artists, Nicolina and Perola, transform it into a portal. To find out what that means, I chatted with Clayton and the two artists.

What is the story behind your front door?
Clayton Patterson:‎‎ My front door, at 161 Essex Street, is one of the main places where I took photos of the people in the community.  After I developed the photographs, I would mount the photos in a frame which held 32 photographs.  Soon, if a person had any desire to have some fame or street cred in the hood, it became a thing to have your picture taken in front of the door and your picture in the window.‎ The front door took on a life of its own and became known as the Wall of Fame, and the photos in the window became known as the Hall of Fame. Taking the front door photos is one of my major blessings of being on the LES. I did a book called the Front Door Book, which includes a cross section of door photos.  

What were you able to learn about people of the Lower East Side through your front door?‎
Over the years, starting around 1985, I began taking thousands of such photos. In America, I probably have one of the largest collections of inner city people who dominate the streets. The people include: individuals, families, posses, crews, drug dealers, gangsters, graffiti writers, rock ’n’ rollers, punks, skinheads, mailmen, good guys, bad guys, in-between guys, and yes even a few cops.  The LES. 

Are you happy with the transformation of your front door?‎
To have these two young woman artists, one from Mexico and another from Rio, come to me to do the door was a first. A first, because I had always let the community graffiti people do throw-ups on the door. The streets of the LES used to be the domain of drug dealers. It was not like today where you have writers from all over the world come and do tags or bomb the hood. The streets were runs by dealers. Who needs some art type looking for fame attracting attention on the block? Each territory was run by its own crew, except for my door. I had tags from all over the hood.

However, now an outsider wanted to do the door. Okay, gentrification had changed everything. I had seen their work in the community, and I knew they were on it—good artists with good intentions. I said fine, and it turned out to be much better than fine. The door looks great, fabulous, wonderful—a real work of art. The door is still being photographed, but not only by me. So many stop to marvel at the work and take a photo before they move on. These two woman artists, Nicolina and Perola, are now a part of the legend of the 161 front door. 

Photo by Clayton Patterson.

How did you end up at Clayton's front door?
Perola‎: One of the objectives of our portals is to bring the community together and to exhibit experimental art throughout the neighborhood as it has been formerly done with great appreciation. Clayton Patterson is one of the characters that has helped to build the cultural history of the East Village and the Lower East Side. So we ended up finding his contact  through a mutual friend.
Nicolina: We called him up and soon found ourselves in the dim light of his lair surrounded by incredible artwork and photographs from many brilliant artists, including Clayton. He offered us his door. I remember wondering why we didn't think of that before. So it became our exception, the only portal below Houston street.

What exactly is the Portals Project? 
Nicolina: The 13 portals are an interactive street art experience that combines ancient history, modern technology, and urban exploration. It is a combination of our passion for painting and our love for community. With the portals we've found a way to connect directly to the public through our art. The QR code acts as the virtual portal connecting the participant with the oracle. The oracle guides them on their journey and gives them clues which can help them obtain one of the 64 coveted keys that unlock the secrets to portal 13.
Perola: The concept of play is very important for this project as well as in contemporary philosophy and art. You can see this discussed in the work of Giorgio Agamben, among other modern philosophers. While playing with meanings, objects, and history, the participant can experiment with new concepts and create his or her own reality within the project. This is the real freedom. In its deepest truths, the portals leads to freedom.‎

What do portals mean to you?
Nicolina: Portals are gateways to other realms, to the mystery beyond the veil of this material reality.
Perola: But in order to pass through one of them, you have to achieve a new perspective, attitude, or awareness. Facing a portal is the equivalent of questioning or experimenting in life. Nicolina and I have both witnessed portals in our lives. When I was seven, I had my first mystical experience on a secluded beach in Rio. I saw a glowing portal that appeared as a spiraling mandala. At the time, I didn't know what it was or what it meant. I still don't know.
Nicolina: I saw a portal once in the Mayan ruins of Palenque, Mexico. I stayed the night there by myself  a couple of years ago, and I witnessed the entire staircase of the Temple of the Sun vibrate and shift in a strange, mystifying way that I cannot explain. I had never seen anything like that before or since. ‎

What other portals have you created?
Nicolina: We spent the winter in Brazil painting portals and had a stockpile of seven of them before we launched the project on July 13th. Since then we have continued to paint them as we go.  Out of the portals we have finished, number three is my favorite. We were channeling oriental dragons, and the piece took on a life of its own. This was the first portal to be stolen. Then someone stole number five less than 12 hours after we unveiled it. But as Perola says, “It's part of the game.” Once the art is put up, it's not ours anymore—it belongs to the whole of the community.

Has anyone ended up traveling through one of your portals yet?
‎Nicolina: Yes. Someone came out of a portal once. We couldn't get permission for the location of portal two, because the owner was traveling abroad and impossible to reach, but we decided to take the risk because the spot was so perfect and had also been riddled with graffiti for years, making it clear to us that they didn't care too much about the appearance of the space. We went to install the portal very early the morning before the unveiling, 5 AM or so. We were painting over the graffiti and pulling out some nails, and all of the sudden it opened, and a man walked out and scared me half to death. He turned around to see what we were doing, and as our hearts were in our throats, he gave us a thumbs up, smiled, said it was beautiful, and went back in to go to sleep.
Perola‎: The ultimate portal to pass through is 13. But only the 64 key holders will make this unique journey. We have something special for them there... on the other side.‎

@RedAlurk

Previously - This Skateboard School Is Keeping Kids Out of Trouble in Brownsville

It's probably best to leave the context of this photo out and just enjoy it. Via Flickr user Catholic United Financial.

Half a year into his tenure, Pope Francis has proved to be very, very good at generating headlines.  In the past few months, he announced that he’d be driving a used 1984 Renault around Vatican City, washed the feet of female Muslim prisoners, made remarks that seemed to indicate he’d be OK-ish with homosexual priests, got embarrassed that his old cathedral built a life-size statue of him, called people who sent him letters to comfort and advise them (including one gay Catholic), spoke out against economic inequality, and wrote an open letter in which he said that atheists and agnostics could be forgiven by God. What’s more, Francis’s second-in-command, Archbishop Pietro Parolin, told a newspaper that priests may someday be allowed to marry.

Naturally everyone, especially progressive types, is all in a tizzy. “Is Francis the Most Liberal Pope Ever?”  asked an article from The Week. Chris Hayes of MSNBC was more blunt: “Best. Pope. Ever.” The consensus is that not only is Francis personally charming, he’s also willing to embrace left-wing causes that dovetail with the Catholic mission of aiding the less fortunate (a mission that, for instance, inspired nuns to get involved in 1960s Civil Rights marches). He has also signaled that he’s open to broad, sweeping reforms involving the priesthood.

If you’re Catholic, all of this is probably very important to you. You may, like writer Michael Brendan Dougherty, be suspicious of Francis as a continuation of a “larger era of the church in the past 50 years which has been defined by ill-considered experimentation.” You might, like American Archbishop Charles Chaput, be pissed off that Francis isn’t more of a hardline conservative (or you might think Chaput is way out of line).

But if you’re not a Catholic, the pope doesn’t have any say in your life. You may be more charmed by humble, down-to-earth Francis than his predecessor, who looked like a Disney villain and issued a proclamation abolishing limbo, the bit of the afterlife where unbaptized babies were sent. You might be interested in what this new pope does in the same way you’re interested in what goes on in the lives of, say, the British Royal Family or Kanye West, but why should the word of an old man in a funny hat matter?

One slightly esoteric but important answer is that whatever else he’s doing, Francis is clearly committed to underlining the niceness of the religion he leads, and that’s no small thing.

Backing up a bit: In The Evolution of God, Robert Wright’s excellent history of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, the author discusses (as the book jacket puts it) how those faiths have moved “away from belligerence and intolerance to a higher moral plane.” One example of this is how God changes from the Old Testament to the New—in the former, He’s on the side of the Israelites and helps them conquer and destroy other tribes, but by the time the latter is written He’s a God for all peoples (or at least, all peoples who adopt Christianity). Though religious leaders have done horrible things and bigots have used various scriptures as a way to defend their ugly beliefs, in general, religions have historically moved toward tolerance. God has gone from commanding people to be nice to only their clan, tribe, or race to commanding people to be nice to everyone. Wright says that mostly has to do with nations and tribes forming alliances and trading partnerships with others—it’s harder to view the other guys as heathens who will burn for all eternity when you are dealing with them on a day-to-day basis. Thus the moral circle is expanded and enemies become, if not friends, potential allies. Writes Wright:

“The god of the Abrahamic scriptures—real or not—does have a tendency to grow morally. This growth, though at times cryptic and superficially haphazard, is the “revelation” of the moral order underlying history: as the scope of social organization grows, God tends to eventually catch up, drawing a larger expanse of humanity under his protection, or at least a larger expanse of humanity under his toleration.” [emphasis mine]

In this context, Pope Francis’s emphasizing that atheists and homosexuals are deserving of God’s love and forgiveness is part of a millennia-spanning trend. Today’s world is more interconnected than ever before—economically, socially, and politically—and intolerance isn’t just vicious and evil. it’s a short-sighted way of cutting yourself off from those who could help you in all sorts of ways. (Imagine how tough it would be for an extreme homophobe in a big city to refuse to have any contact whatsoever with gay or trans people.)

Militant atheists will of course say that religions breed intolerance and should be stamped out entirely (an ironically intolerant view), but that’s not the universe we live in. There are 1.2 billion Catholics worldwide, and it can only be good for everyone when the leader of their church preaches open-mindedness and reaching out to other faiths. Francis is using his not inconsiderable platform to increase the net total of tolerance in the world. A thousand years ago popes were ordering the invasion of Muslim countries; today the pope is washing the feet of a Muslim woman. That’s progress, however slow.

Pope Francis isn’t as perfect a liberal as some would like. He holds conservative views on women, and he hasn’t indicated that homosexual intercourse and condom use aren’t sins (in other words, he’s a Catholic). And the headlines about Francis claiming that atheists could go to heaven if they followed their consciences were wrong and based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what he actually meant. I haven’t heard him ordering all the priests who sexually abused children and young men—or their superiors who covered up such cases—to be defrocked and prosecuted.

But the pope’s ceremonial, largely rhetorical role is still very important. For many non-Catholics, the office may mostly be an indicator of outdated attitudes that no one should take seriously. But isn’t it nice, then, that even such an old-fashioned figure is willing to accept, if not whole-heartedly embrace, gays and atheists? It’s entirely possible that Francis’s words will change the attitudes of at least a few bigots. That's a pretty big accomplishment.

@HCheadle

More on the pope and Catholics:

The Sad State of America’s Aging Sisters

Pope Francis Is Shockingly Good at Social Media

Pope of Many Hats

Image via Flickr.

For reasons that are obvious, my memory is not the best. Writing stories for this column often brings back important details I’ve forgotten. Every week, I find myself reconstructing whole scenarios and revisiting past iterations of myself that are younger, stupider, and often misguided. The shenanigans I relate are usually just that—shenanigans, silly bullshit that doesn’t hurt anyone. But when I look back on one story from college, I realize how immature my homeboys and I were. We didn’t directly hurt anyone, and in the end the vibe returned to normal, but looking back, one of our reactions makes me SMH. (I’m very into the phrase SMH these days.)

Leaving things to the last minute is my mark, and in college I drew this signature style out over four and a half hazy years. I didn’t put much effort into excelling in my studies until my final semester, when I rallied every ounce of give-a-shit I had left and plowed through my capstone courses. (I’m still quite proud that I made it through these classes, because these classes were fucking hard. Marketing seemed like a bullshit major until those last few credits.) On the first day of my marketing capstone, I was placed in a group of five, and within the first three weeks, the group dwindled to just two guys—myself and a tall white boy I’ll call Charles. Charles was a charming, mellow kid, and being paired together in a hell class accelerated our friendship. He was sharp, but had a really goofy sense of humor, which is why I couldn’t tell if he was joking when he told me a girl had raped him.

We were both early to class that day. We sat at our adjacent desks and discussed a fraternity that had recently been busted for roofie-ing girls. In the midst of agreeing that frat culture is just plain fucked up, Charles said, “Yeah man, I was actually roofied once, and a girl raped me.” My reaction was an uncomfortable chuckle, which I regretted once I realized he wasn’t joking. He wasn’t wearing the serious expression you’d expect to come with such a divulgence, but rather he said it with a nonchalance that showed a lack of trauma. The very fact that he mentioned it to me in class made it seem so trivial, despite the implied gravity of his statement. Before I could ask him any uneasy follow-up questions, the professor burst into the room, and another intense class session commenced. A lesson was taught, and notes were taken, but all I could think about for those 90 minutes was Charles’s ordeal. It wasn’t until we walked out of class together that he fleshed out the horrific story.

Charles’s female friend dragged him to a party one night, asking him to look out for her because one of the guys who lived at the party house had been creeping on her. Though Charles didn’t feel up to it, he obliged. He decided not to drink that night, but when his friend handed him her first drink, he said, “Fuck it, just one.” As it turned out, the creeper his friend was worried about had put a roofie in the drink that ended up in Charles’s hand. About halfway through the drink, Charles began to feel woozy, and shortly after that, everything went black. Other people at the party told Charles that when he started acting fucked up, he caught the attention of a girl everybody called the Dude. As Charles described it, she was called the Dude because of her mannish features; she was derided as the most physically repulsive girl around. “The grossest thing was that she had this potbelly that protruded far past her breasts,” Charles said, making me shudder. According to eyewitness reports, the Dude became enamored with Charles, and as he faded in and out of consciousness, she began fondling him. She eventually led him up to her room, stripped them both naked, and had sex with him without his knowledge or consent. Charles said he’s not sure if there was penetration—or even if he was able to become aroused in his state—but the Dude insisted that they had sex and that she wanted to get breakfast with him. Charles flipped his shit, told her that he had been drugged, and ran out of the house to the nearest STD clinic. He said that the most unsettling part of the whole fiasco was having his pee-hole swabbed at the clinic—a treatment he wouldn’t wish on his worst enemy. By this point in the story, we had reached the train. Before we parted ways, Charles made a request: “Please, do not tell anyone about this.”

As I trudged home, my brain was exploding with questions. Did Charles’s female friend know the drink was drugged? Did the Dude know he was drugged? Was there penetration? Is that even possible for a guy to have sex if he was roofied? When I finally walked into my house, my homeboys could tell I was perplexed. They all stopped their chatter and looked at me standing in the doorway. Charles’s story had flushed every other thought out of my mind. Helplessly, I broke my promise to Charles. “You guys are not going to fucking believe this…”

I never mentioned Charles’s name, but I told them the whole thing. As I laid out the story, their reactions ranged from sheer shock to the same uncomfortable chuckle I had uttered earlier. As I told them the story, we smoked a huge blunt and discussed every possible detail at length; we were all incredulous. Eventually, our minds wandered to other places and the story of Charles being raped by a girl was pretty much forgotten. It wasn’t until our final project in the capstone class that it came up unexpectedly.

For our final project, Charles and I had agreed to do a mock sneaker commercial. My house was close to campus and every single one of my buddies rocked black sneakers, so we congregated there to shoot the ad. Charles got along well with my friends. He passed the final test when he said he was down to blaze. We took a break from the shoot, rolled a huge blunt, and took seats around the coffee table in the living room. As we got stoned, we shot the shit, and the issue of frats using roofies came up once again, because another roofie incident had happened at a frat. During the discussion, my buddy Paulito said, “Yeah man, nobody is safe. Hell, the Kid knows that one guy who got roofied and raped by a girl.”

I could feel my face flushing as Charles turned to me with his jaw agape. No one else noticed until Charles exclaimed, “You told all your friends!?!” In that moment, it occurred to me that even though I had blown it, it was up to Charles to confirm that the story was about him—saying this was doing just that. All my homeboys went dead silent. We were all looking at Charles, and he was scanning the crowd right back, his mouth still wide open. I don’t know who it was, but someone chuckled. Then someone else. The laughter became contagious, and as the volume started to rise, Charles’s own expression began to soften, and his wide-open mouth began to laugh. With blunt smoke billowing between us, we all laughed hysterically at the nightmarish awkwardness of the situation. Not knowing what else to do—how else to react—we laughed away the direness of Charles’s ordeal as just one of those fucked up things that happens sometimes.

Looking back on that scene, I am mortified. We were so immature as young men that the same response we would have had for an especially loud fart was the only reaction we could muster. If we had been a room full of girls, the inappropriateness would have been far more apparent, but as a bunch of guys we had no gauge for the situation. I have never heard another account of a man being drugged and raped by a woman, but I recognize that it has probably happened to other guys, and it's far from something to chuckle about. 

@ImYourKid

Previously - Thirty Tons of Hash Set Ablaze? A Pothead's Lament 

Nothing makes the average American male angrier than a woman playing sports... except maybe a blackout at the Super Bowl, full-priced buffalo wings, or a black president. After Title IX created a mandate to cultivate women's collegiate sports programs, female athletics grew in both size and scope. Women's college basketball rose in prominence to the point where the NBA created a women's division called the WNBA in 1996 to service a growing fanbase. Unfortunately, that fanbase stopped growing a few years after the league's formation.

The response from the majority of the United States in the past 17 years has either been casual indifference or outright antipathy. Sports writers struggle to find a reason for the league's existence and some disinterested observers take to their computers to denigrate the entire concept of women playing basketball.The hashtag #WNBA2K14 was trending last week, after a PC modifcation for the video game NBA 2K13 featuring WNBA players was teased on YouTube. The below tweet is just a small example of what happens when you give a talking asshole with arms and legs a keyboard and a modem.

WNBA 2K14 just got leaked check out da gameplay, she dribbled all the way to da kitchen pic.twitter.com/cOkpEzagJp @Cierraadavis11 @Gurman2210

— Jalen (@jalen123) September 11, 2013

I decided to see a WNBA game between the Los Angeles Sparks and Minnesota Lynx so that I could judge the sport with an open mind, without all the casual misogyny, but also with all of the many delicious craft beers they were sure to offer in the arena's bustling concourse.

Unfortunately, finding a beer was next to impossible because everything was fucking closed.The reports of WNBA games being sparsely attended are true. Most of the food and drink stands at Staples Center were shuttered like the above Mexican eatery. The concourses were barren of anything remotely resembling activity. It was like being in the epicenter of a plague outbreak or a meeting of gay Republicans.

Once in the stands, things got a tad more lively. ESPN listed the official attendance as 11,553, and most of those people were actively involved in the contest. After baskets from the home team, the crowd stood up, yelled, and clapped like they were at any other sporting event. The more passionate fans verbally abused the referee and threatened him with physical violence. For some reason, that made me feel more comfortable.

I made the mistake of standing in front of this couple for too long as I made my way to my seat, and I got yelled at for obscuring their view of the action. The look on their faces says, “I am going to sternly, but politely enjoy this spectacle, and if I don't get the pleasure of watching it unobstructed, I will punch you in the dick,” so I quickly moved myself out of their blast radius before they strangled me with their chain wallets.

With such a small crowd, it's expected that fan energy will dissipate during slower moments, so the Sparks organization does their best to keep everyone entertained. There's literally a contest or singalong during every timeout. At times, I forgot I was even there to watch a basketball game, because I started to fixate on the overly ingratiating DJ who kept trying to get me to sing along to “I Wish” by Skee-lo. It was like ten women got together to play basketball in the middle of the world's lamest county fair, although at least at county fairs, all the churro stands are open.

I fully understand why the public address announcer has to be so loud and the Sparks' mascot, Sparky, needs to be all up in my grill constantly. If there weren't all of these distractions, the 11,000 of us in attendance would notice the empty seats and deafening silence and hang ourselves with our commemorative Los Angeles Sparks “rally towels.” That's not going to be good for league PR, but the neverending stimulus also accentuates the sense that the game itself is not enough and that the WNBA is a minor league. 

The most egregious misuse of my time was the Ole Skool Crew dance troupe. If you're familar with the 30 Rock clip where Liz Lemon joins the New York Liberty's Timeless Torches, then you've probably got a mental picture of this descent into madness. The Ole Skool Crew isn't just a hilarious series of misspellings. It's also a collection of older women who can still “get down” with their “bad selves,” and do so without your consent during halftime of Sparks games. To say I felt a crippling sense of ennui upon seeing old women dancing to Drake songs while a man in a dog costumed watched from the stands would be an understatement on par with claiming the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is “complicated.”

I don't bregrudge these ladies their right to bust a move or two, but I came to see basketball. I didn't pay for a dance recital. If I wanted to see old people dance, I'd go to a bar mitzvah or a Greek wedding. A dance troupe comprised of elderly women is the sort of thing that either gets people to come back week after week because of the bizarre novelty factor, or it reminds you that the spectre of death is breathing its cold, harsh breath over your shoulder at all times. The Ole Skool Crew do their damnedest to fight off mortality with some hip-hop, a little salsa flavor, and a whole lot of attitude, but to no avail. You can't stop Father Time, even with a well-timed Harlem Shake routine.

Whereas the NBA uses the sex appeal of their cheerleaders to keep their predominantly male audience entertained during breaks in the action, the WNBA uses a strange form of wish fulfillment for the older women who attend their games. The Ole Skool Crew's message is that even if you are a butch old granny, you can still be cool and you can still get funky. There's nothing sexy about that, nor is there anything sexy about the WNBA. They could so easily appeal to the carnal appetites of their fans, regardless of their sexual orientation, but they don't. The players are not objectified, the dancers are fully clothed, and besides the players, everyone in the arena is pushing 50.

This gray haired fellow won $50 after answering an obscure question about the Sparks correctly. I realize that saying “obscure question about the Sparks” is redundant, but even some of the other die-hard fans in the crowd seemed stumped. Plus, he was one of a smattering of men I saw in the stands besides myself. He deserved to make that awful, awful face when he won. He's a credit to our gender for being so open to new things.

When Candace Parker, the Sparks' star player was ejected, my fiance turned to me and said, “Why did she run off the court so fast? Do you think she got her period?” I laughed, but I also felt strange hearing a joke like that from a woman. It seems that even the WNBA's target audience has a hard time embracing the sport.

To everyone but the season ticket holders, the WNBA is the punchline to a crude joke. The only way to make the WNBA and other female professional sports feel more legitimate in the popular culture is for men to start respecting it. We have to actually treat it as equal to the men's game. Sure, there's no dunking and the passing is kind of sloppy, but these are the best female players in the world.  As long as women playing basketball remains a curiosity, the need for a bunch of absurd “entertainments” like dancing grandmas will continue. When the Ole Skool Crew is dead and no longer twerking at halftime, and Sparky the loveable mascot hangs up his sneakers, will the WNBA survive? 

Dave's new book, Letters from My Therapist is the WNBA of humor books. It's cheaper than the real thing, but easily just as entertaining. It's on Amazon and the iBookstore, so drop your Candace Parker jersey and go buy it.

@dave_schilling

More excursions into the unknown from Dave Schilling:

The Whitest Vacation Destination in America

Living the High Life in a Music Festival VIP Section

Comic-Con Parties Are Where Nerds Go to Feel Sexy

While I was in Havana recently, I paid a visit to El Museo de la Revolución. The Cuban Revolution Museum, housed in the former presidential palace, is still pockmarked with numerous bullet holes and packed with propaganda lauding Castro's Communist regime. Most of what's on view is the kind of thing you'd expect to find in a communist revolution museum. There are framed photos of brow-beaten serfs and bearded mountain rebels. There are a number of hagiographic amateur Che Guevara waxworks. There is a "corner of cretins," depicting George Bush as some kind of donkey-Nazi hybrid.    

However, upon reaching the last room, I saw something that you might not expect to spot in an exhibition of all things anticapitalist. Surrounded by black and white photos of Castro and other revolutionary types—plus dozens of weapons from the uprising—there hung a large picture of Twilight star and teenage-girl-exciter Robert Pattinson.

The photo shows R-Patz in a black beanie, T-shirt, jeans, and jacket, apparently strolling through the same room I was standing in. However, it's clearly been photoshopped (a search of "Robert Pattinson black beanie" brings up the exact same image, only he's in LA, not Cuba) and the text surrounding it makes no mention of the actor ever visiting the museum.

Which raises the question: Why is there a picture of this Hollywood A-lister, representing all that is beguiling and vapid about capitalist America, on a poster hanging in the shrine to all things Cuban and communist?

Before detouring into a prolonged career of guerrilla warfare and the successful evasion of assassination attempts, legend has it that Fidel Castro dabbled in the movie business. Paramount talent scout Jerry Beeker was on vacation in Havana, a popular haunt for the 1940s Hollywood crowd, when he spotted a young, clean-cut Castro at a nightclub and invited him to the US for an audition.

The Cuban boarded a ferry to Florida, traveled to Beeker's office in California, passed a screen test, and went on to star as an extra in two Hollywood flicks—so the IMDB story goes. After that, Castro got into staging revolutions and left his budding silver screen dream behind.

So could it be that the ailing 87-year-old, holed up with only Benny Moré records and his memories of shooting at Batista's soldiers in the jungle, sees something of his young self in Pattinson's work?

Click to enlarge.

Maybe a fan put it there. Or maybe R-Patz had made an unpublicized visit to the museum several years ago, which the Cuban regime wants to flaunt as a high-profile defection. Or maybe the person who designed the poster just found his image on Google and shopped him in without realizing who he was.



Or perhaps it was a prank—Havana's answer to Banksy trying to erode the sanctity of La Revolución in the traditional street art fashion, i.e. by making unimaginative juxtapositions in public spaces.



I put it to Pattinson's manager, Nick Frenkel, to see if he could shed any light on the mystery, but he refused to comment. Unfortunately, the Cuban Ministry for Culture wasn't up for a chat, either.



Other dictators aren't averse to a bit of surprising celebrity love. Albanian despot Enver Hoxha was a huge fan of Norman Wisdom, whose harmless slapstick comedy was seen as a communist parable on class war. Kazakhstan's controversial ruler Nursultan Nazarbayev recently showed that there's more to him than restrictive laws and the exploitation of migrant workers when he paid Kanye West a reported $3 million to perform at a family wedding. 

Robert Mugabe straight up digs Cliff Richard's "perennially wholesome" vibes and North Korea's cinephile tyrant Kim Jong-il was famously besotted with the actress Elizabeth Taylor. Even Turkmenistan's reviled dentist-turned-dictator Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov got a birthday shout-out from J-Lo a couple of months ago.



If anyone can help me get to the bottom of this, please get in touch.

Follow Jack on Twitter: @jacklosh

More stories from Cuba:

Is Cuba Arming North Korea with Fighter Jets and Missiles?

In Cuba, Tattoo Artists Make More than Doctors and Lawyers

Havana Feels Like a Paradise in Purgatory