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Meet the Dating Coach Who Wants to Help Stoners Find True Love

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Photo via Wikimedia Commons

As a newly single woman, I've quickly grown tired of the unsolicited fisting offers on OKCupid and Tinder—and as a newly single stoner, the prospect of finding a romantic partner who is not only interesting but interested in weed too makes me exhausted. Most pot fans will understand the feeling: Sometimes it feels as if you either have to awkwardly adapt your smoking to fit the lifestyle of a non-toking lover or else wind up with someone with whom all you share is a love of greens.

Molly Peckler has made it her mission to help people like me. She's a dating coach and the founder of Highly Devoted, a new service that aims to provide stoners with some much-needed love counseling. "If cannabis is an important part of your life, your relationship mustreflect that," trumpets her website. Amen.

To learn more about her business—and to hopefully pick up some free tips—I called Peckler up.

Your new stoner dating coach, Molly Peckler. Photo courtesy of Peckler

VICE: Why'd you start Highly Devoted?
Molly Peckler: I created Highly Devoted because I know that there are millions of responsible cannabis consumers out there who need a little bit of help in the love department. They want to confide in someone who understands them and respects them. There are a lot of matchmakers and therapists who look down on weed. They don't understand how it can fit into a healthy lifestyle and a healthy relationship. Marijuana has helped my husband and me to forge a much deeper bond than we ever would without it. That's one of the reasons why we're so compatible.

Weed can be great in relationships. So how'd you come up with this idea?
I've always had a special relationship with men. I just get how they communicate, and I also have the ability to put anyone at ease that is around me. I'm very emotionally intelligent, I'm very curious, and I'm a great listener so people always come to me for advice in their relationships. I was eventually recruited by a high-end executive matchmaking firm. I spent several years matchmaking; I got tons of people married and happily in love.

How'd cannabis get involved?
I have been passionate about cannabis for a really long time. Obviously it's been an important part of [my] relationship [with my husband], but I also have a young family member who has a life-threatening illness, and his parents have fought tirelessly to get the medicine that he needs. I know that there are so many people [like him] out there, and that cannabis is far less dangerous than alcohol and many pharmaceuticals. I had the opportunity to join a cannabis consulting firm. I got the background in cannabis consulting and not long after realized I want to be able to bring my greatest talent—my ability to help people in their love lives—to cannabis consumers. I saw that there was just such a huge need in the market.

Whenever people find out I love weed, they're really surprised. Because they don't think that I look like the typical stoner. I love being able to shatter those stereotypes, because I know so many people who are responsible and well-respected and also happen to love weed. So I took all of my experiences together and I came up with Highly Devoted.

"If cannabis is important to you, that has to be reflected not only in your relationship, but in how you look for a partner."

How does a coaching session work?
The most important part of my coaching is being able to make discoveries together and being able to help you look through your past experiences and learn from them and really understand what you need in the present to have a successful future. What I really want to help my clients become is confident. That is so important because many people don't put as much thought into their specific needs. If you're not confident, you're going to make decisions for the wrong reasons. That has huge ramifications for the rest of your life. I'm just a natural cheerleader; I love making people feel good about themselves, and helping them to forget about the things that are holding them back.

So it's about taking action and actually making change in your life rather than too much rumination on the past?
You have to be able to look to the past. One of the most important things is to kind of see patterns in relationships. You're not going to be able to move forward successfully unless you've really got that under control, if there's something that's unhealthy going on. So you have to go back. It's also about being able to be ready for that right relationship. Because if the right person comes into your life and you're not ready for that, it's not going to work. So it's very important to be able to focus on yourself. The healthiest relationships are made up of two people who are independent and confident and happy in their own life.

Have you ever thought about creating a matchmaking service for stoners as well?
Potentially down the road. Right now, it's about people being able to become their own matchmaker. When someone's in a really great place and really knows what they want, I can help them overhaul their online dating profile; I can do dating role-play; I can help plan dates. It's kind of an all-purpose type coaching.

If cannabis is a big part of your life—do you feel you should be dating someone who also is into it?
Yes. If cannabis is important to you, that has to be reflected not only in your relationship, but in how you look for a partner. So many people get into a relationship and one person smokes and the other person doesn't, and then the smoker is forced to be a little bit secret about what is going on, and whenever there are secrets in a relationship that's just toxic. Nothing good can come from it. It's not like you have to be with someone who smokes, but if it's an important part of your life the person you're with has to be okay with it. And not just OK, but supportive.

In my experience, relationships are sometimes not as fun when only one person smokes.
Well, when you're at a party, and someone there pulls out a joint and starts smoking, it's kind of like there's automatically that comfort there. There's that bond there, you feel like you can open up to them. And that can be huge in a relationship. A lot of people who use cannabis—and I don't want to over-generalize—have similar senses of humor or similar perspectives. You have to be on the same page. Opposites attract, but that's not going to last in the long run.

Follow Sophie on Twitter.


Diaspora Drama and Duas: Visual Artist Isaac Kariuki on Identity

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Diaspora Drama and Duas: Visual Artist Isaac Kariuki on Identity

New Orleans Is Tired of Talking About Hurricane Katrina

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It's August 29, and Hurricane Katrina has reached critical mass in New Orleans.

But when I tell you about a storm hitting south Louisiana right now, I am not talking about August 29, 2005, the day that wet, wide mess of a storm whipped across our coast and kicked our asses.

This is not a reenactment, a retrospective, nor a documentary. This is now. Right now, today, the howling, gale force winds are blowing hard down here and the flooding is catastrophic, again.

The flooding is of memories in this town, none of them good, some of them haunting people to the brink of collapse, like the levees. The hard winds of emotion are reducing some residents to fits of agony. The "remembrances" and "observations" and "celebrations" from that time and since are so intense that some residents have packed up and left town this weekend to get away from the media maelstrom and relentless sorrowful nostalgia that is now filed under the name: Katrina, Ten Years After.

Related: The Lower Ninth Ward,Ten Years After Katrina

OK, this is also a time of metaphors gone wild around here. Of total loss of perspective. Of holding on tight, to something or someone—anything or anyone. I am no less guilty of that than any other.

New Orleans is an all-Katrina, all-the-time carnival of excess right now. Every newspaper headline. Every talk show. Every art gallery, playhouse, even every nightclub because every band has a Katrina song. Some have entire albums.

All the famous people are here, from presidents to the pundits. The American fetishizing of anniversaries has hit this town like a Category 5. And although you can look around and see a city standing tall and tough, physically—with all our new hotels and hospitals and malls and even our new levees—the damage here now, at this most poignant date on the Gulf Coast calendar, is emotional, psychological, and just plain mental.

It's not to say that these are not better days in New Orleans—the Crescent City, the Big Easy that isn't so big and never was as easy as most folks think. Our economy is ripping. The recession of the past ten years was, for us, a windfall. We got so much federal, corporate, and charitable money that no one in the world has any idea exactly how much.

We have a lot to be thankful for. We have, for the most part, blossomed into that big, bright, beautiful, rebuilt, reborn, and re-imagined shining city on the hill. Except for the hill part. There are no hills here. But you get the point.

Numbers tell the story: In fiscal year 2014, the city collected over $46 million in revenue from hotel occupancy fees, and this year is on pace to be even higher. According to the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau (NOCVB), 9.52 million people laid their heads down to rest in our 39,000 hotel rooms last year—both of those the largest numbers on record.

And here's a fetcher for you: Prior to Hurricane Katrina, there were 809 restaurants in the city of New Orleans. Now, there are 1,408. Of course, since I started writing this story, two or three more probably hit the market.

I mean, everyone knows we love to eat down here. But 600 more restaurants than before? With 10 percent fewer residents?

This country is hungry for some New Orleans right now, to be sure.

According to Katrina 10, a Rockefeller Foundation think tank and the city's primary source for economic statistics and analysis, New Orleans is among the most vibrant small business environments in the country now.

"Entrepreneurial activity in New Orleans is 56 percent above the national average, painting a rosy picture for the business climate," reads one recent analysis. "Fueled by an engaged community, strong financial incentives, and an unmatched culture, one of the fastest growing startup hubs has grown out of the recovery of New Orleans."

The publisher of Forbes magazine described the city's economic growth since Katrina as "one of the great turnarounds in American history."

So, like I said, these are better days. We should be walking on sunshine, right?

And many are. Lots of folks—maybe even most—are feeling just fine around here about what this city has become. It's cleaner, smarter, and prettier—if that were possible.

But it's also still a dangerous place to walk around at night in some neighborhoods. And beyond the veneer of national coverage, we have more broken streetlights than some cities our size have streetlights, total. Our streets—paved upon a wet, sinking foundation—are in a constant state of upheaval (literally, not metaphorically).

And the truth is, for all the tax dollars this country has poured into rebuilding our levee system—the previous incarnation of which collapsed the first time it was ever tested and killed 1,600 of us—we have no idea if the new one works. There is no way to know if it will work until millions of pounds of water get hurled into the rock again like last time.

We are living now, as we lived before all this, on blind faith.

So for all the good and bad, we flutter back and forth about what terminology is appropriate for this occasion that looms over us. Is it an anniversary? A remembrance? Mourning? Observation? Celebration? Eulogy? Commemoration? You tell me: What are you calling it?

Truth is, they're all appropriate. In a larger communal sense, this is a time to raise a toast to the triumph of the human spirit and a recognition of the resilience of the people of New Orleans. But there is a strong undercurrent bubbling up this weekend, flushed out by the endless stream of imagery and remembrance and observation and celebration and media lights shining down on us, which has some folks running for cover.

And not the metaphorical kind. Wounds have been re-opened here. Scabs ripped away. Memories a lot of people had managed to escape for ten years have come flooding back like, well... a flood. (I warned you!)

Like I said, it is the anniversary of metaphors, ten years since Katrina, the glorification of which we have managed to avoid for, well, ten years.

There are many here wishing hard and fast for this to go away, for the date to pass, for the attention to wane, for the conversations to switch to the weather, the Saints, the elections, anything but this.

Jesus, even Donald Trump would be a welcome distraction.

We here are stuck in an endless cycle of Katrina—a name many here still refuse to speak. And despite the profound, inescapable and triumphant leaps of recovery and rebirth we have experienced, there's no two ways about it: This is tough as shit to go through again, to relive on a local level the exposure of our national nightmare and disgrace.

To see how far we have come yet how far we still need to go. It's a national discussion being played out in a city of lore that looms large in the American imagination but is actually, truthfully, a pretty small town. Considering.

Nevertheless, New Orleans is shouldering once again the burden of our unfinished—and in some cases unstarted—national conversations. Race. Poverty. Income Inequality. Energy. Rising seas. Loss of the wetlands.

And that's fine. We love conversation down here. We love talking as much as we love eating. In fact, all we talk about when we're eating is what we're going to eat next.

But I stray. Everyone here has a story to tell. And over this weekend, unless you unplug, disconnect, and go off the grid, you just might hear every one of them. But we're OK. We're gonna make it. And we're gonna stay here and keep making our way through this wild ride, trying to find our way back home.

There is nowhere else for us to go—even though many in the media, clergy and Congress told us we should find another place ten years ago. But maybe they have learned, at long last, at this most painful and triumphant juncture, what we here have always known: The longer you live in New Orleans, the more unfit you become to live anywhere else.

That's the one true crazy thing about all this. Here, at the nation's first geographical front against disaster, subsidence, evaporation and extinction: We're still here, ya bastards.

Chris Rose is a New Orleans-based freelance writer, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author of the New York Times bestseller 1 Dead in Attic.

Tune in Today for Episode 9 of VICE on Beats 1

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Tune in Today for Episode 9 of VICE on Beats 1

Thai Police Say Bombing Suspect Had More Than 200 Forged Passports

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Thai Police Say Bombing Suspect Had More Than 200 Forged Passports

"It Was A Big 'Fuck You' to Katrina": New Orleans' Musicians Play On

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The boat wouldn't start and Lewis Bremont's father was struggling to come back to the house, waist deep into the rising water. Without a working car to flee the city along with the other million New Orleanians who had followed Mayor Ray Nagin's mandatory evacuation order, the Bremonts had decided to stay in the city and ride out the storm. They had waited for buses to pick them up and bring them to the Superdome where people were being sheltered. The buses never came.

Like the rest of the 100,000 who decided not to evacuate, the Bremonts had first shrugged off the severity of the situation. A Category 3 hurricane was nothing new to them and they were still irritated by the costly and pointless evacuation they had gone through the year before when Hurricane Ivan missed the metropolis. "Usually storms in New Orleans mean party time! It's only when we saw the river flowing in reverse on TV that we knew it would be serious," Bremont, a sound engineer who was 16 when Katrina hit New Orleans, told VICE. "In the end the storm was not that bad. The problem turned out to be the levees."

As the Industrial Canal surged into the Ninth Ward—a low-lying, poor, and mainly African-American neighborhood—water began moving entire buildings, destroying the weakest structures and trapping people inside the sturdiest. "About six, seven feet of water all around," recalled Bremont. "The boat we had been trying to get on was out of gas. Swimming was out of the question so we just waited for help in the attic."

A Blackhawk helicopter from the National Guard eventually spotted them on the roof of their house, more than 24 hours after the hurricane had receded, and a small dinghy soon came to rescue them. "Everything we had fit in a single backpack. My trumpet? My daddy's drums? Our family pictures? Gone."

Also gone were the weekend gumbos, the St. Bernard Avenue barbecues, and the second-line parades in the Calliope projects.

For the Bremonts, a family of musicians who had lived in New Orleans for generations and had been actively participating in the local culture, seeing roofs emerging from the glassy street-rivers and navigating through submerged cars and dead bodies felt like witnessing the end of the world.

We were singing gospel. It meant the world was still here. We were alive. And our music, man, it was a big "fuck you" to Katrina.

Inside the Superdome, the crowd was overwhelming. Distraught survivors were gulping MREs, fighting at vending machines, and desperately calling out the names of their loved ones. "We was packed like animals," Bremont told VICE. "People talked of women getting raped in the bathrooms. The toilets were backed-up anyway, so people were relieving themselves in buckets. The smell was terrible." The family was brought to the basketball arena for their safety, where they stayed with the sick and elderly. The military were concerned that a generator failure would lead to a riot, should the camp be plunged into darkness. "It was bad. Real bad."

Twenty-thousand refugees were sharing the space. Soldiers began sending incomers wading back to the convention center as the inside of the stadium became an apocalyptic scene, with addicts smoking crack in the corridors and dying of overdose, people passing out from heat exhaustion. One man jumped to his deaths from the balcony as gunshots echoed through the night.

Looting was rampant. "Army rations weren't enough. Things were fucked-up and nobody knew what was happening. Everyone was tired and hungry. A lot of good people did crazy things during those days," Bremont said. Bremont and his father helped distribute basic supplies like bottled water and diapers that scavengers had smuggled from drug stores and hospitals.

On their last day at the Superdome, Bremont and his father recognized a group of musicians they had played with once at a wedding. They talked together, and after a while, they began singing "I'll Fly Away" in deep, bluesy voices. The lyrics resonated in the flooded streets. Refugees soon gathered around them and the blank stares from the last days changed into vivid looks as they clapped and sang along. "It was then that I understood," said Bremont. "I had heard that song before, but this was the moment I understood where it came from and what it meant. The music I had been playing with my father, it all made sense. We were singing gospel, it meant the world was still here. We were alive. And our music, man, it was a big fuck you to Katrina."

Jazz was born from funerals. Created by slaves mixing African and European music in Congo Square in 1835, it expanded through dirges played by brass bands to celebrate the lives of deceased community members. While the rest of 19th century America enjoyed military hymns, New Orleans was coming up with music burials, a tradition that would become the basis for second-line parades and incubate the roots of contemporary music.

Second lines are a way of life in New Orleans. Consisting of a marching band followed by people dancing to jubilant harmonies, they are strongly tied to the city's history. Their provocative sense of freedom generated, among other things, the permission for slaves to keep drumming amid a minority of white settlers and the creation of social aid for destitute African Americans.

But after Katrina, with 80 percent of the population evacuated and 134,000 housing units damaged by the storm, jazz and second lines were distant memories drowned in pools of muddy water. The city was a ghost of itself.

Texas and Georgia were full of New Orleanian refugees forced to relocate in neighboring states and cities. "I was in Houston with family when I heard that Fats Domino had been airlifted from his house in the Ninth Ward," trumpeter Kermit Ruffins, a well-known figure in the jazz scene, told VICE. "We all cheered when we saw his picture in the paper. It was the first good news for the music community. It was a small victory," he explained. "We missed our city so much."

Longing for New Orleans was what led the Bremonts, now temporarily living in Baton Rouge, to spend their Thanksgiving weekend participating in the first second line organized after Katrina. "We didn't even stop by our house," recalled Bremont. "Our priorities were kind of messed up," he laughed.

The Soul Rebels Brass Band playing "Just a Little Walk with Thee" in honor of the 1,836 storm victims was a ray of light in the bleakness. As tradition wants, a congregation grew behind the band—black people, white people, people with umbrellas and handkerchiefs, buck-jumping and singing and waving almost as usual, all walking along in rhythm with the music and under the white November sky, walking through the narrow streets and to the appeased river, carrying with them the weight of the past and the promise of hopeful tomorrows.

Music was needed to cope and reunite. It represented a bit of normalcy after the devastation. If jazz kept playing, New Orleans's heart would keep beating.

Food is never spicy enough out of town anyway. Parties don't feel the same. Culture can't compare. Listening to a Jessie Hill record on a front porch with a Sazerac in hand, that's what laissez les bons temps rouler means!

The fact that musicians were among the first to return to their ravaged hometown after the storm is no coincidence. Music had showed them the value and power of their culture. This shared sense of responsibility for keeping New Orleans lifestyle alive explains why places that had never hosted concerts before started offering gigs as soon as in the late weeks of September. The Jazz Vipers played at Angelinis on Decatur Street, a pizza parlor that was running on generators at the time. Coco Robicheaux played at Apple Barrel. Walter Wolfman at Maple Leaf. Street performer Doreen Ketchens played by candlelight, under curfew, with soldiers stationed nearby in full attire, and went home to a FEMA trailer like 114,000 others. The Rebirth Brass Band performed three times on October 29 alone. "The world's eyes are on New Orleans right now so this is our chance to step up," Phil Frazier, one of the formation's members, told Offbeat Magazine. "People are looking to the Rebirth and Dirty Dozen, and there are new bands coming along. It's overflowing into hip-hop and other things. We got to maintain."

Maintaining was a frequent theme after 2005. The stalwarts of New Orleans' musical traditions had been living in the most affected areas of the city; many had left because of the abysmal post-Katrina healthcare or died in the floods. The new generation needed to carry on their heritage and nurture their culture or risk it vanishing completely.

What set this new generation apart was its renewed appreciation for tradition. "Students that were into bounce [a New Orleans kind of hip-hop] like me started teaching at St James Infirmary to the youngest ones," explained Bremont. "It was a big mess all right. But it helped protect our identity," he said. The mentoring of younger students in school also had the benefit of keeping them out of trouble since they weren't allowed to play in bands without good grades. "Music was channeling their energy," said Lisa Grillot, the co-founder of outreach foundation Trumpets Not Guns, in an interview with VICE.

Bremont and his father began gutting their house right after New Year's Eve, repairing what could be and removing debris by the truckload. "[Insurance company] State Farm eventually sent us a $1,900 check. $1,900 for the whole house," he said, describing how damaged the property was. "The first thing we did with the money was go to a pawn shop and buy a trumpet and a set of drums for me and my daddy so we could play again."

They would work on the house during the day, often helped by friends, and would meet neighbors on the corner at night for impromptu second line parades, walking and playing in St. Claude for small crowds of contractors before driving back to Baton Rouge in their rental car. "We were all struggling. It got us all a little closer," said Bremont.

The neighborhood was disfigured. Where nice shotgun houses had once stood were vacant lots overgrowing with weeds. Katrina crosses, the famous X-codes painted on the walls of flooded properties to report bodies and hazards, were everywhere. Funerals seemed like they would never stop. Corpses were still being retrieved.

But on February 2006, New Orleans celebrated Mardi Gras as usual, laughing in the face of fate. The extended Bremont family attended the festivities, accommodated by friends whose house in Metairie had only sustained light damage. "We ate king cake and made a whole lot of noise. Me and a cousin went on a Krewe d'État float and threw doubloons to pretty girls. Cancel Mardi Gras? What the hell you talking about?" said Lewis.

Many musicians who had not yet returned decided Mardi Gras was the right time to finally come back. Kermit Ruffins reclaimed his regular Thursday night gig at Vaughan's. Trombone Shorty gave a concert. Even Mardi Gras Indians were dancing in the middle of the traffic. The Golden Eagles battled against the Golden Comanches, showing off their colorful sewed costumes and singing "Iko Iko" near Canal Street. "We battled to not be forgotten," Big Chief Monk Boudreaux said with a smile as he remembered that day. Beads were thrown and shows went on like any other year, because Mardi Gras was a symbol of continuity, more than ever before in the history of New Orleans. Celebration had to prevail on rough times.

"I'm so glad we back home," would later sing local Free Agents Brass Band in their tune "We Made It Through That Water." "When I lost my city I almost lost my mind," the lyrics went on, before they were covered by layers of horns and brass blasting at full power.

"Ain't no city like the N-O," they repeated. "Ain't no city like the N-O."

With 77 percent of its inhabitants regionally born-and-raised, New Orleans had been a remarkable exception in a transient America, until 2005. People often lived there all their lives. Real estate was passed from parents to children, and with it the memorabilia full of the extraordinary history built by the previous generations. Food is never spicy enough out of town anyway. Parties don't feel the same. Culture can't compare. Listening to a Jessie Hill record on a front porch with a Sazerac in hand, that's what laissez les bons temps rouler means!

Because of this, New Orleans held a common ideal which ultimately proved essential to its survival—a local patriotism that embraced everything from trombone solos to jambalaya platters and held it against the generic and the mundane in a feat of resilience.

The Bremonts took part in the city's reconstruction. They wouldn't let their memories go to waste. They were able to move back in their house by September, though the interior was barely fit for living. By then, Lewis had turned 17 and was volunteering at WWOZ as an audio technician. "I was at the French Market studio and had beignets with the staff almost everyday. This was heaven for me," he recalled.

With a tremendous part of the city having suffered flood damage and FEMA's sluggish responses to housing issues, trouble was always looming near. "You'll hear there was no more crime in the city after Katrina, but the crime had just moved to Houston for a while," remarked Bremont, referring to the increased criminality the Texan city experienced after evacuees found refuge there. "And it came back in no time."

I'd rather be poor here than rich anywhere else.

Another source of struggle was the belief among the black population that the catastrophic levee failures hadn't been due to negligence and bad engineering from the Army Corps, but were instead the fruit of a plan by the city's elite to drive low-income African Americans out of town. "They're trying to wash us away," people would shout.

New Orleans' black population is hovering at 59 percent today, compared to 67 percent before the hurricane, and the total population that fell from 484,674 in April 2000 to 230,172 in July 2006 was back to an estimated 384,320 by 2014, according to the US Census Bureau. But it's true that the people are not the same as before the hurricane. "The demographics have definitely changed," actor and resident of Pontchartrain Park Wendell Pierce told the Times-Picayune, quick to remind the paper that while having newcomers is wonderful, much of New Orleans culture comes from the working poor.

"Everything comes at a price," Bremont said, sipping an Abita beer in a Tremé honkytonk. "But we got to be careful. Because what is the point of rebuilding if we lose everything we fought for in the process?"

In contrast, several out-of-state organizations provided financial housing and social services to musicians and members of social aids and pleasure clubs. America's increased attention towards New Orleans also means there is now more of everything that made the city special in the first place. Last month, there were over 1,400 restaurants to choose from, with festivals every weekend and accommodations at every corner. The culture industries are thriving.

"The majority of musicians are home now," explained musician Glen David Andrews at Jazz Fest 2011. Andrews had also evacuated to the Superdome after a fallen tree had crushed his house during the hurricane. "Nothing can hold the soul and spirit of New Orleans down. When I swing out a good tune, I'm playing in memory of Louis Armstrong and all the people who played before me. The music can't die. This is not the first time we rebuilt, and it won't be the last. Unfortunately, this is a city that sits 25 feet below sea level," he said. "That's not what I dwell on. We're rocking'n'rolling out here. This is my home."

Lewis Bremont is more resentful. "You know, I hear all the time that Katrina ended up helping the city," he said. "That the storm was actually beneficial to us because it put us under the spotlight. Well, guess what? We didn't need no damn spotlight. We didn't need no damn storm to keep playing, and we certainly didn't need to die drowning for it. The truth is, people who really cared about New Orleans were the ones who brought the city back, not the other way around. Katrina didn't fucking help us. We fucking did!"

The data stands on Bremont's side. 39 percent of children are now said to be living in poverty through the Orleans parish, up from 38 percent pre-Katrina and still 17 points higher than the national average. The median income gap has continued to widen between white and black families. There are now 3221 fewer affordable public housing apartments than there were in 2005, and rents have increased by 41 percent.

"You'd think things would have improved a little with the federal money, but we ain't been getting none of it," said Bremont as he walked on Claiborne, going back to his Seventh Ward one-bedroom. "Sure, there's a Whole Foods in Mid-City now. I mean, that's exactly what we needed," he smirked.

Indeed, even if progress is visible, many issues remain as unresolved as they were in 2006. Cat claw vines still creep over ramshackle buildings. Residents still believe their administration is rife with corruption. Nothing has really changed.

"That's where we're at now. But I'd rather be poor here than rich anywhere else," Bremont called, raising his trumpet to the sky and letting a long note out, mentioning he couldn't wait to second-line in commemoration of Katrina's ten-year anniversary.

"We're all part of the same big family," Curtis Pierre, a saxophone player performing in front of the St. Louis Cathedral near Jackson Square, told VICE. "We all know each other. Sometimes we fight, sometimes we struggle, but we always look after each other when hard times are coming. It's how we do it here. Can't nobody take that from us."

Follow Anthony on Twitter.

How Art Helps My Students in New Orleans Deal with Their PTSD

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I came to New Orleans in 2008 and worked for a year in a public high school as a science teacher. My students knew death intimately. On dress-down days, they came to school in white T-shirts with iron-on transfer pictures of their former classmates' faces and words like, "Rest In Peace" or "In Loving Memory." At the time, New Orleans had the highest murder rate in the country. While I arrived in the city understanding that fact as a statistic, my students understood it as a way of life. Hurricane Katrina had hit just three years prior. Sometimes the weather stormed, and kids fell to their knees, putting their cheeks against the ground to sob; the memory was too heavy, and too recent.

That school closed the next year and I found a job at a new charter school with a rosy reputation and brand new paint. I taught first grade. The charter school had more resources than the high school: Each classroom was outfitted with a fancy electronic chalkboard, whole class sets of colorful multi-part curricula, and a computer for every student. The rules were stricter and the staff stayed after school later. But the kids, even at seven years old, were still visibly suffering. There was a special room set aside for students who had meltdowns. The room had no furniture or carpet, because children regularly threw desks or chairs or ripped carpet off the ground. Once I saw an angry, tear-faced six-year-old turn over a bookshelf three times his height in the school library.

Related: New Orleans Is Tired of Talking About Hurricane Katrina

In 2012, the Institute for Women and Ethnic Studies in New Orleans reported that at least a third of the children in New Orleans showed symptoms of PTSD and depression. That's a percentage that exceeded the national average so profoundly that mental health workers didn't even know how to make sense of it.

Children under the age of ten are generally less likely to develop PTSD than adults. But children whose mothers have experienced PTSD are significantly more at risk than their counterparts. And the historic storm that hit in 2005 made a lot of New Orleanians vulnerable to the condition.

Of those who survived Hurricane Katrina, 33 percent show symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

With Hurricane Katrina came more damage than anyone could have imagined. There was the physical damage from the storm, but there were other forms of damage too. Those who left were forced onto buses and herded to Dallas or Houston. They didn't know when they'd be allowed to go home. They were forced to abandon their lives. Those who stayed might have ended up at a makeshift refugee camp set up in the Superdome, where people reported being stabbed and raped and forced to eat off the ground.

It's important to note that not everyone who experiences major trauma will suffer from PTSD. Of those who survived Hurricane Katrina, 33 percent show symptoms. It's an unusually high percentage, even for a population that's suffered a big trauma.

Read: The Lower Ninth Ward, Ten Years After Katrina

I know a little about trauma, because I was raped by a stranger in 2004. I didn't report it, but I did mentally revisit it, constantly. I revisited it so much, in fact, that I was practically unsurprised when I was raped again by a non-stranger a few months later. I didn't report that, either; but I did begin to feel sharp pangs of paranoia afterwards.

Trauma is all about details. Trauma renders itself in certain songs, in the quality of the air against the sky, in colors of socks, in flavors of alcohol. When the human brain encounters a trauma, it makes quick decisions about what to remember, and it often remembers otherwise mundane details: the timbre of birdsong, or the specific shake of a tree's shoulders. Sometimes the brain gets kind of obsessive about trauma. The rhythms of the brain catalog the trauma as anxiety, and the anxiety is ceaseless, and doctors call this post-traumatic stress disorder.

Clinically speaking, PTSD is an anxiety disorder that develops when a person experiences something terrifying. The terrifying thing—maybe it was being the victim of violent crime, or witnessing one; maybe it was surviving a natural disaster or a war—affects the person's brain chemistry. Formerly calm people can grow skittish. They might be plagued by nightmares and flashbacks; they experience fear in ordinary situations, and act out accordingly.

My PTSD followed the textbook definition exactly. I stopped sleeping. I had flashbacks all the time; I started skipping classes because I didn't want to experience a flashback at school. Once, during a flashback, I remember crawling under a metal desk in the student center and carving the insides of my wrists with a broken wire to keep myself from screaming. The distance of time makes it obvious to me now that I would have benefited immensely from some mental health services, but I was stubborn then. I denied that I suffered from PTSD or depression, and let panic attacks and depressive lows dictate my life. To be fair, this response is typical of many PTSD sufferers.

I was, however, particularly drawn to other peoples' trauma. That's pretty typical, too: People who are suffering seek out others who are suffering for plenty of reasons. Mostly, people want to feel that they are not alone. Hence Alcoholics Anonymous, and group therapy.

In my third year of teaching, I had a student in my class whom I will call Eva. Eva said almost nothing, but was nevertheless ostentatiously disruptive. Once she threw a fish tank off the shelf after she found out that we would be eating bagged lunch in our classroom rather than go to the cafeteria because of an assembly. Another time, she knocked over four desks before stabbing another student in the face with a pair of scissors. She was five years old.

The school psychologist told me that Eva had definitely gone through some major trauma, although she wouldn't tell me what it was. Over the years, I learned the specifics of Eva's trauma, and like the school psychologist, I hesitate to talk about it, because it is not mine to talk about. I will say that Eva had witnessed extreme violence at a very young age, which she remembered vividly; she was also the survivor of sexual abuse, which she remembered in fragments.

Experiencing major trauma like that can have a profound psychological effect on anyone. A child with developing brain chemicals is especially susceptible to complications. Human brains do a good job of recognizing danger and providing the adrenaline necessary to elicit a fight-or-flight response when confronted with threats. But when confronted with abnormally large threats repeatedly at a young age, the brain's response mechanisms can get confused and mis-wired. In short, the emergency reaction system can get turned on permanently.

I wouldn't admit this to anyone at the time, but I felt a connection to Eva because her meltdowns looked very similar to my own. By the end of an episode, she'd be shaking in the corner of some small space, sobbing and wordless, her face hot and buried into her arm. In those moments, she'd let me hold her and stroke her hair while she found her breath. I looked down at her little head and climbed back into moments when I'd cried like that, feeling broken and alone. There was a selfishness to all of this, but also the warm conceit that misery must love company.

The point of painting was to avoid being sucked underneath the turbulent wave of anxiety; to ride it out until it passed.

Most days, Eva stayed after school because her mother worked two jobs and couldn't pick her up on time. I didn't mind; Eva was less volatile when the other kids weren't around, and she found something comforting in reorganizing the books in the classroom library. One afternoon, after a particularly stressful day at school, I sat at my desk drawing to calm myself down. There was a set of oil pastels stashed in my desk, and I drew swirls and circles to let my mind relax.

I had started painting after my assault. I couldn't push the flashbacks away and late at night, unable to fall asleep, painting became my outlet for busying my hands and keeping my mind at bay. The point was never to be an artist. The point was to pass the time. The point was to avoid being sucked underneath the turbulent wave of anxiety; to ride it out until it passed.

Eva must have noticed that I wasn't tapping at my computer like I normally do after school, and she took an interest in my art-making. At this point in our relationship, Eva hadn't really spoken to me. She had answered a few of my questions at the prompting of her mother at a parent-teacher meeting once, but that was it. But she was clearly curious. I decided to take a risk and raise a conversation.

"These are oil pastels," I offered. "They're amazing. They're like paint in a stick. Do you want to try one?" I rolled a pink pastel toward Eva. She picked it up and gently scribbled on a piece of computer paper. "No, no. You have to push HARD," I said. "You want the color to really SHOUT." Eva pushed hard. The color shouted. She looked pleased. "If you think that's cool," I said, "Try coloring with that pastel on black paper. Normally you can't see anything that you put on black paper, but bright pastels color right on top of it." I pulled out a piece of black construction paper and put it in front of Eva. She drew a heart on the paper with the pink pastel.

Then she said, "Cool."


Watch On VICE: The World Is Sinking - Preventative Measures


Hurricane Katrina wrought insurmountable psychological trauma across the city. No one denies it. Add to these continuing repercussions the high rates of violence, murder, and illness, and you are left with a city that plainly and obviously needs time and space and resources to heal. There should be no surprise that rates of PTSD and depression among the people of New Orleans are so spectacularly high. But it didn't stop the government from enacting massive cuts to mental health services, hospice care, and psychiatric treatment in 2012.

The cuts decimated what was already a pretty flimsy mental health system in the metropolitan area of New Orleans. According to an article in the Gambit, the Interim LSU Public Hospital (ILH), which supplied the only inpatient mental health provider in New Orleans proper, was reduced to 15 emergency mental health beds. They were forced to lay off staff, prolonging recovery time for trauma patients and further pushing the already-stretched ILH mental health emergency facility to capacity.

Due to these cuts, as well as cuts made by individual charter schools, mental health was not prioritized at the school level either. The school I worked at was unable to renew the contract for the school psychologist who helped me work with Eva, and to this day, she has not been replaced.

I am not trained in art therapy. Art therapy has never been administrated to me by a professional. I don't know statistics about art therapy. The American Therapy Association defines art therapy as "a form of psychotherapy involving the encouragement of free self-expression through painting, drawing, or modeling, used as a remedial activity or an aid to diagnosis." That's all well and good. The thing I understand to be true is that art is a language all humans can speak, and for this reason, art contains enormous capacity for healing.

The morning after Eva and I painted together, I left a set of pastels on her desk. I noticed her scribbling with them on her homework folder during a math lesson, when ordinarily she liked to crouch inside the bookcase and tear up pieces of paper. At the end of the week, Eva approached me during recess and asked if I would get her a fresh set. Eva had never communicated with me in a full sentence before; this one even included the word please. I got her a 24-pack of oil pastels at the art supply store after school that day.

One day, about a month later, Eva came to school a little early. She came into my classroom and produced a black piece of paper with irregular red streaks across it, and a wiry tangle of lines concentrated in the middle. It looked electrical and mighty; notably intentional-looking for what seemed to be a scribble constructed by a five-year-old. She put the picture on my desk and said, "This is what it feels like when I'm mad. This is what it feels like all the time."

On VICE News: Ten Years After Katrina, Here's What's Happening to Louisiana's Coastline

I didn't begin to confront my own PTSD until well after I'd moved to New Orleans. There were days at school when I would experience flashbacks while teaching, and I'd start crying in front of my students. I was embarrassed and felt like I might lose my job, so I sought out a good therapist. My therapist didn't specifically recommend painting, but she did want me to find activities that calmed me down, and painting was really all I could think of. I started making little portraits in watercolor to help myself breathe. I noticed my joints relax the moment my brush hit the paper.

There was no way for her to explain her trauma in language. She needed to show it.

This was a physical reaction that I witnessed in Eva, too: She softened in the shoulders and curved like clay over her work. But whereas I painted arbitrarily, to soothe my mind and quell rising tides of panic, Eva used her art to express what she was feeling. When she showed me the red scribble and told me that it represented her anger, a lightbulb went off for me. There are no words for this. There was no way for her to explain this in language. She needed to show it.

Art became Eva's primary mode of communication. She drew constantly, and I gradually was able to tell if she was mad (red scribbles), sad (purple blobs), calm (blue swirls), or bored (all the colors, all the shapes, all over the paper). Over time, she started talking to me after school while she drew. She also started sitting at her desk during regular classroom lessons, drawing on her worksheets with profound focus. When the next parent-teacher conference came around, Eva's mom told me that Eva had covered her bedroom walls in her own pastel art. I told Eva's mom that for the first time all year, Eva had taken—and passed—a math test.

Eva figured all this out on her own. At five, she recognized the discomfort of her own trauma enough to do something to feel better. She looked her own monsters in their terrifying faces, and she drew red scribbles around them.

Related: Living with My Post-Katrina Survivor's Guilt

Since Eva showed me how abstract art can alleviate this difficult business of translating trauma, I've worked with hundreds of students in the exact same capacity as a push-in teacher. I work with children who show symptoms of PTSD and depression (or, simply, children who regularly exhibit disruptive classroom behaviors), and I basically copy the curriculum Eva made up. I have them draw what they are feeling. That's pretty much all there is to it.

Here is what I've noticed: Children who have experienced trauma want to express what they're feeling, but they don't always know how. Emotions are very complicated, and no one ever wants to be thought of as dysfunctional, or broken, or sick. It's not like every child who has emotional difficulties will pick up a set of pastels and naturally communicate her deepest fears and darkest feelings—but more children are willing to go there than you might imagine. Especially when you use pastels. Pastels are amazing.

The important takeaway isn't really about the art, or even about the trauma. It's about the acknowledgement. There is a deep human need to grant ourselves our suffering; to know that we all suffer, and that pain is important. Maybe there aren't always words to sculpt the difficulty around; and if the words aren't there, you simply have to find another way.

Follow Sophie Lucindo Johnson on Twitter.

Oliver Sacks Humanized His and Others' Diseases, Is Dead at 82

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Oliver Sacks Humanized His and Others' Diseases, Is Dead at 82

The Storm of the Century: Al Roker's New Book Explores the Hurricane of 1900

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Al Roker. Photo by Eric Ray Davidson, courtesy of NBC

On September 8, 1900, a hurricane swept over Galveston, Texas and all but leveled the city. The island's 38,000 residents weren't expecting a storm, but it didn't exactly come out of nowhere. Cuban meteorologists had accurately tracked a tropical cyclone through the Caribbean, and projected that it would cross the Gulf of Mexico and strike the Coastal Bend of Texas. But U.S. Weather Bureau chief Willis Moore dismissed their findings, refusing to allow a storm warning to be issued even by his star weatherman Isaac Cline, who happened to be stationed in Galveston.

So nobody left. It was just another Saturday at the beach until the city began to flood. Cline issued a warning around noon, but by then the water had already risen several feet. The next morning, 6,000 to 10,000 people were dead, whipped by 145 mph winds and drowned under a 15-foot storm surge. Any structure near the beach was uprooted and splintered into a great pile of debris that mowed across the island, tangled with corpses, horses, chickens, and dogs. Everything was underwater. Galveston is a 27-mile long sandbar two miles off the coast. At the storm's peak, it was under the Gulf of Mexico.

Hurricanes didn't have names or classifications in 1900, but this would have been a Category 4. On the island, its name is the "1900 Storm," or "The Great Storm." It was a Cape Verde-type hurricane that formed off the coast of West Africa, gathering strength in the Atlantic before cutting a path through the Caribbean and blowing into Galveston. In Washington, Moore was convinced the storm would instead loop back towards the Florida Keys and ride up the East Coast. Its actual route would forever change the course of the South, so much so that NBC weatherman Al Roker has made the storm the subject of his new book, The Storm of the Century: Tragedy, Heroism, Survival, and the Epic True Story of America's Deadliest Natural Disaster: The Great Gulf Hurricane of 1900.

Galveston was the South's most metropolitan city, one of its largest cotton ports, and home to more millionaires per capita than anywhere in the country. All of Texas was growing in 1900, but Galveston was the center of trade, and was known as "The Wall Street Of The South." The hurricane choked the island overnight, knocking out the only bridge and covering the island in a thick black slime. Communications went quiet. One newspaper labeled Galveston "missing."

Recovery had commenced, though, and The Galveston Daily News was able to print an emergency edition with a list of the dead. Corpses were carted to a warehouse down by the wharves, but the number of dead was overwhelming. Martial law was declared, and black citizens were rounded up at gunpoint and drafted into "dead gangs" to comb the island for bodies and pile them onto barges. The dead were weighted and dumped 18 miles out to sea, but washed back up on the beaches the same day. Once it became apparent that the corpses would have to be burned to contain the spread of disease, great funeral pyres were lit all over the island, and everyone was drafted into cleanup. Galveston's workforce was thus integrated, and allowed a break every half hour for whiskey. Fires burned on the island for months.

Aid came to Galveston from all over the world. The reporter Winifred Black went and covered the tragedy for William Randolph Hearst's newspaper empire, and Hearst's rival Joseph Pulitzer arranged to send 78 year-old Clara Barton, founder of the Red Cross, to head up relief efforts. Barton would end up staying for two months, tending to a village of white tents on the same beach where the storm made landfall. She said later it was the worst disaster she'd ever seen.

The same devastation would have happened as far as physical devastation, but could more lives have been saved? Absolutely.

Galveston built a Seawall in the years after, jacking up thousands of buildings onto stilts and dredging mud from the bay to raise the island. Seawall Boulevard rose 17 feet over the gulf, and when another hurricane hit in 1915, islanders watched the storm from inside The Galvez Hotel. Galveston finally had its high ground.

But the Oleander City never regained its glory. Development was scared inland, shipping lanes stretched deeper into Galveston Bay, and Houston grew into the fourth largest city in the country. The island remains under the shadow of the storm.

Like post-Katrina New Orleans, Galveston is still vulnerable. The Seawall spans less than half of the island, most of which is low-lying marshland. The prairies out on the West End, where I grew up, will eventually sink.

Until that happens, Galvestonians will stay put. Riding out storms has been built into the culture for a century. Hurricane Ike proved that again in 2008, when a fresh row of beachfront houses were washed away. The next storm will take another row, the coastline will continue to erode, and people will rebuild.

Roker's title, The Storm Of The Century, is an accurate one. There have been bigger storms than the 1900 Storm, but none as catastrophic. Roker spoke with me about his book, the politics of storms, Prince, and Hurricane Trump.

VICE: I've read every book on this storm and was thinking there wasn't anything else to say but you found stuff!
Al Roker: Well, to me, the seminal book is Erik Larson's Isaac's Storm. It was brilliant. I'm such a huge fan of his. I was thinking about writing a book about Katrina—this is a little more than a year ago—and then you start going back to compare stuff. I was researching the 1900 Hurricane, and I remember being in Galveston in 2008 for Ike, and—look, I'm no research genius, so I hired this guy Bill Hoagland, and I said, "See what you can find. I'm just curious." And he came back with this sheath of stuff and I was like, "These stories, these people... it's almost like they were created." There have been two comments that I keep getting from people: A) this should be a movie, and B) did you make these people up or make composites? And I said,"No! These were all real people."

Ten years after Katrina, we tend to think of that as the most political hurricane because of what happened afterwards, but really 1900 was the most political storm before it ever made landfall.
Absolutely. You talk about parallels, you've got Cuba, [where] the foremost authorities on [the storm were]—and by the way, they got the forecast, track, and all of that correct—but they couldn't get it out because Washington didn't trust Cuba. They didn't want to listen to Cuba, felt superior to Cuba, and swore them offtelegraphically—technologically, really, because that was the technology of the day—and the forecast never got out. The same devastation would have happened as far as physical devastation, but could more lives have been saved? Absolutely.

Then we have another parallel where Willis Moore puts a moratorium on the use of the words"hurricane" and "cyclone," and a hundred years later in Florida you can't say "climate change."
Yeah! And look—you've got the man of the day, Isaac Cline, who believed, "We don't get hurricanes because there's this curve," and the city fathers wanted to build a Seawall! Had that Seawall been up, it would have been a different story.

But why didn't they think a hurricane could cross the Gulf from Cuba? It had happened before, even in Galveston.
It had, but they were always able to weather it. The reason was, a storm of a certain magnitude has its own curve, if you will, its own almost gravitational pull. So if it was going to be that strong, it was going to curve and move away. Because one like that had not happened in memory since that area was populated. You have to remember: a hundred years earlier, Jean Laffite the pirate is using [Galveston] as a base.

And he torched the island when he left! Do you think our modern awareness of hurricanes came from 1900?
I think it's one of these things that's cumulative. The 1900 Hurricane, The 1935 Hurricane, Hurricane Camille...

Carla.
Carla. You go down the list of these iconic, destructive storms, and then there's kind of a lull, and then in 2005, when Katrina and Rita and Wilma... that litany of storms just battered the Gulf Coast and East Coast. And then there's a lull, and you get 2008, and we had Ike just batter Galveston. Water comes over the Seawall, it's crazy. And then it's quiet again, and then you get Irene, and then you get Sandy, and you get a number of other storms, and you get a blizzard. All in the same season. So for each generation, there's going to be those storms that are iconic, and people will tell their children about them.

People are fed up with Washington, and then they wonder why Donald Trump is doing well. I'm not endorsing Donald Trump, trust me, but people are gravitating toward him because he speaks his mind.

Then you have what happened with Irene, "Okay, well that one didn't do any damage, so Sandy can't possibly do any damage." But hurricanes aren't related.
We are very narcissistic when it comes to our weather. "If it didn't hit me, then it didn't happen." But the fact is, Irene decimated Eastern Long Island, a good part of Connecticut, and interior sections of New England. There are still places that haven't recovered. Because it didn't hit New York City, people go, "Oh, it was a miss!" No, it wasn't! Maybe for New York it was, but for a good portion of New England, this thing kicked people's asses.

Especially when people feel most threatened by the wind, but it's the flooding that kills, and Irene brought tremendous flooding.
Exactly, and it's like this catch-22. People think because it hasn't happened to them, or because the forecastmissed it, "I'm gonna stay." And then they stay, and something happens, and they die because they're caught in the storm surge. It's crazy.

Over the last couple decades, as the weather's become more politicized, has it changed what you do at all?
No. It doesn't change anything I do. That's why God created more than one channel. You don't like what I'm saying, go somewhere else. Weather's not political. The environment is the one leveler. It doesn't care whether you're black, white, Republican, Democrat, Tea Party, male, female—it doesn't care. It doesn't care! Unfortunately, you look at Katrina, and the areas where people who don't have a voice live in the areas that have lagged in coming back. And that's unfortunate. That's where it's not the weather itself. You see the disparities in the aftermath.

In Galveston we built the Seawall and raised the island and Ike still tore it up, in New Orleans they're not quite ready for another Katrina. Is New York prepared for another Sandy?
Yeah, they're trying to harden the subway tunnels. If there's any good out of Sandy—and it was horrific, and could have been 10 times worse had it come a little further north and stayed its original strength—we realized justhow vulnerable we are, and now have to make the infrastructure investments to take care of that.

Do you see Galveston sinking in 50 or 100 years?
Well, look, just from sea level rise, they're going to have to deal with it. Things are going to have to be addressed. Things are changing. The sad part is, you talk about the politicization of this—on my Wake Up With Al show on The Weather Channel, we had the pollster Frank Luntz, who's by and large recognized as a Republican pollster. But what I value from him is that he's pretty honest with the data. He did polling about climate change—the environment—and when you talk about the environment, everybody was on board. Everybody was like, "We gotta make changes, we gotta take care of stuff." The moment you labeled the same question inserting "climate change" instead of "the environment," all of the sudden it went down party lines. And that's the big problem. People want it. I don't think the politicians realize that. They wantstewardship of their environment, and want solutions. If anything, the weather is a bellwether—no pun intended—for politicians about what they should be doing for their constituents. The constituents want their politicians to take action. And by its very nature now, nothing is happening in Congress, or the Senate. People are fed up with Washington, and then they wonder why Donald Trump is doing well. Now, I'm not endorsing Donald Trump, trust me—I'm going to make that perfectly clear—but people are gravitating toward him because he speaks his mind. He doesn't dance around, and from what they can see he gets stuff done, which is the antithesis of what's happening in Washington now. Whether that can be attained or sustained remains to be seen, but it explains why he has done as well as he's done so far.

Alright, Mr. Weatherman. "Singing In The Rain," "Purple Rain," or "I Can't Stand The Rain?"
How about "Who'll Stop The Rain?" A little Creedence Clearwater? No, I would have to go with Prince. I mean, how do you not go with Prince?

Follow Lance on Twitter.

My Summer of Picturesque Purgatory Working in a National Park

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Image via Flickr user Don Graham

Grand Teton National Park is the Marcia Brady of the US National Park Service family. Gorgeous, popular—2.7 million people visited it in 2014—and pristine, the expanse of federally protected land in Wyoming seems like it would be a wonderful place to work. At least that's what I thought when my friend, who had gotten a gig as a chef in one of Grand Teton's restaurants, texted me about a job there.

"It's so fun and beautiful," he typed. "You'll save a ton of money, drink a lot, hike, and steal company cars."

His text came while I was working late again, grading papers in my balmy, puberty-scented middle school math classroom in Oakland. I was in the process of wrapping up my fourth year of teaching and hated it. I was having a severe quarter-life crisis, trapped in a monotonous routine and convinced that life was passing me by. In other words, the proposition hit me at a time when I needed a shake-up and was vulnerable enough to accept a temporary job 1,000 miles away without hesitation.

I tossed my inspirational posters and dry erase markers into storage, then called Grand Teton Lodge Company to inquire about a summer serving position. The interview lasted five minutes while the manager hummed through my answers like a beatboxing human resources hype man. I was hired on the spot and soon off to see what wonders awaited me at Jackson Lake Lodge.

For years I had dreamed about living in an iconic park, a postcard view in every direction, surrounded by nature without the bad habits and distractions that were suffocating me in Oakland. Well here I was. Grand Teton National Park is spread across roughly 480 square miles. The Snake River winds through a sprawling valley floor blanketed with sage and wildflowers, bordering the snow-capped 40-mile Teton mountain range. There are over 60 species of mammals that reside within the park's bounds, including wolves, bears, otters, lynx, and bats. I could become Thoreau's bastard daughter with a smartphone, retreating into the wilderness to detox and repair. I expected to basically be transported to a "Life Is Good" shirt, to spend my days hiking, swimming, and sitting at a campfire alongside my stick figure dog. I'd work long hours, but the job would be less emotionally taxing than teaching, with low intellectual and emotional investments and nothing to take home at the end of my shift. Looking back, nothing could have prepared me for the summer that followed, but it ended up being some slightly demented form of heaven just the same.

On VICE Sports: The Woman Who Struck Out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig

I drove into the park at dusk in late June, narrowly avoiding grazing bison and tourists who resembled Patagonia-clad paparazzi. It took nearly an hour to reach the employee village from the park entrance. Trucker pills fueled my anxiety and cold feet, but the surroundings quickly tranquilized any fear. I pulled into a turn-off alongside the river and watched the sun set and a full moon rise. A moose and her calf meandered lazily along the opposite bank. My body was the ultimate all-you-can-eat buffet for mosquitoes, but I was too enraptured by the view of my new home to swat them away. In French, the name Grand Tetons means "large teats," and taking them in that first night, I felt as mesmerized as a teenage boy with his first issue of Playboy. This was the ultimate nature fantasy come to life, and I would get to experience it daily for the coming months. Then, as if on cue, a longboarder gripping a red Solo cup skirted in front of my car, forcing me to swerve out of my fantasy and back into reality.

I witnessed an equal amount of scenic nature and depraved humanity that summer—wildlife and wild life, if you will.

When I arrived at the log cabin office, an employee supplied me with the standard bedding and directed me to my lodging. "The chick you're living with knows you're coming, so don't let her act surprised. You're replacing a porn star who was pretty popular around these parts," she added with a wink and old-timey tip of her visor. My room in building six was small, with a set of twin bunk beds and low dressers. My roommate, a student in her third year at a Christian college, had decorated the area with Captain Morgan bottles, paintings, and an acoustic guitar. The air was perfumed with the same Bath and Body Works spray I'd used in high school to mask the scent of my period. The staff's communal bathroom was down the hall; when I walked in I could see two pairs of flip-flops peeking out beneath the door to a shower stall accompanied by the sound of some girl either faking an orgasm or practicing her best moose call.

The employee village was comprised of folks somewhere on the transient spectrum: students, retirees, carnies, hippies, and international employees on short-term J1 visas. Approximately a third of the staff were foreigners lured to Wyoming with the promise of seeing America. J1s, or "Banging Bulgarians," as many referred to them, worked the worst hours in some of the lowest-paying jobs, and mostly stuck together, including at the employee dining hall.

Workers didn't have their own kitchens due to an overabundance of bears near the village. Supposedly, the curious creatures would try to knock down cabin doors at the first whiff of Easy Mac. There are bear attacks and related deaths every season in the Tetons and Yellowstone, but interest often overrules risk. While driving to a trailhead one day, my friend and I got trapped in a "bear jam," the Tetons' form of gridlock—that's when a bear sighting leads to a mess of parked cars, open Prius doors, National Geographic–wannabe photos snapped with DSLRs, and kids getting too close to the animals for comfort.


For more on wildlife, watch our profile of Cambo, a kid who spent two years alone in the backwoods of Alabama:


Bison trotted along roads and across pedestrian crosswalks, offering a hairier interpretation of Abbey Road. While drying off on a riverbank late one afternoon, I befriended Narcissus, a beaver I named for his habit of gazing at his own reflection in the water. He sat admiring himself until the sun retreated and the reflection disappeared. After sundown, the cries of peeper frogs echoed through the woods; they served as background singers for howling coyotes. Most folks' favorite animals were the two foxes that lived in the village and were fed a diet of raw hot dogs by an older chef. If you were lucky, they'd trot alongside you on your walk to work. If you were unlucky or had hot dog–scented body odor, they'd nip at your ankles relentlessly.

I witnessed an equal amount of scenic nature and depraved humanity that summer—wildlife and wild life, if you will. "You're skinny and pretty, girl. You're in," my coworker commented between slapping ladles of honey mustard on plates during a dinner shift. Men in our demented adult summer camp threw out pick-up lines to any woman within a two-mile radius. "Camping" or "showering" was code for sex. The there were village regulars, as well: Randy, the alcoholic mailman who hit on any girl under 21; the "Bulgarian Barbie," our resident village hottie with an affinity for Akon and bending over to pick up invisible objects; Miss Kate and Moose, sisters in their 60s from Florida who were incredibly funny and ruthless at poker.

With all the long hikes, camping (wink), and swimming, we spent so much time around each other that I learned more about these people than some friends I'd known for years. The expansive park was our playground and we made the most of it. One of my best friends, Ivan, was a J1 from Bulgaria. He called me his crispy muffin after a customer at the park diner demanded I re-toast hers one morning. We regularly chugged Dr. Pepper from the dining hall soda fountain and joked our way through brutal 15-hour shifts, subtly trolling customers who acted like the menu was written in hieroglyphics. I taught Ivan to drive on winding dirt roads, kicking up dust and disturbing the peaceful environment by blasting The Marshall Mathers LP at top volume.

Image via Flickr user Mark Gunn

During one of the hottest days of summer, a group of us went rock jumping. We waited our turn as a family filmed themselves one by one on a GoPro. After they left, we jumped and swam for hours, a perfect view of Death Canyon in the distance. Floating in the middle of the lake, listening to my friend Sara talk about her childhood, I was totally content. It was enough to just be there with her, accept this temporary environment, fast intimacy, and be present without distraction. I felt completely at ease with her, and realized that I didn't feel the same with people back home. I rediscovered the value of being alone that summer, especially when sneaking off on hikes to covertly smoke weed (a federal offense on National Park Service property) and swim at my secret spot.

On my last day, my closest friends and I took canoes out on Jackson Lake. We paddled to a deer-inhabited island, swam in freezing water for as long as we could stand it, and sunbathed topless until too many families got a PG-13 view. I ate a final greasy burger and hiked up to watch the sun set behind the "teats" that remained as mesmerizing as they'd been on that first night. Yes, the job was exhausting and demeaning at times. But I miss being surrounded by nature—hiking to the point of exhaustion, relieving aching muscles in the river, and sleeping deeply beneath visible stars. I miss the freaks I connected with there, the openness I felt emotionally and spatially, and the agency I reclaimed in my life. An old lady from my restaurant died a few months ago, though I still don't quite believe it. In my mind, those same people are still there, frozen in time, feeding the foxes, witnessing "bear jams," staying up all night telling stories. Despite the shitty work and countless oddballs, we occupied a very special place in time reserved just for us that can't be replicated. At times it felt like purgatory, but looking back, it was closer to paradise.

Follow Meg on Twitter.

This London Rebel DIY Regeneration Shows How to Solve the Housing Crisis

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Houses boarded up on the Sweets Way estate in North London. All photos by the author

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

We're told the only solution to the housing crisis is to build more homes. Just throw up enough new apartments and the market will sort itself out and make things a bit more affordable, right? But if you're a person who's getting kicked out of low-cost housing so that the structure can be flattened and then gentrified, it is in fact the building of houses that is the cause of your housing crisis, rather than the solution.

House building is an increasingly violent process forcing us further from our cities and our lives. Following colossal privatizations initiated in the 1980s, the stratospheric rises in property values have seen investors transform homes into financial instruments and bricks into gold. With housing allocation focused on generating profits, developers are demolishing public housing to construct private fortunes—buying up the price controlled homes of the poor to build properties designed solely to exploit the market.

The violence of turning homes into piggy banks is clearest when you witness an eviction: the moment when the human need for shelter and the meaningless abstractions of investors brutally collide. First legalized by a court system that has repeatedly shown itself to be unjust, evictions finally manifest in court papers thrust at people by gangs of police and bailiffs who throw families into the street while mumbling that they're "only doing my job."

A private security guard patrols the estate.

For the 142 families of Sweets Way in North London, the shattering effect evictions have on people's lives has been grimly demonstrated. Annington Homes—the UK's largest private landlord—plans to demolish all traces of the existing residents to build 288 new units. Annington was almost given Sweets Way in a controversial 1996 privatization of government housing, but now, by kicking out the low-rent social housing tenants and cramming the site with market rate properties, a community is being butchered so the investors can make a killing.

An inhabitant of Sweet's Way for over five years, Anna's story is typical of what has become commonplace for residents at estates across the country. When Anna received her eviction notice, she searched for alternative accommodation only to find that as a single parent with two young children, no landlord would rent her an apartment. As bailiffs dragged her neighbors screaming from their homes, Anna turned to the local council for help only to be told that as she was not yet homeless, she would first have to be actually evicted before they would assist her. Left stranded on an emptying estate and not knowing where she was going to live, life became a tortuous wait to be dispossessed. This limbo had an effect on her children that Anna describes as "heartbreaking."

Just one hour before her eviction Anna finally discovered she was expected to move to a flat just outside the borough. As she frantically rushed to move three bedrooms by herself, the bailiffs ran out of patience, sealing the doors and her remaining possessions inside her former home. To prevent reoccupation, workmen used sledgehammers to smash the walls, ceilings, sinks, and toilets. In spite of this, Anna was one of the lucky ones, as some residents were being relocated as far away as Birmingham, while others were billed for the cost of their own eviction.

Annington Homes is part of the portfolio of Terra Firma—a multibillion-dollar investment fund. The brainchild of financier Guy Hands, Terra Firma has interests in everything from cattle farms to trains, planes, and Odeon cinemas—netting Hands an estimated personal fortune of $385 million. Hands describes Annington as "a pure play residential property company... with the ability to benefit from the strength of the property market." When asked by the Guardian in March about the impact his investments have had on residents' lives, Hands declined to comment.


WATCH VICE's documentary exploring an urban legend in London:


Unsurprisingly, the residents have given Hands the finger. By occupying their former homes and resisting evictions, they have now delayed the destruction of their estate and its community for over five months. Following Annington's alleged wanton vandalism of perfectly serviceable buildings, the residents' latest initiative has been a collaborative action they have termed "Do It Ourselves Regeneration"; sensitively refurbishing semi-demolished homes back into an inhabitable condition.

Intending to demonstrate how grassroots solutions can trump the astro-turfing of private finance, the "People's Regeneration Show Home" has been collectively built by a community with no formal construction skills. Use of reclaimed materials from the sort of palette "edgy" designers can only aspire to, has created an architectural vocabulary unique to Sweets Way. The holes in the walls left by Annnington's sledgehammers have been carefully re-plastered and rooms repainted; reclaimed timber cabinets have been built into a kitchen with a floor imaginatively retiled with surplus roofing slate. On hearing about the project, local tradesmen came to donate sinks and toilets, and installed them for free. Local electricians did the same thing with the wiring.

Anna excitedly told me about residents' dreams of a self-sufficient neighborhood, comprised of eco-homes nestled among communal gardens and allotments, populated by children's play areas and a strong community. Throughout the reclaimed estate the residents' fantasies have begun to become a reality, as brightly colored structures containing everything from kids' playhouses to vegetable gardens are being combined with artwork to produce a vision that is certainly more interesting than a cookie-cutter development would be. Proof, Anna reckons, that if granted residency rights and a small amount of money, existing social housing could not just be preserved but enhanced.

A bathroom destroyed by bailiffs, and another renovated by residents.

Annington's planning application claims Sweets Way is "unsafe" and "out of character" with the local area, whereas occupiers have demonstrated that urban improvement can be undertaken through the democratic participation of communities.

Annington proposes to create a neighborhood of "Traditional Private Aspiration"—comprised of suburban homes, but it seems that what is actually being constructed is more along the lines of a tax efficient investment opportunity; the same bland nothingness that has given rise to a thousand identical towers lofting everywhere in our cities, with the obvious effect of making England even more boring than it has already become.

In just one week and for less than $615, the residents have sustainably returned a home to use. With over a million properties lying empty across the country, the self-built solutions of Sweets Way offer a route out of the crisis that we could begin to take immediately.

Residents have built greenhouses and planted makeshift allotments to take back the estate.

Far from being a single historical event, this process is ongoing. Yesterday, the residents of Sweets Way appeared in Court, and a possession order was granted, meaning they can be evicted at any time.

Building our own homes—with permission or otherwise—not only materially improves our immediate situation but asserts political power. By using our own agency to shape our built environment we do not simply demand a right to our cities but take it. The residents of Sweets Way are calling for urgent reinforcement to prevent their eviction and dispossession. When the future will only contain what we put into it today, we would be foolish not to support them.

Ben Beach is an activist with the Radical Housing Network.

Meet the Former Soap Shoes Pro Athlete Who Became a Las Vegas Pickup Artist

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All photos courtesy of Ryan Jaunzemis

As all true 90s kids know, Soap Shoes were once a popular—well, semi-popular—type of footwear that had a concave plate at the bottom, allowing "Soapers" to slide down rails and off ledges. It was like being a skateboarder without a board. Sonic the Hedgehog once wore them. What could be cooler, right?

The inventor of the shoes, an inline skater named Chris Morris who began marketing them in 1997, also put together the first and only Soap pro team, which consisted of six guys who adopted a number of tricks from the skateboarding world, performed them in demos at American high schools, and appeared in promotional videos that played in malls across the country. One of these legendary Soapers was Ryan Jaunzemis, a Californian aggressive inline skater who was signed to Soap at 17 and immediately abandoned any thoughts of going to college, much to his mother's chagrin.

Although mom (rightly) thought the shoes were a fad, the now 35-year-old recalls being dazzled by a corner office at corporate headquarters and by sex with what he calls "hot Soap groupies." One day, though, a reply-all email disaster got him booted from the team. (The company ceased to exist by 2001.)

On VICE Sports: It's OK to Have the Hots for Baseball Players: A Manifesto

Currently, Jaunzemis is working as what he calls "Las Vegas' most aggressive dating and seduction coach." He still hangs out with his old buddies from the team, uses phrases like "awesome sauce," and is fond of both the hashtag #soaplife and the emoji combination .

I got on the phone with him to find out what it was like to be in the Soap scene back in the day.

VICE: How did you transition from being a pro inline skater to a pro Soaper?
Ryan Jaunzemis: I got my first pair of shoes from a friend of mine named Kenny—I bought them off him for $10. They had a hole in the side of the shoe, and I was trying to do the same stuff that I was doing on my rollerblades—but because of the hole, I'd jump on the handrail and there was this friction that put a blister on the side of my foot. So I took some duct tape and taped up the side of the shoe. The duct tape slowed me down so much that all the sudden I had this level of control [while I was grinding], and I was able to start doing stuff like unity grinds—which is a grind where you're crossing your legs. All of a sudden, I could do tricks, and I could slide on one foot for 20, 30 steps.

At the time, that was kind of unheard of. I felt like I had found the secret to Soaping. It turned out later that if you just ground the shoe down on a disc sander all the way to the rubber, you'll get the same effect. I started doing those tricks, and that's how I made my sponsor video. On my video, I was doing backslides all down ten- and 20-step handrails, and none of the other guys could do that at the time. Ben [Kelly, another pro Soaper] was really diggin' it, so he put me on the team.


Watch: The Disturbing Truth Behind the 'Spitman' Urban Legend


What was it like back in the day to get paid for sliding around?
It was amazing. There was a lot of house parties back then. That was a time when hip-hop music was in its prime. JNCO jeans were the big fashion, white shirts and visors. Putting bleach and Sun-In in your hair. And then touring around, grinding these huge rails.

My video was playing in stores in Pacific Sunwear and Journeys all over the country. It was super cool. And then being able to make $1,000 a day—at the same time I was working at an ice cream store called Scoops, and I was making $6 and some change in an hour, and to make $1,000, that would take me like two months of scooping ice cream.

For a 17-year-old kid, that was awesome.

"Raving was really big back in the day, in Los Angeles, so we were using the shoes to sneak drugs into raves."

Were there groupies?
What they would do is they'd send us to the high school with a little practice rail and a bunch of stickers and a notepad to collect emails. This is before Facebook and Instagram, this is back when the biggest thing online was AOL, with the little AOL chat rooms and "you've got mail" and that kind of thing.

I would take all the Soap stickers and I would write my phone number on the back. And then I'd hand 'em out to the girls. Then there was times on tour—Soap was paying for our hotel rooms, and we'd meet other people at the convention show and they'd say like, "Oh, you guys are those Soapers!" And we're like, "Hey, we need booze." We'd slip 'em a couple bucks or whatever, and we'd have a whole ice chest full of beer, and then we're like, "OK, the party's in room whatever," and there'd be all these little Soap groupies there like, "Oh my God, that's so cool, your shoes are so awesome."

Was the Soap scene a drug-fueled one?
One of the interesting things about Soaps is they developed these plates called "Maxwell plates," which are also called "stash plates." When you're walking around with Soaps, sometimes you step on the stairs and you slip [because of the concavity at the bottom], and a lot of the schools were complaining. So Soap came out with these filler plates, and you lock 'em in and they look just like regular shoes, so you can walk normally. Raving was really big back in the day, in Los Angeles, so we were using the shoes to sneak drugs into raves. We'd be selling ecstasy, and girls would be like, "Oh, how do you sneak this in?" And we're like, "These are Soap shoes," and they're like, "Ah, this is so cool!" So, yeah.

Were your parents down with you being 17, touring, and getting into shenanigans?
My mom was not too thrilled with it, because I ended up graduating high school with like a 1.3 GPA or something, and I was starting to fail all my classes. And she kept saying, "This Soap shoes thing, this is a fad, you need to study and get good grades so that you can get a job and go to college," and I was trying to tell her, like, "I'm not going to college. I'm going to be a pro Soaper, or a pro skater." And so she would get pissed off about that, and then I was on drugs, I was shoplifting, she was finding weed. She kicked me out of the house, and I ended up living in a park down the street for a couple weeks after she found this big, five-foot bong that I had bought from Venice Beach. I had acid and mushrooms in the house, and ecstasy.

I was selling weed at the time, at the same time I was doing the Soap shit, and I was rapping. I had this song called "Blunted," which is basically about smoking weed. I was using it like an advertisement, and so I would go to the park with a bunch of weed, like a quarter-pound of weed in my backpack, showing up on my rollerblades and selling weed, and then I'd give 'em a copy of my CD, Blunted, to kind of keep 'em thinking. I kept watching hip-hop, and I was like, "Man, a lot of these people use rap as like a commercial, to talk about how good their drugs are." So I kind of wanted to do the same thing, and I was like, "I want to be the kingpin of El Segundo, selling all the weed."

Did you think at the time that Soaping would be a lasting career?
They were designed for just little kids to just slide around on curbs, and it was supposed to just be for fun. But me and the other four main guys—which was Brendan Smith, Danny Lynch, Paul Cerfuentes, Eddie Ramirez, and myself—we took it way more serious than it was. And we were really starting to turn it into a job.

These guys, they started paying us $200 an hour to do a photo shoot. So we were doing these commercials and making $1,000 a day at 17 years old, which was really amazing. But [the company] didn't see Soaping as a sport. The guys basically said, "Walking from point A to point B is not considered a sport." And us on the team, we were trying to push it to be much bigger than it was, and ultimately, I ended up being fired because I was trying to push it, I guess, too far. and I pissed the main guy off, Chris Morris.

Why were you fired?
So me and the owner, Chris Morris, kind of had this beef. He ended up hiring me as a marketing assistant to the corporate office. I was 19 years old, I had a corner office that was overlooking the warehouse. We had a half pipe in the warehouse and we were able to skate during lunch. So that was kind of cool. Except I was trying to make these ads, and I was trying to design ads for them to put in, and they kept saying, "Well, we don't have the budget for this, this is not how Soap wants to be portrayed." Eventually, I just got fed up, because I was saying, "Hey, for all our blood, sweat and tears, we're out here 20 hours a day basically being the poster boys for your product."

I could say, "Hey, $1,000 a day is really good for a 17-year-old kid," but when someone else is making $20 million and you're making $1,000, that really ain't shit. So we were saying, we deserve at least six figures, because it's said that Senate—which is like the biggest rollerblade company—they were paying their professional riders, rollerbladers, six figures. So we wanted some kind of scale that was equal to that, or at least somewhere along those lines.

So I got fed up, and I started writing this hate mail, where I was just pissed off and I was like, "Man, fuck these shoes, maybe I shouldn't have ever even done this, maybe I should've just kept skating." I was writing that to my friend Justin, but I was writing it on the company Outlook Express, or whatever it was. When I pressed "send," I actually put "reply to all," and that little hate mail that I wrote, it went out to everyone in my contact list. So it went out to Justin, but it also went out to my mom, it went out to my brother, everyone in my school, and then it went out to everyone at the Soap shoes company, including Chris Morris.

So about ten minutes later, his secretary came in, and she's like, "Chris got your email," and I'm thinking, "What email?" And she's like, "It doesn't look like you really want to be here, so you're free to leave anytime." And I was like, "You're firing me?" And she's like, "Well, it's more like a layoff, but we read your email, and it doesn't seem like you're happy here anyway."

What did you do after that? Go back to working at Scoops?
I ended up doing a couple commercials for Heelys, when they first came out with Razor scooters, but they didn't have pro teams like they do now. Around the same time, my girlfriend got pregnant with my son Aaron—so at that time it was like, "Well, my soaping career at this time is over, so maybe it's time to grow up and do the family thing," and I ended up joining the Navy. That was the end of Soaping for quite a few years while I handled that stuff.

After the Navy, I ended up moving to England with my ex-wife—we have two children. But we went through a very violent divorce, and I ended up going to jail, and I'm now banned from the United Kingdom on seven different counts of criminal activity. I got kicked out of the UK, and I ended up in Las Vegas, and then I ended up in this weird underground community called the Seduction Community. I ended up running the whole Las Vegas scene and I ended up on the cover of Las Vegas 7 magazine and City Life.

So how many pairs of shoes do you have stashed away, and how long will they last you?
Well right now I think I have about four pairs. When I was signed, in '99, I think I had 60 pairs. If I still had them now, some of those shoes are going up for $1,200 to even $2,000 on eBay. If I had a couple now, then drinks would be on me.

The way that the shoes are designed, they're just to slide around on curbs. My souped-up, super-charged Soaps will allow me to do much more aggressive movements, rather than the stock Soaps.

Those will probably last me quite a long time, honestly. I do invest in a lot of shoe-goo, sometimes they'll kind of fall apart and I'll glue them back together. Or they could last, like these ones. These are now probably 18 years old, or something like that.

Why not just get a skateboard?
The most interesting thing about Soaps—what people don't understand—people say, "Well why don't you just rollerblade, or why don't you just skateboard?" And the guys that are really into Soaps, they kind of discover that in Soaping, you can grind stuff that isn't accessible with your skateboard or blades. For example, like, if someone wanted to grind the rails inside Disneyland, or Magic Mountain—there's these amazing red rails by the Ninja roller coaster at Magic Mountain—you can't really rollerblade through the front gate of Magic Mountain, so you can't grind those rails, because you'd get kicked out. Or the fountain in the mall, the Galleria Mall, because security would kick you out. But with Soap shoes, it's so underground and so concealed that no one knows you have 'em.

You can hang out at the mall, and you can go grind the mall, you can hang out, have a hotdog on a stick, have a milkshake, hang out with your friends and go grind, and then when security comes by they'll just say, "Hey, you guys can't be skateboarding here." And you're like, "I don't see any skateboards. There were some skateboarders, but they just left." And security will be like, "Oh, OK," and they'll just leave.

There's something kind of secretive about it, and it kind of calls to a certain type of individual. A lot of times in the casinos, those are kind of fun places for me to grind because I live in Las Vegas now. I can't, obviously, rollerblade in a casino because they'd have a shit fit. But I can wear Soaps, and I can grind on the sinks inside the men's restroom. I can slide across the marble sinks, and stuff like that. I grinded on one of the slot machines over there, that was kind of fun. And they were like, "What are you doing?!" And I was like, "Oh, nothing, I just drank too much." And they're like, "Oh, OK." But we Soapers, we're a different breed. We're troubled.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Just One Bump of Cocaine Makes It Harder to Perceive Others' Emotions

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Just One Bump of Cocaine Makes It Harder to Perceive Others' Emotions

Death-Positive Activist Megan Rosenbloom Thinks America Needs to Deal with Death

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Death-Positive Activist Megan Rosenbloom Thinks America Needs to Deal with Death

VICE Special: The Making of 'Prince' - Part 1 - Part 1

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VICE's Amsterdam office co-produced Prince, the debut feature film by Dutch writer and director Sam de Jong. This stylish, coming-of-age tale follows a Dutch-Moroccan teen as he cares for his junkie father and falls in with criminals in order to impress the neighborhood girl.

The movie is equal parts authentic and surreal, and uses a cast of non-professional actors to portray life in the streets in contemporary Amsterdam. There's also a killer 80s-style soundtrack. For this five-part VICE Special, we take a behind-the-scenes look at the film's production.

Prince is now in theaters and available to watch now on iTunes and OnDemand.


Viral Video of Women Fighting Israeli Soldier Spotlights Harsh Treatment of Stone Throwers

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Viral Video of Women Fighting Israeli Soldier Spotlights Harsh Treatment of Stone Throwers

What Inmates Are Saying About Colorado Shooter James Holmes Getting Life in Prison

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Earlier this month, America learned that James Holmes would escape the death penalty after a lone juror reportedly thought capital punishment was too harsh of a sentence for killing 12 people (and wounding 70 more) inside an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater in 2012. Avoiding the death penalty was a big break for the brazen murderer, and although his sentence was not announced until last week, Judge Carlos Samour, Jr. made it clear early on that Holmes would never walk free.

"He has to be punished for every crime," Samour said in open court. "If that adds up to 12 life sentences, so be it. It is the court's intention that the defendant never set foot in free society again. If there was ever a case that warranted a maximum sentence, this is the case. The defendant does not deserve any sympathy. Sheriff, get the defendant out of my courtroom, please."

Twelve life sentences and an additional 3,318 years of imprisonment is the actual sentence Holmes was given last Wednesday. His lawyers will undoubtedly file a host of appeals, and Holmes will be placed inside a maximum-security faculty where he can still experience some semblance of humanity. Life in prison is a far different animal than life on death row—Holmes will eventually be able to move around, associate with people, and enjoy all that prison has to offer. That may not sound like much to those of you in the outside world, but when you were looking at a possible execution, it is a legitimate reprieve.

"Good food, clean air up in the mountains, lots of drugs, some homemade brew and maybe even a shot of pussy," says James Diederich, a federal prisoner due to get released next year. "And he'll get a ton of fan mail by some hot bitches who will send him money."

Currently at FCI Terre Haute, Diederich has previously done time in the Colorado state prison system. He says that Holmes will probably experience some problems with gang members at first, but will eventually be fine and serve a relatively peaceful bid. As far as state prison systems go, Colorado's is a decent one, according to Diedrich.

"There's plenty of life inside of prison," he tells me. "And it sure beats the hell out of death."

Diederich is not wrong. Although I have not been behind bars in Colorado, I have done served state time in both California and Arkansas, and I'm currently sitting in federal prison serving my 18th straight year for a sentence that offers no hope of freedom.

Like James Holmes, I am doing life without the possibility of release. Unlike Holmes, I killed no one. My crime was dealing drugs—4.4 kilos of meth to be exact—and because I had two prior drugs convictions, and refused to cooperate with the government, I ended up receiving a mandatory life sentence. (As of November 2013, there were more than 3,000 people serving life sentences for nonviolent crimes.)

As I watch people like James Holmes, the Green River Killer, and the BTK serial killer escape the death penalty and receive effectively the same fate as my own, it completely boggles my mind. I find it hard to understand how a person convicted for drug crimes could share the same sentence as a stone-cold murderer.


Check out our documentary about late VICE Prison Correspondent Bert Burykill trying to keep it on the straight and narrow after his release.


I've been in prison a total of 21 years, and it that time I've known a lot of murderers and rapists. Many of them appear to take great pleasure in sharing every detail of their crimes, reveling in their own audacity. It's like war stories to dudes in prison. Guys laugh over their victims' last words, or talk about cutting up body parts or disposing them or how the corpse would defecate or make farting noises. When I was housed at FCI Butner in North Carolina, right next to a sex-offender unit, the child molesters and rapists would sit around trading images of their victims like baseball cards, and I even heard the rapists boast that they have vivid memories of their victims etched in their minds that no prison sentence could take away from them.

For those of us who are trapped in here with people like that, it's frustrating—maddening—that selling drugs sometimes carries the same penalty as killing or raping someone. One inmate named Kenneth Choice says he can't believe that Connecticut just shut down its death row and yet so many federal drug offenders remain behind bars with life sentences.

"Does this make any sense?" asks Choice, a first-time drug offender serving life without the possibility of parole. "How can we have so many people out there wanting to save the lives of all of these horrific killers, but we still in here for drugs?"

"I hope the Holmes case brings to life the absurdity of it all," said Dennis, another federal prisoner serving a life sentence for drugs. "He hurt and killed all of those people and what did we do? We gave some people what they wanted, not much different than a bartender."

There are many problems with our criminal justice system, and this is just one of them. I don't advocate death for anyone, but when did murdering 12 people in cold blood and selling drugs become equal offenses?

Follow Robert Rosso on Twitter.

Here's Kanye West's Speech at the VMAs: 'I Have Decided in 2020 to Run for President'

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Here's Kanye West's Speech at the VMAs: 'I Have Decided in 2020 to Run for President'

VICE Vs Video Games: A Guide to the Worst Video Game Controllers Ever Made

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Illustration by Stephen Maurice Graham

Video games are, for the most part, pretty great. I feel we've established that over the last 45 years or so of hitting square balls with primitive paddles and shooting alien invaders from out of the sky. But what lets them down, in every hardware generation, is control: Our enjoyment of this always progressing medium, this uniquely interactive entertainment, is often dependent on our hand-to-eye coordination, and our ability to map to memory a wide array of commands triggered by a selection of color- or shape-specific buttons. We have to connect what we see on the screen to what is in our hands, and back again, feeding into and from the pixels and polygons that leap and bound at our whim—assuming we're not repeatedly tripping our avatars into an another-life-lost chasm of fiery death.

For some, this comes easy, and games makers understand that what works for one title will fit others, too—which is why reload is so often where it is on first-person shooters, whatever the developer, and why those left and right triggers aim and fire accordingly. Others can never get to grips with even the best video game controllers around, and in the current console generation we've one of the greatest ever produced with the Xbox One's wireless controller. It's effectively an expertly tweaked take on Microsoft's previous official pad, for its 360 system, adding extra rumble on the triggers and refining the curvature of the unit, so that it's more comfortable than ever in the palms. Its thumbsticks are just right, the NES-like four-pronged D-pad a pronounced improvement on the 360's circular version. It's just really good, is what I'm saying. Though it's missing a "share" button, which in 2015 is just dumb.

(And hey, Sony fanboys: I really like the PS4's DualShock 4, too. It's a great controller, with a touch pad that's actually useful and that all-important share functionality that keeps me in Twitter likes. But the thumbsticks get a bit slippery, don't they? Yeah they're sort of ridged around the circumference, but my dumpy digits are never quite as secure when battling through Bloodborne as they are cruising through Dying Light on the Xbone. Maybe it's just me, and I should keep a towel handy. It's probably just me.)

The "Duke" in all its hideous glory

It wasn't always this way. Microsoft's first console, its original Xbox, launched in 2001 amid a storm of hype strong enough to blow an armada around the world for the entire 16th century—and with it came a controller that to this day (I know, because I asked Twitter) is regularly cited as just the worst pad ever given the official seal of approval and boxed with its parent machine. This was the "Duke" or, less flatteringly (although you can see why), the "Fatty," and it was an absolute monster of a controller that would give a professional wrestler hand cramps after half an hour of Halo.

Just look at it. It looks like an attachment you put on the end of a hair dryer. It looks like one of those automated vacuum cleaner things that you see in the kitchens of rich people's houses on the TV, when you're channel hopping and end up on ITV2 because you hate yourself. It looks like the worst Bat-gadget ever, the kind of WayneTech mistake that cost the company millions of dollars but that's OK because Bruce can take the hit... cocktails? What is that weird D-pad explosion meant to be? Does that central X have to be quite so enormous? I mean, we already know we're playing an Xbox—it's there, in front of us, like a dredged submarine, rattling up a racket. Why do the lettered buttons look like those coded tablets that your gran takes, yes the one in the home, to keep her breathing against her will oh why oh why won't you let her just die?

It's a mess, isn't it, and it's completely understandable that Microsoft killed it as soon as they could, replacing the "Duke" with a more compact model, the "S," in which we can see the beginnings of the classic 360 pad's smooth design. But the "Duke" probably isn't the worst controller—the worst official controller—to have ever been passed from owner to just-popped-over friend with the command of, "You fucking do better, then, prick." Trip back through further console generations and there are so many horrors. Some of which you might consider to be amongst the best pads you've ever known. But I'm writing this article, so you're wrong.

Because humans have three hands, obviously

Step forward, the triple-pronged, single-sticked, Z-below beast that is the Nintendo 64's official pad, dating from 1996. That analogue erection, which would limply drift six months into ownership, never quite standing proudly after your nth attempt at acing Crystal Lake in 1080° Snowboarding, was introduced to enable better character control within a 3D space, essential for launch title Super Mario 64. Some will claim that the pad was designed the way it was as a direct result of Shigeru Miyamoto's landmark platformer, but that is (says Wikipedia, quoting a Nintendo technical director) "a misnomer." Whatever the real story behind the pad's production, it was flawed from the first moment it landed in player hands: There was no way to comfortably reach both analogue stick and D-pad. Unless you had three hands, which most humans don't. I'm surrounded by people right now, and I'm telling you: they all have two hands. I should probably stop staring.

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The N64 pad was also massive, and while the optional rumble pack was a cool extra—it came boxed with Star Fox 64, buzzing as wildly as a 15-year-old in the summer sun after downing a bottle of Banana Red 20/20 whenever McCloud got a missile lodged in his Landmaster—it simply added extra weight to an already cumbersome controller. What Nintendo did next, with the GameCube, was reposition the stick closer to the D-pad, removing the third prong and going for a more "traditional" wing-grip body, albeit with that customary company quirkiness, which explains why A, B, X and Y are so bizarrely arranged. My fingers and thumbs never got used to the GC's uniquely awkward layout—I loved its spongy triggers, but that Z button was a constant irritation, while the C stick... what did the C stick do again? Did it order pizza? It probably ordered pizza.

Nintendo's biggest rival through the 1990s, SEGA, wasn't without some crappy controllers of its own. Its swan-song console, the Dreamcast, was special in many ways, but its official pad was a distressing hybrid of future-facing ambition and abject stupidity. Good: its colorful face buttons and second screen (which was on the changeable memory cards, called VMUs—"Visual Memory Unit"). Bad: its size (too big), its cable positioning (it's backwards), and its flappy triggers. You couldn't really hold it for too long, either—much like the "Duke," its sheer size was always forcing the hands into position, rather than resting in them with ergonomic precision. They always felt cheap to me, too—I've three of them, and I don't think one works perfectly anymore.

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I hate to say it, but against the wonderful Super Nintendo pad—I mean, look at it, it's just too pretty, and it sat in the hands like a purring kitten—the Genesis's three-face-button controller was a bit of an ungainly brute. It was just so massive, the A, B, and C buttons broad and, after not too long at all, utterly unresponsive. SEGA's smaller six-button pad, which they released in 1993, was a much better option, even for older games that didn't need the row of X, Y, and Z inputs. Come the 32bit era, SEGA's first-model Saturn pad was divisive, but I kind of liked its blocky body—it looked like the result of an illicit peripherals liaison between the Geneis's curved number and its predecessor, the perfunctory, not-quite-a-NES controller of the Master System.

While Nintendo and SEGA were at each other's throats in the early 1990s, and before Sony swept in to pull the mascot-branded rugs out from under both their fortunes with a beaming grin that positively screamed "I fucking told you so," another company was aiming to advance gaming into a brilliant new future of BIGGER STUFF and LOUDER THINGS. Atari, having already given the world an abomination of a controller with the 5200's mobile-phone-sucking-on-a-sex-toy disaster (it had a pause button, though, and was the first controller to do so), was about to reveal another pad riding high on Twitter's love-to-hate list.

Someone at Atari was pretty high when they approved this, most likely because they figured they could order munchies-countering pizza with it.

The Jaguar came out in 1993, promising 64bit gameplay while the likes of SEGA and Sony were only offering half that many, um, bits. Remember when we measured console power in bits? What did that even mean? Can someone leave me a reply in the comments because I'd like to know but while I am currently using a laptop with a perfectly good WiFi connection I can't Google for answers due to being blinded by that absolute horror of an official controller, just up there. Now there's a pad you definitely could order a pizza through, right? I mean, look at that layout: it's a phone! It's an N-Gage, without the screen. Only, it looks even more like a phone than the N-Gage ever did—and that was made by a company best known for making phones. What idiots men are.

The reasoning for the phone-numbers-like array beneath the regular A, B, and C buttons—which irritatingly run backwards, from the perspective of a SEGA user—was that an overlay could be, well, overlaid atop it, explaining the function of each button dependent on the game. Amazingly, Atari later produced a "Pro" version with even more buttons, adding an extra three atop the C-B-A line allowing for better control of fighting games like Primal Rage, as well as now-customary shoulder switches, L and R. But nothing was about to reverse the Jaguar's from-the-outset decline. Offensively aggressive marketing, a paltry selection of desirable games, and a controller that looked like it was designed by an eight-year-old with the very loosest grasp of the alphabet using a bunch of broken shit he found in his parents' garage, it all added up to a sad end to Atari's hardware business. They wouldn't produce another console after the Jaguar, and you know what? Good, I say, because they were lying to us. 64bits? A pair of 32bit chips does not a 64bit system make, you deceitful dolts.

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OK, that's probably enough. I might have taken the Philips CD-i's weird, TV-remote-like controller to task for being a certifiable basket of crap, but since the company lost a billion dollars on their flopped console, I'd say they've suffered enough. The Amiga CD32's pad warrants a mention, too, on account of being, basically, upside down and, if you squint, sort of smirking at you, laughing at you, for buying Commodore's always-likely-to-fail system over a SEGA or Nintendo. This new Steam controller also looks like it's destined to, what are the kids saying, get in the sea? Why would a controller be anywhere near the sea? You might drop a Game Gear in the surf I suppose, should it slip from your grip during a frenzied session of Baku Baku while on an afternoon stroll in the shadow of Sellafield. Anyway, the Steam controller: probably cack.

Wait. Can we count Kinect? Should we? Does that not make you the controller? Sure, you're an awful controller. The worst. Now click away and whine somewhere about how I just "don't get" the N64 and "missed" the Wii U's GamePad off this list because I am an SJW shitstain pushing an anti-Xbox agenda or something. Happy button bashing. Be grateful that your PlayStation's not got one of these plugged into it.

Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.

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