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Raver Day at Disneyland!

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There are many subcultures that have made Disneyland their mecca for meet-ups—most notably the goths and those Disney megafans who dress like biker gangs. But there are also a bunch of lesser-known events, like Nerdy Day, Dapper Day, and a day for ska fans called "It's a Ska World After All."

Last Saturday, it was the turn of ravers, who spent the day in the park for their 14th annual Summer RaverDay, which is exactly what it sounds like.

I'm from England, so when someone says the word raver to me, I picture someone dressed relatively casually, standing in either a warehouse or a field, with a facial expression that indicates their skull is trying to chew its way out of their head.

But the Disneyland crowd was made up of kandi ravers, an altogether more American version of the culture—covered in beads, denim, and synthetic fur, and friendly to the point that it made me suspicious. Like this:

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When I arrived I spoke to a girl named Valerie, who was attending the event for the first time. She was happy to explain the kandi scene to me. "It's all about PLUR," she said. "Which is peace, love, unity, and respect.

"There's always love to it," she went on, before explaining the significance or the bracelets they were wearing, which, she said, were all either made by her or given to her by other ravers she'd met at events. "It's always done with PLUR," she said. "It always has to mean something. If I feel like there's no meaning to [the bracelet], I will take it apart."


Like raves? Check out our video of a psytrance rave in a forest:


She then showed me how you go about exchanging the bracelets, a process that is to kandi ravers what secret signs and handshakes are to the Masons. (You can see it demonstrated here.)

I asked one girl if it was uncomfortable to wear that many bracelets. She pulled back some of them to show me what her skin looked like underneath. "This is what happens," she said. "We call it 'kandi cancer.'"

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When people had told me about PLUR, I had assumed that "PLUR" was basically a code word for "DRUGS"—because, I mean, look at these guys. But Vince Cotson, the organizer of RaverDay, assured me this wasn't the case. Everyone present, he said, would be spending the day drug-free. "In fourteen years, there have been no incidents whatsoever of people behaving inappropriately," he told me. He'd also specified on the event's Facebook invite that drugs were not OK ("NO DRUGS" was written all in caps), and that pacifiers were also banned. "Some people see pacifiers as a drug symbol," he explained.

I'm fairly sure he wasn't lying. The day was pretty much 100 percent wholesome good-vibes family fun. Everyone was as nice as you'd expect a group of people who look like they covered themselves in glue and rolled through the world's most upbeat garage sale to be.

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The only unwholesome thing I saw all day was this, which was given to me by a raver who recognized my English accent and struck up a conversation me. "I'm interested in a fetish that originated in England," he told me. "It's called 'sploshing.'"

Then he handed me the above business card, which promoted his sploshing website, where he posts photos he takes of naked women rubbing food on their bodies. He was wearing a kandi bracelet that had a plastic cupcake hanging from it next to the words "TOSS ME." Which, he explained, was a reference to "this goofy thing we do at the end of the shoot where I get them to turn around and I throw cupcakes at their ass."

You know we have a whole site devoted to dance music, right?

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Toward the end of the day, this old lady approached the girl on the left and asked what was going on. "We call these bracelets kandi," the girl explained. "When you have a good experience with someone, you trade kandi with them. That way, if you run into them at another event, you can be like, 'Oh, I saw you at whatever.'"

Then she gave the old lady a bracelet. It was cute.

Scroll down for more photos.

Follow Jamie Lee Curtis Taete on Twitter.


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RELATED: Go behind the scenes of Escape from Tomorrow, a movie shot entirely at Disneyland and Disney World without Disney's permission.

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The VICE Guide to Right Now: Rachel Dolezal Told Matt Lauer She Would Do It All Again

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After announcing Monday that she would step down from her position at the NAACP, Rachel Dolezal, the former chapter president who allegedly pretended to be black, went on Today Tuesday morning for her first in-depth interview since the scandal broke. In the ten-minute interview with Today's Matt Lauer, Dolezal stated that she has self-identified as black since she was five years old.

"I was drawing self-portraits with the brown crayon instead of the peach crayon and black, curly hair... That was how I was portraying myself," Dolezal said.

When Lauer questioned when she first began "deceiving people" about her race, Dolezal was quick to jump on his choice of words.

"I do take exception to that, because it's a little more complex than me identifying as black or answering a question of 'Are you black or white?'"

She went on to say that she stands by her choices, and if she had the chance to make them again, she would.

Watch the interview above and read a full transcript on Slate.

Want Some In-Depth Stories About Race?

1. Everything We Know So Far About That Lady Who Allegedly Pretended to Be a Black Civil Rights Leader
2. The Evolution of Black Masculinity Through Fashion
3. What Am I Saying When I Say 'Nigger'?
4. 'The Last Black Man in San Francisco' Will Put a Face to Those Displaced By Gentrification

VICE Vs Video Games: Xbox's E3 2015 Presentation Was Great, but It Possibly Wasn’t Enough

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'Cuphead' image via Studio MDHR.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Ironically, Microsoft hasn't exactly had the rub of the green at recent E3s. In 2013, the announcement of the Xbox One was woefully mishandled, an emphasis placed on its multimedia functionality over its role as a machine for the very latest, most exciting video games. And that was before the console's price was revealed: a whopping $100 more than the PlayStation 4. Which might have been okay if the system was being pitched at a hardcore fan base who'd put years into the 360's catalogue, and who were now willing to follow the Xbox brand into the next generation of gaming, but it wasn't—this was an entertainment unit for everyone, apparently. 2014 saw Microsoft attempt to claw back some of the ground lost to Sony, but it was a meek showing, lacking spark, and stripped of confidence. And nobody mention Phantom Dust, OK?

With the Xbox One's sales still well behind that of its major competitor, the PS4—Sony's current-gen console has now shifted over 22 million units, versus between 12 and 14 million for Microsoft's black box, and around 10 million for Nintendo's Wii U (according to figures from March 2015)—2015's E3 needed to see Phil Spencer (no, no, not that one, this one) and company deliver the goods like they've not in some time.

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'Recore' might be amazing, but right now we really know nothing about it.

And, earlier on today, they did, with Kotaku UK editor Keza MacDonald calling the company's conference of 2015 "the best I've seen," with Xbox "finally showing some vision," and VideoGamer deputy editor Steve Burns writing that "it was clear the firm's offering had improved immensely." I can only agree, but nevertheless I've come away from watching 90 minutes of sizzling exclusives and updates on progressing hits in the making wondering whether it's enough. By which I mean: if I couldn't already switch on an Xbox One almost whenever I like, would this E3 showing make me rush out to buy one?

Probably not, is my gut reaction, even though a lot of good was said during Microsoft's allotted time to shine. The Xbox One is the place to play a number of intriguing-looking indie titles first, and in some cases it's the only platform to play them on. The company's ID@Xbox division is certainly doing what it can to diversify the options available to Xbox owners, with the next game from Gone Home studio The Fullbright Company, the quite-probably-suspense-filled sci-fi wander-about of Tacoma, Capybara's (Superbrothers, Super Time Force) fantasy adventure Below and Hinterland's survival sim The Long Dark all at least debuting on Xbox One, console-wise. And then there's the utterly gorgeous Cuphead, which briefly took center stage, its makers at Studio MDHR promising 16-bit-era platform toughness matched to an aesthetic straight out of 1930s animation.

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ID@Xbox, E3 2015 montage.

Writing at Offworld, Leigh Alexander points out that while Cuphead is a "fun, classic-looking action game," it's also coming to PC, and while the definitely-an-exclusive-no-seriously-they-told-us-as-much (and by they I mean Big Phil himself, and Big Phil would never lie) Recore "looks unique" (it sure does), what we saw of it this E3 gives nothing away about how it'll actually play. Featuring creative talent that previously cut teeth on games like Mega Man and Metroid Prime, Recore is absolutely unlikely to suck, but until we know what we're going to be doing in it, it's tough to get overly excited. Ashen, too, is too vague a proposition right now to really commit to.

One of the bombshells was that the Xbox One will soon be backwards compatible with a bunch of 360 titles, which leaves me wondering: so what? Surely introducing that functionality at this stage of the console's lifespan is, while a nice gesture, utterly too late in the game for it to matter a great deal to anyone who already owns an Xbox One. Those old 360 discs, assuming you flogged your 360 (and if not, you still own the appropriate system, so), will be scattered throughout the nation's CEX stores by now, traded in for an afternoon with that one with the Romans that everyone played once before crying, deeply, into their empty wallets. And the conference's lengthy highlighting of the previous-gen compatibility factor doesn't quite tally with its immediate functionality, given the current list of games that will actually work. Which isn't many, at all.


Related: VICE's documentary on eSports

Alternatively, check out The Mystical Universe of 'Magic: The Gathering'


The big guns were, expectedly, rolled out—Halo 5 opened the show and looked every inch the eagerly anticipated first-person shooter it is, five minutes of solo campaign footage making me wish that Destiny had a plot worthy of its expertly engineered gunplay. Call me old fashioned, but I like a decent yarn to run the course of my shooty-bang-bangs, and that's precisely what the Halo series has delivered in the past. As has Gears of War, which got two bites of the E3 cherry: firstly, with an update on the Xbox One remaster of the original—said "ultimate edition" is out on August 25, with a beta running right now—and then with a gameplay reveal for Christmas 2016's Gears 4, which I've got to say had me purring. Smaller muscles and bigger atmosphere appears to be what it has in store, and the horror-hued slice of action we got to see has me hopeful of something with more substance than 2013's lightweight Judgment.

But with the best part of a year and a half to go until the release of Gears 4, there's little else from the triple-A sector to truly shake up what's rattling around the Xbox One's software catalogue marked as "exclusive." The announcement that you can carry over PC mods to your Xbox One Fallout 4 campaign does nothing for me, at least, and neither does anything to do with the Forza series—Forza 6 looks incredibly handsome, but so did Horizon 2, and that was approximately half as much fun as the graphically inferior Mario Kart 8. Getting another two Rainbow Six games with an Xbox One version of Siege is a big "so what," too, given you can buy those games for pennies at most second-hand stockists.

Check out more tech and science and things that light up real prettily at Motherboard.

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The HoloLens 'Minecraft' demo was a bit special, admittedly.

Okay, so there are perks to being an Xbox One owner over representing the PS4 club. New to Microsoft's platform is the Xbox Preview program, effectively Early Access but on a console, which is where you'll soon be able to play Elite: Dangerous and DayZ without splashing your cash upfront. Kotaku speculates that this could mean a closer relationship between Xbox and PC games going forward.

The HoloLens demo, using Minecraft, was legitimately magical, like the future we all imagined in 1989 arriving several years too late but still completely beguiling, and you'll be able to play Dark Souls 3 on Xbox One, too. Not exclusively, granted—but that's something you definitely can't do with Demon's Souls and Bloodborne. And then there was some stuff from Rare—a new title called Sea of Thieves (also for Windows) that looked like Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag filtered through Epic's Fortnite, and a budget collection of 30 older games bunched on a single disc. Pretty good, isn't it? Assuming you're aged 30 or over.

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'Sea of Thieves,' announcement trailer.

For me, though, there's not enough here to totally turn my head from my PS4 (Sony's own conference takes place at 2 AM UK time, just over an hour from the time of me publishing this). A new controller? (Which you want $150 for.) What's wrong with my old one? Am I not elite enough for you, Microsoft? Now you're making me feel bad. A partnership between Windows 10 and Valve VR? Fair enough, that is big—but it ultimately means nothing until the Vive headset is in the wild and there are compatible games enough for most people to begin dreaming about investing in the kit. I still don't see VR happening in the home, although down the pub is a different matter entirely.

Better than last year, then. And an infinitely superior showing compared to 2013. But Xbox at E3 2015 can only claim a hollow victory—they didn't suck, and while that's certainly progress, it's more a relatively safe scurry to second base than an extravagant home run. But then, perhaps Sony will strikeout in 2015? There's not all that much longer to wait.

Follow Mike on Twitter.

Meet the Injured Veteran Who Claims his Home Was Ruined Thanks to a Government Contract

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Sergeant Kevin Nanson in front of his home. DAILY VICE.

Sergeant Kevin Nanson's home is a disaster. The siding has been removed, so the place is just covered in plastic. Inside, tools and boxes are strewn across unfinished floors. Out back, his lawn is mostly dirt.

This was supposed to be his dream home for his family, his wife, Kim, and their two young children. He was supposed to have an elevator to bring him to the second floor. He was supposed to have ramps to get him around the house. He was supposed to have an accessible bathroom and bedroom.

Instead, he alleges he got stuck with a contractor who took the money and left him with a ruined house.

Now, Nanson is in limbo. For the moment, he's still living on-base in Edmonton, waiting for the government to recognize the mistake, and contribute the money to fix his home.

Nanson says an inspector has told him that hundreds of thousands of dollars of work remains—both in doing the actual upgrades and in repairing the previous contractor's work—but the money isn't there.

Daily VICE spoke to Nanson, and toured his unfinished home, earlier in June.

Nanson is profoundly frustrated by the country that he served.

Nanson was wounded when an IED hit his convoy in Kandahar in 2008.

"When the bomb went off I lost feeling in my hands, I have a traumatic brain injury, incomplete spinal separation, my back was broken in three spots, and my skull and my face was broken in nine spots," Nanson told VICE.

He returned to Canada after that, and went back to living at his temporary home in CFB Edmonton.

The Canadian Forces assessed his injury. Under the New Veteran's Charter—a controversial reform of the benefit system for veterans that pays out one lump sum based on a soldier's injuries—Nanson received one wad of cash. He received a dollar figure for the damage to his spine. Another figure for his brain injury. Another dollar figure for any other injuries sustained.

Nanson took that money and invested in a home for his wife and kids. They found one, in Gibbons, Alberta, and put the money down. Then they applied for funding from the Canadian Forces to cover the expenses. He found one contractor to do the work.

However, because military procurement rules require multiple bids for all work worth over $5,000, they had to find more options. Another contractor, Northport Accessibility Construction, came forward with a significantly lower bid. Nanson says the Forces rules required him to accept the lower bid, or else take the pricier option but pay the difference

So the Forces greenlit Northport. Nanson said he had bad feelings from the get-go.

Throughout the winter, while driving his kids to school, he would drive past his would-be dream house.

"The things they were saying they were doing, they weren't. The supplies they said they had ordered and weren't delivered, they didn't," Nanson alleges.

He said, throughout February, the siding on the home that was supposed to be there, wasn't there. The garage door the company said they installed, wasn't installed.

[body_image width='872' height='608' path='images/content-images/2015/06/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/06/16/' filename='meet-the-injured-veteran-who-claims-his-home-was-destroyed-thanks-to-a-government-contract-651-body-image-1434489428.png' id='66923']The doorless garage. DAILY VICE.

After much back and forth, and complaining to his chain of command, Nanson eventually fired the firm in May.

Now, looking back, he's seeing the red flags. For one, the company didn't exist until after they submitted a bid to renovate his home.

The company was incorporated on January 9, 2015, and has no other trace online. VICE called both numbers listed on their sign—one was disconnected and the other, was for a cellphone for Allan Boyce.

VICE reached Boyce this week to ask about the problems with the job.

"There was nothing wrong with the work that was done," he said.

Boyce explained that his contract was originally for $220,000 and he received $150,000 of it before the contract ended.

He said the $150,000 paid was for the garage, which wasn't finished, and the cabinet work. He admits that the house still needs flooring, paint, trim, siding, and the garage door, amongst other work. It's unlikely that it could have been finished with the remaining $70,000 left on the contract, although Boyce claims he could have done it.

VICE tried to get Boyce's past work experience, but he refused to provide it.

[body_image width='640' height='351' path='images/content-images/2015/06/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/06/16/' filename='meet-the-injured-veteran-who-claims-his-home-was-destroyed-thanks-to-a-government-contract-651-body-image-1434489669.png' id='66926']Much of the home is unfinished. DAILY VICE

When Nanson's home was inspected, he was told that things were far from resolved.

Faced with Nanson's horror story, the Canadian Government struck an apologetic tone.

"Sergeant Nanson served Canada with distinction, and Canada will be there for Sergeant Nanson and his family," Veteran's Affairs Minister Erin O'Toole told the House of Commons when asked by the opposition on June 9. "The renovations to the home have been approved. While the problems with the contractor are being resolved, we have directed that Sergeant Nanson and his family can remain in military housing at no cost after his release until the contracting is complete."

While the minister was promised that, however, the 18-year veteran of the Canadian Forces wasn't informed of this news. In fact, he says, a young officer knocked on his door last week, asking to view his temporary house on the Edmonton military base. He's still slated to move out on June 30.

"He got a fax and an email from housing here, saying the house would be vacant in the coming weeks," Nanson said of the young officer.

"Clearly there's massive gaps in communication somewhere."

Nanson said he finally got news this week that he would allowed to stay in his on-base temporary home in CFB Edmonton.

The Canadian Forces have told VICE that they're planning to re-assess the home, and fix the damage. However, they still haven't told Nanson whether he'll get more money to do so. Right now, he's only got $60,000 left in his benefit.

"Now, because nobody there wants to admit fault, they essentially say 'now, you have to make a new plan, but your new plan has to be $60,000,'" he said, adding that the paltry sum won't even be enough to cover supplies.

One well-respected contractor came forward, offered to do the project on the cheap—at about $300,000—and he was turned away by the military.

If Nanson wants to fix his house, he'll have to pay the difference, unless something changes.

"And I think it's unfair, it's beyond unfair that someone else mishandled my benefit and now they want me to pay the difference and it's gross negligence at its best," Nanson said.

Nanson said he's had enough.

"I spent 20 years in two separate countries, fighting for the Queen," said Nanson. "I'm done. I'm really, really done."

He's not the only one. A long line of veterans have taken aim at the Harper government, saying their cost-cutting have wreaked havoc on Canada's veterans. A coalition of veterans have a long-running protest to push the Harper government to stop the clawbacks of their benefits.

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.

I Went to a Bizarre Conference on How Abortion Affects Men

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[body_image width='893' height='504' path='images/content-images/2015/06/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/06/16/' filename='i-went-to-a-bizarre-conference-on-how-abortion-affects-men-body-image-1434483897.png' id='66878']

Alliance for Life Ontario's ad for the conference. Screenshot.

Do you know a guy who's always angry, drinks way too much, or randomly went out and bought an expensive sports car?

How about a guy who's just really immature or bad in bed? Or even a gay guy?

Turns out he might be acting out because the woman he got pregnant had an abortion, according to the speakers last weekend at Canada's first conference on men and abortion hosted by the Alliance for Life Ontario.

I came across the event's poster and was intrigued by the photo of a forlorn-looking man clutching his forehead framed by the title: "Men & Abortion: Reclaiming Fatherhood & Finding Peace."

Even as a staunch advocate for a woman's right to choose, I found myself feeling sorry for the dude and wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

So I made my way to Niagara Falls last Friday and nestled in with hundreds of pro-lifers, made up of mostly white middle-aged folks, evenly split between men and women, who packed into a conference room at the Crowne Plaza. Jakki Jeffs, the Alliance for Life Ontario's executive director, kicked the morning off by saying the event was non-denominational, but went right into a prayer in the name of Jesus.

"Help us to be patient as we learn to go forth after this conference with the absolute courage and integrity of being able to share the truth of this other piece of the abortion story," she pleaded.

After the "Amen," the woman next to me squirmed in her seat waiting for the first session, "Men Hurt Too—The Reasons May Surprise You," to start.

"I can't wait to soak it all up and hear about these poor, poor men. I've been waiting all week," she said to no one in particular.

Brad Mattes, president of the International Right to Life Federation in Ohio and a "post-abortion" peer-counsellor for men, took the mic and rattled off all the other symptoms men can experience when their partner gets an abortion.

These include sleeplessness, panic attacks, becoming addicted to porn and masturbation, impotence, and even misogynistic tendencies, he said.

[body_image width='2048' height='1536' path='images/content-images/2015/06/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/06/16/' filename='i-went-to-a-bizarre-conference-on-how-abortion-affects-men-body-image-1434483569.jpg' id='66864']

Getting the crowd going. Photo courtesy the author.

Because a man might feel so frustrated at his lost opportunity of being a father, he might develop a destructive attitude and "a general hatred" toward other women.

And he might pursue "homosexuality" because it provides "sexual gratification with no fear of pregnancy" and therefore no fear of abortion, he said.

"Just imagine the human carnage only from the man's point of view that many of us have not even stopped to think about," Mattes declared. "When abortion takes place, it can damage or totally obliterate aspects of men's development."

He put up a slide with a quote from a former vice-president of medical affairs at Planned Parenthood: "It doesn't matter how much men scream and holler that they are left out. There are some things they are never going to be able to experience fully. I say tough luck," her quote read.

"See, Planned Parenthood doesn't even care about the guys," Mattes said.

He really knew how to rile up this crowd.

"WHAT A BITCH!" blurted out another woman at my table, who later told me she was from a church group for women. Others across the room mumbled worse obscenities.

But Mattes quickly reassured everyone that all was not lost.

There are ways we can all help these men through the trauma of abortion. "What they need is a peer-counsellor environment," he said, before listing the ways the counselling ought to be done. This could include helping him name the unborn child and creating a certificate of life to hang on the wall.

Everyone rapidly took notes.

"He also needs a gender-neutral environment in which to share his story," said Mattes. This apparently means no frilly curtains, flowered upholstery, or art on the walls depicting anything feminine; things typically found in pregnancy resource centres, which might scare him away from getting help.

"A man goes in there and he runs because he thinks if he goes into that room, his penis will fall off!" he cried.

"The answer is really easy to resolve: put a big screen TV and a remote...if you want to throw in a black leather couch, that's icing on the cake."

The woman next to me agreed wholeheartedly. "That's absolutely right, that'll get him talking."

Mattes signalled that his presentation was nearly over, and clicked to a slide with a stock photo of a man smiling ear-to-ear.

"Abortion is a cancer," Mattes continued to a sea of nodding heads. "It maims and kills everything and anyone in its way. It doesn't pick out the poor, or it doesn't exclusively target the rich. It doesn't care if you're white, black, brown, or in between."

In the afternoon, Linda and Chuck, a married couple—high school sweethearts from from St. Louis, Missouri—took the stage to speak about the abortion they had back in 1976 when they were 17, and echoed many of the symptoms Mattes discussed earlier in the day.

After their abortion, they say they became depressed and angry. Linda says she ended up in the psych ward because she couldn't cope. Chuck said he felt emasculated and eventually became a workaholic. Linda described how she overcompensated when raising their two children, and, as a result of the abortion, became a "helicopter mom."

But after many years of counselling, they eventually overcame the experience and have made it their life's mission to tell others how much it hurt them and almost destroyed their marriage.

After the conference, I wondered if all this was just another iteration of the men's rights movement—which insists that men hurt too and are often silenced by feminists.

Can feminists who advocate a woman's right to choose also accept that men can be traumatized by abortion?

I talked to Kelly Gordon, a professor at the University of Ottawa who researches anti-abortion movements in Canada and the US, who said conferences like this represent a trend in the anti-abortion movement, which is slowly trying to change its identity and move away from shaming women who choose abortions as a way to stop them.

"It's rebranding itself as a sympathetic movement that doesn't necessarily vilify people, but is there to help them heal," she said.

But, she added, it's a trend that's unlikely to make a real splash in the anti-abortion, or pro-life, movement in Canada and that we should be critical of studies linking behavioural problems among men with abortion.

"What my research has found, is that the anti-abortion is moving away from using religious arguments against abortion," she said. "They are trying to use this scientific research that's often not that scientific, and can reaffirm harmful gender stereotypes."

"Whether there can be a therapeutic space for men and women to talk about these issues, I'm sure there is. I don't know if conferences like this are it. These discussions need to be centred around women's experiences."

But for Jeffs, that is precisely the problem.

I caught up with her after the conference to discuss what she hopes it will accomplish. "We are sowing the seeds to get counsellors and therapists and Canada to look at the other part of the abortion drama," she told me.

"Being involved in pro-life for 30 years, I would say we didn't think men were affected by it. All we were looking at was the woman, and how she was feeling. It was a complete oversight on my part, but this is how that changes."

Follow Rachel Browne on Twitter.

Should You Be Eating LSD for Breakfast?

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Should You Be Eating LSD for Breakfast?

Pentagon Unleashes Behemoth Bible Laying Out the Laws of War for US Soldiers

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Pentagon Unleashes Behemoth Bible Laying Out the Laws of War for US Soldiers

We Spoke to the Anonymous Activist who Helped Ban MRAs from Toronto Pride

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A drag rainbow, from Pride 2014 in Toronto. Photo via Flickr user Joseph.Morris

The past 14 months have been a rather spectacular disappointment for Canada's men's right's activists and any other man with a baseless persecution complex. In the timespan of just over a year, MRAs have planned a failed music festival, given a disastrous interview to a local podcast, erected a hilariously untrue billboard, and most recently, were told to stay the hell away from Toronto's Pride Parade scheduled for the end of June.

Last week, thousands of people let out a collective sigh of relief when Pride's dispute resolution committee officially banned men's rights group CAFE (Canadian Association for Equality) from its 2015 parade. The group, composed mostly of the kind of men who professionally antagonize women on the internet, has strong affiliations with American men's rights group A Voice for Men and was banned from last year's Parade in a controversial last-minute decision.

This year, the decision to ban CAFE from all Pride activities was made after the organization received numerous complaints regarding the group's application to march in the parade. Dispute resolution arbitrator Paul Bent gave the following justification in a statement released by Pride Toronto last Wednesday:

"My decision is based on balancing of interests: I considered CAFE's response that inclusion, diversity and equality are values the organization shares with Pride versus the numerous complaints filed against CAFE's participation arguing that CAFE, as an organization and through its affiliation with men's rights groups, contravenes Pride Toronto's vision to, 'create a safe space to engage communities in the celebration of their sexuality.'

I must give the complaints of members of the LGBTTIQQ2SA community precedence when they indicate the participation of CAFE could directly undermine the participation of queer, lesbian and trans women in the Pride Parade."

It can sometimes be difficult to trace the origins of anti-MRA activism since many individuals operate anonymously to protect themselves from the inevitable harassment that comes with criticizing the movement.

VICE spoke to the Toronto woman, Emma R (a pseudonym), who was responsible for mobilizing the largest response against CAFE's 2015 inclusion bid. It all began when she started a Facebook event urging people to speak up after realizing that there was a very real possibility CAFE could be permitted to march in this year's Pride parade.

"I created the Facebook event right before I went to bed and when I woke up in the morning, over 1,000 people had joined and confirmed that they'd submitted complaints to Toronto Pride's executive director Mathieu Chantelois," Emma said.

Less than 12 hours after the event was created, Pride announced that given the heavy influx of concern from the community, the board would be activating its formal Dispute Resolution Process. Only two weeks after the Facebook event was launched, the Pride board of directors announced that CAFE would be banned from not only the 2015 parade, but all future Pride Toronto events.

"My motivation for spearheading this was around comfort," Emma explained. "As a gay person, I'm lucky to live in Toronto in 2015 and it's pretty safe to be queer and out and about, but even then I've received—for something as benign as holding someone's hand and walking down the street—I've had comments and questions and invitations for threesomes from shitty guys and threats in some cases. For a lot of queer and trans people, Pride is literally the only time all year you are guaranteed comfort. So to have a group that has such a demonstrated history of making people feel uncomfortable, [it] is just asinine to me that they would want to take part."

To someone unfamiliar with the men's rights movement, it may seem peculiar that Pride Toronto—a group whose main mission is purportedly inclusion—would ban an organization simply because some people find their views controversial and unpalatable. After all, the LGTBQ diaspora exists across many political constituencies, ethnic groups, and religions.

But unlike all of the aforementioned communities, the sincerity of CAFE's commitment to the LGBTQ community is nefarious at best. The group claimed to be strong advocates of LGBTQ issues in a statement made last year, but there is no mention of queer initiatives or programming on their site. More troublingly, when the group applied for charitable status with the Canadian Revenue Agency last year, they falsely cited a partnership with gay rights organization Egale Canada, which later confirmed suspicions that the two organizations in fact had no relationship at all.

I asked Emma about the small number of self-identified queer MRAs. If what many claim is true—that queer advocacy and men's rights advocates are ideological opponents—where do their interests fit into this equation?

"Maybe you're a gay queer man and maybe you're worried about the same issues that are part of the men's rights platform," she said. "That's totally OK. I think men have it really hard in a number of areas. Men's sexual assault isn't taken seriously; society has the expectations of hyper-masculinity that men need to adhere to. All of that is fair. But I think instead of addressing these problems, the men's rights movement is scapegoating feminism and scapegoating women as the cause of their problems.

"The struggles of women and the queer community may not be exactly the same, but they overlap. Feminism is a queer issue."

And while Emma's campaign was successful, it was not without due risk. After less than 24 hours, she began to receive concerned emails from other feminists warning her of the risk she undertook by attaching her name to such a public anti-MRA initiative.

"I canceled the public event and created a private one after about 24 hours. I felt cowardly, but the thing is that the men's rights movement isn't just about a crazy opinion, they're people with a demonstrated history of doxxing women and perpetuating violence."

Emma's fears about potential harassment and even physical violence are not unfounded. In April 2014, Queen's University student Danielle d'Entremont was assaulted outside her home the night before a men's rights lecture was scheduled at the university. The lecture, which was partially organized by CAFE, had drawn ample criticism from concerned students about its misogynistic undertones and denial of a sexual assault problem across campuses. D'Entremont had been a vocal opponent of the talk and was said to have received many threats prior to the assault which left her bruised and battered. The assailant is said to have been waiting for her outside of her home and knew her first and last name.

Naturally, the official stance of men's rights groups across the board is to condemn violence and harassment toward women. But the true sentiment of the Canadian men's rights movement doesn't lie within the seemingly reasonable rhetoric of CAFE's leader Justin Trottier or any of its other spokespeople. It lies deep within the angry forums, subreddits and YouTube comments where an unsettling hatred for women is ever-present and insidious.

The call to ban CAFE from Toronto Pride may not seem like a landmark decision—some will point out that it is only one event—but it represents a growing mainstream understanding that through its vitriolic tactics and misogyny, the men's rights movement fails the very men it claims to support.

"If you scratch the surface and look past the veneer of equality, they're scary people with scary ideas," said Emma. "I think an appropriate queer ally who digs a little deeper into these guys will realize they're not a group you want to align yourself with. The men's rights movement does nothing for queer people."

Follow Neha Chandrachud on Twitter.


Move Over, Mars: Saturn’s Moon Titan Is Surprisingly Earth-Like

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Move Over, Mars: Saturn’s Moon Titan Is Surprisingly Earth-Like

Identity Theft Is the Big, Fat, Dirty Secret of the LA Restaurant World

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Identity Theft Is the Big, Fat, Dirty Secret of the LA Restaurant World

What White Supremacists Are Saying Online About the South Carolina Church Shooting

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Commenters at the white nationalist Vanguard News Network react to the killing of nine people at an historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina.

Law enforcement has reportedly apprehended Dylann Storm Roof, the 21-year-old who allegedly shot and killed nine people at an historic black church in South Carolina Wednesday night. Details are still emerging about his life, but the motive seemed to become quite clear when a survivor of the attack relayed a hateful and terrifying message.

"I have to do it," Roof apparently explained to his victims, all of whom were black. "You rape our women and you're taking over our country, and you have to go."

There are 19 hate groups currently operating in South Carolina, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). One of those groups is a part of the Nation of Islam, and another solely focuses on discrimination against LGBT individuals. The rest, however, are either chapters of the Ku Klux Klan or white nationalist, anti-immigration, neo-Nazi, and neo-Confederate sympathizers. None of these groups have claimed affiliation with Roof as of yet—though Roof has been photographed wearing a jacket adorned with the flags of Apartheid-era South Africa and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), suggesting, at least, that he may have held some pretty traditional racist views.

That begs the question: What are avowed white supremacists saying about the shooting? There's no Official Racist Neo-Nazi Spokesperson, but there are plenty of places where these people gather to share their views. Stormfront—which SPLC considers the first major internet hate site—has been around since the 90s in various forms. There's also the Vanguard News Network (VNN), which was launched in 2000 as a place for Holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis to spew their nastiness unchecked.

Here's what some of these forums' users have had to say so far.

Stormfront

White Virginian:
"Obviously I am very against this heinous act of violence. Although a White guy going on a mass shooting is made such a big event because it happens so rarely. Blacks commit mass shootings everyday in every major US city."

maththeorylover2008:
"Well....they can't blame the police for this one!!

But, worse, the White residents of Charleston may have to tread carefully. But it is still too early to tell and as I mentioned earlier this guy could just be a W****er who snapped or had some other falling out."

Johnny Simcox X:
"I pray for all the whites in that area and elsewhere that will be killed and raped using this as an excuse."

White Nationhood:
"I'm really hoping this guy isn't one of us but at the end of the day that is not going to matter to those who are hell bent on destroying our race. Stay prepared and watch out for your loved ones, this is going to be a horrifying summer."

LeonidasThe2:
"Yes, you dont go bombing churches period. I just want to go on the record that I am completely against this as a White Nationalist.

I hope he is not of our people. Regardless, what a coward."

Catcher:
"I feel so damn alone it is making me angry. My family is NOT racially aware, they laugh at me. I have no weapons. My former friends are cowards and weak. I get more anxious every damn day knowing my enemies are growing around me and a weakling like my own mother smiles and believes we all are "just" human.

SouthernCornbread:
"You know, what if the perp was actually Black? I know it sounds crazy, but think about it. Make-up can do a lot. Maybe I am wrong, but I am always skeptical."

Artemis Drake:
"All of these faces that we'll be seeing will have to be run through the Crisis Actors database, but the playwrights probably learned from their F-ups after the last couple of atrocities."

Vanguard News Network

Vijay Coomar:
"I hereby nominate this man for the 2015 Nobel peace prize. ugly coons create menace filth entropy and destroy the peace serenity calm and equlibrium that my dear YT has created. so eliminating niggers is equivalent to ushering in peace calm and equilibrium. more power to this guy. just imagine the situation if all white men were like this. we would have eternal peace.

Therefore, noble peace prize"


Interested in white supremacists? Check out our documentary on the White Student Union at Towson University in suburban Baltimore, Maryland.


Sean Gruber:
"Thank God he didn't attack a synagogue or any powerful jews. Isn't it lucky that things always work out that way?"

Eric Powers:
"This sounds suspiciously like a government false flag. Young White male with sandy blonde hair shoots up a Nigger Church in the middle of Charleston, SC and vanishes without a trace into the night.

Now the media is focusing on the "White shooter". FBI investigating hate crime. Has all the fingerprints of a government sponsored media coordinated false flag designed to stoke racial tensions and further clamp down on "White Supremacy"."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

What It’s Like to Experience Edmonton’s Annual Erotic Nightclub, Smut Cabaret, For the First Time

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Welcome to Smut Cabaret. Photos by Mat Simpson

My Saturday night took a turn to the bizarre as I entered Edmonton's annual Smut Cabaret.

Smut Cabaret is essentially a massive, yearly, one-night-only erotic nightclub during Nextfest (Edmonton's yearly multi-disciplinary arts festival that hosts about 800 artists).

At Smut Cabaret, anything goes. All night, I was surrounded by things ranging from homemade masturbation videos to theatre clowns, human animals, literal hi-def assholes, and fabricated body modifications.

I had no idea this artistic dark erotica party had even existed until that strange night. Some friends and I had just finished watching Jurassic World when we decided to venture to what we thought would be a classic Nextfest performance. Still basking in our childhood dinosaur nostalgia, we arrived outside the venue.

"Are you guys here for Smut Cabaret?" a strikingly beautiful woman in spider-webbed nylon tights asked.

"We're here for the Nextfest thing?" I said in an uncertain tone.

"Yeah, you guys are at the right place. Go upstairs and have fun," the woman said while smiling with a devious grin.

When we reached the top, I peered over the legions of heads to see what was in store for us.

I observed a man in a chair, dressed in what I assume was full leather gear and holding a leash that was attached to a black choker. Attached to the choker was a woman in a corset, on her knees licking her hands as a puppy would. There was also a clown moving his body in a seductive manner to an eerie circus tune.

One of my friends looked at me and my other friend in slight distress.

"There is no way we can do this sober," he said.

We all nodded in unison, bought our tickets, and speed-walked to the nearest liquor store. After crushing a tallboy of Steamwhistle each and washing it down with a mini bottle of Smirnoff in the alley behind the venue, we made our way back up the stairs to one of the most outlandish nights of our young lives.

Upon our re-entry, a young woman stepped on stage and announced that she was going to play an erotic question answer game with someone. The other participant turned out to be her mother. Both daughter Ainsley Hillyard and mother Fern Snart began asking each other prewritten questions about their sexual history. The catch was whoever did not answer had to take a shot of gin.

Snart was obviously the participant to take the most shots of gin. Especially when her daughter asked questions like, "Mom, when was the last time you masturbated?"

After the mother-daughter sexual questionnaire ended, it was time for poetry.

"I think she's talking about giving a blowjob or getting a facial or something," a random patron with blue pasties over his nipples said while pointing at the slam poet.

"Lips, tongue, breath, warm, up, up, up, all over my head, my shirt, your shirt, all from your strong throbbing member."

The pasties man was correct.

Suddenly, all the screens in the venue were switched on to homemade masturbation videos consisting of jump cuts, multi-coloured dildos, and deep moaning.

What I'd later learn from curator Beth Dart when I messaged her about craziness I'd witnessed was that: "Smut Cabaret is an experimental platform for artists to experiment with different audiences and experience the more sexual side of acting."

I noticed a room in the distance with a sign that read, "Heavy petting zoo," and overseeing the entrance was a tall dominatrix-looking woman known only as "the zookeeper."

As I entered the petting zoo, I was given tokens. The idea was to ask an animal if you could pet a part of his or her body. If they accepted your token, you were allowed. The main rules were no sex or "forced" petting.

I approached a female "animal" on the far side of the room and sat down on her blanket. She had jet-black hair and was clothed in lacy black lingerie and garters. After contemplating on whether or not I was going to go through with this, I decided to go for it.

"May I pet your leg?" I asked as instructed in the rules.

She nodded and I awkwardly handed her my token. My hand met with her lower thigh and I began grazing my hand up and down her leg.

"This is kind of a weird for me as it is for you," she snickered.

"Did you want to pet me somewhere else?"

"Why not?" I answered.

This time the pet turned into somewhat of a massage on her shoulders and neck.

"It's ok that you're uncomfortable. I'm cool with what's going on. That's the whole point of this. Consent."

After my time in the petting zoo, I was conflicted with what to do next. I found myself venturing into the notorious "butt room," I had been hearing so much about. Every person who stepped out of the butt room either came out with an expression of utter horror or embarrassment

The room was empty and had a solitary chair, a video camera, and a screen. The screen instructed me to drop trou and look at my own asshole with the video camera attached to the screen.

My immediate response was not one of shock, but reassurance. After all, I was indeed looking at my own asshole—only it was in high definition and covering a TV screen.

There could be nothing weirder than the butt room, I thought to myself. I was sadly mistaken.

Adjacent from the butt room was another room that consisted of a woman in goggles and a lab coat, and her assistant, who wore leather holsters around his chest.

It looked like a scene out of a Mad Max movie.

The "doctor" threw me in the chair and placed headphones over my ears that were playing industrial metal—possibly Ministry, and what sounded like hardcore sex.

The two miscreants began ripping apart a cardboard box and duct taped a cardboard shell to my back.

"Beautiful," the doctor cackled.

To top off the night, Smut Cabaret ended with and energetic, sweat-filled set by electronica band Physical Copies.

Later that night, as I lay in bed, my mind blown open by the weirdness I'd just endured, I kept cycling through night's events. Apparently, according to patrons of this year's Smut Cabaret, the party was quite "tame," due to the venue.

If that was tame, I can't imagine what next year will be like.

Everything We Know So Far About the 21-Year-Old Who Allegedly Committed the South Carolina Church Shooting

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Dylann Storm Roof. Photo via his Facebook page

Dylann Storm Roof looks like a menacing version of Macaulay Culkin. In his Facebook profile photo, he sports a bowl cut so silly-looking it's easy to miss the Apartheid-era African flags on his jacket. In another picture, Roof looks like any other college-aged kid showing off his car—except his is outfitted with a Confederate-flag vanity plate.

Reportedly coming in at 5'9" and 120 pounds, Roof is scrawny, his bone structure childlike. But you don't need to be a robust physical specimen to carry out a mass slaughter in America. For Roof, all it took was a gun and plenty of racial animus.

On Wednesday night, the 21-year-old allegedly shot up the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Charleston, South Carolina, killing six women and three men, including beloved pastor and state senator Reverend Clementa Pinckney. Charleston police chief Greg Mullen promptly labeled the massacre at the historic black church a hate crime, an assertion that was bolstered after a survivor relayed the shooter's horrifying words.

"I have to do it," Roof, who was arrested during a traffic stop Thursday in Shelby, North Carolina, reportedly explained to his victims. "You rape our women and you're taking over our country, and you have to go."

Roof was born in April 1994 to Ben and Amy Roof; it's unclear whether his parents are still together. One classmate who went to middle and high school with Roof described the suspect as "emo" and said he had long blond hair and kept to himself. At age 19, Roof had no job or driver's license, according to an uncle named Carson Cowles, who worried about him spending too much time in the house.

Cowles said that Roof's dad gave him a .45-caliber gun for his 21st birthday, which seemed to make the morose kid perk up a bit, theNew York Daily News reported.

Back in February, Roof started posing strange questions to employees of a local Bath & Body Works and a store called the Shoe Depot. When freaked-out mall workers called the cops, Roof was caught with an unlabeled bottle containing what he initially claimed were Listerine strips before admitting they contained Suboxone, a drug used to treat opiate dependence that's classified as a Schedule III narcotic. He was arrested and banned from the mall for a year. (Roof violated the ban two months later and was picked up again for trespassing.) A man named John Mullins told the Daily Beast that Roof, his former high school classmate, was "kind of wild" and a pill popper.

When Roof lived in a Lexington, South Carolina, trailer park, he bragged to friends about a plan to shoot people at a local college. No one there took him seriously, however, because he was known for a "deadpan" sense of humor, a friend named Christon Scriven told the Daily News.

As he was led away in cuffs from the Shelby police station Thursday afternoon, Roof appeared to smile, grimly, at the assembled cameras.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

I Asked a Bunch of Epidemiologists How To Make Fashion Out of Parasites

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Illustrations by the author

One of the great things about being a vapid moron is that no one expects anything from you and you can do whatever you want. For five days I wandered around the annual Ecology & Evolution of Infectious Disease conference in Athens, Georgia, hovering over the cookie table and complimenting scientists on their shoes. When my 2011 article about how to make a suit out of living raccoons appeared on my newsfeed in the middle of a presentation on parasite conservation, I started to wonder about the logistics of making a bodysuit entirely out of roundworms instead. (A lot of people thought I was going to get rabies when I did the raccoon suit, but contracting baylisascaris was way more plausible and terrifying, in my opinion.) So as math prodigies and scientists from around the world conspired to solve legitimate problems that exist, I decided to ask them about making fashion with our parasite friends.

Sars Textile

Liam uses statistical models to predict the transmissibility of RNA viruses. During lunch break he told me about an art project he worked on with Robbie Coleman, a conceptual artist from Britain. Coleman made a textile using images of the SARS virus and installed it as wallpaper in a functional hotel room. The wallpaper stayed there, open to the public, as a reference to the original SARS case in humans.

When Liam first explained this to me, I wasn't sure if the SARS virus was actually imbedded in the fibers or not. Obviously that would never happen and I'm just an idiot. But I like to think that artists are always pushing the envelope, whether or not that envelope is filled with SARS. Who knows? Maybe Coleman had a method of containing the virus in capsules that no one besides him would ever detect. This is all to say: Liam suggested using representations of the parasites to design a textile.

Parasite fashion not your thing? Let Kara show you how to make a suit out of live raccoons!

Bikini Heterorhabditis

Tim, who researches host-parasite co-evolution, revealed himself to be a fashion visionary. I'm not sure if he was drunk when we met but I'm pretty sure I was leaning into his face with stained teeth, reeking of red wine.

"What would you do if you could design a suit made out of parasites?" I asked.

"Bikini," he replied.

My eyebrows lifted off my face. I had never even considered that.

"Using only worms," said Tim.

It was so simple, so beautiful. I pictured rows of tapeworms crocheted together.

"No, no, just one worm," said Tim as he mimed a narrow band across his chest.

My mouth fell agape.

"Like, just a nipple strap?" I asked.

"Yeah, covering the nipples."

"What about the bottoms?"

He mimed another imaginary worm across his hips, essentially the size of dental floss. "Well, I guess you would need more than one worm for the bottoms," he added.

Again I pictured a crocheted pattern of worms but knew Tim's idea was much more parsimonious.

"What kind of worms would you use?" I asked.

He thought for a second.

"Heterorhabditis," he said.

In my notebook there's a scribble that looks vaguely like, "RHebpus."

Microscopy Printed Bra

Tanya, who studies rabies, also suggested using worms, only her idea was to turn them into a scarf. She tapped her lab mate, who was in the middle of a text conversation, and asked for her input. She looked up from her phone with an absent gaze.

"A bra," she said and immediately went back to texting.

"Made out of what?" I prodded.

"Oh," she looked up from her phone again. "Bright colors," she offered.

"But what parasites?" I said.

"It could be anything." She didn't look up this time. "Bright colors," she repeated. "Like microscopy."

I wandered away imagining this becoming a thing in 2018.

Organic Fabric

Reni's job is to explore the path of a population's extinction. When I asked her how she would make fashion out of parasites, she thought I was talking about the Invertebrate Ball at Friday Harbor Lab. After I explained what I meant, she told me that her initial thought was a reference to flour refinery. She'd heard about ground crickets being used as a protein-rich flour substitute and wondered if something like this might be possible for parasites and fabric. That was her INITIAL thought. Imagine what she can accomplish in one day. You can't. You can't imagine that.

Blood

Peter is an important figure in the world of disease ecology, something like a king. When I asked him what he would do his response was just, "Blood."

"Like, Carrie style?" I said.

"Yes."

Trematode Accessory

Maybe one of the strangest answers I got was from Ian, a disease ecologist from Emory University. The bar was closing and everyone was trying to figure out where to go. We were all standing near a giant trough of tiramisu. When his friend relayed the question to him he said, "Tennis ball!" as if he were on a game show.

"What?" said his friend.

Ian's arms stretched backward and he pointed to his own spine.

"A trematode," he said. "As a tennis ball, that straps around your back."

His friend interjected, "That's not what she meant, Ian."

I urged him to continue. It was amazing.

"So the trematode is burrowing into the amphibian," he said.

Then I think he said the words "retinoic acid," but I'm not sure. I had no idea what he was talking about. According to my Google search results, it looks like trematodes cause limb deformities in amphibians. According to the journal Ecology, it looks like Ian "combined multiscale field data with manipulative experiments" to better understand parasite competition via Ribeiroia onatrae and Echinostoma trivolvis.

Wow, epidemiologists are really smart. Maybe one day all of these things will exist and humans will stop being so overpopulated and there will be peace on Earth at last.

Follow Kara on Twitter.

Why Iron Maiden Still Rules, and Heavy Metal Will Never Die

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Why Iron Maiden Still Rules, and Heavy Metal Will Never Die

The VICE Guide to Right Now: Ten Thousand Dogs and Cats Will Be Eaten This Weekend at China's Annual Dog Meat Festival

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Thumbnail image by Isobel Yeung

Every year, the town of Yulin in southern China comes together for a dog-meat-fueled festival in honor of the Summer Solstice. The annual festival started in the 90s, but eating dog has been part of the culture in some parts of China for millennia. Animal rights activists in the country and around the world condemn the festival and rally against it each year, but even a recent Change.org petition hasn't stopped Yulin from gearing up for 2015's dog meat bacchanal this weekend.

One animal lover cashed in her savings this year to try and buy up the animals before they hit the chopping block. But with an estimated 10,000 dogs and cats (if you're going to eat dog, why not eat cats, too?) lined up to be slaughtered, she can't possibly adopt them all, and people will be feasting on man's best friend at the festival this year, like it or not.

In 2014, we sent host Isobel Yeung to go check out the dog meat festival and pet some of the pooches destined for the slaughterhouse. Watch the documentary above.

Want Some In-Depth Stories About Animals?

1. When Ferrets Are Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Own Ferrets
2. The Legal and Ethical Quandaries of Getting Your Pet Stoned
3. A Brief History of Scientific Experiments on Cats
4. The Cruelty and Controversy of Beijing's Black Market for Dogs

You Can Now Order an STD Test on the New Planned Parenthood App

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Along with ordering your laundry, your lunch, your groceries, your ride, your booze, your weed, and your butler, you can now order an STD test with a few swipes on your smartphone. This week, Planned Parenthood joined the mobile delivery market with a new app for on-demand chlamydia and gonorrhea testing, available to users in California.

It works like this: You download the app, called Planned Parenthood Direct, to your phone (it's available for both Android and iPhone, because STDs don't discriminate). Then you create a profile with Planned Parenthood, enter your shipping address and payment information, and order the test within a few clicks. The test gets delivered to your doorstep in two to four days in discreet packaging. Then you pee into the provided cup, send it back to Planned Parenthood, and wait for the results to come through on the app.

If you test negative, then you're good to go. If you test positive, Planned Parenthood directs you to the appropriate treatment. For chlamydia, they send a prescription for an oral antibiotic to your local pharmacy. For gonorrhea, they schedule a time for you to get an antibiotic injection. The service, including the treatment, comes out to a flat fee of $149.

In Planned Parenthood's 100-year history, this is the first time the organization has integrated mobile technology into the way it provides healthcare. "Our goal is to try to reach people through whatever means they're most comfortable, and it's clear that a lot of industries, including healthcare, are moving into mobile applications and online applications [to reach people]," said Jon Dunn, the president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Orange and San Bernardino Counties. "This is the first step in Planned Parenthood providing mobile services."

The app was designed with millennials in mind—a demographic that's both bad at getting STD check-ups and already accustomed to ordering everything with a few swipes in an app.

"We believe that there's a market for young professionals, primarily because of the privacy and convenience," says Ana Sandoval, the Communications Director for Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California, the statewide public policy office for the seven planned parenthood affiliates in the state. Their target user is someone young, with a busy lifestyle, who might not otherwise get tested on the reg.


VICE News goes undercover to report on crisis pregnancy centers, religious centers posing as abortion clinics to try to talk women out of ending their pregnancies.


This isn't the first service to offer at-home STD tests. There are a variety of mail-order STD tests, like SDT Test Express, which offers a chlamydia and gonorrhea test for the same price as Planned Parenthood Direct. But Planned Parenthood Direct is the first to offer the service through a mobile app, and to provide treatment. "Those other tests are just tests," Sandoval points out. "If you do test positive [with Planned Parenthood Direct], you can get treatment and a prescription, emailed to your local pharmacy."

It's worth noting that Planned Parenthood offers a sliding-scale for its in-clinic STD tests, meaning if you go into one of their health centers, you can get the same tests done for a reduced rate (for people with limited income, they're often free). Some health insurance companies also cover preventative STD testing. But Dunn points out that the purpose of Planned Parenthood Direct is to reach people who wouldn't otherwise show up in a Planned Parenthood Clinic. As he explains it, the app is offering a "premium service"—privacy and convenience—for an out-of-pocket fee.

Swipe Left or Right? Some Experts Blame Dating Apps for a Rise in STDs

In California, where the app is piloting, chlamydia and gonorrhea are both relatively common. In 2013, the most recent year that statewide data is available, there were over 38,000 cases of gonorrhea and nearly 168,000 cases of chlamydia. Those rates are highest among people aged 15 to 24 (women in that age group accounted for 66 percent of all female chlamydia cases, and 54 percent of female gonorrhea cases). You know what else people aged 15 and 24 have in common? Almost all of them own smart phones.

"Our hope was to reach people through a convenient test that would alert them to the fact that they might be positive and get them easy treatment," said Dunn.

In the near future, Planned Parenthood hopes to launch the app nationwide. The organization is concurrently testing a complementary app called Planned Parenthood Care, available in Washington and Minnesota, which "allows people to talk to a Planned Parenthood provider online and face-to-face through a secure video consultation system, and then receive birth control or an STD test kit and treatment, if necessary, in the mail." There are also plans to broaden the scope of services offered on their mobile apps—things like emergency contraception, which are "in the early planning stages right now." Which means that one day, there will be nothing you can't do on your phone.

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.

The Love Trip

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Photos by Bryson Rand. Bryson Rand's work is included in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter at Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

This article appears in the June Issue of VICE Magazine.

When I was 19, I got a letter from Klaus Wouters. He worked as a handyman and music teacher at Silver Springs, a school for troubled kids in the San Gabriel Mountains. He knew (or guessed) I was still in Southern California. He wondered how my life was going. He mentioned that a handicapped boy named John Cressey had gone missing. He remembered that John and I had been friends. He suggested we meet for Sunday dinner, but he didn't have access to a car.

I had expected never to hear from Klaus, or from anyone at Silver Springs. The letter brought back memories of having my face smushed into a patch of snot-damp carpet by Rudy the facilitator, his knee pressed into my back, while he whispered in my ear that he loved me, that unless I gave up the ego trip and got into my feelings I was bound to end up dying in a gutter of AIDS.

But Klaus had taken a special interest in me. I had told him shameful and embarrassing things, stuff I would have liked to erase from universal memory, but having him as a confidant had kept me from losing my mind that year. Maybe I felt like I owed him something. He was probably going to be alone for Christmas, as I was. So the next Sunday I borrowed a friend's car and headed up to Little Eagleneck Village.

I pulled off the road at the log-cabin restaurant and spotted Klaus on the porch. He wore a fringed, buff-colored jacket I'd never seen, like a cowboy or Native American jacket, and was staring blankly into the distance. I got a rush of dread, certain I'd made a mistake. I was going to drive away, but Klaus saw me and approached the car.

He made a few quick glances back at the restaurant and up the road, as though he thought someone might see him, opened the door, and got in.

"Let's not go here," he said, thumbing at the log-cabin restaurant. He seemed shorter and thicker than I remembered him.

He wore baggy jeans and a mustard-colored shirt. His cheeks were pink, his hair combed back, clustering in curls at the nape of his neck. I could smell his suede jacket, and another scent that might have been a hair oil.

I asked him where he'd like to go. He said it didn't matter to him, he would eat most things. There was a hamburger restaurant down in the valley that he remembered having enjoyed, though he couldn't recall the name. Pop's, it could have been, or Happy's.

I took a curve too hard and told myself to slow down. A scenic overlook swung past, a glimpse of the endless city spread out in the valley below. Tremendous boulders were strewn along the edge of the road in the shadow of orange cliffs towering on the right.

I popped in a tape. The road descended into the foothills and came to the intersection of old Route 66. The Inland Empire stretched in both directions. "Swing a left here," said Klaus, meaning east toward the desert and beyond. We passed a car dealership decorated with garlands of red, green, and silver tinsel. I began to dread the empty silences lying ahead. Klaus kept glancing in the side-view mirror, and I got the strange idea that he was eyeing a gray minivan that had settled into the lane behind us.

We passed a sign for the city limits of Casterly, which rang a bell with Klaus. He said he remembered a restaurant shaped like a boat. "I always thought it would be interesting," he said, "to eat at a place like that." As the highway came into the center of town, I asked if he knew the name of the restaurant. Klaus shook his head: "You can't miss it," he said, "it's huge and painted blue."

"Turn left up here," he suggested. We drove through a subdivision of wooden bungalows, past plowed-up grove land and a fenced-off industrial zone, always with the mountains behind us, or off to the side, blocking out half the sky, blue and massive and veined with white powder. They had a flattened perspective like paintings on a Hollywood set. We never saw anything like a boat-shaped restaurant. The choice came down to Casa Dinero and a Sizzler in a fake adobe building. Casa Dinero was closed.

We sat opposite each other in the booth. Klaus ordered a shrimp basket while I had a burger and fries. The food was delicious. Klaus dipped his shrimp first in the cocktail sauce and then the tartar sauce, holding his good arm, elbow out, somewhat high above the table, to keep his jacket sleeve from catching in the food. He crunched off each shrimp at the tail stub; his mustache bobbed up and down as he chewed, grunting faintly with contentment. When he'd finished he hailed the waitress and ordered a second basket and asked if I wanted another burger; the entire meal was on him, he said, down to the tip.

"What happened to John Cressey?" I asked.

Klaus glanced at me with his heavy-lidded eyes and continued to chew for a while. "They've got a shrink up there now," he said, as if it explained something about the unknown fate of Cressey. I knew Klaus hated shrinks and feared them. "I'd like to believe," he said, "that no harm has come to John. Maybe he knew some people who were able to get him out of there." I was struck by that last phrase.

Then he began to recount a story from the papers a few years back. A hiker had found some bones in a ravine out by Lake Elsinore. There was a jawbone with braces still attached. They thought it might have to do with a boy who'd gone missing in the 70s. But when they sent the bones in for testing, it turned out they were the bones of a girl. "Of course," added Klaus, "that wouldn't have anything to do with John."

He ordered a brownie sundae with vanilla ice cream. When he came back from the restroom I noticed he was wearing pointy black boots, that his feet were unusually small, and that he was grinning broadly.

Outside it was cooler in the late-afternoon shadows, and I zipped up my hoodie. Klaus seemed fortified by the meal and invigorated by the atmosphere.

"Casterly," he said. "I remember Casterly. You can feel how close the desert is."

He said we should keep heading east on Route 66; we should go see a little of the desert. I said I thought this basically was the desert.

"No, I mean the real desert." He wanted cactus plants and Joshua trees and lines of tall, thin palms stretching to the white horizon. "The kind of place where you have to knock out your boots for scorpions."

I said we didn't have a map, that maybe we could go another day. He said all we had to do was go east, keeping the mountains on our left. I had never been to the desert either, but, as I told Klaus, the sun was getting low and we would never make it there before dark on the old highway. He agreed that we should take the freeway.

"There is plenty of light left. We'll be there in no time."

Once we were on the freeway, I popped in a Grateful Dead tape, a live recording of a show from the 70s.

"I remember this music," said Klaus. "You could get lost in it."

He was smoothing his shirt down over his belly. Within minutes he asked me to pull the car over.

"Klaus," I said, "what is it?"

"Pain. Bad pain." His face looked a little greenish.

"Where is the pain, Klaus?"

"Stomach cramp."

I took the next exit and pulled over onto the shoulder. When I stopped the car he was groaning softly.

"Do you need an ambulance? Should I go get help?"

Klaus shook his head, opening the door. I got out and came around to his side, thinking he was going to vomit. But what he did was get into the back seat. He lay on top of the stray pieces of paper, clothing, cassettes, and CD cases scattered there. He had his knees bent, his small pointy boots up on the seat.

I watched him for a minute.

"You're going to need a doctor, Klaus," I said.

I worried that he might be having an attack of diarrhea. There wasn't much around; down a service road, I could see a low white building that might have been a garage or small warehouse. Behind us the sun sunk toward a hot-pink horizon. Scrub bushes along the side of the road cast spiny shadows on the dry, pebbly dirt. I figured if it were diarrhea, Klaus couldn't play it off; there's no way to dissemble in an emergency like that.

"Keep moving," he said. "Motion is the best thing for it."

When I started the engine I said I was taking him home.

"The desert," Klaus said. "We're going to see the desert. It's OK. I know how this goes."

"We won't get there in time," I said. "We have to go back."

"There's plenty of light," he said.

It had an absurd ring of fatalism, like a final wish, and I suddenly had an apprehension that if Klaus died out here, nobody would come to claim the body. When I steered the car onto the eastbound ramp, I didn't know if what we were doing was right. I drove with the passenger seat empty, Klaus lying back there like a patient. The valley opened out before us. I could see the windmills ranked in the distance, their white sails turning against the darkening sky. I could even see the shadows cast by their towers. The rearview mirror blazed with a golden-pink light. I had turned off the music.

"I remember drives," Klaus said. He explained that he'd grown up in a prairie town, and when the summer heat became uncomfortable, his mother would take him and his sister, Gerthe, on long drives in the loess hills. "All three of us sat up front with room to spare. No one wore seat belts back then." One time, he said, they stopped at a tourist motel that had a swimming pool and a diesel-powered train you could ride along a track that circled the motel. The gift shop, he recalled, sold pelts of small animals, Indian arrowheads, and corked glass vials filled with a mustard-colored powder: the glacial silt that the winds had blown, over millions of years, into fantastical dune-like drifts all along the eastern side of the Missouri River Valley. "That was the summer after I came back from the hospital."

And he added: "It's all just pictures, isn't it?"

Then he fell silent. We passed the exit for Banning. Dusk fell over the landscape. A cluster of phantom mountains rose up on the right, while the range we'd been tracking on our left sank and dissolved; then the mountains on the right also sank and dissolved. I thought Klaus might be asleep. But when he resumed speaking, I realized he was alert.

"I was five years old," he said, "and I thought I would never come home. I was in an iron lung, and they said they might never let me out. They put a little mirror on the front, so you could see behind you. You could see people coming in and out of the room. It was supposed to make it less claustrophobic."

This was in 1952, Klaus explained. I had never heard him talk about his illness. I remembered how, when Klaus played guitar, he held the neck in his good hand, working the frets with blunt, strong fingers, while he strummed with the disabled hand, using the thickened, brownish nails of his thumb and index finger.

He said that his memory of those years was run through and through by the sounds of flood sirens and tornado sirens, and a song called "Young Lovers" spinning over and over on his sister Gerthe's record player.

***

I had to pee. I saw tiny clusters of lights in the distance and, seemingly closer at hand, on the left side of the freeway, a service island glowing in the surrounding dark. When I took the next exit, I found myself on a one-way road heading away from the island, but continued on in the hope that, being so close to the freeway, we'd soon come to another gas station or a McDonald's.

The road dead-ended at a high chain-link fence. It suggested the perimeter of a small airport or a prison, but I couldn't see any structures, only a dark and evidently vast area of land. I turned left. The road passed through a small neighborhood or town in which nothing was open for business, and then it seemed we were really out in the country. Finally I pulled over and got out to pee in a ditch. Klaus said, "Let's not stop just yet. I need to keep driving for a bit." A bright moon hung in the sky, and in the course of that long pee, as my eyes adjusted to the landscape, I realized I could see twisted black shapes in the moonlight—oddly tufted trees out of The Lorax, which is to say trees like souls, like ancient souls or punished souls out of Dante, frozen at intervals all the way to the edge of visibility, where I could make out the silhouettes of huge rock formations.

"Klaus, you've got to see this," I said back in the car. "I think it's the desert, the real deal."

"Well, now I'm tired," said Klaus from the darkness of the back seat.

"You don't want to see the desert?"

"I'll see it in the morning."

"What do you mean?"

"We must have come halfway across the State of California. We must be about halfway to Phoenix."

It did feel incredibly late, but when I started up the car and pulled back onto the road, the dashboard clock said it was not even ten.

"We won't be making it back tonight," said Klaus, "that's for sure."

"I don't think it'll be a problem. We just need to figure out where the freeway is."

"There's too many cops on the road at this kind of hour. You didn't see them. I did."

Something darted across the headlights, my foot hit the brake, and I swerved into the oncoming lane. I swerved back and knew I had missed the animal, a rabbit or hare, but suddenly saw in the sweep of headlights a boy standing on the gravel shoulder. When I blinked we'd passed him. I slowed the car, convinced I had seen him in that flashbulb instant, shirtless and shoeless, with a blond crew cut and a scar across his chest. I stopped the car and turned to look back. Klaus, too, was sitting up and looking out the rear window. I thought we were looking for the same thing, a boy back there on the shoulder, and was about to speak, when I realized he was looking at a pair of headlights in the distance. It was hard to tell how far behind us they were, but they seemed not to be coming closer, as if they had also stopped.

"Who is that?" I said.

"Them?" Klaus said. "The Grey Family."

I didn't know what he meant, and for a moment I thought I must be going insane—but then Klaus was laughing, hacking and spluttering, and I realized he'd only been kidding.

A business district emerged up ahead, with a Wendy's and a couple of motels. I knew we couldn't be far from the freeway and could ask directions. But Klaus said we should stay in a motel. "I just need to call it a day." He would pay for the room, he said—for two rooms, if need be.

I said, "Don't you have to get back to the school? Don't you have to go to work tomorrow?"

"I might be done with that school," said Klaus after a pause. He added, "They're going to the medical model."

The choice was between the Desert Palms Motel and the Desert Oasis Motel. Those might not have been the names, but they were something like that, and the one I chose (the Desert Palms) had a blue neon sign with a trim of yellow bulbs. I parked under the portico and saw the gas needle was on empty. When I got out and Klaus didn't follow, I went into the lobby without him. I already had an idea of what was going to happen. The clerk, an older woman with garish makeup, looked straight out of central casting for a scary nurse in a comedy or horror. I paid for the room with cash. Filling out the registration card, I didn't know the license-plate number, so I went back out to look. Klaus was sitting upright in the backseat. When he saw me he waved through the window.

We drove around the side of the motel and parked in front of our room. There were only two or three other cars in the lot.

"At least we got some place to lay our heads," said Klaus when I unlocked the door. He spoke as if we were hobos or bone-weary pilgrims. The room was a smoking room and smelled like one. There were two beds. I flipped on the light, then turned the knob on the A/C unit to "fan"; the machine clattered to life and exhaled a sigh of musty air. Klaus sat on the bed closest to the window. He patted the comforter, plumped the pillows. He slid out the bedside drawer and removed the Gideon Bible, inspecting the front and back covers, as though he'd never seen one before. I lay on the other bed in my shoes, watching as Klaus removed his Native American jacket and hung it up, fastidiously, in the closet, which was a narrow recess in the wall. My apartment, I thought, couldn't be more than a couple of hours back west. I could easily be there, in my own bed, by midnight. I wasn't sleepy in the least. But Klaus, for his part, seemed happy to be here. I still didn't know where he normally lived.

"No toothbrushes," he said, emerging from the bathroom. "They used to give you those little toothbrushes." He wondered aloud if there was any place such items could be had.

I offered to go find us some toiletry products. "Ah, who cares," he said. Then he reversed himself and said it was a good idea. He pulled out a fat brown wallet. He peered inside, seeming to poke around in it. Then he produced a limp bill and handed it to me gravely. It was a ten. When I left the room, Klaus was removing his pants. I hoped he was going to go to the bathroom.

Outside in the night I saw a mini-mart a little ways down and decided to walk. I got the toothbrushes, a travel-size tube of toothpaste, and a small blue bottle of Scope. I also picked out some jerky, a bag of peanuts, and a small bottle of orange juice. Then I thought of Klaus and went back and got a second of each. Standing at the checkout counter, I noticed a pair of unusual men emerge from the back of the store and make their way slowly toward the exit. They wore dark suits and had long reddish beards and skullcaps. The shorter man was blind, feeling at the floor with his white cane, while the taller man escorted him by the elbow. I wondered if there were colonies of Amish in the desert.

I sat on a bench near the lobby, eating the jerky and peanuts, then smoked a cigarette, watching an occasional car pass. When I came back to the room, I looked through the gap in the curtain. I could see Klaus in bed. Television light flickered over his face and his arms—he had the covers pulled up to his chest. I tried to open the door quietly. The room smelled steamy, and an MTV veejay was yammering. A bath towel hung on the back of the chair. Klaus's clothes were stacked neatly on the round table. I set my items on the bureau and stole a glance back at Klaus, watching his eyelids. I couldn't tell whether he was asleep or pretending. I took off my shoes, turned back the covers, and lay down in my clothes. I watched MTV for a while and must have drifted off, because I found myself in a troubling phone conversation with the front-desk clerk, who was trying to explain that something was wrong with the bathroom, that I shouldn't go in there. My bathroom? What's wrong with it? I demanded. It's handicapped, said the clerk, and I didn't know whether she meant the bathroom was reserved for the use of the handicapped or the bathroom itself was handicapped. Then I realized I was controlling both sides of this conversation, that I had been dreaming but now wasn't. The TV was playing a Cranberries video. I glanced at Klaus: He was flopped on his stomach, his head turned to the window. I got up and turned off the TV, then tried to go back to sleep—but I knew this disjointed feeling, and I knew I wouldn't be able to sleep. So I tiptoed out of the room, trying not to make the latch click too harshly. Out in the night it felt better. I took huge breaths of the desert air, then lit a cigarette and wandered through the breezeway into the pool area. The pool was illuminated and, when I dipped my hand in, pleasantly warm. The moon had disappeared; the black sky was filled with stars. Aside from the little accent lights in the cactus garden, everything else was dark. All at once I felt urgently horny—or maybe it was just giddiness—but I stubbed out my cigarette, stripped naked, and slipped into the water. I let my air out gradually, sinking till I was crouched on the bottom. Then I pushed off and burst up through the surface, shaking my hair and squeezing the chlorine water from my eyes. I frog-kicked up and down the length of the pool, stopping to hold my head back and gape at the unthinkable, fragile mass of stars. Is it sad that this was one of the most genuinely erotic experiences of my life?—not just up to that point, but ever? No one in the world knew where I was at that moment, except for Klaus.

I squeezed out my hair, dried off with my boxer shorts, then put on my jeans and shirt, my hoodie, socks, and shoes. I lay on a plastic chaise and smoked a cigarette. When I got back to the room door I realized I didn't have my key.

Through the gap in the curtain I could hardly make out anything. I rapped lightly on the window.

I waited, listening. I didn't want Klaus to wake up, but I rapped again anyway. Then I checked all my pockets and discovered the key in my hoodie.

When I let myself in, the TV was playing an Alanis Morissette video on low volume. "I wish I could get them to play that one over and over," Klaus said. He was stretched out in his underwear, the oblong sack of peanuts on his furry chest, squinching his toes in sync with the beat. "The music now is better than it used to be. In a way. The production values are better."

"Aren't you tired, Klaus?" I said. "Don't you want to go back to sleep?" I got up and closed the curtain and came back to bed.

He shook some peanuts into his palm, cupped them to his mouth, chewed, and shrugged.

"We could go back," he said. "I know you're probably eager to get back."

"You mean now?"

He shrugged again. He said that he felt refreshed. He'd just needed to clear his head. He clamped the bottle of juice in his armpit and cranked off the top with his good hand. He said he felt fine, that he could drive the car if I wanted.

"Do you have a license?"

"It's OK," he said. "I'm a pretty good driver."

"Klaus," I said. "What are you going to do? If you don't go back to the school?"

He was thinking, he said, of getting back into the Movement. There were some people he thought he could reconnect with.

"People from San Francisco?"

He didn't reply. Then he said, "I heard there's a lot going on in Germany. After the Iron Curtain. Europe is where things are going to be happening. A lot of people are going to need help." He asked if I had ever been to Europe. I could come with him, he said. We would have to go soon. Everything was opening up.

"Klaus," I said. "Do you remember the time you played 'Puff, the Magic Dragon'?"

"Which time?"

"In the rap," I said.

At the school there was a circular pit in the fireplace room, with two steps down, like an orange-carpeted amphitheater. We sat in a circle for group therapy sessions called raps, in which we had to recount our troubled pasts in graphic detail. We had to scream and cry theatrically, get in each other's faces, call each other out. Rudy, the facilitator, would invoke our childhood selves; he would disclose information he said he'd obtained from our parents.

In the rap you were supposed to find out your lie. It had to be something juicy and repressed, a bona fide trauma. Everyone had to do it. The most dangerous thing you could say at Silver Springs was that you didn't understand why you were there. So one time I went on a rant about an older cousin, a Halloween party. I invented details about a Dracula cape and glitter on his skin and the plastic fangs he took out of his mouth. I used the name of a real cousin—Jamie—and said that for days and even weeks afterward, I kept discovering little bits of glitter in my bedding. I invented the part where Jamie coached me to say, and believe, that this hadn't happened. I was ashamed to have given Jamie's name and thought how I would never again be able to look my cousin in the eye.

Klaus shook his head. "Not in the raps," he said.

"Yes, you did. You were there on the edge of the pit. With your guitar. I remember."

He was smiling. "I remember that number. I sang it sometimes. But not in the raps."

A gray light was seeping into the room, from around the edges of the window curtain. I looked at Klaus's little feet, at his brawny white thighs and stout torso, at his arms, one strong and one stunted, at his lips and heavy-lidded eyes.

"But why," I said, "did you ever want to work at a place like that?"

He thought for a minute. "I guess I wanted to be on the side of the underdog, on the side of the person who is in trouble."

"But Klaus," I said, "the school was the trouble. It was a joke. A horrible charade. A nightmare. They taught me not to trust anybody. They taught me not to trust my own mind."

"They said you kids had been on a fear trip. Up on the mountain we were running a love trip."

Houseworld Raises the Roof of Immersive Theater

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Joe Crow Ryan as the Bathtub Guru in 'Houseworld' in 2015

Perhaps the most creative task for New York City's creative class is affording to live in this big-ticket city. Odd jobs can lead to unexpected artistic pursuits and equally rare living situations. Andrew Hoepfner, the 33-year-old musician of Give to Light and Darwin Deez, has made ends meet with the money he's earned from playing the organ in Brooklyn churches. Through his church connections, Hoepfner was invited to live in an enormous parsonage house that was occasionally rented to the HBO series Boardwalk Empire for filming. Hoepfner, too, saw the potential to create worlds in his home, and inspired by the immersive theater format of Sleep No More, transcendental meditation, old computer games, and the human psyche, he converted the house into a surreal theater experience called Houseworld.

Somebody has the key to the attic, but who and how to get it? Audience members wander the house encountering "residents," who engage them with activities, games, portraits, monsters, or shots of whisky. The Bathtub Guru, played by musician and G-train subway platform performer Joe Crow Ryan, sits in the tub and dispenses clues and red herrings. The man with sensitive ears, Nevins (played by Jason Trachtenberg of the Trachtenberg Family Slideshow players), will teach you his much-loved board game called "picnic," in which the rules are never explained and the only way to learn is by playing—kind of like life, or Houseworld itself. The cook (Salvatore Musumeci) is angry, but if you say the right thing, he'll give you a beer. Haunting folk singer Larkin Grimm sings a cheery death song on the harmonium as the murderous Amaya. Sound healer and musician Jesse Paris Smith, Patti Smith's daughter, plays the Angel of Peace and Light. Each character represents a different emotion, and though the vibe is mainly whimsical, the intimacy of the experience can get intense. The Best Friend character offers a chill reprieve, an always-available pizza, and video game-fueled escape zone.


Watch an exclusive video of 'Houseworld' :


Many people who see Houseworld want to get involved, and many former audience members have become future cast members as the performance continues to evolve and shift shape. This happened to me. After seeing Houseworld in February, I asked Hoepfner if I could participate, and he invited me sit in as the Best Friend at a performance two weeks ago. I knew Hoepfner and a chunk of the cast from the Sidewalk Café/Antifolk music community and was delighted to encounter so many talented artists from the scene engaging in an innovative collaboration of this scale.

This interview took place earlier this week, when Andrew and I met at my house to talk, just days before the end of his Kickstarter campaign. Though he's reached his $30,000 goal, donating to the Kickstarter is currently the only way to reserve season two tickets.

VICE: How do you see Houseworld in the context of your own life? What journey brought you from Andrew Hoepfner, the musician, to Andrew Hoepfner, the immersive-theater mastermind?
Andrew Hoepfner: If Houseworld was a reaction to anything, it was being bored and jaded about shows at clubs, bars, and outdoor festivals—those limiting ways that music is expressed. My first idea for Houseworld was a very precisely staged show in the living room, a music concert, but very different from a club. With birdbaths, a harp, the sun pouring in from windows, and everyone wearing white robes—and all the songs designed to communicate a feeling of peace and relaxation, right? That was my first idea, of like, Wouldn't that be such a nice change from having to go play this bar? And then you go up to my room and somebody sings you a song, just you and them. And then you go down in the basement, and there's a monster in the basement. And then it wasn't about the concert at all.

How is Houseworld different from Sleep No More?
When I attended Sleep No More, I was immediately in love. It was like discovering a new medium. I think of it like going to see The Jazz Singer in 1927, and thinking, "Oh! Movies! We can tell stories through movies! I could make a movie!"

I stopped taking vacations. Whenever Houseworld happened, I thought, This is like going to my favorite city.

You invested your own money in the first season of Houseworld. How much money did you spend?
It cost between $5,000 and $6,000 to put on the first six performances. There was also probably $1,500 or $2,000 from the pockets of other cast members. Now I've spent around $8,700.

As a music teacher and musician living in Brooklyn, that's quite a personal expense. How did you make the decision to self-fund it like that?
I don't earn a lot of money, but I'm pretty good with money. I don't have a pet, I don't have a wife, I don't have a girlfriend, I don't have a baby, so I can just spend all my leisure money on Houseworld. I stopped taking vacations. Whenever Houseworld happened, I thought, This is like going to my favorite city. Rio de Janeiro is a place that I really love going. I've spent a lot of money to go there. And when I would do Houseworld, I would think, Well, that was just as good as buying a ticket to Rio. I went to Houseworld for a night.

Jesse Paris Smith as The Angel of Peace in 'Houseworld' in 2014

Could you tell me about how you got interested in transcendental meditation?
I became interested in meditation in general about five years ago. I listened to an audiobook of Catching the Big Fish by David Lynch. It became my inspiration, kind of like a religious text to me. It brought me back to what I love the most about making art. I'd gotten into a place that I really didn't like with art, trying to figure out what production style and what genres people were interested in, trying to pick apart the details of what music is worth creating right now, and I started forcing myself to learn a lot about stuff that wasn't what I loved. In Catching the Big Fish, David Lynch talks about falling in love with the idea, and that really grabbed me. And because he was kind of preaching my artistic gospel to me through this audiobook, I became very interested in what fuels him. So I had to learn about transcendental meditation.

How did transcendental meditation inform Houseworld?
The meditation is described as improving the container of your awareness. So you're not going in to meditate to get ideas for Houseworld or whatever your project is, but you're improving your awareness container so when you go back into the world, it can start to receive those ideas. I found huge improvements in my artistic ideas and my relationships with people and my emotional state, so I'm kind of sold on transcendental meditation.


Speaking of the Bathtub Guru, meet New York subway performer Joe Crow Ryan:


I heard you describe Houseworld as "therapy in disguise." Could you talk about that?
When you go to a party, somebody might ask you, "How are you?" and you say, "I'm good, everything's fine," right? That's, like, a party conversation. But when you go to Houseworld, you're kind of welcome to say, "Actually, this part of my life isn't good, actually I have a sadness here," or, "Actually, I'm really angry," or, "Actually, I have this secret that I'm ashamed of," and so I started giving characters ways to give our audience permission to have those discussions.

How so?
For example, we have this character, Nevins, who loves playing this game. He might tell someone, "Sometimes people say that I'm irresponsible. And sometimes I feel guilty. Maybe I am a bad person. Do you ever feel irresponsible?" There's this idea that Nevins is maybe the father of the monster in the basement and that he's neglecting his son in order to play this game and not deal with the difficult issues. So he would prompt people to talk about neglect and irresponsibility and the guilt of that.

Then there's also Angela [Carlucci], who's the healer. The healer is prompted to go around and directly say, "If you're experiencing any pain, whether it's physical or whether it's emotional, you're welcome to bring that to me, and maybe I can offer you some peace."

Jenny Reed as The Wind in 'Houseworld' in 2015

While playing the Best Friend, I was visited by someone who is one of my best friends, and she is typically a very warm, generous person, but something about being in Houseworld made her a little bit more mischievous. I noticed that she was really embracing it. I was like, "Hey, do you like cards, you want to play a card game?" And she said, "Yeah sure," and she picked up the deck and she's like, "How 'bout 52 pickup?" and throws all the cards. It was shocking because she isn't someone who would ordinarily do that. Then she switched back into reality and said, "I'll help you clean it up." But for a moment she was kind of indulging this part of herself where she just wanted to mess around, which was cool.
I want Houseworld to be a place where people can go to darker, stranger places because it is a darker, stranger place. The character, Nevins, loves his game, but he has sensitive ears. So you can either delight him by playing the game, or you can torture him by being loud. We like the idea that you can give someone the chance to explore their dark side, be that dark character, and leave without any consequences.

Andrew Hoepfner in 2014

One of my favorite parts of Houseworld was when Jesse Paris Smith does this sound ceremony at the end of the play. It reminded me of yoga, where after doing all this activity, you just lie like a corpse on the floor. In New York, you get to see so many cool cultural performances, but then you get on the subway and it's hard to process the experience. Houseworld has that built into it. Jesse is a certified sound healer and Patti Smith's daughter. How did you get to work with her?
Jesse was born in Michigan, and she seeks out Michigan things. She found my old band Creaky Boards. We're all from Michigan. She started dating me for a little bit, then Mike Campbell, who is in the cast and a chief collaborator on the show. Mike told Jesse about the show, and she designed the sound-immersion ceremony for it. I love it. It's the closest I get to a spiritual ritual that resonates with me.

Jesse Paris Smith as The Angel of Peace in 'Houseworld' in 2015

How did you get to be so involved with churches? Are you religious? How have churches informed Houseworld?
I was raised Lutheran in Michigan, and started questioning it in my adolescence. Around then I became a non-Christian. But, as a consequence of my upbringing, I know how to play a hymn. And that's just been a valuable way for me to both earn money and kind of endear myself to these churches and get access to them as artistic spaces. When I was 19, I recorded my first solo album in a church, where I played music and was friends with the pastor. I had my drums in the basement, I slept there half the time, I ate the spaghetti and the peanut-butter crackers for my meals.

Now I have my fourth set of keys to my fourth church, which is beautiful, and almost always empty. I can go there and be loud, record, and even stage Houseworld. In the West, religion is becoming less and less popular so all these buildings are becoming neglected, so they're just empty most of the week. Because I have hymn skills and this religious background, I can't get away from these beautiful empty spaces. It's too good to pass up.

Andrew Hoepfner as The Greeter in 'Houseworld' in 2015

Probably the most interesting Kickstarter award is that for a $10,000 donation, the band DIIV will reenact your dream. How did that come about?
Zachary Cole Smith and I played together in Darwin Deez. He texted me that he heard I was doing a Kickstarter, and asked how he could contribute. He couldn't play a benefit show for us because of contracts with Governor's Ball and Webster Hall, and we had already had the idea that a Kickstarter reward would be reenacting someone's dream, so we decided his band would do that. That will happen in season two this fall.

Tell me about your own creative development. When did you start playing music and how did you end up in New York?
I fell in love with the piano when I was five or almost six. My sister started piano lessons and I was so jealous of her. When she would walk away from the piano, I would sit down at the book and try to decipher it until I'd earned myself the right to get lessons too, even though the piano teacher thought I was too young. I followed that path and joined rock bands, and I eventually moved to New York City because I love the creativity here.

My reason for moving to New York is actually kind of a Houseworld reason. When I would walk down a street, I'd want to go into every storefront and see around every corner. What's in the back of this club? What's in this store? In Michigan, where I'm from, I didn't feel that way. In Michigan, I'd walk down the street and I'd think, "I'm not interested in what's behind any of these doors. I'm bored. I'm restless." So I moved to New York because I wanted to see what's in these buildings, what's behind these doors, and that's kind of a Houseworld feeling.

Season Two of Houseworld premieres this fall. The Kickstarter to fund it ends Friday.

Deenah Vollmer is a writer and musician in Brooklyn. Follow her on Twitter.

How the Gangs of 1970s New York Came Together to End Their Wars

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In a scene from the new documentary Rubble Kings, former New York City gang leaders offer up a list of clans that seems to have no end.

The Savage Skulls. The Black Spades. The Ghetto Brothers. The Deadly Bachelors. Javelin. The Dirty Ones. The Tomahawks.

One former member asks early in the film, "Remember the scene from The Warriors, with 'Can you dig it?'" whereupon the screen flashes to the opening moments of the 1979 cult classic. Hundreds of NYC gang members are assembled around a peacekeeper named Cyrus just before he's shot and killed.

"That really went down," the former gang member continues. "That really happened.'"

This is what the Bronx looked like in the early 1970s: a battleground filled with gangs of all shapes and sizes in a vaguely moderated state of anarchy, turf wars fueled by the economic failure of shoddy urban planning in a city verging on bankruptcy.

Rubble Kings is the story of what happened on those disheveled streets as told by the leaders of the gangs themselves. It's a gripping chronicle of the bad old days of New York—a time that now seems foreign, even if it's still invoked by defenders of broken windows policing as a testament to how much worse things could get. Still, contrary to the idea that policing saved us all from doom, the happy ending in Rubble Kings does not come from the hallways of 1 Police Plaza. Instead, it comes from a truce orchestrated by a gang called the Ghetto Brothers. That peace that would go on to have cultural ripple effects around the world.

The documentary, which will be released on-demand and shown in select theaters starting on Friday in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, comes as gang violence is once again on the rise in the city. VICE sat down with Shan Nicholson, the director, to discuss what his documentary's all about, and how the Bronx tore itself to pieces in the first place.

VICE: So how did you get involved in this project?
Shan Nicholson: Basically what happened was I started with another film before this, and was doing a bunch of research for that. I ran across the Ghetto Brothers story by reading Jeff Chang's book, Can't Stop Won't Stop. I also knew about their music, because I still DJ and produce. The Ghetto Brothers record was like the Holy Grail of digging. If you found that record, it was like the golden ticket to Willy Wonka's. It was one of those records that was folklore. Their story was always in the back of my head, but when I read Chang's book and I heard the backstory of the gang and the truce, at first I thought it'd be a great narrative. I really wanted to approach it as that. When I started doing more and more research, with the footage of the treaty and the Ghetto Brothers, I was like, "Wow. Let's start with the documentary and then write the script." It was one of those stories that kept following me. Very serendipitous. Like, I was at a party and someone mentioned the Ghetto Brothers. And I said, "I was just reading about them!" Eventually it went into focus.

Gang members in the Bronx. Photo by Stephen Salmieri

And why did you want to tell this story?
In my day, it wasn't gangs, it was crews, but we went through a lot of similar events where I lived in Long Island City, Queens. I lost my best friend in 1992, and for everyone involved, we wanted revenge. He was murdered, and there was no rhyme or reason for it. It really struck me a chord in me that these guys chose peace over violence, and they actually turned the whole thing around, against all odds. That was not the norm of the day. If somebody kills one of yours, you definitely kill one of theirs. That's what really resonated with me about this.

But I made a creative choice to be behind the camera, and not really tell much of my life story in it. It's weird how art works: You're obviously a product of your own environment, and if you, as an artist, are able to channel your experiences into your art, then bravo, right? I never thought about my connection with my past when I made this film, but it's like that vibration—it comes into focus, and it locks in, where it's like, "Oh, that makes sense." It is channeling my past, and I'm kind of consoling my own demons in a lot of ways with this film.


Check out our documentary on the subway gangs of Mexico City.


There's always been a history of gangs in New York. So why did they came about in the certain times that they did? To me, it was really interesting how they came about at this period of time in the 70s. It was a reaction to not only the social and economic downfall of New York, but also, the false hopes of the 60s. A lot of these guys came up in a time of hope, and that hope was dashed when all of their leaders were killed. Then it was this whole Fuck you attitude: We're gonna be Hell's Angels now. And then, going back to the political activism that was instilled in a lot of these gangs, because they were protecting their neighborhood. Just galvanizing that energy and turning it into something positive was really powerful to me.

Members of a gang known as the Screaming Phantoms. Photo by Perry Kretz

What surprised you the most when researching and making the film?
Just how organized these guys were. The traditions that went along with it, too, with the Apache lines (which were territorial lines you didn't cross) and all of that. They had this law and order that they followed. And that was across the board: It wasn't like the white gangs did this, and the black and Puerto Rican gangs did that. It was this standardized language and culture that they created for themselves. And I didn't know that it was based off the Hell's Angels. But that's what it was. The warlords as the sergeants-in-arms, the Gestapos as the foot soldiers; that's all biker terminology. I didn't know that. With presidents and vice presidents—it was very organized from the top down.

It seems like most of the gang members stayed in New York and became community activists.
Most of them channeled their energies in different ways to give back. At the end of the interviews, when I had all of my base questions done, I asked, "Is there something I'm missing here? Is there something I'm not asking you that you want to tell me?" And they all said, "We all survived, man. And we're all doing good. When you get older, you have responsibilities—either you have kids, or you just can't live that lifestyle forever. We survived and we did something positive with ourselves. If anything, you have to mention that."

Most things you see with gangs, from TV or movies, they paint these gangs as monsters, reinforcing fear and stereotypes. If you hear about black and Latino gangs now, they're always drug pushers. You have to understand that this is a mentality that goes along with it. In the communities, it's a group tribal experience that these kids go through. It's really how you choose to use that energy.

Two members of a gang known as the Savage Nomads showing off their street jackets. Photo by Stephen Salmieri

Throughout the film, you don't really hear from the NYPD, partly because they seem too scared to go there—you mention in one part that if someone died, the police would show up in riot gear just to haul off the body. What was the significance of cops back then, especially in light of current criticisms of over-policing?
That's another way the gangs kind of filled the void. They did police their own communities. They kicked out the junkies, and most people, if they had a problem, would go to the gang leaders and say, "Hey, there's an issue here. Somebody raped my daughter," or whatever the issue was. They were the law of the land. I heard a story that one day, they cornered this cop car by knocking down a side of the building, and then they started throwing bricks and garbage cans from the roof at the car. It was a wasteland, so what do you do?

When you hear the pro-cop crowd talk about the bad old days, they tend to say it was broken windows that saved everything—it was this "quality of life" policing that restored law and order. But in this movie, it's not that at all. It was an internal peace, not an external force. Why is that important in the current national dialogue of criminal justice reform?
This film has been an eight-year process. We finished filming a year and a half ago. If it came out then, it would've been relevant, but now, it's very timely with what's going on. The fact that the Bloods and the Crips are getting together in Baltimore for a peace treaty... it's the same shit. It's not killing each other, but essentially, it's the same thing: They're rallying around a death to create peace.

The gangs of New York come together to discuss a truce. Photo by Alejandro Olivera

In this present day and time, when we see gang violence back in headlines in New York, what lessons do you think this story has to offer?
We screened this film for a bunch of high school kids from this rough part of Brooklyn. We did this Q&A and they were ice cold. The moderator was like, "What do you think about the film?" And everybody wanted to be too cool for school, and nobody wanted to answer it. But this teacher was sitting next to one of the worst kids in the class, and the moderator asked the class, "What would you say about this film to your friends?" And the kid, under his breath, was like, "It changes people's minds." And the teacher was like, "Raise your hand, man! Tell them that!" And the kid was like, "Nah, nah." I said to myself, "Man, this isn't resonating with these kids."

But then afterward, the teacher pulled me aside and told me that story. If I reached that kid, something is going on. Even if it just resonates for that day.

As a teenager growing up through senseless violence that was going on, it doesn't take a sledgehammer to make a difference. It takes a nudge. It's the leadership—leading by example. You just need to show them a different direction, and know that they have that ability to change their environment and themselves. It's not a big thing. We all have that power; it's just taking the responsibility to it.

The thing about it, you think about how New York has changed. This is one of the richest cities in the world, whereas back then, those kids were living in rubble and squalor. I know a lot of these gangs are drug-related, but at the same time, look at what these kids did with nothing, literally living in rubble. They turned violence into culture. So what's your excuse? Why are you still hurting each other? What's the point?

Follow John Surico on Twitter.

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