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A Dispatch from Jeremy Hammond's Sentencing

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A Dispatch from Jeremy Hammond's Sentencing

What We Shouldn't Be Doing in the Wake of Typhoon Yolanda

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A military aircraft passes over a washed out village near the city of Tacloban, Leyte Island.

The horrific statistics emerging from the Philippines in the wake of Typhoon Yolanda (as they call it locally, or Haiyan as it has been called elsewhere)—thousands dead, millions displaced, a still-uncountable number of homes, schools, and businesses destroyed—may strike us as a story we’ve heard before. But ultimately, the tragedy is unique.

It’s like the first line of Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The specific properties of the storm, and a combination of geography, infrastructure, culture, and history in the place where it struck, are unlike anywhere else, so it ought to be approached on its own terms.

This seems obvious when you think about it. But those of us who respond to disasters typically don’t. We expect the situations we encounter to unfold according to a set pattern. And worse, the pattern we expect is based on myths that rarely, if ever, happen. This is finally compounded by our all-too-human insistence to base our news stories and response plans on the pattern we expect, instead of the situations we actually see.

I know, because I’ve been there. As a foreign correspondent, I have paid witness to hurricanes, floods, fires and, in my absolute worst day on the job, the earthquake in Haiti on January the 12th, 2010. In my first calamities, I thought I knew—without much training and only a little prompting from my editors—what to expect: helplessness among the victims, looting, social breakdown, and the looming threat of disease. The aid workers and soldiers who rushed into the scene expected them too and confirmed our suspicions with speculative quotes. Then we all went looking for proof, reporting and reacting to the closest things we could find.

An elderly woman wipes sweat from her face after scavenging the rubble for reusable materials.

But the truth is, we were often wrong. Looting was rarely a problem, and where there was violence it was more often perpetrated by police than hungry survivors. A library of scientific studies has shown that disease outbreaks rarely follow natural disasters—except in cases where, by some piece of terrible luck, an unrelated epidemic already happened to be raging. And helplessness is one of the last things you’ll see in a disaster zone. From Caribbean flood zones to the blacked-out streets of post-Sandy Staten Island, what I have seen far more often is survivors banding together, finding creative ways to help their families and neighbors get by.

In the Philippines, a familiar pattern is playing out in the headlines: “Desperate Philippine typhoon survivors loot, dig up water pipes,” ran a Reuters headline that was picked up by media across the world on the November 13. In the UK, the Mirror took the measured tone you might expect, reporting that the Philippines is  “on the brink of anarchy”  Stateside, USA Today added: “Doctors overwhelmed by sick, needy in Philippines.”

Survivors cover their noses as they pass by cadaver bags.

Look more closely, though, and the stories rarely back up the headlines (which may well have been added by an editor far from the disaster zone). While the above stories mentioned events vaguely related to the themes of social disorder and disease, the evidence in the stories contradicted the theses. The Tacloban survivors who dug up those water pipes were clearly showing more resourcefulness than greed, finding ways to reach drinking water because of a lack of better options. Even the source of the headline’s news, the city administrator, explained to the news service, “The looting is not criminality. It is self-preservation.”

Nevertheless, the Mirror attributed the digging up of water pipes to “anger and frustration,”  which doesn't make all that much sense if you think about it. A report on Channel 4 News featured conversations showing remarkable stoicism on behalf of ordinary Filipinos. “We’re OK. We’ve got no food, no electricity—but you know what? We’re still happy,” said one. “The relief convoys just pass us by and they don’t stop. There’s nothing to do but look at them. I guess I can’t get mad about it,” said another. This may seem like an extraordinary kind of resilience, but it represents a far more common reaction than panic.

Disaster experts such as Erik Auf Der Heide of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that violence and social breakdown are exceedingly rare after disasters. They note, however, that authorities’ usually disproportionate fear of potential disorder is often a pretext for security-driven, “command-and-control” responses that leave large areas without help and prioritize the protection of property over human life. If the mission of the US Marines who have been to the Philippines is anything like their colleagues’ role in Haiti four years ago, many will waste valuable weeks—and millions of relief dollars—on guard for a civil crisis that never comes.

As for USA Today’s warning of disease, it took two sentences to reveal the exaggeration. Far from being “overwhelmed by [the] sick,” the reporter noted doctors have “been treating cuts, fractures, and pregnancy complications, but expect that soon they will be faced with more.

What evidence are they basing these expectations on? The article quotes speculation that survivors forced to sleep outdoors might be at risk for dengue or malaria and that the lack of running water could lead to a cholera outbreak. All sound plausible, but what conditions were people sleeping in before? Does the population in question already know how to deal with mosquito or waterborne disease? It seems likely that they do; one of the accused water bandits told a Reuters reporter, “We don't know if [the water]’s safe. We need to boil it.” Which is exactly what they should do.

Soldiers walk past a military aircraft at the Tacloban city airport.

In Haiti, the assumption that we knew the answers before coming in led to one of the greatest disasters-on-disaster in modern times. There, after the quake killed 100,000 to 316,000 people, responders also assumed a cholera epidemic might be looming, despite the small detail that there had never been a laboratory-confirmed case of cholera in Haiti, ever. Focused on the wrong threat, no one bothered to screen UN peacekeepers arriving from an active cholera outbreak in Nepal, nor repaired the flawed sanitation system on their rural Haitian base. Scientists say those soldiers’ bacteria caused an epidemic that has since killed more than 8,300 Haitians.

The worst bias responders and journalists typically show when arriving in disaster zones is to forget that life did not begin, and will not end, with the catastrophe. In the Philippines, washed-out roads and already difficult travel conditions have, predictably, hampered rescue efforts, and the emphasis is on speed—or lack thereof. But preparation and readiness would always have saved more lives than any response.

In Haiti, much of the media attention was focused on foreign rescuers’ efforts to pull survivors from the rubble. But the sad truth was that rescuers took days to arrive and, in the end, were able to save only around 200 of the untold thousands trapped. Most rescues will be by neighbours or first responders already nearby. So the real question is whether institutions will be created before the next disaster strikes so that people can do better than pulling corpses out of rubble hours or days after it’s too late—a task very few aid groups are willing or able to get to grips with.

A survivor walks past two ships that ran ashore, crushing villages in their path.

Of course, anything can happen. So the key is to stay aware and try to get a sense of what is actually going on. In the Philippines, the UN has again set up its “cluster” system, in which aid workers hold meetings to coordinate on topics such as water, shelter, or health. That system failed most Haitians, however, largely because the meetings were closed to the public and held in a language—English—that few could speak. In the Philippines, it will be far more effective for responders to spend time listening to survivors and finding out what is actually going on.

Responders should also always be honest with their donors, letting them know if they actually have experience in the place they want to work (or even have people on the ground). Donors and reporters should want to know what the groups asking for their money realistically expect to accomplish and how much money they really need to do it. And above all, responders should be accountable to the people they promise to help and always adhere to that primary principle: first do no harm. All too often these things don’t happen.

The irony in Anna Karenina is that there are no truly happy families; each has their own problems. It’s the same with countries. None of our cities and homes are immune from disaster, and in a warming, crowded world, calamity seems more likely to strike than ever. In every case, it is crucial to stop, understand the situation, and keep working until the real problems are solved. It’s what we would expect for our own families, after all.

Jonathan M Katz is a freelance journalist and the author of The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster. He was the Associated Press correspondent in Haiti from 2007 to 2011.

@KatzOnEarth.

More stories about disasters:

A Doomsday Prepper Explains How to Solve the Philippines' Typhoon Crisis

I Spoke to the Hurricane Sandy Meme Model

These Nuclear Physicists Think Dave Suzki Is Exaggerating About Fukushima

Meet the Guy Who Created a Rabbi Shaped Dildo

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Image courtesy of Shed Simove

On paper, the Jewish comedian Shed Simove sounds like a parent’s ideal child. After graduating from Oxford University and becoming the commissioning editor Big Brother, he embarked on a successful comedy career and published three books. Not all parents, though, would be eager to see their offspring hit the headlines for a somewhat less prestigious reason, such as Shed's most recent product, the Rampant Rabbi, a rabbi-shaped silicone dildo.

A parody of the popular Rampant Rabbit vibrator, the Rampant Rabbi is a miniature man shaped like a normal dildo, complete with a suit, kippah, and curly hair. Recently, Shed tried to trademark the device, but Ann Summers, the British chain lingerie store behind the Rampant Rabbit, challenged his trademark application, accidentally giving the Rampant Rabbi a whole lot of publicity in the process.

This isn’t the first time Shed’s name has appeared in tabloids because of his weird entrepreneurial endeavors. Shed has created other “masturpieces” (including Cunt Dracula and the Queen Elizabeth-shaped Buckingham Phallus), changed his name to God, trademarked the phrase “The Trademark Office Has No Sense Of Humour,” created his own currency, and sold enough copies of a blank book called What Every Man Thinks About Apart From Sex to make it an Amazon bestseller.

The Rampant Rabbi sounded like another publicity stunt, especially since there’s an entire section on Shed’s website devoted to scandals. But I also wondered whether there was more to his headline-grabbing than an inexhaustible supply of puns. So I called Shed to see if he merely wanted attention or if there was a bigger point to the silicone rabbi he wants women to sit on.

What inspired you to make the Rampant Rabbi and your other “Masturpieces?”
I love wordplay, and I also like playing with societal conventions. I like looking at taboos like religion and sex—big issues like life and death. For me, the idea of a product that combines religion and sex is intriguing. But more than that, I’m a comedian whose jokes are three-dimensional. When your usual comedians think of a joke, they’ll write it down and it will become a line in their set. My life is a series of experiential jokes—3D jokes.

What gave you the idea for the Rampant Rabbi?
Because I work on puns, I think it must have popped into my head. I take an interest in the fact that Rampant Rabbit is a bestselling dildo. You take one letter off the Rampant Rabbit, and suddenly you’ve got a slightly humorous idea.

Did your Jewish heritage influence the Rampant Rabbi?
Yes, I think so. When I produce a product, part of it is to make my friends and family laugh. I’m not religiously Jewish or culturally Jewish, but I was born Jewish. I think it’s fun to play with one’s culture. I hope it’s an affectionate homage.

Has your dispute with Anne Summers been resolved?
I filed the trademark so that no one else would be able to make a toy called the Rampant Rabbi, but it got on the radar of the Ann Summers legal team, and they took umbrage to the fact that it was close to their trademark of Rampant Rabbit. It is very unlikely that the intelligent women that are buying both products are ever going to confuse a vibrator which causes amazing pleasure with a medical-grade silicone phallus in the shape of a rabbi. What do you think, Rachel?

I’ve never used a vibrator or dildo myself, but you’re probably right.
A similar situation happened with my 50 Shades of Grey parody [which was a book containing 50 pages that were different shades of grey]. I released my 50 Shades of Grey, and the lawyers at Random House who, ironically, were my publishers for my first real book, Ideas Man, didn’t see that I wasn’t competing against the real 50 Shades of Grey. If you’re passing off a pretend Louis Vuitton handbag, I understand that, but I’m not trying to create counterfeit goods. I’m trying to create parodies.

You said you're interested in big issues. Do your parodies make a broader point?
I think that I’m a bit like the Dalai Lama—I’m the Dalai Lama of novelty. A smiling, radiant, fun being, with a serious message underneath. I know I’m not changing the world, but sometimes taboos and things that people hold dear can be a ripe seam of comedy.

What kind of woman do you think will masturbate with your dildos?
The modern woman. I designed these creations to be something unique—there are lots of normal adult toys out there that are smooth and look like the male appendage. But no one has ever done one in the shape of a queen before; I thought that might capture the imagination of a nation of people: the modern woman and the modern man. I’m an equal opportunities adult toys creator.

Are you worried that nobody will want a small statue of the queen inside their vagina and you won’t sell any dildos?
I never am worried about sales, Rachel—the business side of it is never my motivation. I think “What is art?” is an interesting question. Without being too pompous about it, when Damien Hirst or Banksy does a piece that’s brilliantly witty and comes to life in a visual way, their output goes for hundreds and thousands of dollars—perhaps millions—and who deems it art? I think of my stuff as my art, because it comes from my soul. Who’s to say that the Rampant Rabbi shouldn’t win the Turner Prize? I think it should.

@RachelMSavage

More about sex toys:

Scanning the Future of 3D-Printed Sex Toys

I’m a Homo but I Loved Having Sex with This Robotic Pussy

Can Any of These DIY Sex Toys Make Me Orgasm?

Kids Telling Dirty Jokes: Gabriella

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Kids Telling Dirty Jokes is our new series that features tiny comedians we found on Craigslist. The second episode stars Gabriella, a Kathy Griffin Jr. who looks like an adorable, little angel but is actually a foul-mouted baby heathen. 

Previously - Talin

 

 

Taji's Mahal: Traveling Across America with the Infinite Daps Tour

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Alongside filmmaker Adam Sauermilch, I spent ten days on a bus, documenting RL Grime, Baauer, Ryan Hemsworth, and Jim-E-Stack on their Infinite Daps Tour. We had planned activities for every tour stop, but a few days into the tour, we realized it was impossible to stop at an aquarium since every day the guys were waking up at 3 PM after a long night of playing for fans. However, we did slip in some go-carting, good old fashioned American gun shooting, and BBQ. As Adam filmed the dudes' every move for THUMP's documentary, Infinite Daps, I snapped these photos of the musicians and their fans. 

@RedAlurk

Previously - Jumping Around with Ninjasonik

Comics: Fashion Cat

Mapping Toronto's Music Scene Thanks to a Sweet Infographic

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Toronto is a world class music city.

Sure, we have suffer from sporadic inferiority complex symptoms now and again—thanks to the belief that our scene is not as exciting or as diverse as the scenes in Montreal, New York, London, etc., but that’s simply not true.

Before some guy wearing a mouse head was on the cover of Rolling Stone and a former Degrassi star was selling out stadiums simply for his rapping abilities, Toronto’s music scene has been flourishing for decades. No matter what your tastes are, there’s something here for everbody, whether it be hip-hop, electronic, indie rock or a genre that doesn’t even have a proper name yet.

Thanks to the folks at Red Bull, we now have this incredible infographic that has exhaustively (but by no means completely) detailed the city’s music history from A (Air Canada Centre) to Zed (Zed’s Dead). Painstakingly curated by local DJ and music journalist Denise Benson—whose dedication to chronicling Toronto’s music scene through her writing and “Then & Now” column for The Grid— should certainly be recognized here. It features timelines dedicated to artists, journalists and promoters (in three different categories - disco/dance floor/electronic, rock/indie/alternative, and hip-hop/reggae/soul), media (including several outlets that have died and been reborn in a different incarnation), record stores, and events ranging from Jimi Hendrix’s arrest at Toronto International Airport in 1969 to "SARSStock" with The Rolling Stones in 2003 to Deadmau5 becoming the first Canadian artist to headline the venue formerly known as SkyDome (Rogers Centre) in 2011.

As someone who has only lived in Toronto for a little over five years, it’s remarkable to me how so much has changed in that time. There’s now a fancy furniture store in the building on the corner of Queen Street West and Bathurst, which used to house The Big Bop/Kathedral, and where I crowdsurfed in the basement watching Fucked Up play for the first time. I came here from Nova Scotia for school, but I was introduced to Toronto through the music of bands like Crystal Castles, Final Fantasy, and Death From Above 1979. The timeline also serves as a eulogy for some of those groups that have since broken up, Broken Social Scene (many of whose members are still making music under different guises) and The Constantines to name two in particular. Hopefully whether you’ve lived in Toronto your entire or a few years like me, this timeline will trigger your own memories of seeing your bands with friends, buying your favourite record at a local shop or attending one of the city’s world class music festivals.

And what’s next? Toronto’s newest wunderkinds include 16-year-old producer Ebony “Wondagurl” Oshunrindie (who was responsible for creating the beat for Jay-Z’s track “Crown”) synth-pop band DIANA (whose members have being playing in various other musical projects for several years), and the EDM trap duo Thugi. Despite this infographic ending now, for Toronto it’s certainly not the end of a timeline—just a pause, while an extension cord is found for the new artists, bands, journalists, and publications that will continue to push the city’s music scene in new and exciting directions. Whatever happens, you can guarantee it will be as diverse as Toronto itself.
 

See the full Toronto music infographic right over here, thanks to our musical friends at Red Bull.

Poachers Are Still Getting Duped Into Shooting Robot Deer

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Poachers Are Still Getting Duped Into Shooting Robot Deer

Weediquette: Smoking on the Can

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Image via

Although I’ve spent countless hours defending my weed habit, I would never defend my love for tobacco. Where standing up for cannabis becomes more mainstream everyday, the defense for tobacco weakens—and rightfully so. We all know how bad cigarettes are for us, and doctors (mainly my sister-in-law) tell me quitting tobacco is the best thing I can do for my health. Time and time again, I’ve tried to quit smoking tobacco, but—as many of you know—it’s really fucking hard. Cigarettes are engrained into my daily routine. Although I’m a fairly strong-willed person, I can’t quit smoking. Even if I manage to cut out cigarettes from my life, I have another habit to face, because I prefer to smoke spliffs. (Of course, I always smoke with pure hemp papers; I’m not an animal.) No joint is as juicy to me unless it has that extra kick, and this preference harangues me daily. A few decades ago, hearing a stoner criticize tobacco would have been laughable, but medical knowledge has turned the tables. You can call anti-cigarette ads propaganda, but they’ve outperformed any headway Reefer Madness made.

As the tide changes, I’m frequently reminded of why I should quit. Instead of hating myself for failing to quit smoking cigarettes, I recently took a comprehensive look at my smoking habits. I isolated my addiction down to three or four cigarette breaks a day and realized they all take place while I'm sitting on the toilet taking a crap. 

I learned this habit from my relatives. My family is weird. We’re Muslim, and although most of us were never particularly religious, we adhered to the restrictions our culture dictated. Avoiding pork was easy, but abstaining from alcohol was another story. America is a country where drinking is a part of life; sobriety made us a whole different kind of family. Most my family members—especially my parents’ generation—lacked vices, so they smoked. In my house, the adults smoked in secret. Somewhere along the line, they deduced that the best place to feed a clandestine smoking habit was in the bathroom before a shower. Theoretically, this was a good idea—stuffing the door with towels keeps the smoke in, the shower steam neutralizes the smell, and most bathrooms have a vent. For years, these practices prevented me from discovering their smoking habits. As a kid, I never thought about the weird smell that lingered in the bathroom after my uncle showered, but around the age of 13, I put the pieces together, and I wanted to take part in the family ritual.

I had recently moved from my home in Thailand to Long Island, and my circumstances were not apt for socialization. At a time when most kids were occupied with soccer practice and birthday parties, I had oodles of time on my hands. On top of being bored as hell, I had arrived at an age when most kids want to break a rule or two. One day after school, I came home and went straight to the bathroom to do a search for contraband. Sure enough, underneath the sink behind a multipack of scrubbing pads were a pack of cigarettes and a book of matches. I quickly shut the door and carefully pulled one of the pristine white cylinders from the box. I did a quick check before lighting it. Door stuffed with bathroom mat? Check. Fan on? Check. Makeshift toilet paper ashtray? Check. I lit the cigarette. For two minutes, I was in the throes of excitement until the process of smoking the whole thing began to feel tedious, but I was stuck—if I didn’t turn the whole cigarette to ash, I needed to dispose of it. What if it doesn’t flush? I wondered. I’m in it this far, might as well finish it. But what do I do, just stand here? Well, there’s a toilet. I might as well take a shit.

The moment I sat down on the can and took a drag of the cigarette, I felt the legacy of my forefathers. If you’ve smoked a cigarette, you know that it can make you need to shit, but hopefully you have the restraint to not combine the two activities. However, if you make shitting and smoking a habit, no shit will feel as satisfying unless you’re smoking the customary cigarette that goes with it. You’ll be cursed to be a cultural deviant for the rest of your life, and you’ll tie an essential function of your body to a detrimental substance. The first time I smoked a cigarette in the bathroom, it all made sense—all the adults in my family weren’t just hiding their smoking habits from us. They were hiding their smoking and shitting habits from us.

As much as I knew this that first time, I knew I was fucked. For me, smoking on the can made me feel better about waking up for school. I  despised waking up early, and that morning smoke eased the transition between slumber and real life—which I always found so difficult. It became an addiction, and without ceremony, I joined the ranks of my family’s secret society.

The habit was pretty easy to maintain all through high school when I lived at home in can-smoking central, but when I went away to college, my dorm's community bathrooms posed a threat. Undeterred by building regulations and the guaranteed opposition of my floor-mates, I smoked in the stall. Guys would stand outside the door and yell at me as I smoked, but I didn’t care. Eventually, the guys realized I refused to quit. When I moved off-campus the following year, I continued my smoking and shitting ritual. Few roommates cared, and on the rare occasion that someone confronted me about it, I apologized, admitted it wasn’t cool, and then confessed that I was going to continue smoking and shitting no matter what they said. Because I refused to budge on my morning ritual, I became easy-going when it came to my housemate’s foibles. I knew they would always have my bad habit on me, so I ignored the annoying things they did.

After 16 years of smoking as I shit, I now execute the habit like a ninja. If the right elements are in play, I could smoke a pack of 100s in your master bathroom and you would have no idea that I was ever there. That said, I’ve started to cut this awful habit out of my life. On days when I wake up feeling right, I can power through the morning without having a cigarette until after lunchtime. But then there are those mornings when I wake up hating everything and know I won’t be able to get through the day if I don’t sit on the can for 10 minutes with my head in my hands, smoking a cigarette and wondering if I should call out of work just for the fuck of it. On those mornings, I regress to my old ways, and the possibility of having a tobacco addiction for the rest of my life seems more real. If that’s the case, I sincerely hope the world becomes more and more critical of tobacco until it’s illegal. I’d rather not curse my future kids with the same fate by leaving them a pack of cigarettes to find behind the multipack of scrubbing pads in the bathroom. 

@ImYourKid

Previously - Hans the Weed Snob

Unaccompanied Miners

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Jose Luis and his cousin, young laborers who work together inside the Cerro Rico mine. All photos by Jackson Fager.

In 1936, George Orwell visited a coal mine in Grimethorpe, England. “The place is like… my own mental picture of hell,” he wrote of the experience. “Most of the things one imagines in hell are there—heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and, above all, unbearably cramped space.” Orwell was a lanky guy, 6'3" or 6'2", and I am too. So I was reminded of his comparison recently while crawling through a tunnel as dank and dark as a medieval sewer, nearly a mile underground in one of the oldest active mines in Latin America, the Cerro Rico in Potosí, Bolivia. The chutes were so narrow that I couldn’t have turned around—or turned back—even if I’d wanted to.

Orwell wasn’t the first to equate mines with hell; Bolivian miners already know they labor in the inferno. In the past 500 years, at least 4 million of them have died from cave-ins, starvation, or black lung in Cerro Rico, and as a sly fuck-you to the pious Spaniards who set up shop here in 1554 and enslaved the native Quechua Indians, Bolivian miners worship the devil—part of a schizophrenic cosmology in which God governs above while Satan rules the subterranean.

As an offering to him, miners slaughter llamas and smear blood around the entrances to the 650 mineshafts that swiss-cheese this hill. Near the bloodstains, just inside the mine, a visitor can find beady-eyed statues with beards and raging boners—a goofy caricature of Satan known as El Tio, or “the Uncle,” to whom workers give moonshine and cigarettes in exchange for good luck. Before entering the mountain, I’d offered a small pouch of coca leaves to one of these little devils, requesting a bendiga, a blessing for my safety.

A few hours later, I was hundreds of feet underground, shambling through three-foot-tall tunnels, bony knees bruising over hard rock. My guide, Dani, a miniature man with the strength and temperament of a donkey, had burrowed so far ahead that he’d disappeared into the darkness. I called out to him. When he didn’t reply, my photographer Jackson turned to me and coughed. “I’m freaking out,” he said, and we soldiered on, trying to trace Dani’s path through the hot, sulfur-stinking tunnel.

The Cerro Rico is collapsing. At its most productive the Rich Hill, as its name translates into English, yielded more than half of the world’s silver, bankrolled the Spanish empire for 200 years, and inspired a popular saying based on the name of the city where it’s located: “Worth a potosí,” as in, “That Escalade must be worth a potosí, hombre.”

But after 500 years of exploitation, the hill—which, at almost 16,000 feet, is actually a gigantic mountain towering like a skyscraper above the ramshackle churches and plazas of this city of 240,000 people—is as exhausted as its workers. Today, it still produces a little tin, zinc, and silver, and 15,000 men continue to labor inside of it, but they’ve done such a thorough job that the Cerro Rico has become structurally unsound. “One of the fears,” Roberto Fernandez, coordinator of the labor rights NGO Yachaj Mosoj, told a reporter in 2010, “is that Cerro Rico is going to crumble like the Twin Towers, floor by floor.”

The Cerro Rico mountain—which miners also call the “mountain that eats men”—looms over the city of Potosí, Bolivia

In an attempt to calm Jackson’s nerves, I reminded him that tourists were taken into these mines all the time. I’d actually visited ten years ago. What I didn’t mention to him was that the depth at which we were spelunking was far beyond the limits recommended to study-abroad students.

Jackson and I were on a mission to find child miners, 3,000 of whom are rumored to work in the Cerro Rico illegally. Their work is officially forbidden by the Bolivian government, so they tend to stay out of sight when foreigners come around. But Jackson was still nervous, with good reason—according to the most recent available statistics, 60 children died from cave-ins and other accidents in the Cerro Rico in 2008 alone. In a country as poor as Bolivia, just because tourists—or children—are allowed to do something doesn’t mean it’s safe.

When we finally caught up with Dani, he had crawled his way to a group of working miners. Mazes of tiny tunnels led to large rooms carved out of rock, where silver veins have been dug out with hand picks, jackhammers, and sticks of dynamite. Five filthy and shirtless men stood around. Dani introduced us.

“Osama bin Laden is hiding down here!” laughed a guy with a shovel, stripped to the waist. When I pointed out that bin Laden was dead, he seemed genuinely surprised.

The men were in their 30s, they told me, and they’d been working together in the mines for about ten years, splitting the profits of the minerals they collected and sold. At best, they each made about $30 a day. They confirmed that there were children working down there but couldn’t say exactly where. But we didn’t talk long. It was nearing the end of the workday, they had just finished planting eight dynamite sticks in a nearby rock face, and they wanted to ignite it so they could go home—but they couldn’t, because they’d forgotten matches.

“Captain America,” one miner said to me, “do you have any matches?”

A statue of a miner, holding a jackhammer and a rifle, at the miner’s market in Potosí

I didn’t. The only solution was for someone to scramble back up to the mouth of the mine—a half-hour journey at a steady clip—and retrieve some.

And that’s how Dani, our trusted guide, abandoned us in the depths of the Cerro Rico.

“I’ll go get some for you, brothers,” he told the crew before racing off into one of the feeder shafts and disappearing. They shrugged and returned to work.

“Jesus,” Jackson said. “He really left.”

“Yup,” I said.

A few minutes later, I heard a sizzling sound. Jackson stared at me. Then we both looked to the corner of the chamber where dynamite fuses dangled from a wall like tampon strings plugging up a whole world of trouble.

“Are they lit?” I asked one of the miners.

“You bet,” he said. Apparently they’d found some matches after all.

“When are they going to explode?” I asked. It seemed like a pertinent question, given that we were standing almost a mile underground, in a chamber full of dynamite, inside an already collapsing mountain.

“Any minute, Captain America. You’d better run!”

A worker inside the Cerro Rico mine.

I’d gone to Bolivia because some NGOs and activists there have been trying—seemingly against all good sense—to lower the legal working age from 14 to six years old. And this was not the doing of mine owners or far-right politicians seeking cheap labor like one might expect. Instead the idea has been floated by a group of young people ages eight to 18 called the Union of Child and Adolescent Workers (UNATSBO)—something like a pee-wee version of the AFL-CIO—who have proposed a law that aims to allow young children to legally work. Bolivia’s congress is slated to vote on a version of the law as soon as this month.

Why would an organization dedicated to fighting for the rights of young workers want to lower the legal working age? Current regulations state that youth can begin work no younger than 14, but these laws are rarely followed. Bolivia is a nation of fewer than 11 million people. This includes approximately 850,000 children who work full-time, nearly half of whom are under 14.

“They work in secrecy,” Alfredo, a 16-year-old who since the age of eight has worked as a bricklayer, construction worker, and currently as a street clown, told me when I met him at a cafe in El Alto, the teeming slum city just outside of La Paz, Bolivia’s capital. Outside in the street, children known as voceadores—“barkers”—leaned from buses and called out their respective destinations in the hopes of earning a few coins from sympathetic or illiterate passengers unable to read the signs. “And that secrecy,” he continued, “pushes these kids into the shadows, as if they were criminals.”

As we ate lunch, Alfredo told me a story about his first experience of exploitation, while working making matracas, small music boxes, when he was 12. “The boss was refusing to pay me my wages,” he said, which amounted to about $3 per ten-hour workday. “And I kept demanding my wages, and he kept saying, ‘I’ll pay you later, I’ll pay you later.’ After six months of this, he said I hadn’t done a sufficient job… as an excuse not to pay me.” If Alfredo had been working legally he would have technically had legal recourse to demand his back pay. “In the end, I got half of what I was owed.” Shortly thereafter, he joined UNATSBO.

Jose Luis searches for a vein of silver inside the Cerro Rico.

In 1910, at the tail end of the industrial revolution, somewhere around 2 million children in the US worked in coal mines, factories, and on plantations. A century earlier in England, more than 50 percent of the workforce in some textile and garment factories consisted of child laborers. The inspiration behind David Copperfield was Charles Dickens’s own experience working in a factory as a 12-year-old. “I know enough of the world now to have lost the capacity of being much surprised by anything,” he wrote, “but it is a matter of some surprise to me, even now, that I can have been so easily thrown away at such a young age.”

But today, after two centuries of economic development, compulsory schooling, and restrictive legislation, less than 1 percent of the workforce in the Western world is made up of children, and the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) Minimum Age Convention has codified these developments into a widely followed international agreement. In 1973, the ILO convention set the minimum working age at 15 (14 in some circumstances) and was ratified by 166 countries.

Efforts to eradicate child labor in underdeveloped countries, however, have floundered. According to the ILO, there are still 168 million children in the world under the age of 17 working in every type of grueling physical capacity imaginable. In Africa, 59 million children work, or one out of five young people; in Asia, the workforce includes 78 million kids. In Latin America, it’s 13 million, or nearly one of every ten children. In Bolivia, the poorest country in South America, one of every three children works.

According to the ILO, the total number of children working worldwide has declined since 1960, but rapid urbanization has increased child-labor figures in many cities. Additionally, a 2008 study by the ILO projected that the global recession was likely to drive 300,000 to 500,000 new children into the Latin American workforce. The fact that so many children continue to work is, according to a joint study by economists at Cornell University, “a failure of stunning proportions.” Because so many of these kids work illegally, they are invisible, laboring in the shadows. It’s not just child miners, in other words, who work underground.

Miners inside the Cerro Rico.

UNATSBO formed sometime around 1995 in response to the still-abysmal working conditions faced by young laborers in Bolivia. From the start it was composed of kids organizing kids, voting for their own leaders and rules. Last year Alfredo, the street clown I had lunch with, was elected president of the El Alto chapter of UNATSBO. He had participated in a march on the president’s palace in La Paz in December 2007, with 1,000 other UNATSBO kids, to protest legislation proposed by Bolivian President Evo Morales that, if passed, would’ve raised the legal working age from 14 to 18. His fellow marchers wielded placards that read, if i don’t work, who will support my family?

UNATSBO’s protest helped defeat the attempt to raise the working age to 18. It was a clear victory, but not the solution to Bolivia’s macro-socioeconomic problems.

Luz Rivera Daza, one of UNATSBO’s fully grown supporters from the NGO Caritas in Potosí, where she works with unionized children, is part of a larger shift in the thinking among some Latin American intellectuals and activists about how best to respond to the realities of child labor in the 21st century.

“If I tell kids to stop working in the mines, what can I offer them instead?” she told me when I visited her at her office in Potosí. “The families of these children may literally starve if they stop working—their wages help keep the families afloat. Restrictive laws hurt these children,” she said. “We need to eradicate poverty before we can talk about eradicating child labor.”

Luz told me she hadn’t received pay for three months because a crucial grant to her NGO had failed to come through. “I don’t believe that work is bad for kids,” she said. “What’s wrong is exploitation and discrimination because you’re a child.”

But when I asked Luz if she would allow her own children to work, she paused. “No,” she said. “I wouldn’t.”

Miners inside the Cerro Rico.

Mainstream regulatory bodies like the ILO and the UN agree with her on this last point. The ILO’s preferred policy position is total prohibition of all child labor performed by people younger than 14. “The dangers of allowing children as young as six to work are tremendous,” Jose M. Ramirez, head of the ILO’s International Program on the Elimination of Child Labour, told me. “If they’re working, then they’re likely not spending enough time in school. And while the immediate result of youth having jobs is that the children earn money, in the long run they lose money.”

Another destructive effect, Jose pointed out, is that employers sometimes hire children instead of adults, depressing overall wages. This is precisely what happens in Bolivia’s sugarcane harvest, where child workers are known as cuartas, or “quarters”—meaning they’re considered one-quarter of a person and paid accordingly. Hacking away at reeds with machetes in extreme temperatures, they’re also, like many child workers, subject to physical and psychological harm.

“Some say our attempts to eradicate child labor are culturally imperialist,” Jose said, pointing out another rift in the child-labor debate. In much of the world, the concept of childhood stems from the Victorian idea of the “walled garden”—the belief that kids develop best by being protected from the concerns of the adult world for as long as possible. Yet in Bolivia, where 62 percent of the population is indigenous, Quechua and Aymara Indian leaders celebrate child labor and don’t think children should be barred from contributing to their families’ livelihoods.

Though President Morales has been a strong advocate for protecting the cultural traditions of Bolivia’s indigenous groups, his administration believes that all labor by people younger than 14 should be explicitly banned. It’s not 100 percent certain what exactly is included in the current bill that UNATSBO has proposed to Bolivia’s congress, because as of press time it’s still not through the final phase of revisions. UNATSBO aims to explicitly prohibit the most dangerous jobs, like mining and sugarcane harvesting, and lower Bolivia’s minimum-age requirements.

Mabel Duran, a specialist in the Bolivian Ministry of Labor, told me that President Morales’s administration supports updating the child-labor code to tighten restrictions on dangerous work but does not support lowering the age limit. She explained that her office carries out inspections, helps organize protests of businesses that employ young children, and investigates complaints about the mistreatment of child workers.

But the government’s failure to enforce the existing laws gives legitimacy to the legalize-child-labor approach of UNATSBO. In Bolivia, UNATSBO and its various chapters have 15,000 members, and there are similar child unions in Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, Guatemala, Colombia, Paraguay, and Nicaragua. As these groups grow in size and influence, a larger split between First and Third World child-labor advocates looms. While UNATSBO’s current bill may or may not pass in Bolivia’s congress, it likely won’t be the last attempt of its kind.

Alfredo, right, is the 15-year-old leader of the El Alto chapter of UNATSBO, the Union of Child and Adolescent Workers. By day, he works as a street clown alongside his 12-year-old nephew.

The Sucre Cemetery grounds in Potosí—all glittering caskets and skeletal trees, with the snowcapped Cerro Rico looming in the background—are the closest thing to a public park in Potosí. There, I met two shy siblings, Cristina and Juan Carlos, where they work cleaning gravestones. Cristina, 16, started working when she was 13, and Juan Carlos, who is 13, started working when he was eight.

Because of overcrowding, the caskets are stacked vertically, and Cristina and Juan Carlos climb ladders to polish or place flowers on graves for the elderly, who pay them about $2 to $4 per day in tips. They work for a few hours after school and from 6 PM to midnight on weekends. Half of their earnings go toward school supplies and clothes, and the other half is given to their father, a truck driver, to help pay for food and rent. They also said that their father has a new girlfriend and squanders some of his money buying her gifts.

Cristina and Juan Carlos’s older brother, Jhonny, got Juan Carlos involved in UNATSBO. He had been working since he was eight or nine years old, but two years ago, at age 19, he committed suicide by hanging himself.

At the cemetery, Juan Carlos took me to his favorite part of Sucre’s grounds—his dead brother’s gravesite, which he polishes as part of his routine. As he dolefully scrubbed the stones, I saw that a bottle of homemade corn brew—or chicha—lay beside Jhonny’s tomb because he was a fan of drinking. “There used to be a lot more kids at the cemetery,” Juan Carlos said. “But a lot of them have retired due to drugs and alcoholism.”

While Juan Carlos polished away, Cristina led me to a part of the cemetery where the city’s miners were buried. It was a beautiful sepulcher, the Andes towering on the horizon. One wall read, the miner’s service to his community ends here.

When I asked Cristina if there was anything she didn’t like about her work, she said that drunks and thieves sometimes sneaked into the cemetery at night and harassed her. “They call me a slacker,” she said, “and say that I’m just working for my own enjoyment.”

When she was done polishing the miners’ tombs, I asked her if she ever thought about death, having spent so much time working in the cemetery. “I’m more afraid of life than death,” she said after a long pause. “Because in death, at least, you can rest with God.”

Cristina, preparing flowers to place on graves at the Sucre Cemetery in Potosí

On one of my last days in Potosí, I finally managed to arrange a meeting with a child miner who makes his living in the depths of Cerro Rico. Fifteen-year-old Jose Luis met me at his family’s shack in the working-class neighborhood of San Cristobal. Their house rests on a steep, cobblestone slope shrouded in clouds. Like everyone else in the city, Jose Luis lives in the shadow of the Cerro Rico.

On some mornings and nights he walks an hour up the dirt road to Cerro Rico before descending into the mine to work.

“At first I was very scared,” he said, recalling his first day at the mine at age 11. “All that darkness is spooky.” A few years later he was in the tunnels sifting rocks when he spotted a group of men carrying a dead body. It was an accident, and that became his new fear: getting killed. “If you go up,” he said, “you don’t know if you will come back down.”

Jose Luis works on a team with his father and cousins. He avoids the most dangerous jobs, like drilling, which fills the lungs with dust and leads to silicosis (and, eventually, death), and dynamiting, which can cause cave-ins. Instead he goes to the mines a few days a week after school to search for small bits of silver. He can earn up to $20 a day; often, however, he doesn’t find any valuable minerals and earns nothing.

Unlike the laboring urchins that Dickens documented in 1800s England, who were exploited by sinister and unscrupulous industrialists, today’s child laborer is often self-employed, struggling to make a few bucks in an informal economy whose rules and rewards are ever changing. That’s why today’s child labor is so difficult to derail—there is no clear enemy besides poverty, plain and simple.

After our interview, Jose Luis and I went down into the mine together. I wanted to see firsthand what his workday was like. He was chipper, and happy to have the company.

At Sucre Cemetery in Potosí, Juan Carlos stands in front of his brother’s grave. His brother also worked in the cemetery until he committed suicide two years ago.

It took about a half hour of crawling to the shafts where Jose Luis worked. I watched him, on his knees in a four-foot-tall cave as he chipped away at a rock face, scouring for silver.

“You know this is dangerous, right?” I asked.

“I do,” he said. “But I try not to think about it.”

Dynamite blasts periodically erupted in the distance, and his dad and cousins arrived not long after we did. With them was another young miner, 12 or 13 years old, dressed in a pink jumpsuit and looking completely shell-shocked. He and six grown men had been upstairs drilling and dynamiting. He said that he’d dropped out of school two months before and had just started working the mines.

“Do you like it?” I asked.

“No,” was all he said.

All photos by Jackson Fager.

Delve into the mines with Bolivia’s young workers with our new documentary Child Workers of the World, Unite! this month.

More from this issue:

Thank You 

Unaccompanied Minors

Twitter Selves

Scientists Have Identified the Most Irreplaceable Areas on the Planet

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Scientists Have Identified the Most Irreplaceable Areas on the Planet

Music Reviews

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HOPSIN
Knock Madness
Funk Volume

Every 16-year-old skate rat with a zit factory for a face and a dense thicket of unwashed pubes needs a guardian angel, and for that, God dooked this dog-log straight onto LA. If you think you might fit his demographic, steal the keys to your mom’s certified preowned Toyota Sienna, and scoot on over to the nearest Best Buy. Then go to Crate & Barrel, pick up a classic black-serrated chopper, and cut your face off.
DANIA MEHBOOBY-PHAARTY
 

FUTURE
Honest
Freebandz/A1/Epic

Ever since I illegally downloaded this record, I’ve been guzzling codeine and popping MDMA like a sorority girl at Ultra. It’s made me realize a handful of fun facts about this strange world: 1) Future is my favorite rapper; 2) Future perfect isn’t a tense, it’s a sentence fragment I should consider revising; and 3) I can’t feel my dong when I pee.
JERRY NATHAN
 

MIA
Matangi
N.E.E.T./Interscope

In the high school cafeteria of the music industry, MIA doesn’t sit at the table, she sits on it, spread-eagle. She’s unfazed by the popular kids, and so far removed from the normal drama of homework and friends we can’t help but sorta wonder if she’s even listed in the official registrar. She’s never been “nice” to us, of course—she’s never been “nice” to anyone—but one time she wordlessly plucked a french fry off our lunch tray and slid it between her plump lips and licked the ketchup off like it was Don Juan’s dick. It was at that moment we realized we never wanted to mean something to someone more in our entire stupid lives.
LINDSAY WEIRD
 

CUT COPY
Free Your Mind
Modular

I remember sitting on a plush couch at a Cut Copy concert in 2005. I was about 20 years old, I’d been treating my body like a landfill for weeks, and I’m pretty sure I had a “dime piece” on each arm. I vaguely remember the frosty chill of the raspberry vodka in my hand, and the suppleness of kangaroo leather against the nape of my neck. Now I’m sitting in an office listening to a song actually, literally called “Walking in the Sky” off an album actually, literally called Free Your Mind, and you should really see my face right now. Just take one look at my goddamn fucking face, pussy.
ZARDOZ
 

BEST COVER OF THE MONTH

DEATH GRIPS
No Love Deep Web
Harvest

Death Grips are like that psycho girl you dated in college who was the first person to ever tongue your butthole. It felt better than being on ketamine in space, but it came with the price of explaining to your parents why the nice girl you’ve been spending so much time with puked in their imitation Mycenaean vase. The Grips felt like life-changers when they dropped, but by now, we’re kinda over it and are ready to date erudite women who are sweet and do yoga and shit.
JAWN F. KENNEDY
 

MELVINS
Tres Cabrones
Ipecac

Sometimes I feel like the rules of punk changed before I was old enough to play. It must have been sick 25 or so years ago to skate around all day, boozing, using, and listening to Melvins while spray-painting the words fake abortion clinic on anything that moved. This record is equal parts perfection and mind-numbing idiocy, but at least they’re touring with new material instead of trotting out the sort of ATP nostalgia trip that’s somehow considered acceptable these days.
LINDSEY LEONARD
 

BAD RELIGION
Christmas Songs
Epitaph

I really hate this. I don’t know what Bad Religion is thinking, but there’s no such thing as God. All this music and culture are distractions from the very real horror of human violence and depravity that squirms like a bed of writhing snakes under society’s civil veneer. Law and order is a collective dream we can awaken from at any time. Soon there will come a day when the poor and downtrodden will no longer be placated with food stamps; instead they will sup on your entrails and blood, boiling your premature babies in a cauldron of bullion and duck fat. You’re dialing 911, but I have different numbers: 9mm, 12 gauge, and AR-15. It’s gonna make The Turner Diaries look like The Wizard of Oz.
BRADLEY “DIRTBOMB” BANKS
 

MATT PRYOR
Wrist Slitter
Rory

Matt Pryor is the guy from the Get Up Kids, and this record is called Wrist Slitter. Low-hanging fruit, I know, so I’m just going to take the high road and say this album does not, in fact, make me want to slit my wrists. It kind of just sounds like another Get Up Kids record, which just makes me want to cut up this CD so I can stab the members of said band in the larynx so their creative afterbirth can’t hurt anyone else.
DAN OZZI
 

WOODEN SHIPS
Back to Land
Thrill Jockey

While I listened to this album, I made a mental list of the dumb things that it reminded me of. Fast-forward to an hour before deadline, and since truly being capital-F Funny is harder than fisting a pigeon, I decided to cut out the middleman and present the list to you, unedited: the fake band from a commercial for dick pills played through a cheap reverb amp; a much more boring version of the Brian Jonestown Massacre with less money for drugs and gear; a weak, shitty fart on weak, shitty acid.
CHJRISTIAN STJORM
 

BLANCHE BLANCHE BLANCHE
Breaking Mirrors
Wharf Cat

A couple years ago, I stumbled across an insane music video for a song called “Talk Out Loud” from some Vermont freako band with a hilarious name. It was shot on a VHS camcorder from the 1800s and featured a sea of disembodied heads, a poorly framed tarp, and some lanky V-neck-wearing ding-donger wielding a keyboard as a shield. It was an absolute masterpiece of brain-dead, interstellar Casio pop, and I watched it a million times. But remember that time in high school when you were tricked into putting “Come On Eileen” on a mixtape because Napster told you it was a Clash song? I’m pretty sure a similar thing happened here, because these songs are a field of severed baby scrotums away from the one I remember by a band that was supposedly the same as this one.
SUKDIS P’JOSTICLE
 

TITLE FIGHT
Spring Songs EP
Revelation

For four songs, this is a pretty wacky ride. It starts off with what sounds like Hot Water Music in the midst of puberty and then lapses into some out-of-shape, slowed-down, spare-tire-stomach jams. Seriously, guys, if your band is named after one of our most primal sports, you’d better be in fucking tip-top physical condition. This sounds like the recording was made in between scarfing a huge plate of poutine at noon and the inevitable food coma that follows two hours later.
DAN OZZI
 

BEST ALBUM OF THE MONTH

MAGIK MARKERS
Surrender to the Fantasy
Drag City

I used to use this band as my alarm clock throughout my mid-20s. That was a dark time for me. I remember one summer morning when I woke up and slammed my alarm clock on the nightstand while coughing cigarette butts out of my mouth. I stumbled into the living room to see the remnants of the jar of peanut butter I’d scarfed the night before—not by smearing it on bread, or even using one of the knives lingering in the petri dish that doubled as my sink, but by sticking the TV remote into the jar and licking the peanut butter off the buttons like a hobo. I remember feeling like Magik Markers were my only friends, and looking back I’m pretty sure they were.
JED LARSON
 

PAMPERS
S/T
In the Red

Sometimes when I’m listening to Drake’s lyrics, I’m all like, “Oh, for fuck’s sake, this is totally something my mom would say.” Not so with these dudes. Sure, they could be talking about white-wine spritzers and alimony, but who the fuck can tell? They’re loud, they have unintelligible lyrics, and they named their band after a diaper. Drake can go shit his pants standing and then suck a good man’s dick.
SHANDWICHES
 

TOUGH AGE
Tough Age
Mint

Vancouver is cool because if any of your stuff gets stolen you can just bike over to the Downtown Eastside Open-Air Thief Market and buy it back from a toothless crackhead for a shiny toonie or whatever the fuck they do up there. What sucks about Vancouver is there are a bunch of IT guys pretending they’re in bands, which is the long and short of this piece-of-trash ensemble. I hope they choke on a gooseberry, or even a snozberry if you want to get all whimsical about it. That said, if you’re in Vancouver, say hi to Glenn from Beatroute. His bands are worth listening to, plus he hosts karaoke parties that look like The Apple.
HI GLENN
 

MOUNT EERIE
Pre-Human Ideas
P.W. Elverum & Sun

Have you ever wandered so deep into the woods that it took you hours of following streams that at first led nowhere and then, eventually, to your escape? That’s how all the other Mount Eerie albums sound. Pre-Human Ideas still sounds like getting lost, except this time you’re in the Viridian Forest (you know, from Pokémon), and all you can hear for miles are the robot voices of a million SmarterChilds and unanswered Missed Connections. It freaks me out and, honestly, breaks my heart a little bit, but I don’t hate it because sometimes getting your heart broken is exactly what you need to realize you’re a twat.
CAROLINE RAYNER
 

SWEARIN'
Surfing Strange
Salinas

I want Swearin’ to soundtrack everything I remember about my favorite road trip. Such as: we were driving from New York to Ohio, we only stopped for snacks, and we learned you could drink beer in the car without God teleporting a cop onto the asphalt. If you’re into it, promise me you’ll play this album over and over until you learn all the words. Promise me you’ll cry a little bit if you feel like it, because everyone else is passed out in the backseat anyway, and who gives a rat’s sack.
CAROLINE RAYNER
 

PSAPP
What Makes Us Glow
The state51 Conspiracy

This one goes out to all the dorks into getting dick-slapped by Portland. Why don’t you go get a kiosk at your local farmer’s market, hippie? What other cheap jokes can I make about the Northwest? Swiss chard tastes like burned paper, cassette tapes sound like shit, and kickball is for adults who wish they were still babies. Have a nice life, idiots. We’re canceling distribution in Oregon. [Editor’s note: this band is from London.]
DIC FLAIR
 

SORE EROS AND KURT VILE
Jamaica Plain EP
Care in the Community

I’ve never heard of Sore Eros, but I’m definitely familiar with Kurt Vile. Wakin on a Pretty Day was great—it really changed the way my mom paced her morning mall walks, plus it referenced Air Bud 2: Golden Receiver. This new EP was actually recorded 13 years ago, when Vile was in his 20s and working as a forklift operator in Philly. Props for him for getting out of Dodge, but this album is so goddamn boring it gives us yet another reason to hate the City of Brotherly Pud. (Just in case you’re wondering, the first two items on this list are “bars close too early” and “literally everything else about Philadelphia.”)
SAMWISE GASPEE
 

THE GROWLERS
Gilded Pleasures EP
Everloving, Inc.

The only two things you need to know about this band are that their name is a slang term that means “gross vagina,” and they created their own genre called beach goth, which is at least a step up from other made-up genres like rapegaze and frat punk. #SeapunkForever, though. #SeapunkForFuckingEver.
ALEX HAUS
 

ERAAS
Initiation
Felte

This whole album sounds like a contrived attempt at all the in-between moments in Radiohead songs that you don’t even notice until you have a sick day or something. Like, you’re in bed or cleaning and you’re out of good postclassical ambient bands, so you throw on Kid A and think, Holy fuck, Radiohead isn’t a bro meme at all! And then you realize that I hate you, fuckface.
MARGARET SNATCHER
 

THE BLOW
S/T
Kanine

When I was a teenager, I was this weird art lesbian in a small farming town who became very good at the internet during those early, lonely days. One of my crushes passed Poor Aim: Love Songs to me, and it did that life-changey thing that music used to do to us when we were teenagers. But this self-titled album is all growed-up and super annoying. No warmth or tiny, secret vibes. I guess that girl is in a long-term relationship now or something. It’s chill, though. And remember, kids: all love dies eventually.
LINDSPEE LEONARDEE
 

ONE DIRECTION
Midnight Memories
Syco/Columbia

I would guesstimate that there are several hundred lucky girls across the globe who’ve done it (“it” being defined as “at the very least an OTPHJ”) with one or more members of One Direction. These girls are probably hoping that their super meaningful tryst has been immortalized on 1D’s second record—’cause that’s what the title suggests, right? And how cool would it be to be the subject of, or at least a fleeting, semen-stained mention in, a pop song?! Little do they know their moment has already been committed to tape. One Direction has been advised by their legal team to record every single sexual encounter they have with their groupies (whose IDs are naturally checked by security in advance). This is to avoid potential lawsuits, allegations of rape, etc.—I’m sure you understand.
TAYLOR TAYLOR TAYLOR
 

KELIS
FOOD
Federal Prism

Remember when Kelis came out with rainbow-colored hair, shouting like a vengeful banshee? I miss that Kelis. Now that she’s disembarked from the EDM bandwagon and is hanging around her local taco truck with Dave Sitek, there’s a chance she’ll be great once more. But then again, this record was supposed to come out over the summer, and then she said September, and now it’s November, so there’s a very big chance that when this eventually comes out it will be severely dry and overcooked. Ba-dum-tsssssh.
PHARRELL WILL.I.AM.S
 

WORST COVER OF THE MONTH

HEIDECKER & WOOD
Some Things Never Stay the Same
Little Record Company

I almost gave this record a Barfy because Tim Heidecker makes me really uncomfortable. Yes, he’s a comedic genius on par with Voltaire or John Maynard Keynes, but I’m also pretty sure he’s the type of guy who calls customer-service lines on the backs of potato-chip bags so that he can relish some kind of fleeting human interaction while he touches himself (under the pants, over the briefs). Oh well, you win some, you splooge some.
TIN MAN
 

R. KELLY
Black Panties
RCA

If I could have lunch with one person on the planet, it’d be the awesome new gay-abortion pope. But my second choice would be R. Kelly, who I actually did meet earlier this year. All the other music writers out there had to wonder what his latest opus sounded like, but Kells himself showed it to me and it blew my mind all over my face and neck. Its quality proved one thing: there is no father to R. Kelly’s style (he is, however, everyone else’s father, in the musical sense and also in the he-probably-fucked-your-mom-and-he’s-your-dad sense).
DREW MILLARD
 

WORST ALBUM OF THE MONTH

AVRIL LAVIGNE
S/T
Epic

People used to get all mad at Avril Lavigne because she didn’t know who the Sex Pistols were, but seriously, who cares? I can’t think of many things that are more punk than not knowing who the Sex Pistols were, and frankly, “punk rock” isn’t even a real thing. All I’m saying is that there are way better reasons to hate (or love, depending on your point of view) her, and one of them is the number she did on her ex-husband, that dude from Sum 41. Have you seen him recently? He looks like Richard Dreyfuss’s bloated corpse weeks after he was shot trying to escape a death camp, which makes her the Goebbels of the third floor of the mall.
VINNIE VANNUCCI
 

LADY GAGA
ARTPOP
Interscope

Have you ever pissed on your belt? I do it at least two times a year and it doesn’t exactly make me proud of myself. There are a lot of dumb things girls don’t know about male sex parts, and I say that because my policy, whether you realize it or not, is to only write reviews for women. Another one is this thing that happens after you have sex. Sometimes dried jizz collects on your dickhole, and when you try to pee the next morning, your urine stream hits the cum barrier and splits in half, spraying wee-wee all over the wallpaper in your girlfriend’s mom’s bathroom. Then you realize you also pissed all over the fresh towels, and that’s a major pain in the ass.
TIM TOM
 

THE SPACE LADY
The Space Lady’s Greatest Hits
Night School

Susan Dietrich, a.k.a. the Space Lady, a.k.a. my galactic wet dream, was this weirdo homeless dropout busker chick who drifted between Boston and the Bay Area back in the 70s, supporting her draft-dodging husband and three kids by playing zonked-out space-themed psych covers in a winged Viking helmet. Most street musicians have a story like that, but most of them also make music that belongs in the environment where it was conceived: a quaint little town I like to call “Covered in Human Turds and Boxed Wine in the Dumpster Behind Carl’s Jr.”
DINAH SHORE’S TOOTHED OVARIAN CYST
 

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Purple Snow: Forecasting the Minneapolis Sound
Numero Group

Ah, hell yeah. Hell. Fuckin’. Yeah. I bet this four-disc survey of Minneapolis pre-Prince boner jams will set you back like $80 or something, but I got it for free and my girlfriend’s been thanking me for it ever since by reenacting scenes from Body of Evidence. Last night we threw this fucker on, and I rocked her until four in the morning sans protection, pausing only briefly to switch positions from the “Jiminy Stick-It” to the “Ferdydurke.” And to think, all this time I thought the only way to fix a broken relationship was to pork someone else every now and then.
WHACK PALANCE

PitBoy - Episode 1 - Tyler, The Creator

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PitBoy - Episode 1 - Tyler, The Creator

An Important Note for Frod Nation Supporters from Mayor Rob Frod Himself

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Me and my Frod Nation homies.

Folks, the wonderful city of Toronto is in the middle of a crisis. The Toronto Star and their minions in City Council have, believe it or not, wholly manufactured this mindboggling catastrophe. The destructive powers of this unholy alliance stretch far and wide, and as a result, there are going to be some serious consequences. Even as I write this, they are trying to strip me, Mayor Rob Frod, of my powers as the duly elected mayor of Toronto the Good. And that ain’t right.

So how did this start? That’s a good question, and for a change, I’m happy to answer it. As you know, the Toronto Star has been trying to kill me ever since the newspaper was founded. Thus far, I’ve evaded all the poisoned Gatorades they’ve planted for me at football games; and the exploding mickeys of vodka they hid in the glove compartment of my SUV. I’ve survived every attack, just like Rasputin. But apparently that’s not enough for the Star: they’ve also hounded my family, left mysterious bruises on my wife’s limbs, followed me in a spy plane, and even stooped so low as to get me fired from my football coaching job. But you won’t believe their latest trick.

In what can only be described as a full-frontal assault on democracy, Toronto’s City Council has called three special meetings to take away most of my special powers, deprive me of crucial staff, and even downsize my budget… that part is the worst because now I’ll have to rely on cocking my fist at people to get things done even moreso than before! Who do these councilors think they are? My big brother Doug and I were elected by millions of pure-hearted Frod Nation supporters, and now these unelected, elitist, latte-sipping councillors (93% of them at least) are following marching orders from their union bosses at the Toronto Star; so they can destroy me and start spending taxpayers’ money, like the drunken pirates they are, on rum, parrots, peg legs, and treasure chests.

Meanwhile, you’ll hear all sorts of explanations and justifications for this fiasco that try to pin Toronto’s mess on my personal behaviour. I know what you’re thinking folks, and I’m the first to admit that I’ve made a few mistakes—but I’ve sincerely apologized for them. I’m only human, after all. Just ask yourself this: would you want a mayor that isn’t human? Do you want to be ruled by a sinister robot with beady laser eyes? Of course not. You want a human, just like yourself, and I’m the most human-like human being that has ever existed. Sure, I’ve had a few wobbly pops on the job, and I’ve had a lot of wobbly pops while sitting behind the wheel. I’ve smoked rocks with known criminals, I’ve licked box within the confines of my loving marriage, and maybe I’ve had a few dudes capped; just like everyone else. I’ve said I’m sorry so many times for all this human behaviour, that I don’t know what else I can say, or do, to make these people leave me alone.

Clearly my sincerest apologies aren’t enough for the Catholic school board, or the police, or the Argonauts, or Iceberg Vodka, or Santa Claus… all of whom, of course, are controlled by the Toronto Star. They want nothing less than to kill me, and decapitate me, and hang my body in Nathan Philips Square where it can be drawn and quartered, my glistening entrails strewn across the ice rink like streams of blood-drenched taxpayers’ tears. The joke will be on them when I’m prime minister, folks.

But I digress. I want to reassure you, Frod Nation: I’m not going anywhere. No matter what these sniveling left-wing tax-and-spend socialists do, I’m going to stand on the floor of the council chamber and stamp my foot while refusing to budge. I’m going to hold every item until my dying day—and I might even literally hold my breath until my face turns blue. Believe me, I know exactly how to handle these obstacles, because I perfected the art of disruption at the tender age of two. You can’t buy that kind of experience and expertise, folks.

I’m going to continue to do what I was elected to do: save taxpayers money. First thing’s first, I will put a stop to this expensive police investigation into my totally legal comings and goings, because that’s just taxpayer money going down the drain. I’ve also given pay raises to all my staffers so they can hand out enough Rob Frod magnets to create a force field that will trap these councillors in latte carbonite once and for all (still trying to figure out the exact science on this one). Then I will sue every city staffer who has ever rolled their eyes at me, and keep the city government tied up in the courts for months, so I can keep doing my job unfettered. That’s a good word, unfettered, isn’t it? I bet you didn’t think I even knew the meaning of it! And you’re right; I learned it from my fancy new lawyer, George Rusty Eye. Unfettered is the perfect word to describe the new and improved Mayor Rob Frod… unfettered, undefeated, uncensored, and unleashed!

Anyway folks, the campaign for re-election begins today. I’ll be asking the taxpayers of Toronto (everyone else can bite me) to keep Frod Nation alive on October 27, 2014. I even have a catchy new slogan: “STILL NO CHARGES YET!” So get ready and zip up your hazmat suits, because this campaign is going to be a bloodbath in more ways than one.

God bless Frod Nation, and God help Toronto.

 

Follow Mayor Frod on Twitter: @TOMayorFrod

More on Mayor F[r]o[r]d:

Rob Ford's Office Hired a Hacker to Destroy the Crack Tape

Our Questions for Rob Ford's Office about their Alleged Plot to Hire a Hacker

Rob Ford Has a Terrible Photographer

Fresh Off the Boat: Moscow - Trailer


No One Is Paying Attention to Dubai's Mega-Rich Rappers

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Luxury cars outside the People by Crystal nightclub

The United Arab Emirates isn't a country you'd typically associate with hip-hop. It's a place that is generally bereft of the cultural signifiers native to the dark, dank locales where rap was birthed—Illmatic, for instance, probably wouldn't have been the same album if it was about the struggle of going $40 million over budget on your new artificial archipelago instead of the fight out of inner-city poverty.

But the young Emirati elite throwing cash at studio time and music videos to force their way into the rap game don't care about that, and why should they? Genres don't have to stay rooted. Dubstep was spawned in a south London borough known for its train stations and knife crime, and has become the party music of choice for frat boys with facial piercings the world over.    

The problem is that those wads of cash aren't conducive to your scene being taken particularly seriously. There aren't many rappers in the UAE unleashing conscious backpack records about the government's oppression of its critics; far more who are content to jack Flo Rida's artistic process and find new words to rhyme "club" with over a lame club-rap beat.

That said, there are some Emirati acts trying to reclaim a bit of prestige. Like Desert Heat, two dishdash-wearing brothers from Dubai who you might remember from the 2008 UAE rap classic, "Keep It Desert." One of the brothers, Illmiyah, has said it pains him that Emiratis "are stereotyped as [being] born rich and privileged," and wants to correct that assumption. In fact, he even released a solo album called Stereotyped to prove it. Unfortunately, Desert Heat were banned in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait after releasing their first album, and haven't had much success in their native UAE, either.

American hip-hop is popular in the Emirates—Rick Ross had his first show there last month—but the radios won't play homegrown MCs and it seems like nobody bothers to seek out local artists online. It's kind of like UK hip-hop, I guess, only even less popular.

DJ Bliss in his studio

I wanted to get a better idea of some of the other people who make up the UAE's hip-hop scene, so I went to speak with a few of them. The first was DJ Bliss, a producer, radio host, TV presenter, and the face of Beats by Dre in the Emirates—and pretty much the only Emirati in the country's music business who everyone can name. After DJing at parties as a teenager, Bliss—real name Marwan Parham Al Awadhi—ended up momentarily bowing to family pressure and pursuing a career with a multinational tobacco company.

But that blip only lasted a year before he struck out on his own again, leaving his brothers to start a successful shawarma chain and landing a spot on one of Dubai's biggest radio stations. He's clearly been raised with the comforts of basically any Emirati his age, but Bliss struck me as a hard worker, not someone who's let his parents' money ferry him to where he is now.

He has the ego of any other young, successful DJ, but having managed a rapper who's been on his books for two years because "the time isn't right," he understands the problems facing the Emirati hip-hop scene—nobody plays it and nobody promotes it, so nobody listens to it. He also doesn't shy away from the fact that some of the Emirati rappers born into infinity pools and Maybachs are arguably just tourists in a culture that they've summoned into existence with handouts and a bulk order of Yankees caps.

"It's true—rap comes from hardship," he told me. "And from the Emirati view, there really isn't that much struggle; even if you're a high school dropout or whatever, you just join the army and make a crazy amount of money."    

Some time around midnight, Bliss's driver took me to an elite Dubai club named People by Crystal, where I would wait for Bliss while he sped home in his Bentley to change into his outfit for the evening's set. I milled about with my camera around my neck, which attracted a bunch of people who thought I was the club's official photographer. When I told them that I wasn't, and that I probably wouldn't be emailing them the photo I'd just taken of them arranged in cliched bling formation poses, they got angry and I remembered why I don't like elite clubs: they're full of people who want to go to elite clubs. I left halfway through Bliss's set. 

Bliss (right) DJing in People by Crystal

Bliss's output is tailored to clubs full of expats, and although he produces his own stuff—which is actually pretty good, in that bashy, shouty Jay Z way—he gets a much better response when he's dropping Kanye and Macklemore. Something a little more home-focused, though this time run by expats, is FreekTV, a YouTube channel that mocks Abu Dhabi culture at the same time as it champions local hip-hop talent.    

I met up with Mustafa Ismail, a Somali who founded and runs FreekTV, and Muhammed Rachdi, a Tunisian and frequent collaborator who MCs under the name Alonzo. They don't have much time for the Abu Dhabi and Dubai rich kids, talking more about the underground scene in the poorer (but still comparatively wealthy) areas of the country—mainly the emirate of Sharjah. The hip-hop that emerges from this region, they say, is slightly darker in terms of beats and lyrical content; more Raekwon than R. Kelly.

But the music is hard to find. A couple of shitty YouTube videos is about all you can find, because these guys don't know how to promote their tunes and don't necessarily have the money of their contemporaries in the wealthier emirates to make professional music videos. There are no shows organized for up-and-comers and nobody has any kind of web presence, so mostly they'll make a song and just send it out on BBM or email it to friends. 

When Sharjah was brought up, I asked Mustafa and Muhammed about Dangour, a rapper from the area who was arrested in 2011 for "inciting gangsterism" and sentenced to three months in jail. His crime? Spreading a music video on BBM where he rapped about making life very painful for anyone who disrespected him, smoking hash and hating white people over torture footage. The police later confirmed this was fake, but nevertheless the court eventually ruled that Dangour had created the video to "make people scared of him." Which seems like the sort of exercise in obviousness you'd expect from a country that hasn't come to grips with its cultural tropes quite yet.

Dangour's is the only case I could find of an Emirati rapper trying to present himself as a thug, even if it was all an affectation. According to a policeman who knew him from school, "Dangour wasn't tough then. He used to cry all the time." Talking to Emirati media after the arrest, another local rapper, Mohammed Al Amry, said, "He wanted people to talk about him like he's a criminal and he was looking to be arrested. But don't blame rap music. It's not about the music, it's about him." 

Mustafa from Freek TV

Muhammed didn't share Al Amry's opinion: "He's got something special about him," he told me. Unfortunately, I couldn't find out what that special something is, because every attempt to contact Dangour was fruitless, save for one muddled email from an associate telling me he was in Malaysia and "trying to claim his rights from outside." 

As you'd probably expect, the output from Emirati rappers who aren't being jailed is considerably tamer than Dangour's love letters to flagellation. For example, Dubai-based MC Bunny J's videos don't feature anyone having their face kicked in, just people wearing sunglasses at night and pouting a lot in deserts. Those videos in mind, I expected a spoiled kid hopped up on delusion when I went to meet Bunny—a Dubai police officer by day—and his manager in a Starbucks in Dubai Mall. Instead, I met two slightly timid men with a genuine passion for what they're doing.    

Bunny J is never going to deliver anything too profound—DOOM and Immortal Technique needn't worry too much about an Emirati invasion occupying their niche. But, to him, that doesn't matter: "I just rap about life, partying, what I see. I just do it for fun." I asked how that poppin' bottles lifestyle fits in with his religion and whether he's ever encountered any opposition from particularly conservative family members, but he just told me that Islam is important to him and left it at that. The UAE is moderate in comparison to many of its neighboring countries—and the vast majority of its citizens are expats—so everyone I spoke to told me that the culture is accommodating of hip-hop, even if it was a new phenomenon when Emiratis started rapping themselves.

Bunny J

Bunny was excited to show me the video for his new single "Fly Away," which, although not exactly inspired, wouldn't be out of place on a playlist, all auto-tuned chorus and lyrics about "touching the sky." Sadly for Bunny, he's inevitably going to have a hard time getting his song played in whatever Dubai's Boujis equivalent might be, telling me that the radio ignores people like him and that there's not really any other platform for his music to exist upon.

I tried to track down anything resembling an amateur Emirati hip-hop battle night, just to see if there's anyone in the country nurturing the scene, but the closest thing I could find was a local poetry slam night called Rooftop Rhythms. Unfortunately, the night I went to can probably best be summarized by the guy who spent the majority of his time reciting lyrics about how his "rhymes are sick" from his phone. Maybe it was just an off night, but it didn't give me much hope for Bunny and his peers.

The scene seems to be festering. The artists are passionate and dedicated, but nobody else really seems to care. The silver spoon lifestyle might seem at odds with other hip-hop movements around the world, and it does translate to some pretty awful music the majority of the time, but that doesn't mean the scene should necessarily be ignored—a lot of people like awful music.

Before I left him at People by Crystal, Bliss had stressed that the "UAE is only young." And he's right. The country itself is only 42 years old, the same mean age as The Wu-Tang Clan. Emirati hip-hop is even younger, which is easy to forget given all the older money propping it up to the same level as scenes that having been evolving for decades elsewhere. That said, age shouldn't be an issue; radio play might be rare and managers few and far between, but the internet also exists. You get the feeling that all the scene needs is someone good enough to get people listening.

Follow James on Twitter: @duckytennent

More musical scenes that we've hung out in:

WATCH – True Norwegian Black Metal

WATCH – Donk

WATCH – Raving in the Black Sea

Typhoon Haiyan Transformed Me from a Tourist to a Medic

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All photos courtesy of Mark Dashwood

This fall Mark Dashwood, a doctor from Devon, England, did what thousands or millions of Western tourists have done before him and went backpacking through Southeast Asia. Only Typhoon Haiyan went through Southeast Asia at the same time, killing thousands and destroying the homes and livelihoods of tens of thousands more. Needless to say, my friend Mark's vacation was ruined and he decided to put his medical skills to good use, assisting the victims of the disaster as best he could. I called him up to see how he was doing.

VICE: Where were you when the storm hit?
Mark Dashwood:
I was in Boracay; it’s quite a touristy island in the central Philippines.

Did people know how bad it was going to be?
I read about it on the BBC website two days before it was due [to hit], but no one else had heard about it. I told the owner of the hostel I was staying in, and he set up a meeting to inform the rest [of the guests]. I read as much as I could online, and as soon as I realized how big it was going to be I booked a flight to Manila for the next morning. There were a lot of people who wanted to stay, claiming it wasn't going to be that bad, but I wanted to get the hell out of there.

Understandable. Did you get out?
I went to the ports the next day and tried to leave the island but they’d closed [the ports]. There were hundreds of people trying to do the same thing and no one could get off.



Shit. Why did they close the ports?
I think it was on government orders. They get these signals for how bad it’s going to be and Boracay got a signal 4, which is the worst. The orders from the government were to close everything. At the time it was really frustrating because I had a flight on the mainland, only a ten-minute boat journey away. In hindsight, I see it as a good thing because I know people who got across [only to have] their flights cancelled. There’s a lack of infrastructure on the mainland, which means loads had to stay in huts and just wait for the typhoon to pass. It kind of makes sense that they tried to contain people.

I guess. Where are you now?
I’m in Cebu right now, which hasn’t been massively hit by the storm; the worst hit areas are in the north of Cebu and the eastern islands, like Tacloban. There are a lot of more rural places that no one is really sure about at the moment. Cebu has kind of become the hub from where the whole relief effort is being coordinated. Places that have been badly hit are only two or three hours drive from here.



Are people heading for Cebu, then?
Yeah, the airport is pretty busy. Lots of aid organizations have started coming in, [and also] the military. Despite that, it’s still quite difficult for people to get here; a lot of the roads are closed.

What role is the military playing?
The military has mainly been deployed to try to control the situation—there’s been looting in places like Tacloban. I’ve heard reports that the military have shot people. People worry a lot. Cebu wasn’t too badly hit but there are so many people coming in from the remote places—people who have lost their entire families. It's pretty tragic.

I’ve spent the last few days trying to find ways to help with medical organizations. Yesterday I was at one of the government buildings and we helped package food and rice—tons and tons are coming in. Tomorrow I’m traveling north for that and I’m not really sure what to expect.



So foreign aid is getting through?
Yes, it’s getting through. There’s an airport in Cebu but it’s a lot more difficult getting [aid] to the remote areas. All the roads are down, there’s debris and shit everywhere. I went down to the airport and sat next to someone from the UN. The World Health Organization is arriving—so yeah, people are really starting to flood in. Even in Tacloban, planes keep coming in. It has taken a long time, though—I mean, it’s been more than a week now. People are hungry and desperate.

You’re not a tourist any more, are you?
It’s been very surreal, getting wrapped up in the whole thing. Because Boracay wasn’t that badly hit, sitting on the beach I ended up feeling a bit useless. There’s a Danish guy here who’s getting money from home and has hired a truck and he's just driven off with a few more people trying to aid hard-hit areas on their own. A lot of people have gone home, but there are also those who are still here trying to make a holiday out of it.

Are you planning to stick around?
I’m here till December, so I guess I’ll be helping until then. Once you get involved it’s very hard to leave. You see and hear about disasters like this all the time, but when you actually experience such a thing yourself it’s worse than you ever imagined. I’ve got a bit of medical experience, and that makes it my obligation to do something.

Follow Tristan on Twitter: @tristanjamesme

More stories about Typhoon Haiyan:

What We Shouldn't Be Doing in the Wake of Typhoon Yolanda

A Doomsday Prepper Explains How to Solve the Philippines' Typhoon Crisis

How Remote Islands Are Coping with Typhoon Haiyan's Devastation

Nate Hill Wears Naked White Women as Scarves

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Photo by Zach Schwartz

Nate Hill stood in the living room of a twee North Brooklyn apartment on an afternoon in late October with a naked white girl draped around his shoulders. I pulled out my iPhone and snapped a picture. Then he nodded and started to walk slowly around the girl's furniture. Everything was silent except for the creak of the wood floor. After about a minute, he gently let the girl down. She smiled, said thank you, and showed us to the door. 

The peculiar act that I saw was part of the 36-year-old performance artist's latest project called "Trophy Scarves." The project involves Nate traveling to the homes of white women, getting them naked, and wearing them as human scarves. As strange as it sounds, it's not the first time Nate has perpetrated some seriously weird shit in the name of art and social critique. Nate crashed into the art world back in 2008 with taxidermy tours of Chinatown’s garbage. He followed that up with "Death Bear," a project that involved him wearing a bear suit and meeting up with random people to take away their possessions associated with bad memories. He’s thrown half-eaten cheeseburgers at pedestrians while riding a bike, delivered fake crack to apartments while wearing a dolphin suit, and sent a computer virus to all of his press contacts. Most recently, he’s been focusing on doing race-based pieces, like "White Power Milk," in which he operates a website where you can order milk gargled by pretty, college-educated white girls.

I followed him around Brooklyn as he transformed a couple white women into naked fashion accessories. I asked him a few questions along the way. Here’s what he had to say.


Via Instagram

What’s "Trophy Scarves" about? 
Well, there are people who see certain races as status symbols, and someone had to comment on that.

Is this a similar tone to what you were doing with "White Power Milk"?
Yeah. With "White Power Milk," I just wanted to talk about how people see white women as a status symbol. With "Trophy Scarves," I wanted to find another way to come at that. I guess it’s the same kind of satirical, tongue-in-cheek approach that I like to take with things. I like to talk about something serious but do it in a lighter, kind of a goofy way. 

Are you doing this as a character, like you did with "Death Bear"?
I don’t know. It may be a character, or maybe I think white women are just better! [Laughs] And I think it would be good to make an example of myself. Either way, who cares? I’m not sure it matters.

How long have you been into art?
In college, I just started bumming around the art studios on campus. I was hanging around the artists, looking at their work in the studios, and thinking, I could do this if I wanted to. It was more conceptual art, weirdos, minimalists… My first show was with some friends in 1999, in my early 20s.

What were you like in high school?
Well, my freshman year of high school, I didn’t really have my own identity. I was into hip-hop. So I tried to dress like I was that cool hip-hop guy, but kids could tell that I wasn’t real. Everything was too new. There was really no personality. They could tell that I was a fake. Then I got mugged—people always tell me to tell my mugging story in interviews—this kid grabbed my chain, and he just punched me in the face. I tried to catch him but he was too fast… He was the quarterback for the junior varsity football team. 

So anyways, I got beat up. I ended up going to a school for kids who couldn’t fit in anywhere, there was a class of like 20 kids. There, I just became more introverted, and got into music, and spent time in my room listening to jazz records. I became a very private kid. I felt like I didn’t fit in anywhere.

Sometimes when someone gets into a career people look back and say, “I saw that coming.” Do people from your childhood feel like they “saw this coming” with you?
I dropped a few hints. I was always a weird kid. Even with the jazz records, it was always the weirdest shit, the experimental stuff. I always wanted to see how far I could go. Oh, so this is John Coltrane? OK, well here’s Albert Ayler, or some other random weird shit I could find like, European noise jazz, or Peter Brötzmann. I was always just a fringe person.

You work in a medical lab, raising fruit flies to be used in scientific experiments. Do people at work know that you’re an artist?
Some of them do. 

How do they respond to that?
I don’t talk about it much with them. They might see me doing the art, begging thing on the trains. Like one time, I was with my wife, and we were going to a party downtown, and I told her, "I’m going to start in the front of the train and I’ll meet you in the back of the train." I get up, and right before I’m about to speak I see one of my co-workers, but they didn’t see me yet. It made me realize that maybe someone’s seen me begging on the train, and thought I was weird.


Via Instagram

How does your wife respond to your art?
That’s another thing I’ve had to just let go of: Worrying that she’s not into it, or happy with it. I just have to remember that it’s not her art.  It’s not her life. She has her own stuff going on, her own job, her own hobbies… But how does she feel about it? She tolerates it. [Laughs]

Do you talk about it to her?
Sometimes. But I don’t have any expectations. We used to battle about it, like why she liked them, why didn’t she like them, that she should like them, and so on... I blocked her on Twitter, so she can’t see what I’m doing. She just followed me on Instagram, so I’m probably going to block her on there too.

How do you feel about academic analysis of your work? Like when art critics say something like, “this means that” about you? Is that stuff that you, as an artist, think about?
That’s a good question I see what you’re saying. I’ll think, Yeah, OK, that sounds good. But no, I don’t think about that, academically or theoretically, really.

What’s the future of "Trophy Scarves"?
I’m just going to do this as hard as I can for a couple of months, until the next year, and see what happens. I don’t know how many is enough. I think maybe like 100 trophy scarves. And then after 100, maybe go to 200. It’s like my friend said: "There’s never going to be enough trophy scarves. There’s always going to be one more trophy scarf."

@zach_two_times

More art from VICE:

This Guy Is Losing His Virginity in Public for an Art Project  

The Enduring Art of Afghanistan  

The Art of Taboo - Ren Hang 

These Guys Made a Documentary about the Kids in Kejick Bay, Ontario

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The official trailer for Dogs on a Beach.

Dogs on a Beach, a short documentary by Spencer Gilley and Andrew Hovi, follows a group of kids from Kejick Bay, Ontario—a tiny little town with a population of 400—who took the filmmakers on a tour of their stomping grounds. As the film wanders about with these largely unsupervised kids, it quickly becomes apparent that Dogs on a Beach is brilliant in its simplicity. Moments of childhood summer vagrancy are captured with the handheld intimacy of digital camcorder, lo-fi VHS, and Super 8 footage. Some of the footage was actually shot by the kids themselves, who were clearly just as fascinated by these alien visitors and their cameras, as the filmmakers were with them.

While the film is most obviously about a scenic romp in rural Ontario, the all too typical issue of Canada's First Nations being marginalized serves as a strong undercurrent. For most of the last century, Kejick Bay was an extremely isolated island community. In 1929, Ontario Hydro constructed a dam at Ear Falls that prioritized the delivery of hydroelectricity to cities across Manitoba and Ontario—instead of the First Nations communities that were flooded by the project. Parts of the Lac Seul First Nation, or Obishikokaang as its called in Ojibwe, were submerged underwater. Kejick Bay was cut off from the rest of the reserve, only accessible by boat or snowmobile in the winter when the water froze. That only changed a few years ago after a bridge was built and cars could drive across.

When filmmakers Gilley and Hovi arrived in Kejick Bay, they were outsiders. Hovi was somewhat familiar with the area given that he grew up not too far away in Kenora, Ontario, and had visited the island when his father was working there as a teacher. But ultimately this film assumes the perspective of an alien who isn’t heavy handed about showing what life in Kejick Bay is actually like for these kids. Anyway, before the film's US premiere on Wednesday at the Doc NYC festival, I got in touch with Gilly and Hovi to chat about their experience in Kejick Bay.

VICE: Hi. What were you expectations and motivations going into making this film? Were you planning on making the sort of documentary that it ended up becoming?
Spencer Gilley:
One of the reasons I wanted to do it was [to satisfy] the curiosity of wanting to know what it's like to live somewhere that’s so different from cities where I'm used to living. 

Andrew Hovi: We always knew we were making a documentary of some kind. But we shot on the reserve for a half-day, and I think we shot for four days total in the area. None of the other stuff that we shot ended up making it in, in the end.

How did you meet the kids in the film?
AH: We rolled up, we were lost, and we couldn't find Sean—who is the teacher in town. We didn't want to film anything before we talked to anybody because we didn't belong there. And we felt kind of weird poking the camera out the window. I'm happy with that decision. We eventually found Sean and we didn't really have anything planned. We didn't know what to do. He recommended that the kids show us around. That's the whole movie.

SG: It's almost in real time because we didn't film very long at all, we filmed from late afternoon until sundown.

That part in your film when one of the kids, Deakin, starts strangling a puppy really stuck with me. What was going through your head when that happened?
SG: For me, I was really confused because we didn't belong there and it wasn't our place to tell people what to do. But at the same time you [want to say] “don't hurt that puppy.” You can hear me talking in the movie quietly asking him to stop. You could tell the kids knew he was going to do something. They said: “He's the one who hurts the dogs.” [When it finally happened,] you can tell I felt really weird because I turned the camera away, which in retrospect maybe wasn't the best idea. At the time, it was sort of a, “whoa I didn't come here to film this” feeling. But then later it's like, “oh man, this is one of the most interesting parts.”

I think what’s so interesting is that your emotion and reaction is so apparent. Because you turn the camera away, it makes it more powerful.
SG: Maybe it implicates us. We always wanted to include a little bit of us in the movie. It's interesting for us to come there, but it's also interesting for them to have us come there, on their island.

And about the dog scene, in our first assembly I had originally cut it out because I thought I did a bad job for not filming it. I thought it was too graphic or squeamish. But later as we got older, we were like, “fuck this is interesting.”

Did you run into any other ethical dilemmas when you were editing?
SG: There were some shots that made the film feel a bit too emotional, like "look at these little houses." Some of the shots I ended up taking out were showing what the living conditions on the island were like. After we eventually realized after a year and a half of editing that [the living conditions on the island] definitely was not the focus of the film, we knew it wasn't really relevant. We were conscious about not wanting to make a gloomy, repetitive doc…

AH: It's ground that's well covered, that kind of film. Most documentaries that come out of those spots just focus on the cultural aspect because it's so important to the way they live up there. But, our main goal for sure was to go in and let the people be how they really are.

SG: At the time we were just scrambling to film and get things in focus and hopefully point the crappy microphone in the right direction. And later on when we were editing, we would realize what they were saying in these little bits of dialogue—the native girl who was friends with Emily, Ebony, she wanted to change her name to Abby--I guess to sound more white--and also to dye her hair blonde. So stuff like that we didn't pick up at all when we were filming.

Do you feel like having good instincts are important in this kind of documentary filmmaking?
SG: Totally. In this movie, you can see our decisions being made as it goes along.

AH: And working like that, it's exciting later to find what you actually have. We just filmed and let it breathe and gave it enough time to figure out what it actually is.

Cool, well, you both did a great job. Thanks!

 

More VICE Coverage of the First Nations in Canada:

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Cayman Jack Presents: Travel Week: VICE Guide to Travel: Last Dinosaur of the Congo

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What better way to start off VICE Canada's Travel Week, co-presented by our amigos over at Cayman Jack, than with one of VICE's most awesome, classic travel pieces. Here, David Choe, the man who has since become a kaizillionaire thanks to the Facebook corporation, heads deep into the Congo to visit a tribe that claims they are in touch with a living breathing dinosaur. It's one of those stories that's so clickable and watchable we just had to share it with you again. Have fun.

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