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A Huddle on Domestic Violence Before Taking the Field

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A Huddle on Domestic Violence Before Taking the Field

Alan Smithee Is Officially the Worst Hollywood Director of All Time

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Alan Smithee has been making shitty movies for nearly 50 years. Not just trashy blockbusters, or soppy rom-coms, or those big ambitious psychological thrillers that make absolutely no sense to anyone but the writer—but every type of truly terrible movie. Work so awful that nobody would ever want to have their name associated with it.

In fairness, that's exactly why Smithee's extensive back catalog is so very, very bad: because "Alan Smithee" (or sometimes "Allen Smithee") is a pseudonym used by various directors over the years to distance themselves from films that, for whatever reason, they haven't been able to exercise ample creative control over, and therefore believe to be cinematic trash.

The first movie credited to Smithee was the 1969 Western Death of a Gunfighter. After the star, Richard Widmark, objected to the original director midway through filming, a new guy was brought in. As neither director wanted their name on the finished movie, The Director's Guild of America credited it to Allen Smithee, and his career took off. Over the years, Smithee's work has included a David Hasselhoff cowboy comedy; a sequel to Hitchcock's The Birds; an episode of the ill-fated detective spinoff Mrs. Columbo; and the extended TV cut of 1984's Dune, as the screenwriter and director of the original film, David Lynch, wasn't happy with the television edit. All this led to Smithee becoming "the most well known nobody in Hollywood," according to the Guild's magazine.

Professor Jeremy Braddock of Cornell University, who edited the book Directed by Alan Smithee, explained to me how directors' careers live and die by their reputations. "In the late 1960s, directors were given more freedom to make movies, more freedom to establish themselves as artists and auteurs. It also means that their names can accrue value, or alternatively be tied to a compromised or bad production. So, commercially, at this time, the director's name started to be used as a marketing tool."

In his book, Braddock takes the idea of an auteur—the director as author and artist—and applies it to Smithee's films. Even though a different person directed each one, he points out, the Smithee films reveal the influence of the industry rather than an individual. Braddock then suggests that this "in itself is also a form of genius, the genius of the system. We can also think about these great studios as being auteurs in a way."



Related: Watch our interview with Sam De Jong, director of the new film 'Prince'


Rick Rosenthal directed the 1983 film Bad Boys (nothing to do with the 1995 Lawrence/Smith buddy cop movie of the same name), which helped to launch Sean Penn's career, and now acts as a consulting producer on Amazon's critically acclaimed transgender drama Transparent. Something he's less keen to be linked with is the sequel to Hitchcock's classic, The Birds II: Land's End, which he directed but subsequently removed his name from. Tippi Hedren, who both starred in the original and featured in the sequel, said of the film: "It's absolutely horrible. It embarrasses me horribly."

Rosenthal maintains that the film did well for producers at Showtime, and told me that his use of Smithee had nothing to do with the success of the film. He signed up to direct with assurances that parts of the script would be changed, but "those scenes were removed and the original scenes were put back in. I was told no, I had to shoot those scenes. That was the start of it, and the shape of the film was quite different from what I thought I was going to be shooting."

Unfortunately for others in Rosenthal's position, it's not always that easy to get Smithee to take the rap. The Directors Guild judges each pseudonym request individually, before negotiating with the film's production company, which can result in the director losing any further royalties or income from the film. Rosenthal remembers his hearing as a positive experience—a "kind of a healing process," as he put it to me.

Tony Kaye, the director of American History X, found it only made things worse. He infamously objected to the influence of the film's star Edward Norton over the studio. During the editing process, Kaye spent $100,000 placing ads denouncing Norton in the LA press, and he invited along a rabbi, a monk, and a priest to try to mediate during his meeting with a studio executive. When he later tried to disown the film and attribute it to Smithee, the Guild decided that his feud had been so public that any attempt by Kaye to distance himself was pointless, and denied his request.

Rosenthal has also taken his dealings with studios very personally in the past. He hasn't worked with Showtime since The Birds II, and burned his bridges with Warner Bros TV in style: "I hired a plane to fly a banner over a studio that I was leaving, and kind of had a little bit of a dispute," he told me. "It didn't say anything terribly negative, but I played a character called Uncle Richard, and it said 'Bye Bye Uncle Richard.' The net result was that I didn't work for that studio again for 11 years."

Although he wishes he'd taken friends' advice earlier and considered future projects, Rosenthal admits that it's easy to act irrationally in the movie business: "You have an argument with somebody and you're like, 'Well, fuck it, why am I continuing to work this hard for somebody who just doesn't get it?'"

The trailer for 'An Alan Smithee Film: Burn, Hollywood, Burn'

Officially, Smithee was retired following the release of 1997's An Alan Smithee Film: Burn, Hollywood, Burn. This big budget satire featured a director called Alan Smithee as the main character. When Smithee—Monty Python's Eric Idle—realizes he can't disown his own movie because he shares the name of the Guild's pseudonym, he steals the film and threatens to destroy it. Ironically, Burn, Hollywood, Burn was so bad that its real director, Arthur Hiller, chose to use the pseudonym Smithee to distance himself from it.

This wasn't just a publicity stunt, either, as the movie went on to win five Golden Raspberry awards, including Worst Picture (it lost Worst Director to Psycho). Roger Ebert called it "a spectacularly bad film—incompetent, unfunny, ill-conceived, badly executed, lamely written, and acted by people who look trapped in the headlights." He gave it no stars, which seems fitting for a movie about a shit movie. Since then, the Guild has started to use other pseudonyms, although some directors continue to hide behind Smithee, as his IMDB page can attest.

READ ON NOISEY: Some Kid at NYU Made a Short Film About Killing Drake

Rick Rosenthal believes that the only way new directors can guarantee creative control, and therefore avoid resorting to the pseudonym, is by making lower budget films, as "the moment an auteur director has a failure, his or her wings are clipped. It becomes that much more difficult to retain the control that they might have had before a big film flops or fails."

Smithee and the studio influences that formed him will live on in the increasingly extravagant blockbusters we've been seeing over the past decade, as the huge crews remain loyal to the studios rather than directors. While Alan Smithee will probably never win an Academy Award, the films attributed to him reveal what happens when an individual's vision gets crushed by the industry. He might not be a true auteur, but at least he's given us some memorable (and memorably trashy) films.

Follow Bo Franklin on Twitter.

An Inside Look from the Toronto Club That Hosted a Sex Party for the Disabled

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Andrew Morrison-Gurza and Stella Palikarova. Photo courtesy Johann Louw

Before Deliciously Disabled held its first official event this past weekend at Toronto's Oasis Aqualounge, I was told a number of things: that it was not an "orgy" like so many media outlets had purported it to be; that there would be 125 spots available; that there would be all forms of entertainment, including a dick painter (a man who paints with his dick, not a man painting dicks); and that the event was there to allow people with disabilities of all forms to interact with each other in a space where they felt both comfortable enough to express themselves and safe enough to retract and just watch the show.

As VICE previously reported in an interview with the organizers, the event was designed to be fully accessible, with gadgets like hydraulic lifts and harnesses being set up to allow participants to explore each other sexually and, if they want to, even get some good ol' banging going on. There was also booze—lots of booze—along with various forms of entertainment, from DJs to burlesque dancers, all for the reasonable price of $20.

The event, which happened Friday night, proved all those things to be true and more. Andrew Morrison-Gurza, one of the co-founders of Deliciously Disabled and organizer of the event, explained to VICE in an interview Saturday that while he was shocked that an event of this size spawned from a hashtag he and his friends dreamed up, the whole experience represented something bigger than just sexualization for him.

"Sexuality is obviously a big part of it but a lot of people didn't even end up getting full-on sexual," he said."There was flirting, playing around, but the playroom wasn't used by everybody. One of the most thrilling parts about the whole thing is just the thought of being free to do so if you pleased. The possibility of sexuality is more exciting than really anything that could have occurred."

Morrison-Gurza also talked about the larger narrative at play in his mind, which was the fact that the event was "starting a discussion that's not being had."

"To me, it was all about the people. Seeing all different types of people—both disabled and not—gather together and party really made me realize how important these kind of events are" he told VICE. "People talk a lot about an orgy or this or that, but it's really more than just sexual exploration. People had fun and they had fun without feeling like they needed to fit a mold. It's going past what we generally think about disability and the people affected by it.

"Also, getting a lapdance on stage was pretty cool. I definitely liked that part."

Since I a) am a journalist and b) do not have a disability, both I and the organizers felt it was best that I not attend. In my absence, however, was a friend of mine and someone volunteering for the event, Chandler Borland. Through him, I tried to get a grasp of what kind of night played out and whether penis paintings are really all what they're hyped up to be.

VICE: So, how was last night?
Chandler Borland: It was awesome, honestly. Being that I'm also someone with a disability [cerebral palsy], it was awesome to see a mix of the disabled and sex-positive community come together in one place like that. The event sold out and everybody had a good time.

You were a volunteer, right? What was your experience being the observer like?
I was basically responsible for overseeing to make sure everyone was getting along OK, the rules were being followed, and that all disabilities were being accommodated for. Obviously, we had strong rules of consent and such, so me and a few others were out to keep an eye on that, as well making sure that all the harnesses and lifts were working properly.

With alcohol in the mix, consent must have been a big concern. How did you guys handle it?
We had an "ask once" policy that basically gave people one chance to get it right. We were constantly watching and if we felt anything was up, security would have the person removed immediately. Everything worked out fine, thankfully. Lots of people were happy with the event.

Off that point, I know there were a lot of devices for accommodation there, so it must have been pretty hectic. Did you guys run into any issues?
There were a lot of things to take into account. We had to make sure all the furniture and beds were in place, harnesses to get people in and out of wheelchairs. Everything went pretty smoothly, really.

Tell me about entertainment. I'm really interested in the guy who painted with his penis.
Yeah, we had a lot of different acts there, one of which was an exotic male artist who uses his penis as a paintbrush. He'd basically dip it in paint and create patterns on paper to hand out to people. It went along really well with everybody.

That's pretty fucking awesome.
Definitely. That guy in particular was also doing a strip tease of sorts while dressed like Wolverine, so that was pretty neat. Aside from that, we had a lady giving a speech and doing a workshop, a few DJs, one whom played music for the night while completely naked. It was all really relaxed, though. The performers just integrated with everybody else.

What were the main attractions at the event?
Sex positivity was definitely a big aspect of it—we had a playroom where people of all different disabilities could go and engage in sexual activity. I was walking around the venue most of the night and I didn't spend a lot of time near the playroom, but there was definitely a good amount of people who used it. It was really cool because there were a lot of people who were experiencing their first sexual encounter with another disabled person. Like, people with guide dogs, the blind, people in wheelchairs. They were all able to interact and explore each other, both socially and sexually.

I know when speaking to the organizers that the use of the term "orgy" wasn't totally accurate and that this was more about a safe space for disabled persons to express themselves. What's your take on that aspect of the event?
Y'know, the best way I can describe it was that it was much better than a club atmosphere, at least to me. A lot of regular venues don't accommodate disabilities or are just flat-out discriminatory. It was a lot different last night—everybody felt comfortable just being themselves. Having a drink, talking, flirting, whatever it may be, it was a place that you could just kind of relax into without feeling like you were walking on eggshells. Sex was obviously present because it's something that a lot of people don't discuss when it comes to disabilities, but it was far bigger than that.

Will you be volunteering again?
Absolutely. There's nothing else like it.

Follow Jake Kivanc on Twitter.

Canada’s Grizzly Bear Trophy Hunt in Spotlight After Cecil the Lion Outrage

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Photos courtesy Larry Travis

As the roiling international fury over the death of Cecil the lion simmers down to a slow boil, big-game hunters in Canada are quietly gearing up for the upcoming opening of grizzly bear season.

The death of the 13-year-old protected lion, hunted by now-infamous Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer in Zimbabwe's Hwange national park last month, ignited a wave of outrage across the globe.

Though the controversy around trophy hunting in Canada has not reached the same international level, it is into an atmosphere of increased scrutiny that hunters and guide outfitters enter grizzly bear season, which opened in selected areas in the northeast of BC on Aug. 15.

Approximately 300 grizzlies are hunted each year in a limited-entry hunt managed through the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations.

The issue has long pitted environmentalists, tour guides, members of First Nations, and even other hunters against trophy hunters and their guides, who in turn feel they are being attacked for simply trying to make a living.

For long-time hunter and guide outfitter Kiff Covert, the outrage around Cecil's death seems to be more oriented around emotion than the sustainability of a species.

"Why do we personify an animal because it has a name and people take pictures of it? The wilderness isn't exactly a friendly, nice place. With grizzly bears, it's because they're beautiful and people think they're amazing, but if they were ugly and had no hair and killed people every day, everyone would want us to shoot them," he said.

As owner-operator of Covert Outfitting, Covert takes hunters out for one-on-one grizzly bear excursions that can run anywhere from $14,900 to $19,900. Their hunts stay within what he describes as a sustainable range recommended by the province that is within the three to five percent range of the current bear population, he said.

Of this amount, they often take male grizzlies and older bears, he claims, which helps keep the population in check with the carrying capacity of the land.

"It's hard not to like them. That's why I do this for a living—when you're out there, it's amazing to see them. But as a hunter you're born with an instinct. For a lot of people it's just something that's in them," he says.

Covert was raised in Kelowna, but says he has felt deeply drawn to hunting since he was a child, and started guide outfitting in 2007.

"A lot of people think it's total insanity but it's not. Maybe it's insanity living in the top of a skyscraper in downtown Vancouver, and having no idea what nature is or where our food comes from," he said.

Brian Falconer, who grew up in a hunting family in Saskatchewan, spends approximately seven months of his year on the ocean and on the verdant riverbanks of the Great Bear Rainforest, conducting research on grizzlies and marine mammals.

Though not opposed to hunting in general, he finds trophy hunting to be "grotesque."

As a marine operations co-ordinator with the BC Raincoast Conservation Foundation, a nonprofit research and public education organization, he has been devoted to fighting the grizzly hunt over the past decade.

Much of Raincoast's work centres on filling in the gaps of government-funded research, says Falconer, and though it's undeniable that emotion certainly comes into his work, he prefers to frame his argument in ethical, ecological, and economic terms.

Just because the population can possibly sustain a hunt doesn't mean it's ethical, he argues.

"There's a harvestable biological surplus of human beings as well, but we don't have an open season on them. We don't even have a limited-entry hunt where you can draw to kill a human being. All those same scientific facts would apply," he said. "Science gives us information about things, it doesn't give us permission."

It appears he's not alone in these sentiments: two years ago, Vancouver-based research firm Insights West conducted a poll that found though 73 percent of those surveyed supported the hunt of animals for food, only 10 percent supported trophy hunting.

However, even the scientific foundation that a grizzly hunt can be supported ecologically is shaky, Falconer says.

"The ministry always argues that their hunting management strategy is based on their best available science but it's not, it's their best available guess," he adds.

One example of this is mortality rates, which are highly difficult to gauge, he argues, saying there's no ecological basis to justify the removal of top predators in an ecosystem.

To illustrate his point, he cites a number of environmental checks and balances that regulate bear populations naturally, particularly the availability of salmon.

It's also not true that many hunters only take old or male bears, he says.

"Despite the fact that you're not supposed to shoot female grizzlies, on average 35 percent of the reported kills are females. These numbers are not disputed," says Falconer. This statistic is based on the government's own kill records, which were revealed only after a four-year Freedom of Information request battle between Raincoast and the province that ended up in BC's Supreme Court.

In 2012, ten First Nations on the north and central coasts of BC joined forces to inform trophy hunters in no uncertain terms that grizzly hunting was no longer permitted in their territory.

Though ongoing enforcement is tricky, this ban serves to represent the sentiments of many Indigenous Canadians when it comes to hunting for sport, said Doug Neasloss, chief of the Kitasoo/Xai'xais Nation, whose territory is unceded.

"Culturally, it's just unacceptable. In my culture, if you're going to shoot something, you use all of it," said Neasloss, who is the lead guide at the Spirit Bear Adventure Lodge, located in the coastal village of Klemtu, BC. "Quite often when we're out in the field, we have tourists here from all over the world go to an area and we'll come across a dead bear [...] where the trophy hunters come in and just chop off its head and chop off its paws and leave the rest of the bear there to rot."

Cultural objections aside, the hunt is also at odds with the booming bear-watching tours his nation is engaged in, said Neasloss.

The second-largest industry in their community, the Spirit Bear Adventure Lodge employs 45 people (in a community of about 500) and is already booked through to the end of next fall. They conduct an average of 300 tours a year for tourists who come from all over the globe to view grizzlies, especially the rare white Kermode or Spirit Bear.

"I think the new, younger generation now are starting to look at new, long-term sustainable industries, and it's right in line with First Nations values of respecting the land," he said. "We can essentially run a business there without using anything, without extracting anything.

"You're not taking out the fish, you're not taking out the trees, and you're taking these tourists out who only shoot bears with cameras. It's tying our people back to the land again."

Follow Julie Chadwick on Twitter.

Police Are Freaking Out Over Drugged-up Flakka 'Zombies'

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Police Are Freaking Out Over Drugged-up Flakka 'Zombies'

Habits: Habits - 'Breakfast of Champions'

Is Afropunk Fest No Longer Punk?

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Image via Flickr user Adrian Miles

This Saturday, Brooklyn's leg of Afropunk will be held at Commodore Barry Park in Brooklyn. Its headliners will include Lenny Kravitz, Grace Jones, Ms. Lauryn Hill, Death Grips, Danny Brown, and Suicidal Tendencies. This—a festival with a deeply talented, overwhelmingly black lineup that spans hip-hop, electronic, jazz, soul, and hardcore punk—is certainly a cultural feat, in and of itself. But has the current vision of Afropunk deviated from the vision that it sprang from?

It is indisputable that in the past 11 years, Afropunk Festival has seen stark and dramatic changes. What began as a hundreds-large gathering inspired by James Spooner's 2003 documentary of the same name has slowly grown into a festival that amasses 60,000 attendees, boasting headlining performances from D'Angelo, Chuck D, and Saul Williams..

In 2015, Afropunk has only gotten bigger. The fest went international, holding a festival in Paris this May featuring Lianne La Havas plus Jaden and Willow Smith, and in October, will hold an edition of the fest in Atlanta.

Perhaps the most notable change is that Afropunk is no longer free. The festival, which has classically not charged admission and instead sought funding through the help of sponsors, apparel sales, and other avenues, is now charging admission. It's $75 for the weekend, $45 for a day, and free with approved voluntary work. Naturally, questions are raised when something that's been free for years suddenly isn't. A big one: What's changed for there to be a price on a festival that spotlights an underrepresented community?

Festival co-founder Matthew Morgan and co-organizer Jocelyn Cooper were ready for those questions. They were both confident as we spoke about the 11th annual festival in a Brooklyn coffee shop. It's clear when we start talking that they're more interested in conversation rather than a one-sided interview. Before the questioning starts, Morgan gets me to list some of my favorite acts (Kanye West and Turn on the Bright LIghts-era Interpol, I tell him), slightly laments when he learns I'm a black writer who mostly write about hip-hop (I retort it's out of interest rather than relegation), and relates a festival organizer's common peeve—that planning comes down to the last minute despite a year of preparation. But they're here to answer questions, so they're game.

The amiability flips back-and-forth between frankness as we touch on the idea of paying for Afropunk. He's a master of a basic retort: Why not? But his points are valid. For one, people panic to shell out hundreds for Air Jordan releases but are perturbed by a festival fee that's a fraction of that price. And surely a festival with a pro-Afro message is worth $70. It ties back to a common maxim: If the black community doesn't place value within itself, then who will?

"There's a whole value proposition that we have to invest in ourselves," Morgan says. "What is it that people like about the festival? What is unique? What is important? How does it make you feel? And if that experience collectively isn't worth $70, then we don't deserve it. Then go to Pitchfork. Go to Lollapalooza. Go to Bonnaroo. Go support them with your money. Or, stay home."

Morgan's points aren't bits of slick marketing: the festival landscape is overwhelmingly white. Perhaps supporting a predominantly African-American business when Budweiser is raking in money from the Jay Z-founded Made in America festival ("Do they worry about giving Jay Z another million?" Morgan asks) isn't a bad idea. But from 2003 to 2015, Afropunk hasn't just grown—it's been reimagined. It's a question of how far that reimagining and that all-encompassing ambition move away from the original film's dedication of: "to every black kid who has ever been called a nigger...and every white kid who think they know what that means."

Break down the term "Afropunk" to its roots and you get, "African-American rebellion." But being an African-American and being one in the rebellious culture of punk rock comes with its own complexities. Black lineage at the start of rock is a hidden one. Chuck Berry and Little Richard's light are eclipsed by Elvis Presley's pilfering and Keith Richards' licks. Whitewashed out of something they helped create, African-Americans were forced to do something they've been forced to do for centuries: Be resilient. Move forth and create with the little we've been given. Hip-hop was made from this need. The black fans who identified with the thrills of punk found a harsh truth: It wasn't their rebellion. White punks have the ability to rage against their privilege by night, while covering their tattoos by day. Blackness can't be sheathed, and thus to be black is to be in a constant state of rebellion.

Spooner's documentary explores a rebellion that's two-pronged: being the "Rock n' Roll nigger" in what could be a non-inclusive, predominantly white environment, and having that blackness questioned by your own kind.

Inspired by his own experiences in the punk rock scene, Afro-Punk came during somewhat of a dry period for black rock—decades after greats Fishbone and Bad Brains peaked, but shortly before Bloc Party and TV on the Radio (Kyp Malone appears in the film) gained their footing. African-Americans in punk just didn't register in the early '00s.

It's 12 years after the documentary premiered. Spooner, who's forever going to be attached to it (his Instagram bio snarkily states, "And yeah I made the afropunk movie"), has moved on to tattoo artistry. He owns a tattoo parlor over in Los Angeles, but he's eating lunch before working on a client in a Park Slope parlor. Spooner is busy and bi-coastal, but he's vivid and enthusiastic when talking about the climate that birthed Afro-Punk. "When I started making the film in 2001, I would Google 'black punk' and there was nothing. Zero," Spooner recalls.

The film, a DIY effort that featured interviews with African-Americans in the punk scene, became a connector for the many African-Americans nationwide who shared the struggles expressed in the film. They conversed on the message board on the film's website, which hosted a tight-knit community that birthed real life friendships.

"For these kids, it was really like their salvation, they really wanted to meet each other," Spooner says. "So they started talking about organizing a meet up."

That meet-up became the inaugural Afropunk in 2005. Headquartered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and co-curated by Spooner and Morgan, the event was a spontaneous affair packed with curated films, shows at the now defunct CBGB, and a simple picnic with people bonding over a shared passion. "That, to me, was everything that the festival was meant to be," Spooner says. Afropunk in its original form was a product of the punk ethos of Spooner and the music industry know-how of Morgan, who saw potential in the Afropunk brand and invested his own money in making the festival a reality.

A crowd at Afropunk 2013. Photo via Flickr user Daniel Latorre

The difference between Spooner's and Morgan's Afropunk ideologies progressed from a crack to a fault by 2008. That year, Afropunk message board users were surprised to see that the grungy digital hangout spot they frequented suddenly had a white color scheme, on its way to becoming a web magazine (Jenny Hates Techno guitarist John M. Ellison, known on the boards as ghettopunkrocker, recalls: "I remember I logged on and was like, 'Wait, what the hell?'). The messages shared on the site were gone which angered some users enough to leave all together. Spooner also felt alienated from the festival. It had been a chill picnic just a few years ago. Now, a market study was telling him black people liked the color red. So, because Mountain Dew helped fund a festival, he had to watch young attendees take promo pictures as they held free Code Red Mountain Dew: "It was like, shit, that's so not punk," he says. Spooner, who'd never cared too much for organizing a festival in the first place, ended his involvement with Afropunk in 2008.

The fall of the original message boards was probably inevitable; the real time communication and the accessibility of Facebook would've obsolesced it. Plus, Afropunk grew larger than its hundreds of active board members. The sea change was coming.

"I remember making this post on the old board when more people were going on: If this place becomes like a magazine or much bigger than it was, you can kiss it all goodbye," message board member Damos Abadon told me. "Not long after that, it changed."

It seems Spooner's vision didn't really change all that much from film's themes: that search for interpersonal connection through white noise within a more genre-specific lens. Morgan, who came from a music industry background, saw potential. There were others living in boxes, too: alternative hip-hop, alternative R&B, LGBT members, the natural hair community, etc. A more wider definition of Afropunk—"freedom," as Cooper puts it—worked as an umbrella for all those facets of the black experience.

On Noisey: An Oral History of D'Angelo

These days, Spooner's focus is tattooing. He's so out of the Afropunk loop, he claims, that he didn't know the festival he started was charging admission until I inform him of that fact. Although the festival is behind him, Spooner does get melancholic about what it was. "It's challenging to see—like birthing a baby, raising him, and letting it go out and completely disappointing you," Spooner says of what Afropunk has become.

Members of that defunct board have all given different reasons for their distance with current Afropunk (although none conceded they'd simply grown up). One felt it became another brand. Another felt that the second half of the festival's name is overlooked; D'Angelo will get that headline billing over Bad Brains every time. However, the skepticism isn't only held by the OG members. Cynthia Francillion, four-time Afropunk attendee (twice a volunteer), commended Afropunk for giving the natural hair community an avenue to express itself. Black business need support, too, but as most would be, her friends are skeptical about something personally impactful being corrupted. Francillion told me, "They're afraid that Afropunk is going to sell out. They're afraid that Afropunk is going to become a Coachella."

Follow Brian on Twitter.

A New Art Show Tracks Queer Life in Everyday Portraits

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A New Art Show Tracks Queer Life in Everyday Portraits

Canadians Don’t Love Stephen Harper’s Baby Bursary, Poll Finds

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Courtesy Daily VICE

When Stephen Harper announced, last year, that he'd be mailing Canadian families $2.5 billion, it was hailed as a pretty smart political move.

Under the expanded Universal Child Care Benefit (UCCB), families would get $60 per month for each kid between seven and 18, and $160 per month for each child under the age of seven (an increase of $60).

Rather than send out that money immediately, the Conservatives backloaded the benefit until right before the election. Families got months' worth of cheques in one go, just a month prior to the official launch of the 42nd general election.

It was expected to be a political boon for the Conservative government, which was still trying to claw back a lead from Justin Trudeau and, later, Tom Mulcair.

But, guess what: it wasn't.

A new poll conducted by Forum Research shows that Canadians weren't tremendously thrilled at the optics of being mailed a wad of cash.

Of those who received the cheque, 36 percent said the UCCB would make them less likely to vote Conservative. Just 17 percent said they'd be more likely to cast their ballot for Stephen Harper. The remaining half said it would either have no bearing, or that they didn't know.

The numbers are, perhaps unsurprisingly, even more chilly for the Conservatives among the three-quarters of those surveyed who—because they do not have kids, or because their children have aged out of the benefit—did not receive a cheque.

These statistics bear some repetition.

The Conservatives mailed families cheques for $500, and people became less likely to vote for them.

Why?

Well, it turns out that Canadians aren't crazy about being bought off.

When asked whether they thought these cheques were "a genuine effort to help parents with children" or "just an election ploy to buy votes," the responses were pretty clear.

Nearly two thirds of all respondents said it was a case of electioneering, while only a quarter saw it as a straight-from-the-heart attempt to give families a hand. Even a quarter of Conservative supporters saw it as a Machiavellian plot to win political points with the procreating population. More than one in ten Conservative supporters said it would make them less likely to vote for Harper.

Even if the UCCB is a political flop, however, it may actually be surprisingly good public policy. Exactly 70 percent of those who got the cheque said their household actually needed the money—the rest, of course, said they didn't need it. So perhaps Harper's argument that the cheque is an efficient way to help parents cover the cost of having kids isn't totally off base.

On the other hand, the cheques remain a prize you win for having babies.

And it's not like the Conservatives are the only ones who support the UCCB. The NDP want to keep it as-is, while the Liberals want to expand it—but tie to income, so rich families get less and poor families get more.

Forum surveyed 1397 Canadians over July 27 to 28 for the poll. It is considered accurate +/- three percent, 19 times out of 20.

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.

United Airlines' Frequent Flyer App Can Be Hacked to Reveal Passenger Info

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United Airlines' Frequent Flyer App Can Be Hacked to Reveal Passenger Info

Taking the Temperature of Tel Aviv's Insanely Eclectic Music Scene

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Taking the Temperature of Tel Aviv's Insanely Eclectic Music Scene

A Myth-Busting Guide to Migration to the UK

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People waiting around at Calais's migrant 'Jungle.' Photo by Jake Lewis

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

In Britain today, there's almost nothing that doesn't get blamed on immigrants and asylum seekers. On top of stealing jobs and houses and causing an epidemic of ATM thefts, it's foreigners—we're told—who are clogging up traffic on the M4 and slowly killing off the great British boozer. There's even a bloke in Wigan who has to sit "on his own" during tea breaks because nobody wants to speak to him.

Often ridiculous to the point of self-parody, as the panic over migrants in Calais intensifies, the language is getting more and more inflammatory. With all the jargon, spin and just plain bullshit, it can be hard to get a clear picture of what's really going on.

So what does the crisis in Calais really entail? And what about the asylum seekers and immigrants already here? How much of a "soft touch" is Britain? Are immigrants really stopping our sweet kids from playing football in the streets?

Here's a guide to some of the myths you might have seen bandied about.

"THE UK IS HAVING A MIGRATION CRISIS"

It's more of a humanitarian crisis. What's happening in Calais has dominated the news over the past few weeks as migrants make thousands of attempts to reach the UK through the Eurotunnel terminal in Coquelles. Politicians and much of the press are keen to portray them as "economic migrants," or otherwise some grasping freeloaders who need to be fended off.

In fact many migrants are from places like Syria, Eritrea, Afghanistan, and Sudan, and cannot return to their home countries for fear of death or persecution. With no safe, legal passage into the UK and are forced to make incredibly dangerous journeys, from which many are dying. So who is this really a "crisis" for? British holiday-makers—as David Cameron suggested—or refugees? Having your jaunt across the channel delayed sucks, but let's get some perspective.

Though worse than ever before, the current crisis in Calais is in fact nothing new. In 2002, a refugee camp called Sangatte—set up by the French Red Cross to provide emergency accommodation—was closed and since then migrants have been forced to sleep rough. Today they are staying in a new state-sponsored slum commonly known as "the Jungle."

Photo by Jake Lewis

"MIGRANTS AND ASYLUM SEEKERS ARE THE SAME THING"

The terms "migrants" and "asylum seekers" are often used interchangeably, often for cynical reasons. The logic seems to go that it doesn't matter why they're coming here, we have to keep them all out.

In reality, these terms mean very different things. Migrants are people that have moved to the country for a variety of different reasons, some economic, some social. Your mate who popped over to Berlin for the cheaper rent is a migrant—and nobody's calling that a "crisis."

Asylum seekers, on the other hand, are people that have escaped political, religious, ethnic, or some other kind of persecution and are seeking protection from the state. If their application for protection is accepted—in 2014 41 percent of cases in the UK were—asylum seekers are offered citizenship and awarded refugee status.

Photo by Natalie Olah

"BRITAIN IS A SOFT-TOUCH PARADISE FOR MIGRANTS"

The British press likes to paint a picture of border agents standing at the White Cliffs with their arms open and hands out, their big warm hearts bleeding through Amnesty International t-shirts.

In reality the country's asylum system is a maze of abuse and injustice. Initial decisions are often wrong and are regularly overturned. Cases such as Majid Ali—who was forcibly deported to Pakistan in June and is now feared dead—are frighteningly common. And when it comes to LGBT asylum seekers, 99 percent are forced to return home according to Research by the UK Lesbian and Gay Immigration Group (UKLGIG) with many suffering horrific abuse from border officials in the process.

It's even the stated aim of the government is to make the UK a "hostile environment" for illegal immigrants. Under last year's Immigration Act, mandatory immigration checks were introduced for people trying to rent a flat, open a bank account, or access healthcare.

Meanwhile, Britain has been less than helpful to people before they reach the UK. In October the government axed funding for search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean to avoid what Foreign Office minister Lady Anelay called an "unintended pull factor." Last month it withdrew HMS Bulwark, a large warship that had rescued over 3,000 refugees from the area, replacing it with HMS Enterprise, a much smaller vessel that is yet to rescue a single person. The government also refused to accept plans, since scrapped, for an EU-wide refugee quota system, and has opted out of a voluntary plan to resettle some migrants, which other European countries agreed to.

"THEY ALL COME OVER HERE"

Between 3,000 and 5,000 people are thought to be living in the Calais Jungle—a sizable number but only a fraction of the 185,000 people that have arrived in Europe in the first few months of this year. Most arrive in Greece on the East Mediterranean route from Turkey, and Italy on the Central Mediterranean route from Libya. Many then make onward journeys through Europe.

Outside Calais, the UK's role in the wider humanitarian crisis has been anything but magnanimous. In terms of total numbers offered sanctuary, the UK lags well behind many of its neighbors. Last year it granted refugee status to 14,065 people, trailing Switzerland, Holland, France, Italy, Sweden, and Germany.

Someone walking in the Calais 'Jungle' camp. Photo by Jake Lewis

"THE MIGRANT 'SWARM' IS WAY TOO BIG TO HANDLE"

In a debate that desperately needs some compassion, the language being used against migrants has become steadily more dehumanizing. David Cameron called them a "swam," Nigel Farage has been hankering for the army and Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond thinks they constitute a threat to our "standard of living."

Leaving aside the trifling matter of the British Empire, for a continent as wealthy and large as Europe to think resettling 185,000 people would cause the fabric of society to collapse is pretty damn stupid. And in the UK—where just 0.24 percent of the population are refugees—you'd think welcoming a few thousand more from Calais shouldn't be too big a deal. If we let every migrant in Calais come to Britain, we'd be letting in about the same numbers of an average League 2 football gate.


Related: Interested in the migrant crisis? Watch our short documentary 'The Smartest Guy in the Sea'


"THEY'RE ALL BENEFIT SCROUNGERS"

These asylum seekers from Libya—sure, they're risking their lives and leaving their homes to flee the horrors of living in a failed state, but what they're really after is that City-Trader-sized golden hello that all asylum seekers are entitled to—a briefcase stuffed with £50 notes that they all get handed as soon as they get to Kent, right?

Wrong. In fact asylum seekers have no access to ordinary benefits and are prevented from working while they wait for months and, in some cases, years for the outcome of their claims. Instead they rely upon a separate Home Office program. With cuts to asylum rate support introduced earlier this month, all asylum seekers now get a flat rate of £36.95 [$57.63] per person per week, which is not a lot when it's your sole source of income and you're trying to make a new life having escaped a war-zone. Asylum seekers are also offered housing but usually in "hard to let" council properties, which means they suck and nobody who wasn't completely desperate would want to live in them.

Despite popular perceptions, other non-EU residents subject to immigration control have no recourse to public funds like tax credits and Job Seeker's Allowance until they are granted permanent residence. Then they get the same level of benefits as other UK citizens which, in case you've missed the last five-or-so years of government, is not a lot.

Migrants from within the EEA—the European Economic Area—are often portrayed as benefit tourists: those Romanians you read about sneaking in to live it up on the dole. In fact, various studies show they make a net contribution to the country's balance book and various restrictions are also placed on their access to welfare.

"WE SHOULD JUST LOCK THEM UP"

We do, unfortunately. Immigrant removal centers are one of the most controversial features of immigration policy in the UK. They're basically like high-security prisons, except many of the people there have done absolutely nothing wrong.

As well as locking up foreign national offenders and people it wants to deport the UK also holds thousands of asylum seekers in detention while it processes their claims. The scheme—known as Detained Fast Track—came into being in 2000 as a way of quickly processing "straightforward" asylum claims but was suspended last month after the high court judged it so "unfair as to be unlawful."

Not only does the country have one of the largest networks of detention centers in Europe, it is the only country on the continent that sets no statutory time limit on how long asylum seekers can be detained for. People that are refused entrance by their home countries can be left in limbo, denied citizenship in the UK, and unable to return to the country they have fled from, locked up indefinitely despite having committed no crime.

Many of the country's secretive detention centers have been plagued by scandals over the years. Yarl's Wood, one of the most notorious of the country's 13 removal centers, is run by a private company called Serco. There have been allegations of sexual abuse, racism, and poor healthcare standards over the center's 14-year history.

Follow Philip on Twitter.

Moms Who Do Molly

Scientifically, Does Gaydar Actually Exist?

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A gaydar system. Screencap via Futurama, Fox/Matt Groening

The word "gaydar" has been in use at least since the 1990s, and has avoided a fake medical acronym along the lines of ASMR, and HSP. No one is pretending to speak with medical authority when they say "that guy pinged my gaydar."

But while it might sound almost dismissive to imply that we have devices in our brains that detect some kind of waves of gayness emanating from other people, gaydar is a well-studied phenomenon. Unfortunately, the results of all that study just seem to push a unified theory of gay detection further and further away.

The book Gay, Straight, and the Reason Why, gives what's probably the most useful definition of gaydar: "the ability to spot people who are gay without the benefit of any explicit information about their sexual orientation." The author of that book, Simon LeVay is a neurologist who studies brain structures, sexual orientation, and the connection between the two. He says, scientifically, gaydar is mostly detecting traits typical of another gender:

Gaydar appears to involve the detection of ordinary gendered traits, by and large—traits that distinguish men and women and that are important to anyone's life as a social animal. What turns "gendar" into gaydar, for the most part, is simply the mismatch between some of these discernible gendered traits and a person's physical sex.

In 2012, psychologists Joshua Tabak and Vivian Zayas, performed a gaydar experiment involving the identification of faces. People were able to tell if someone was gay only about 60 percent of the time. (It's worth noting that in experiments, gay people appear to have better gaydar than straight people, but those numbers are scant, and it looks like an area that could use further study.)

In other areas, studies show that people's gaydar was actually under 60 percent in terms of accuracy. I found one that suggested 73 percent accuracy in one experiment, but nothing higher than that.

Scientific results just barely better than chance might feel wrong to anyone who claims to have a powerful gaydar, particularly those who enjoy outing celebrities. Rumors about Jim Parsons, Ellen Page, and Neil Patrick Harris dragged them out of their respective closets, seeming to vindicate the rumor mills that put them in that position. Those confirmations shouldn't be mistaken for a sign that society's collective "We already know!" comes from a mechanism accurate enough to demand that people make public declarations about their personal lives. After all, Arnold Schwarzenegger has been subject to gay rumors since he was a kid, and they persisted well into adulthood, but unless he's playing a very long game, Arnie is probably not gay.

But according to Simon LeVay, it's not just false positives calling gaydar's reliability into question. False negatives are rampant. "The studies I'm familiar with usually find that plenty of gay people are mis-diagnosed as straight," he told VICE.


Need more gay stuff? Watch our documentary about gay conversion therapy


At the nuts-and-bolts level, there seem to be two basic components of gaydar: The physical, and the linguistic, both of which have been at least partially confirmed by scientists. Unfortunately these indicators are often found through the exclusive study of men. Also unfortunate: trying to use these indicators to nudge your gaydar one way or another would often be as awkward as trying to practice phrenology on a blind date.

For instance, you can theoretically sometimes tell a man is gay by looking at the crown of his hair. A counterclockwise hair "whorl" is found in gay men 29.8 percent of the time, compared to 8.4 percent in straight men, according to the geneticist Amar J.S. Klar. Gay men also have also been shown to have more "feminine" index and ring finger length ratios, or 2D:4D "digit ratio," an attribute that's also associated with being a dick to women in straight men.

A more promising study at Tufts University found that just by looking at static images of faces in a laboratory setting, people were able to distinguish gay faces from straight ones with an accuracy level above random.

That study suggests that there's some kind of gay face shape, an idea that was proposed last year in a Czech study that claimed gay men have "relatively wider and shorter faces, smaller and shorter noses, and rather massive and more rounded jaws," and that this represented a "mosaic of both feminine and masculine features." The study asked subjects to rate masculinity and femininity of faces on a sliding scale, with mixed results in terms of sexual orientation in general. But observers did rate images of gay men's femininity at .73 and their masculinity at .49.

VICE reached out to the creators of the study, hoping for some further interpretation of those numbers, but they didn't get back to us.

"Sounding gay," on the other hand is such a common notion that it has its own field of linguistics, dubbed "Lavender Linguistics." There's a documentary out called Do I Sound Gay? featuring, interviews with people like George Takei, David Sedaris, and Margaret Cho. The director of that film, David Thorpe told VICE that he made it because, "I worried that I sounded too effeminate for some guys to be attracted to me," and that he "sometimes felt vulnerable in situations where I thought I might not be welcome as an openly gay person, but, like it or not, my voice gave me away."

The notion that it could give Thorpe away suggests that vocal attributes are so strong that they're undeniable if someone's gaydar picks up on them. However, like physical attributes, vocal traits seem to be subtle too. Sure, distinct sounds have been isolated in studies, and associated with a gay (again, usually male) voice, but the range of sounds is all over the place.

In a pioneering 1994 paper on the topic, the anthropologist Rudolf Gaudio found that subjects could identify a gay voice, but Gaudio failed to find what he expected in terms of dynamic range, or what might be called a "sing-songy voice." According to Janet B. Pierrehumbert and Tessa Bent of Norhtwestern University, however, there's a wide range of vowel sounds. "Gay men produced vowel spaces with more dispersion than heterosexual men," they wrote. Greater "vowel dispersion" means more vowels in one's sonic arsenal. They added that "greater precision is also widely reported for women's speech." As is often the case in studies of gay male speech, it supposedly resembles feminine speech, according to Pierrehumbert and Bent.

As for consonants, is there a "gay lisp"? Not according to Benjamin Munson, a linguist at the Univeristy of Minnesota. He does note a "concentration of energy in the higher frequencies," but added that "there's nothing about that that matches the definition of 'lisp,'" when he was interviewed for Slate's "Lexicon Valley." A study by Ron Smyth of the University of Toronto found higher frequencies in the letters S and Z among gay men, and found that gay men use the "dark" L sound (That link is to a YouTube video that will tell you what the hell a "dark" L sound is).

Interestingly, Stanford linguistics professor Robert J. Podesva found an overall shift toward sounds found in California dialects among gay men. In an interview with VICE, Benjamin Munson of the University of Minnesota explained that he had also observed the use of California English in Minnesota speakers who were gay. "It just happened that the variant that was new and stylish in Minnesota was one that had been adopted from the Southern California, reality TV, Kardashian milieu."

The reference to the Kardashians gets at a major problem with trying to use of verbal cues to figure out whether someone is gay: It's subject to trends, and we don't know which ones are going to be permanent. "People have only been studying this for about 15 or 20 years," Munson said. He said he had learned to pick up on a certain set of verbal indicators in the past, but many of those are gone. "It used to be that I had good gaydar among my undergrads," he said. "Nowadays, they all sound gay."

As Henry Alford recently pointed out in The New York Times, gaydar just might not be all that useful soon. There once was certainly a time when you didn't want to just guess someone's orientation for fear that they'd be offended. Lately though, if you need to know the gender of someone's significant other, or you want to try and fix them up with a friend of yours, instead of scrutinizing their face or the way they talk, the best way to figure out their sexual orientation might be to ask them.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

'Shrink': Fiction by Tim Parks

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Above Sigmund Freud's couch, 40 x 50" archival pigment print, 2008. Photos by Jason Lazarus

This short story appears in the August Issue of VICE Magazine

Thomas was furious with his shrink and finally found the courage to tell her so. Three weeks without analysis over the long Christmas break had given him the chance to get his head together.

"The fact is," he began, "if it hadn't been for you I wouldn't have left my wife. I would still have a home and family and an identity that made sense to me. Not to mention the financial side of it all."

Made worse, of course, he might have added, by these £90-an-hour sessions.

His shrink was a small squat woman in her mid 70s who shuffled around a stone floor on slippers while smoking ultrathin menthol cigarettes. She had never asked Thomas's leave to smoke during his visits, which—given that this was theoretically a place of work—was quite possibly illegal, he reflected, and certainly disrespectful. On the other hand he hadn't asked her not to smoke. She exercised a strange power over him that Thomas was beginning to find rather irksome.

The shrink got up to look for a shawl. She must have been cold. Now she sat again and tapped away a little ash. As she looked up, her raised eyebrows seemed to say, Go on, then.

"I came to you in a dilemma over my marriage; you took the decision for me after only two or three meetings. From everything that's emerged in our conversations since, and that's nearly eighteen months' worth, it's become clear that you are viscerally opposed to marriage in general, above all long marriages. No doubt you tell all your clients to leave their husbands or wives. Basically my whole life has been radically and negatively transformed just because in a moment of weakness I took a friend's advice and came to the wrong shrink."

The shrink drew on her cigarette and pulled the brown shawl tight around her shoulders.

"How was your Christmas, Mr. Paige?" she asked. "And New Year's. Did you go away?"

"No. I was here in town. My girlfriend went back to her family. In Dublin."

The shrink waited.

"In the end I took advantage of the situation to get a lot of work squared away so there'll be more free time when she gets back."

Again the shrink did not speak. When Thomas did not continue she simply settled back in her chair as if to make herself comfortable for a long wait. She appeared, Thomas thought, to be observing him carefully, even sympathetically; on the other hand he had long since realized this must be any shrink's default setting. Well, he wasn't going to oblige, he decided. He could stay silent as long as she could. Already he was thinking that at the end of this hour he would very likely discontinue their relationship. But as soon as his posture began to assume a hint of defiance, she enquired:

"Was this the first Christmas you've spent away from your family?"

Thomas reflected: "The second."

Again she made her encouraging face; again he hesitated; again as soon as it seemed he might stay defiantly mute she had a question ready.

"What stopped you from getting in the car and driving over there?"

Thomas too was in an armchair, still in his overcoat. It wasn't clear to him whether the question came from genuine interest or a desire to provoke; he decided to take it for the latter.

"That would have been a big decision," he said, "precisely thanks to all the drastic steps I've taken this year."

He didn't say "under your influence," but felt he could trust her to read the accusation in his voice.

The shrink grinned and sucked the last wisdom from her cigarette. She leaned forward and stubbed it out carefully. The ashtray was clean because, as Thomas had noted some time ago, she always emptied the ashtray between clients and opened the window for a few minutes, which was perhaps why she had felt cold. Outside it was raining on slushy snow.

She waited.

"I feel if my wife were ever to find out the kind of advice you've been giving me, she'd take you to court for destroying our marriage."

"It would hardly have been fair on Elsa," Thomas added, almost involuntarily. It annoyed him that he tended to throw more into the conversation than was perhaps necessary. Sometimes the whole hour was pretty much his own monologue. Which was rather letting her off the hook, he thought. His motor mouth making her money for her. On the other hand he was there to be analyzed, not to keep things hidden. In the end, the whole quandary boiled down to the question, was she friend or foe? And if foe, why on Earth was he paying her to fight him? Suddenly he felt he must solve this question today.

"Sometimes," he announced, "I feel if my wife were ever to find out the kind of advice you've been giving me, she'd take you to court for destroying our marriage."

The shrink did at least seem very attentive now, fascinated even, which was gratifying.

Thomas waited. He would decide this very day if it made any sense at all going on with this farce.

"Tell me about Christmas in the family," the shrink said.

Thomas sighed.

"I always wanted a traditional English Christmas," he told her.

She made her encouraging face.

Untitled, 40 x 50" archival pigment print, 2011

"I mean having a tree. As big as possible. With fairy lights. A turkey lunch. Plum pudding. Exchanging presents on Christmas Day itself. Seeing them under the tree on the days beforehand. We used to have lunch, which was pretty heavy, with quite a lot of wine, something special and expensive, open our presents together sitting around a fire, then collapse into bed or go for a walk."

"Sounds idyllic," the shrink laughed. "I can't see why you didn't drive home then."

Thomas felt angry.

"Obviously it wasn't quite like that. Or it was like that, but it didn't feel as it should have felt. Or as I always hoped it would feel."

The shrink proffered her questioning, knitted-brow look. Sometimes it seemed she worked more with facial expressions than with words.

Thomas tried to focus on Christmas. For some reason he found himself saying, "The Ghost of Christmas Past."

The shrink ignored the allusion.

"Actually it was all very tense. First, Mary didn't want the tree because it dirtied the floor with its needles. She didn't want the turkey because she didn't feel like cooking it. She didn't want to wait for Christmas Day to exchange presents because why not use things once they'd been bought? Probably she was right and it was stupid of me to insist. I think she thought we were doing things too much the way my family had always done them, while her family had never really had a Christmas tradition. It didn't seem they really did anything at all on Christmas. The children loved it, of course. When I said, 'OK, I give in, not this year then,' they started clamoring for the tree and the turkey and so on, and then she changed her mind and we did it anyway, but with a feeling it had all been an immense effort to get to that decision."

The shrink nodded.

"Probably it was my fault. Probably I shouldn't have suggested anything at all."

The shrink pulled out a face that seemed to mean, How depressing, but there you go.

"Then it would have been up to her to suggest what to do, and she would have felt more in control and positive about it all."

The shrink frowned. "Your wife wasn't working at this point?"

"Freelance jobs. Every now and then."

The shrink waited.

"I remember one time she called in the decorators between Christmas and New Year's."

Here the shrink raised her eyebrows as one both surprised and amused. It was the most spontaneous of her expressions so far.

"Tell me," she said, feeling down the side of her armchair for her cigarettes. Thomas was aware of a sudden reciprocal warmth between them. He was rather good at telling stories, and she was an attentive listener. He tried to remember.

"I had invited my mother over that year. Or rather, we had invited her. I would never have invited my mother for Christmas, or anyone else for that matter, if Mary hadn't agreed. Maybe it was even she who suggested it. I can't remember. Actually, they got on pretty well. On the surface, at least. Mary was generous with guests, she put on a big show for them, but then she'd get impatient, especially if the stay was extended. As if put upon. Like they had invited themselves. It was also the first year of the dog. He was still a puppy."

"Ricky," the shrink said.

"The fact is, over the next few days I felt so angry I wanted to die. I really wanted to lie down and die."

Thomas smiled. If there was one aspect of the shrink's performance you couldn't fault her on, it was her memory. Gradually she was becoming a repository of his entire life. Often he wondered how she could do that for all her clients, the same way he wondered how pianists could recall all the pieces they played. No doubt it was this that gave her a hold on him.

"That's right. Ricky."

"The trophy dog," the shrink added. She was rubbing it in, but he could hardly deny these had been his words.

"That wasn't a problem," he said quickly, "since my mother always loved dogs. We always had one when I was a kid."

The shrink waited.

"Anyway, the house needed redecorating. Or rather, the walls needed repapering. My wife liked them to be smart and fresh.

I wasn't too concerned myself. Probably I'm a bit lax that way. I think men and women differ over stuff like that. She had waited till the children were pretty much grown up and had stopped putting fingerprints on the wall. Anyway, she managed to get a cheap price from a couple of guys who worked for a decorating firm. They would do it over Christmas with the firm's equipment, but moonlighting and paid under the table."

Thomas cast about for the actual sums of money but couldn't remember. "Anyway, it was pretty cheap. I mean, it was a serious saving. Mary was always very smart that way."

"Except it was Christmas."

"Right. And my mother was staying. She wasn't well, either. I think she'd had her first operation that year."

The shrink nodded. "Presumably you objected to bringing the decorators in."

"I wasn't enthusiastic. I felt we should do it in summer when it wouldn't matter having the windows open, and the hell with the money since we didn't really have a money problem at the time. I think Mary was naturally a little anxious over money at this point. Not sure why. She didn't use to be when we were younger. Then it was the other way around. Me worried, her not. Anyway, she called them in. I think it was the day after Boxing Day. If not Boxing Day itself."

"So," the shrink observed. "You were insisting on a traditional Christmas show for your mother, and your wife got the decorators in."

"Actually, Mary liked cooking turkey. I mean, once she'd decided to do it. Having my mother there gave her a chance to show how good she was. And she really was. Really is. Certainly much more elaborate than Mum ever could be. Mary is a great cook. In fact, from the moment we agreed it would be right to have Mum over, because it might well be the last year she would be well enough to make the trip, I can't recall any of the usual argument about whether we should have a traditional Christmas lunch or not."

The shrink waited.

Thomas sighed. How weird, suddenly to be going over all this old stuff again. He felt torn.

End of summer lover (the plant on her windowsill), 16 x 20" archival pigment print, 2008

"Basically, it was a disaster. My wife was still in the phase when she thought the dog needed a two-hour walk every day. I mean, she had got herself an outdoor kind of dog, and she felt guilty if she didn't walk him enough."

"Guilty?"

"She said he needed to be walked. She had a responsibility. Obviously my mum couldn't go with her, because she was pretty much reduced to a few steps around the garden at this point. That meant I had to stay at home. So Mary would take Mark for company. Of course, he would rather have slept in. Mary would bribe him by taking him to the coffee bar for breakfast, but then he had to walk for two hours and came back irritated and annoyed. Even the dog was exhausted."

"And your daughter? Presumably she was home for Christmas."

Thomas laughed more heartily. "Sally? She wouldn't have dreamed of going. She just says no. Refuses point blank."

The shrink smiled. "There's always someone who does that."

Thomas stopped and breathed deeply. What was that supposed to mean?

"I was on her side," he said, as if this altered anything. "She was studying pretty hard for his finals at that point. To make matters worse, if I remember rightly, Mark's girlfriend had left him on Christmas Eve, the same day Mum arrived, which rather put a damper on the Christmas lunch. He was really upset. That was his first serious girlfriend. Of course, we were being as sympathetic as possible, but no doubt he could see that we were all pleased as well because it was pretty obvious to everyone that they weren't suited to each other."

"Ah," the shrink nodded, sagely.

"In fact, as I recall it, I was thinking this was a major piece of good news, them splitting up. You know one's always terrified of one's children choosing the wrong partner, right? Mary and I were a hundred percent agreed about that, the girlfriend, though, as I say, the breakup put a very big damper on things; Mark is usually a lot of of fun, and seeing him take it so hard and then texting all the time wasn't encouraging. Plus of course there was the worry they would get back together. At which things would have been worse than before."

The shrink raised a very wry eyebrow here, which again seemed to be trying to tell Thomas something. His mood had definitely shifted. It felt good to be telling the story of this awful Christmas, though dangerous as well, exhilaratingly dangerous. Like walking along the edge of a cliff or something. Suddenly there was a rush of memory.

"The fact is, over the next few days I felt so angry I wanted to die. I really wanted to lie down and die."

In response to this the shrink sat up with a face of intense concern. It was almost comical. Sometimes Thomas thought of her as Yoda in Star Wars. There was the same mix of exaggerated facial expression and supposed wisdom. "Imagine Yoda smoking ultrathin menthol cigarettes and you have it," he had once told Elsa, but then it turned out she hadn't seen Star Wars. She hadn't been born at the time.

"People who feel angry often want to hit back," the shrink pointed out, "but not to die."

Thomas hesitated. Was he really going to go there?

"Normally," he stalled, "I would have joined in the walks, even with my mum being there—I like walking—but somebody needed to stay home and be around while these guys did the decorating. There was lots of heavy furniture to move and cover up. That's it, I remember now. It was part of the cheap deal she'd negotiated that they would find each room ready to paint or paper when they arrived in the mornings, without having to do all the preliminaries. And I knew if I didn't cover things up properly, masking tape around the skirting board and so on, so they got paint drippings on them, or if the rooms weren't ready, there would be trouble. I was tired that year and not feeling too well at the time. Whatever. I don't want to go into that. It was an old problem I'd been having.

But what drove me mad was these two guys, and we're talking your classic working-class decorators, one middle-aged, one young, a real double act, they could see perfectly well what the situation was between myself and Mary, and they were faking respect for me but actually smirking, and my mother could see this as well and the children too, and the guys would ask me questions, what to do about this corner or that mirror, and when I answered they said maybe I should phone the missus in case she sees it differently, and they were right of course, so I did, and she asked me to pass the phone to them so she could speak to them directly, and I realized they had only asked me first to save themselves the cost of the phone call, because they could perfectly well have phoned her directly and left me to get on with whatever I was doing, and then right in the middle of it all, the day they were going to do the big bedroom, our bedroom, I made a mistake and put everything but the bed out on the terrace—the bedroom was on the top floor and had a kind of roof terrace—the bedside tables, an armchair, the carpets, the lamps, a chest of drawers, a low table, etc., etc., and then a little later when I was downstairs making a coffee for Mum—one problem was we couldn't put the heating on because of the need to keep the windows open, so it was freezing, except in the kitchen where I'd fixed a space heater—the day suddenly clouded over and this huge, but really huge gust of wind, completely anomalous, came along and blew everything about, including a nice lampstand with a madly expensive Venetian-glass shade that shattered into about ten million pieces over the chairs and rugs, and the decorators pretended to be sympathetic but were really sniggering.

So then for the rest of the morning I was dreading my wife coming back, which she eventually did with the dog looking more knackered than ever and Mark in a state of angry misery, and Mary sighed as if to say what could one expect, and she said maybe this was a good moment to get rid of the big painting above the stairs that was a favorite of mine but that she had never liked. I should take it to my office, she said, where she knew there wasn't a wall big enough for it. My mother, needless to say, was looking like all she wanted to do was to be allowed to get on the next train home and die in peace, she wasn't used to people arguing, and..."

Untitled, 26 x 36" archival pigment print, 2008

Thomas stopped. The shrink had been chuckling but now used a drag on her cigarette to change the expression to a frown. Thomas knew then that she knew he wasn't telling her the half of it. He felt cautious.

"I remember having a dream," he began. "One of those nights." Again he stopped.

The shrink watched. For the first time she seemed skeptical.

"I'm not sure if it was really one of those nights. But it comes back to me now."

The shrink sighed. "Tell me."

"I had a girlfriend at the time," Thomas said, a little sheepishly. "A mistress, maybe you'd have to say."

The shrink was not surprised. They had been through this.

"Let's say a girlfriend," she said.

Thomas thought, I'm paying her to nod like this.

"I'd been with her quite a while at this point. We got on pretty well. Anyway, I dreamed we were in a mountain valley. It was green and very beautiful, and we seemed happy and relaxed, and she was dressed very beautifully and rather chastely in a long, flowery skirt down to bare feet. I think my feet were bare too. I almost always have bare feet in dreams. Go figure."

The shrink nodded.

Thomas thought, I'm paying her to nod like this.

"It was beautiful, I mean the whole scene just said: beauty, serenity, happiness. A caricature. Except there was the problem that we needed to go somewhere to eat and sleep. There was nothing in the valley but beauty. You couldn't eat that. So we were following a path downward that seemed to be taking us somewhere, except that at a certain point it led into a tunnel. It seemed to be an old railway tunnel, disused now, and we started walking into it, thinking we would soon be out. It was pitch dark, which was worrying with us being barefoot, but there was something faintly white in the distance, and we thought it must be daylight, even if it didn't look like daylight, in fact when we got there it was ice, or maybe frozen snow, blocking the tunnel from top to bottom, there was no way through, it was packed tight, and I remember waking and thinking how strange it was that there could be snow inside a tunnel when there was none outside and wondering how it had got there."

Thomas stopped.

The shrink stubbed out her second cigarette and smoothed out her dress, which had rumpled when she leaned forward.

"You were telling me about that Christmas."

"I drove my mother into town to the station, probably New Year's Eve, pretending it had been a great stay and that everything was fine, even though each of us knew perfectly well that the other knew perfectly well that on the contrary nothing was fine, everything was wrong. And driving back from the airport I thought for the thousandth time that my wife was behaving the way she was because of my mistress, not that she knew about her, but I suppose these things are sort of in the air, so I called her, my girlfriend—I stopped in a service station, I remember—and told her we would have to stop, it was over. She was terribly upset, couldn't believe it even, because we had been getting on so well, and naturally I felt a complete shit, not to mention spectacularly unhappy, but also like I had no right to complain, since it was hardly fair of me to have this mistress, on either of them, I mean, Mary or her, and when I got back the dog had wagged his muddy tail all over the fresh paint to one side of the front door and Mary was just laughing and I couldn't understand why she wasn't angry. I suggested we go out to a celebratory dinner for New Year's Eve, but she said the dog couldn't be left alone because the fireworks would drive him mad and the children couldn't dog-sit because they both had parties of their own, at one of which, needless to say, Mark got back with his inappropriate girlfriend. So all those tears had been for nothing, and on the day..."

"Mr. Paige."

Thomas stopped.

"I'm afraid our time is up, and I have another appointment."

The shrink smiled kindly, but somehow sadly too.

"Let me just ask you, though, was this Christmas you've just spent on your own better or worse than that?"

Thomas had already moved forward on his chair to get up. He felt foolish.

"Well," he grinned, "people kept commiserating because I was alone, like, 'How awful, Christmas on your own,' you know, but actually, well, actually, it was fine. I felt fine."

"And your girlfriend is coming back soon?"

"This evening. I'm going straight to the station right now to meet her."

Saying this, he was embarrassed he was so unable to hide his pleasure and, yes, his pride.

The shrink stood up, smoothed her crumpled dress, picked up the ashtray with her left hand, and offered her right to Thomas to be shaken.

"Next Thursday, then. Same time. Do feel free to call me if you need to."

In the hallway, Thomas passed a man who was struggling to pull off a motorcycle helmet. During the bus ride to the station, watching sprays of slush from the filthy gutters, he reflected on the shrink's method. Was it a method? He felt ashamed of himself and rather happy.


The VICE Reader: A Roundtable on Lucia Berlin, the Greatest American Writer You've Never Heard Of

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Lucia Berlin. Photo by Buddy Berlin. Courtesy of Farrar, Straus and Giroux

It is quite possible that Lucia Berlin was one of the great American prose writers of the 20th century, but until this year, you wouldn't have known it. Berlin passed away in 2004, and in her short lifetime she published only 77 short stories, spread across a handful of books. Her first published story appeared in the early 1960s, and she worked primarily with small publishers and even smaller presses. The peak of her career was in the 90s, when three collections of her short stories were published, but her writing has been hard to track down since then. Thankfully, today brings A Manual for Cleaning Women, a collection of Berlin's short stories that showcases some of her most vibrant work (including "Friends," which was published last week on VICE.com).

Berlin's stories crack open small and specific worlds. She travels amongst those caught in the folds of cities and institutions, from the streets to darkened highways to the hallways of hospitals and hotels and private homes. The writing is tender and blunt; it curves and whips around itself. Berlin was acutely aware of the way language is deployed in the world, from signs to gestural phrases, to the things people say when they don't realize they're saying anything at all.

Both a sly sense of humor and a deep compassion run through the work in A Manual for Cleaning Women, capturing the irreverence of small miracles, the unhinged rhythms of romance and addiction, and the comedy inherent to human fallibility, to pride and pretense and disappointment, to vanity and shame. Many of these stories are semi-autobiographical; all of them reveal an uncanny understanding of human behavior and the human spirit.

Berlin had a life so colorful and varied—and painful, and unlucky—that her biography reads almost as if she had traversed time and space to sample freely from a cascade of potentialities: a childhood amongst Santiago's high society; an abusive family; a series of tumultuous relationships with men and alcohol.

To better understand Lucia Berlin, I interviewed and corresponded with a small group of her close friends and family. Over the course of these conversations, a picture of Berlin herself emerged: one of a deeply compassionate, maternal figure, liberal with both straight talk and insight; a woman who swung between periods of darkness and light, all largely of her own creation; a wild and exuberant writer with a reverence for literature and language, and little concern about the literary establishment or her own place in it.

Lydia Davis. Photo by Theo Cote. Courtesy of Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Writer and translator Lydia Davis, who corresponded with Lucia Berlin for years, though they never had an opportunity to meet in person

Lucia and I began corresponding in probably the very late 80s. Our correspondence proceeded by fits and starts, with sometimes a flurry of letters and sometimes fairly long silences. There was good, warm sympathy between us, and mutual admiration. We talked about our families—we both had sons, and only sons, no daughters. We talked about other writers. I don't think we disagreed about the authors we admired or did not admire. She did not like being negative, though, about other writers—or, rather, she didn't like being what she called "catty." And if she slipped and said something catty she would sometimes apologize in the next letter.

I really don't know how I first acquired [her story] Angel's Laundromat [which was published as a one-off]. But I imagine it was because I was teaching at UCSD and meeting a lot of West Coast writers. Maybe someone mentioned her and said I should read her. That is the most likely, rather than either browsing or being given the book. Maybe someday I'll find a journal entry of mine that answers that question.

I think her most loyal community was on the West Coast. For decades I would mention her name to other writers here in the East, but no one knew her work. I tried for decades to bring up her name and interest other writers in seeking out her stories, but without any luck. So I'm very glad that FSG is publishing this selection. She is that unusual combination of compulsively readable and a very fine writer. So I think this book will do well and maybe at last she will gain that place that I always thought she should have.

Stephen Emerson. Photo by Andy Berlin (no relation to Lucia). Courtesy of Emerson

Stephen Emerson, editor of A Manual for Cleaning Women and a close friend of Berlin's for 25 years

This is all Lucia Berlin territory—Oakland and Berkeley. She lived in countless houses and apartments all around here. These buses still have the route numbers they did in A Manual for Cleaning Women. "502" takes place a half-mile from here.

I'll tell you, I never looked at her work even once between her death and when I started on this, early in 2013. I also didn't re-read her letters. It was too sad. The fact is, I had a lot of trouble getting over her death. And then, throughout putting the book together, I'd keep getting blindsided by forgotten and hidden aspects of Lucia.

Mallarmé had this idea that the poet morphs into his or her work—they become synonymous, the work and the writer, the work and the person—at death. Hence, death is the ultimate moment in the writer's life. So with Lucia, when I reread the work, it was a joy. The delight that's present in her work is completely reminiscent of her spirit.

The work turned out to be even better than I'd thought. Which meant the whole process was completely invigorating. Lucia the person, the friend. Our conversations—all of them were right there.

There's no posturing. She doesn't care how she's coming across. But she does know how to be funny. –Stephen Emerson

Her letters were by far the most painful thing to go back to. Plus late emails stored in antediluvian applications that don't run anymore. Most of it very intense. Her sister's dying—she's writing to me from Mexico City about that. She's moving to her trailer in Boulder. She's carrying her oxygen tank around. She's getting radiation treatments. Hard things.

She stopped drinking in the late 80s. We met in the 70s, but by the time I knew her well, she was heading out of the abyss and becoming a new person. Picking up self-confidence as she wrote more and more. Then she gained further confidence as she got off the sauce. These things all led right to the job at the University of Colorado and to leaving here, both of which were good for her.

When she'd call me up in a shaky state, not sure what she was doing or whether she could, I'd tell her, "Well, you know that you have the power to do anything. Because when you went on the wagon and stayed on, you did the hardest thing in the world." And she'd say, "You're right." And that seemed to work. It's a kind of silver bullet you don't get with many people.


VICE Meets Norwegian writer and international literary sensation Karl Ove Knausgaard:


The reason her stories appear openhearted is that she's such a skillful writer. There's so much work behind the scenes. There's great artfulness. But also there's no posturing. She doesn't care how she's coming across. But she does know how to be funny.

Out in the halls of literature, there's work that's forbidding; there's work that's written in long sentences; there's work that alludes to other writing; there's work that's literary in a lot of obvious ways. And Lucia is a very sophisticated writer, but she doesn't do any of those things. That's one reason the work is accessible.

She was the person who got me to read Thackeray—Vanity Fair. I didn't read it until I was in my 40s. And it was a fabulous experience. Vanity Fair was one of her favorite books. I have no trouble at all seeing the influence of Thackeray upon her.

I got her to read Trollope, Glenway Wescott, Merrill Gilfillan—she loved them all. Then I gave her Dreiser's The Titan. I thought she'd love it. Not one bit. "He writes like a guy." Obviously that was a damning criticism.

I would just like to see A Manual for Cleaning Women find the audience that can connect with it. This work is accessible to just about anybody. But it's also very, very smart. It has elements to it that you don't run into often at all: speed, and joy, in addition to boundless compassion. If the kind of people who read Grace Paley and Alice Munro and Jane Bowles and for that matter Frank O'Hara—if a lot of them could find her stories—that's what I'm hoping for.

She was absolutely passionate about the work. Lucia is gone, but I think we've managed to do something here that serves her work. That's as close as I can get to doing something for her. I think it's pretty close.


Lucia with her son Jeffrey Berlin, who is now an art director and graphic designer in the Bay Area. Photo by Buddy Berlin. Courtesy of the Literary Estate of Lucia Berlin LP

Art director and one of Lucia's sons, Jeffrey Berlin

I have two living brothers; I'm the oldest living brother. We have always struggled with it. A lot of these stories are about things that we lived through. They're some of our worst memories. It has always been a weird thing to deal with. We're really proud of her, and we think a lot of the stories are fantastic. But it's still personal memory, or not exactly the way things happened. I think we separate the truth from the stories. But none of us are not happy about this. There are none of these stories I don't want told.

I remember reading her stories when I was a little kid in the 60s. The first stories she wrote weren't extremely personal or anything that would have bothered me, but I read her from early on. Whenever she was writing, she would show me what she was working on. I think I had pretty intelligent opinions from early on, but sometimes it was like, "No, Mom, that's too much." I remember reading "The Musical Vanity Boxes" when I was maybe ten.

Sometimes it was like, 'No, Mom, that's too much.' –Jeffrey Berlin

"A Manual for Cleaning Women" did spring out of a terrible period for her. She had been writing all through the 60s and early 70s, and she hadn't really finished anything. That was the first story that she really finished. It got her started writing again; it got published a couple times. She started to take herself seriously.

We knew her, and we knew what the situations were. She wasn't writing to explain things to us. I think she was writing to clarify things for herself, and for other people. As we get older, and our memories fade, these stories are sort of mixed in as part of our memory. So it all sort of merges together.

August Kleinzahler, whose letters from Lucia Berlin were published in the 'London Review of Books.' Photo by Laura Wilson. Courtesy of Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Poet and essayist August Kleinzahler

We had a very close friendship, but it was almost exclusively an epistolary friendship: We exchanged letters between 1994 and 2000. It became a very significant correspondence for me. Prior to that I only met her two or three times, rather briefly, in company. I didn't really know Lucia in the flesh, as it were. It was really in the letters that we let our hair down and got to know each other. We talked about things we cared about, which were mostly literary, and talked about our respective lives. The letters got more open-hearted and interesting and intimate. She was a great reader, and that was a treasure, to have someone that bright.

She really had a feeling for poetry. Some of the people she was closest to in her adult life, and in her writing life, were people like Ed Dorn and Robert Creeley. She spent some real time around real poets, and could distinguish not just what was good or bad, but what was alive on the page.

Her letters were as good as her stories. And she tells stories in the letters, which are very much in miniature, almost indistinguishable in style from her formal writing. They were quite ravishing.

I've been telling people for over 25 years that she's one of the best American prose writers that we have. –August Kleinzahler

[In her stories] she finds something compassionate to say, even among the most brutal and depraved behavior. It's remarkable, because she was brutalized as a child, and had a very rough life, at least intermittently. It's easy to become embittered and angered. But she remains very open and curious about the human condition and human behavior. She has a devilish sense of humor and is capable of all sorts of sarcasm and satire, but she did have a buoyant and optimistic soul in many ways—trusting. She was punished for her trust, I think, throughout her life, but she seemed to be resilient that way.

I think in a number of romantic pairings she was treated very badly. Did she make good choices? I don't know. For the most part, probably not. I think she was let down. Was she setting herself up for a letdown, as many people do who make bad choices? Perhaps... probably. Was she attracted to situations or individuals who were dangerous or unreliable, potentially explosive? Perhaps, probably. Was it conditioned by her childhood experience in El Paso? Possibly, probably. And of course, a theme going through her entire adult life: fearsome bouts of alcoholism. Which, you know, can blow up any situation.

She could be rather difficult and combative. Had she been alive, I don't know that this could have come to pass. She was very conflicted about becoming famous, and I think probably in a lot of ways undermined herself periodically. I think that was part of her nature. But a lot of us loved her, and if it has to be done posthumously, it's done posthumously. I've been telling people for over 25 years that she's one of the best American prose writers that we have. Everybody, particularly in New York, thought I was a crank. And now they'll eat their words. Lucia's an extraordinarily original, powerful writer.

[The correspondence] was one of the great treats in my life. All good things come to an end. Well, they can evolve. So not everything comes to an end. But regrettably, the letters did.

On Munchies: Cooking With Silvia Plath Was Exhausting

Dave Cullen. Photo by MaryLynn Gillaspie. Courtesy of Cullen

Columbine author Dave Cullen, who studied under Lucia Berlin at the University of Colorado

There was a big waiting list for her workshop, but Ed Dorn, a mentor of hers, told me I had to work with her. He said, "Just go the first day and beg her to let you in." She let me in.

We stayed close friends after I finished the program. When she moved to California, we talked on the phone once a week. She was a mentor: definitely for my writing, but constantly about my love life—just everything. My all-in-one life advisor. She had a very wild ride in her own life, but I never saw all that. She was sober and sweet, a wonderful, wise woman. She collapsed and was hospitalized about a month into our semester. She was never without the oxygen tank for the rest of her life. It aged her, made her look much more like an old lady, wheeling that shit around. I remember her that way.

She married and divorced three times and had four boys, all within like six years. One husband was an addict; one jazz musician, and she was an alcoholic, a big lush. They were crazy years—and rough on the boys, which she always felt guilty about. I came after, all in her past. She didn't really like talking about all that too much. But I was living some version of that, without the kids, and she knew how to guide me, gently.

With my writing, it was a combination: guidance and critiques, and endless encouragement, but so much of it was also just her work, the stories. They were just extraordinary in their... I was going to say simplicity, but it's the opposite. They're really complex. They're masquerading as quick, easy reads. They seem really simple, but there's so much going on. I was really impressed. I wanted to do that.

If I really liked a guy, and he stayed overnight, I would read 'The Jockey' to him in bed. –Dave Cullen

She was exactly like the stories: so honest, and so candid. In her stories, it's like she could see right inside of her characters and understand them. That's how she was in life. It was uncanny, the way that she could read people. Almost like social X-raying, seeing right inside us. She just spilled herself onto the page, and made it look effortless, instead of trying to make it look gaudy, or gilding it.

My favorite story is "The Jockey." I always read it to guys, especially during my big slutty phase. If I really liked a guy, and he stayed overnight, I would read it to him in bed. If he didn't like it, or didn't get it, that was pretty much the end of him. It was like, "OK, really? You're an idiot then."

She doesn't pull any punches. It's not a mean bluntness; just honesty. Like kids will tell you the fucking truth. It works because she's incredibly compassionate, and tender, and cares so much about her characters. Her hero was really Chekov, specifically because he was so nonjudgmental about his characters. To me, she's at the same talent level as those great writers [Nabokov; Faulkner].

Lucia had different approaches to different people. I was the one she would call to bring over cigarettes, because she was on oxygen, and had like half a lung left. She wasn't supposed to be smoking. But she still loved them, had such a burning taste. She would smoke a couple cigarettes a week. The first time she called and asked if I would bring over two or three, I thought she meant packs. I had no idea you could buy individual cigarettes in Boulder. She just laughed hysterically. She said I was one of the few people left who would do it without judging her. She wasn't Saint Lucia. I mean, she was—to us.

I don't know what the chances are that I stumbled into this program, and she was there—just when I needed her in my life. That was one of the great lucky things in my life. Just that.

A Manual for Cleaning Women is out today from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Anna Wiener is a writer from Brooklyn who lives in San Francisco. Talk to her on Twitter here.

The Worst Drug in the World: I Was Addicted to Spice, and It Might Be Responsible for My Bizarre, Unexplained Sickness

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A pile of synthetic cannabis, branded as Black Mamba (Photos courtesy of the author)

I came across spice in New Zealand, in 2007. The first blend of the stuff, a synthesized cannabis substitute sprayed onto inert leafy materials, was similar to a a kind of weak bush weed, I'd been told. I was trying to avoid cannabis at the time—having smoked it for over ten years, reaching the point where a smoke-up would leave me more dead-eyed and vacant than giggly and high—but the prospect of getting stoned in the wet heat of the Antipodean evening sun was too much to resist. Plus, this wasn't technically weed.

I became instantly hooked on spice, starting to spend far more money on it than anyone ever should. I ended up returning to London earlier than I'd anticipated and, alarmingly quickly, found a local spice supplier. I could buy it over the counter at a head shop—the exact stuff I'd been getting in New Zealand. Then it got stronger: The Gold, Silver, and Arctic blends escalating the high each time.

Related: How Synthetic Weed Is Ravaging Brooklyn's Homeless Population

One problem any dedicated stoner has is finding a dealer who can provide consistently high-quality cannabis. Spice is always consistent. It's a guaranteed hit at a guaranteed level. A weed enthusiast will use several strands of cannabis, some stronger than others, some with varying effects. For me, spice has only one guaranteed effect: stoned, passive, dead weight, heavy-hearted dullness. A pale-faced painkiller, shutting the world off to you and you off to the world. Other accounts suggest it's capable of sending users into a frenzy, with some harming either themselves or others. Either way, it's not exactly the most desirable high.


Watch: The Hard Lives of Britain's Synthetic Marijuana Addicts


Not long ago, the UK's legal high market flourished. A seemingly infinite range of new synthetic cannabinoids emerged, all with different names, but sold in the same near-identical vacuum-packed bags. Eventually they released the stuff branded as Black Mamba, which quickly became my smoke of choice. One evening around that time I was passed a joint made purely from extremely strong, high-grade, instant-amnesia cannabis. I inhaled and didn't feel a thing. I must have smoked about a half ounce that evening, trying in vain to get stoned.

After that, I stopped smoking cannabis altogether. I knew how Black Mamba could make me feel; I preferred it. I chose to continue the habit, to the point where I could easily smoke three grams of Black Mamba in one day. In fact, I did exactly that for over three years.

That I never knew exactly what was in the lab-concocted chemicals I was smoking never really bothered me. I was annihilating my body every night, only to queue outside the head shop the next morning to buy the next three-gram bag. Hopelessly addicted without even knowing it.

READ ON MOTHERBOARD: It's Really Easy to Create Your Very Own Legal High

I've stopped now, though; cut the tie Black Mamba had on me. In the weeks that followed my decision to quit, I felt fairly healthy. I ate well and considered myself to have a normal life.

Recently, the situation has changed. A sickness. Doctors are involved. Blood tests. Stool tests. All they can find is an excessive white blood cell count, supposedly triggered by certain cannabinoids and high levels of stress. There's no concrete evidence as yet, but it would make sense that years of ingesting an unknown mix of chemicals might have some sort of adverse effect on my body.

What alarms me most are the uncharted long-term effects of what I've been choosing to inhale. I'd done a bit of research, found nothing of any real concern, rolled another joint and carried on not really caring about anything: in retrospect, such a strange, dangerous approach to take.

Recently, I bought my first bag of Black Mamba for months. I wanted to remember what it feels like. Why it had such a hold over me. I wrote the following straight after my first hit:

Just over three years. A long time. Looking back it had an effect on everything. Money. Relationships. Operations. Friends. Family. It took first place. It always took everything.

The feeling has passed now. It lasts for about ten minutes. A short smash into whatever pit you were previously digging into. At first it is not the comfortable cradle one might associate with heroin, or cannabis. I pushed it. I missed it. To me, weed is the only sin I allow myself to commit. Or think I'm committing. Sometimes it is more about how guilty you intend to make yourself feel. There is no real evidence. Blood. Inability to get stoned, Frightening moods. And my creativity is weak. Dead. Dull. The light is something else. Some chemical, brutalized version. And boy does it mess your lungs up. Sick. Unavoidable. It's a melancholy trip. It does have positive traits. It is very addictive.

But I see it now for what it really is. The black snake all along. There is guilt; soul-kicking sadness. And the dead part of your chest wakes. Tell myself it's going to be alright. I have annihilated, eradicated my memories. I have emotive, strongly-felt memories. But details are my devil. I see it all now. How deeply layered the hold is. A drug that smashes, bends, and drowns all the elements of myself I'm too terrified to admit.

All I can do now is wait for the test results, find some new way to fill those dead hours and try to get past the one question that's been playing on my mind ever since I comprehended the unknown of the drug's long-term effects: What the fuck have I done? It is a poison, spice, or Black Mamba, or whatever else synthetic cannabis is branded as. My mind and body have had time to breath and heal, but the rusty, smeared-window view of the world that Black Mamba gives you is a hard one to escape. The hours I slept back then were the only hours that I wasn't smoking; a pathetic way to live any life.

Black Mamba will snatch you by the throat and kiss you deeply. It makes you forget why you are. Which, to me, defeats the whole purpose of hallucinogenics. I spent years building some false, black dream. All I'd been was a vessel, driven by an insatiable need for an unknown combination of chemicals.

More on VICE:

A Look Inside the British Government's Legal Highs Lab

I Sell Legal Highs in the UK and Now I'm Fucked

A Guide to Spice: The Drug That's Putting British Students in Hospital

Is Bernie Sanders Actually Larry David? A @Seinfeld2000 Investigation

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All images via the author

[Editor's Note: @Seinfeld2000 started out as a parody of the relatively straightforward Twitter account @SeinfeldToday, but through a unique style, consisting of broken English, an irrational hatred of Barack Obama, and a rich internal world in which the Seinfeld characters are murderous sex addicts who measure time with pieces of technology, @Seinfeld2000 has in many ways transcended his trollish roots. He's made a video game, written an e-book, and been profiled by the New York Times.]

k. so if u follow me on twiter or instagram then u already know FULL WELL that my whole M.O. is just simply conjuring up ideas abt what Seinfeld would be like if it never ended and still going on NBC with brand new epsodes every thursday nite just like back in the day.

But honestly some times that mision statement extend WELL PAST the paramaters of Seinfeld and start to enter brave new teritory. case in point: r u aware its been four years since Curb Your Entuisasm was on TV? i mean technicaly Curb was never on TV becase it was on HBO and HBO is not TV, its HBO but u get the point!!! lmao

meanwhile, a young upstart name Bernie Sanders has been postively ELECTRAFYING the democratic base with fresh new policys like lowering the price of a cup of cofee back down to a quarter "the way it should be," outlawing combs, and sweeping policy that when u buy one pair of bifocals, u get the second pair free. (look im gona keep it with u, his web site has got a lot of policy stuff on it but it was so boring that every time i read one sentance i fell asleep like i just chug a full canteen of Neo Citran—so im just basing what i imagen his policys are based exclusively on his apearance.)


k, im gona stop beating around the bush and just get to the point: is Bernie sanders Larry David? Based on the cursory evedence, all signs point to yes. Brace your self and feast ur eyes on this chart i made:

I dont blame u if u straight up just fainted becase taking that all in is like watching the end of The Sixth Sense and watching the end of The Usual Sus simultaneosly via two screen experience - i dont think im being over dramatic when i say it shaters your entire world view into a milion pieces and then u cant even put your world view back together again becase you cant find your one pair of bifocals. Its prety overwhelming.

Anyway, once i had realize this, i did what any good investigative jornalist would do: i went straight to the horses mouth (the "horse" in this case being bernie sanders and the "mouth" in this case being his oficial twiter account)

One might think that bernie would want to make like Febreze and clear the air but surprisingly i received no respanse from Sandars himself or his team. In fact they didnt even fav my twete as a conciliatiatory move to be like, "k it wouldnt be prudant for us to respond outright but as the preeminent imageneer of modarn Seinfeld epsodes, we bestow this fav upon u if for no other reason than to acknowledge u as a sign of respect." I mean faving my twete would have been the honorable thing to do but perhaps this is a candidate who is not honorable smh

On Motherboard: Facebook Is Trying to Make Blogging Happen Again

With the Sanders campaign completely unwiling to cooperate with a quasi anonymos twiter account that envisiens what Seinfeld would be like today, i had to make like modarn columbo and do what the forensic departments of the finest police statiens in the land do when theyre trying to determine if one person is another person: i just cracked open photoshop and overlaid their faces over each other to see if they would line up. To my chagrin, they did not.

So that setles it. Or does it? Ya prety much. However maybe it doesnt settle it all the way. Over at the lifestyle gossip blog Medium, writer Jonathan Norcross takes a deep dive and posit that maybe they are not the same person but just maybe they are long lost brothers. He points out that they grew up 2 mile apart and they went to high schols that were 1.6 miles apart! And then theres also the fact that Bernie Sanders has a brother in the UK name... LARRY?? I mean arguably these are all things that point to the fact that they are actualy NOT brothers but i think at this point we can all prety much agree that they are similar yes but are not relatives or the same person

But what if they were the same person? LMAO, like what if Lary David was Bernie Sanders and Curb Your Enthusiasm was about Bernies adventures in the White House? Well buckle the fuck up bc thats exactly what i will spend the rest of this article imagening.

The Lincoln Bedroom

Imagen an epsode of Bern Your Enthusiasm where Leon moves in to the white house with bernie. LOL it would be so funny omg k like, it would start off that Leon moves in to the Lincoln bedroom but then Leon has a threesome in the lincoln bedroom.

BERNIE: You had a threesome in the Lincoln Bedroom? Leon you cant be bringing women you pick up in the club to the White house! What if the media finds out!

LEON: i emancipated those two fine women. sexually. it was a sexual emancipation Bernie. do you have any idea how much ass you get when you tell people you live in the white house? Im probably getting more ass than Clinton up in that lincoln bedroom. When im done theyre gona have to name it the Leon Bedroom. Shit i might have to start wearing a stovepipe hat, get me a beard and shit. Im Abraham Leon"

Hard Choices

k and Bernie and Jeff would still be BFFs it would be so inapropriate! The whole ep would be just them LOLing while reading Hilary Clintons 2014 memoir Hard Choices in front of Vice President Ted Danson (its a long story but ya, Ted Danson would be VP)

The Red Phone

U think the hilarity would be all political but no there would still be room for us to witness the more shall we say, intimite side of the Sandars presidency. There would be so much hilarity in the bedroom when Bernie Sanders picks up the fabled presidential RED PHONE at 3am during sex intercorse with his stunning wife Cheryl Sanders. But its only Jeff calling. Heres what their fight would be like:

BERNIE: I cant believe youre yelling at me for answering the RED PHONE. Its the RED PHONE! I have to answer! it might have been a threat from north korea!

CHERYL: but it wasnt a threat from north korea bernie it was jeff. why did you give jeff the number to the red phone?

BERNIE: Its a direct line! im the president, you know how hard it is to get a direct line to me now that im president?

CHERYL: Yeah but if everyone has the line, its not exactly direct, is it bernie

BERNIE: Not everyone has it! just jeff... and funkhouser

CHERYL: You gave it to Funkhouser? Tomorrow morning youre changing the number on the RED PHONE

BERNIE: Ok. I'll change the number

On Noisey: How Seinfeld's Theme Song Was Created

Then he changes the number but doesnt give anyone the new number and then theres an actual North Korean nucular war and thats how the world ends. *cue Curb Your Enthusiasm theme over horifying scenes of the apocalypse*

Follow @Seinfeld2000 on Twitter.

Photos of Greek Christians Crawling to Pray on the Island of Tinos

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Every August 15, Orthodox Christians from all over the world crawl to the church of Our Lady of Tinos in Greece. Yes, you read right: As soon as they disembark the boat at the port of the island of Tinos, many believers fall on their knees and begin the difficult journey to the church. Their aim is to touch the holy icon of Virgin Mary, which can be found inside and is believed to have healing powers.

The icon is believed to be the handiwork of Saint Luke. According to legend, its whereabouts had been unknown until the first day of the creation of the modern Greek state. That's when the Virgin Mary visited Saint Pelagia (just a simple nun at the time) and revealed where the icon had been buried. Our Lady of Tinos was consequently declared the patron saint of Greece and a nationwide fund collection was carried out for the building of a church to house it. The first pilgrimage took place in 1823 and since then it constitutes the biggest Greek Orthodox pilgrimage.

This year, I decided to visit Tinos and experience the pilgrimage myself. I'd heard descriptions of what went down on the island but had an inkling others exaggerated the events. I was wrong. As soon as I got off the boat, I was surrounded by old women staggering up the hill that leads to the Church on their knees.

Believers usually offer the Saint a promise, as well as valuables, in the hope that their prayers will be answered. Often you'll hear prayers for good health or miraculous recoveries, but some can be as prosaic as good exam results.


Watch our documentary, 'Jesus of Siberia':


The pilgrimage has been criticized for being a source of big business for the island and the church's website does little to reject that notion: "Our Lady of Tinos operates as a public corporation, under the supervision of the Ministry of National Education and Religious Affairs... Yearly costs are reviewed and approved by the Greek Court while the budget and accounts are submitted for review and approval to the Ministries of Education and Finance."

Politicians frequently make the annual trip too and this year was no different. President of the Hellenic Republic Prokopis Pavlopoulos and the Minister of National Defence Panos Kamenos both made an appearance this year. But no, they did not crawl.

Who Killed the Venus Flytrap?

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Who Killed the Venus Flytrap?
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