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Toward a Unified Theory of the Cat Man

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Toward a Unified Theory of the Cat Man

Stephen Colbert's Transition into the 'Real' Stephen Colbert Has Begun

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Screengrab via 'The Late Show' CBS

After executing eye-high kicks with his bandleader and muzzling the studio audience, Stephen Colbert greeted viewers of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last night with a very familiar phrase: "Hello, nation." For a blissful second, he seemed to still be playing his role as the conservative haranguer of illegal immigrants, ivory towers, bears, and commoners lacking cosmic treadmills, a character he inhabited for nine years on The Colbert Report. But the blue-suited host quickly checked himself, admitting, "Folks, I don't know what that means." Thus despite his confessional GQ cover story (and a publicity push that landed his mug on every bus, subway wall, and taxi roof in New York City), the 51-year-old Colbert remains in transition, an actor reminding himself not to act in front of a camera.

"With this show, I begin the search for the real Stephen Colbert," he said. Like his fictional alter ego, this gent is still a star-spangled patriot fond of his own image—a projection on the dome of the Ed Sullivan Theater recast David Letterman's longtime home as a faux-stained glass basilica in homage to St. Stephen. "I used to play a narcissistic conservative pundit, now I'm just a narcissist," he joked. But unlike his past TV self, this Colbert followed the traditional late-night format, standing for the monologue and letting the guests (George Clooney and Jeb Bush) bask in attention when they were introduced.

In another departure from his cable days—where he traded verbal barbs with Fox Newsers Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly and once pretended to attack Jon Stewart and Conan O'Brien with nunchucks—Colbert depicted network hosts as a cordial fraternity who literally share a locker room. This summer, when he was a guest on Jerry Seinfeld's web series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, Colbert mentioned that he and The Tonight Show's Jimmy Fallon broke bread in Manhattan when it was revealed that the two would become time-slot competitors. While their mutual "rival" Jimmy Kimmel (who tapes his show in LA) was nowhere to be found in last night's episode, Fallon appeared twice—Colbert even gave his NBC counterpart airtime to promote his own lineup. Regardless, yesterday was a ratings win for Colbert, whose season premiere garnered 123 percent more viewers than the debut of Letterman's final season.

First episodes can be notoriously rocky, and in Colbert's case he had a lot of boxes to check off: He had to introduce a new personality, a new house band (Jon Batiste and Stay Human), a new theme song, a new opening montage, a new set, a new product placement (handled awkwardly, making Comedy Central fans miss Jon Stewart's semi-serious scorn for Arby's), and even his boss, Leslie Moonves, who was seated in the front row feigning readiness to switch CBS programming back over to The Mentalist at any moment. There were also kind words reserved for his predecessor as Colbert vowed he wasn't "replacing" David Letterman and said that Letterman's "creative legacy is a high pencil mark on a doorframe that we all have to measure ourselves against. We will try to honor his achievement by doing the best show we can, and occasionally, making the network very mad at us."


Watch VICE Meets Jane Fonda:


Although Colbert is incredibly likable—in and out of character—and viewers would be smart to withhold judging the show too harshly, the host set expectations quite high when he stated early in the episode, "I have to say, as long as I have nine months to make one hour of TV, I could do this forever." Surprisingly, Colbert's Late Show interview segments were both disappointments. Instead of having a frank conversation with Clooney—who, refreshingly, had nothing to promote the writers filled their nine minutes with clips from a generic, underwhelming, made-up action flick starring the actor. Florida governor and presidential candidate Jeb Bush received less airtime than Clooney and his fake flick. The politician was asked one question with amazing possibilities: "Without in any way diminishing your love for your brother, in what ways do you politically differ from your brother, George?" But sadly, Colbert—an astute parser of political BS—didn't press the candidate for a detailed answer. Aside from asking that lone query, Jimmy Fallon could and would have delivered the exact same interview on his program.

An hour of nightly TV time allows each network host to carve out a trademark personality. With lip-sync battles and irreverent thank-you-card-writing, Fallon is energetic, hammy, and a little immature, while Kimmel is often mocking, sometimes poignant (as seen with his love for Letterman and his outrage over the death of Cecil the lion). Jay Leno was a glad-hander hardwired for punchlines and automobiles, while David Letterman was the wisest-cracking son Indiana ever produced. The Late Late Show 's James Corden is a bubbly fanboy, while Seth Meyers of Late Night appeals to the highbrow late-nighters with segments such as Venn Diagrams and Live New Yorker Cartoons.

During his stints at The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, we more or less always knew what was on Colbert's mind—himself, or at least some hilariously inflated version of it. Whoever this Stephen Colbert will be—the playfully preening charmer; the chummy professional equally at ease with comedians, celebrities, and politicians; the (mostly) earnest family man with a love of America only surpassed by his love of Middle Earth; or some combination of them all—it's clear people will be watching to find out.

Follow Jenna on Twitter.

Quashing Sexism in Music and Why This Is Just the Beginning

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Quashing Sexism in Music and Why This Is Just the Beginning

Walking the Beat with Copwatch, the People Who Police the Police

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Walking the Beat with Copwatch, the People Who Police the Police

My Restaurant Job Made Me Hate Kids

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My Restaurant Job Made Me Hate Kids

Habits: Punk Animals Drink the Flies in Their Wine in Today's 'Habits' Comic

A Houston Woman Just Became the First Person Convicted Under an Anti-Animal Crush Porn Law

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Ashley Nicole Richards. Photo courtesy of the Houston Police Department

The following article contains graphic descriptions of animal cruelty.

On Tuesday, Ashley Nicole Richards, 24, pleaded guilty in federal district court to four counts of producing and one count of distributing obscene videos. The videos in question were "crush" videos in which the Houston woman would don a Mardi Gras–style mask, torture animals, and utter phrases intended to arouse viewers.

In the past, prosecuting the makers of such porn—which is, unfortunately, A Thing—has been surprisingly complex and controversial, with some arguing that images of awful things being done to animals should be protected as free speech.

On Motherboard: The People Who Get Off to Crush Porn

In 2010, the US Supreme Court struck down a 1999 law making it illegal to depict animal fighting or cruelty, deeming it a violation of the First Amendment that could affect hunters, among other people doing lawful activity. (The court was specifically considering a case in which a man was sentenced to three years in prison for filming pit bull fights.) In response, Congress passed the narrower Animal Crush Video Prohibition Act into law that same year, which criminalized interstate commerce of material depicting animal torture. Richards is the first-known case to be indicted in a federal court since, according to a joint press release issued by the FBI and the Department of Justice.

Videos that feature animals like dogs, cats, and birds getting killed are what's known as "hard crush." Then there's "soft crush," which features objects like balloons, toys, or food. At its most extreme, soft crush videos will show animals that people don't find particularly cute or cuddly, like bugs and crawdads. Regardless of the object of destruction is, Justin Lehmiller at Ball State University says we just don't know all that much about the human desire to watch living things get squished.

"There really isn't any empirical research out there on crush fetishes, so we do not fully understand the origins or prevalence of this specific sexual interest," he told VICE. "However, it is suspected to be quite rare."

Facebook groups capture the depraved enjoyment some people get out of the clips. On the page of one woman who calls herself Dressed to Kill Babe, the moderator makes a point of saying hers is "NOT A CRUSH video page" and claims she's practicing animal husbandry guided by a spiritual practices. However, comments on a video that apparently shows a rooster being killed with a Cutco knife suggest otherwise. "Wish I was that lucky rooster," says one. "BRAVE WOMAN!" adds another.

On August 14, 2012, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) alerted the Houston Police Department about a woman they believed had created illicit smut titled "Ebony Kill Cat." According to a the plea agreement, they sent the cops about 20 videos. People from the animal rights group also included a link to a site where one could buy crush porn legally.

In the plea agreement, crush porn is defined as a "cruel and illegal genre of pornography in which women are videotaped or photographed mutilating small animals for the sexual gratification of viewers." Senior Police Officer Suzanne Hollifield of the Houston Police Department's animal cruelty unit watched a 12-minute video called "meshalettekittykat2" that fit this description and also had Richards's email appear on the screen.

Hollifield also watched a video called "Puppy2" that featured Richards hitting a pit bull with a meat cleaver and severing its head. After the dog was killed, Richards urinated on its body. In other videos, the woman would commit horrific acts like step on a cat's eye with heels or burn a dog with a cigarette.

The day after she watched videos of the internet starlet known as "Ebony Crush Goddess," Hollifield, the Houston cop, went to Richards's home, where she lived with a man named Brent Justice. In an interview that took place in the officer's car, Richards said that the two were best friends who had known each other for four years. After being pressed by the cop, who recognized aspects of the residence from the videos, the woman admitted to making crush porn for money and said she drank alcohol beforehand.

Even more disturbingly, Richards called the killings "sacrifices" and "rituals" and indicated that the website she sold crush videos on would cut her a check every time she had made $400 or $500. Justice, the man who she lived with and whose arm can be observed handing her a knife in one video, claimed that Richards would have thrown him out of the house had he not agreed to help out by filming her.

At one point in the investigation, a federal court dropped the charges against both Richards and Justice after constitutional issues were raised. But the Fifth US Circuit Court of Appeals decided to reinstate them, and the defense's petition to the Supreme Court was denied.

PETA has continued to investigate this subculture after they helped nail the Houston duo. With the group's assistance, two adult fetish models were arrested last spring for making animal crush videos, allegedly at the behest of a South Florida fishing captain. But the cases against Stephanie Hird and Sara Zamora were not pursued, according to Miami-Dade County court records. Neither woman was federally indicted, because they were never accused of trying to sell the material across state lines or of knowing that it would be distributed. "Even with this technicality, the producer of the videos, Adam Redford, faced fines and probation and was forced to stop making them," said PETA cruelty casework director Stephanie Bell.

Richards had no such luck. In addition to the federal charges, she pleaded guilty to three charges in state court for dealing crush porn and was slapped with a decade-long sentence for them. Each of the federal counts she was convicted of Tuesday is punishable by up to seven years in prison, and she may also be fined $250,000. (Sentencing is set for December 10.)

Meanwhile, Justice was indicted in 2012 on four counts of creating crush porn, one of distributing it, and another of selling or transferring obscene matter. His case is still pending. The 54-year-old is currently in the Harris County Jail for animal cruelty charges.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Ashley Richards Plea


Trevor Paglen Photographs the Underwater Telecommunication Cables Tapped by the NSA

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'Columbus III, NSA/GCHQ-Tapped Undersea Cable, Atlantic Ocean, 2015, C-print, 48 x 60 inches, courtesy of Metro Pictures Gallery. Photo by Trevor Paglen. For the exhibition, Paglen photographed underwater and beachside cables that the NSA uses to siphon data.

This article appears in the September Issue of VICE

When I met the artist Trevor Paglen to talk about the surveillance state, I found him crouched in the back of a metal bar called Rasputin. He was in Istanbul for an arts festival where he was giving a lecture on government secrecy, a major theme in his work. We'd spent the last few days at a hotel that used to be a hangout for American spies, and it felt fitting that we left the onetime spook house to discuss the NSA in an antiestablishment bar named after a mystic tied to the downfall of the Russian monarchy.

Paglen began telling me about his latest project, which investigates domestic spying at its source.

"When we talk about the internet or mass surveillance—which are basically two sides of the same coin at this point—we use horribly mystifying metaphors to describe them: the cloud, the world wide web, the Information Superhighway, and so on," he said.

"But everything in the world is made of stuff, right? Where is the stuff that mass surveillance is made of, and what does it look like?"

Over the noise of speed guitar and blast beats, Paglen elaborated that people tend to think of all things online as nowhere and everywhere at the same time—abstract tools that connect people across the world as if by magic. "But what," he posed, "do they connect people over?"

In Tubes, a book exploring the materiality of the web, author Andrew Blum writes: "The Internet exists—it has a physical reality, an essential infrastructure, a 'hard bottom.'" While we are accustomed to thinking of it in abstract, confounding platitudes like "the net" or "1's and 0's," the government and military view the internet very differently. Surveillance agencies like the NSA see fiber optic cables, hardware networks, and data centers—concrete things.

This is ripe material for Paglen, who worked as a cinematographer on Citizen Four, the Oscar-winning Edward Snowden documentary. He has also photographed NSA listening stations in the deep woods of West Virginia, testing grounds for chemical and biological weapons in Utah, government-controlled black-site prisons in Afghanistan, classified American spy satellites, and other ghost objects and structures.

By necessity, he often captures his images from extraordinary distances, using telephoto lenses and gear designed for astrophotography. But for his latest project—an unnamed exhibition opening September 10 at Metro Pictures Gallery in New York—the 41-year-old got up-close to surveillance tools while taking a literal deep dive into secret government operations. Paglen photographed the underwater fiber optic cables that compose the physical infrastructure of the internet, specifically the places where the NSA taps them to mine personal data.

"I was thinking about how the NSA looks at telecommunications networks," Paglen told me in a later conversation. "It wears a certain type of goggles to see them, and I wanted to explore what the internet looks like when you put the NSA's goggles on."


For more on Trevor Paglen, watch The Creators Project's 2013 documentary on the artist:



Today, the vast majority of internet traffic, telephone calls, browsing data, and emails cross the world along seafloor fiber optic wires. The government first started tapping these during the Cold War, when the NSA, CIA, and Navy launched Operation Ivy Bells, in which submarines and divers used recording pods to spy on the Soviets. The initiative ended in 1981, when NSA analyst Ronald Pelton was caught selling information about the program to Russia, but the same surveillance tactics have persisted into the present.

According to Paglen, these cables belong to telecommunications companies, but the NSA will offer them money (or threaten to take them to court, citing the PATRIOT Act, the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, and a combination of legal and extralegal threats) to access the tubes' "chokepoints," a colloquial name for coastal landing sites or shallow areas where the cables converge. As Edward Snowden revealed in an archive he released, the NSA taps the chokepoints with submarines such as the USS Jimmy Carter, which has been called "the Navy's underwater eavesdropper."


OPERATION IVY BELLS
In Operation Ivy Bells, the United States Navy, CIA, and NSA placed wire taps on underwater communication lines to spy on the Russians during the Cold War.

The NSA isn't alone in its efforts. The agency reportedly cooperates with its UK equivalent, the Government Communications Headquarters, which has a subsidiary program called Tempora that siphons some 20 million gigabytes of data a day from more than 200 cables that collectively stretch 600,000 miles across the world.

In theory, these surveillance organizations could record any type of information that travels over the cables—Facebook posts, email exchanges, or browsing histories—making this type of privacy invasion more nefarious than trawling metadata like call logs.

For the exhibition, Paglen photographed a number of the most prominent underwater and beachside chokepoints. In doing so, he documented exactly where internet communication and privacy invasion intersect in the most literal manner possible.

Finding the sites posed the greatest challenge. For that, he used maritime atlases—maps created in order to prevent ships from dropping anchors on the cables—that show their general location. "Those are accurate up to about a couple hundred yards," he explained. Then he used maps of reefs to identify where the cables protrude from the ocean floor. "I used this information to basically make giant search patterns, like drawing a square on a map and putting the GPS coordinates in there, before diving down with a team to shoot." He named the artworks after individual cables one can find in maps online, indirectly making the chokepoints—and their coordinates—public knowledge.

"There are a few places in the world where all these undersea cables come ashore," Paglen told me. "They're really specific places in terms of geography." On the West Coast of the United States, they can be found in Seattle, Washington; Hillsboro and Bandon, Oregon; and Point Arena and Morro Bay, California. On the East Coast, there are landing sites in Mastic Beach and other parts of Long Island, New York; Manasquan and Tuckerton, New Jersey; and Boca Raton and Hollywood, Florida.

The Southeast is especially dear to the NSA. Few telecom companies use cables that run directly from Europe or Africa to South America; instead they pass through the US by way of Florida. "The NSA loves that because even if someone in Portugal is talking to somebody in Argentina, and while that theoretically has nothing to do with us, they can spy on them because the cable is routed through the US," Paglen said. "To the NSA, the chokepoints are important because they're in places where they can pluck a lot of information from across the globe very efficiently."

'Mid-Atlantic Crossing (MAC) NSA/GCHQ-Tapped Undersea Cable Atlantic Ocean' (2015). C-print 48 x 60 in. Courtesy of Metro Pictures. Photo by Trevor Paglen

The photographs in the exhibition are interesting in that there's "nothing to see," Paglen said. The shots are basically just blue color fields, murky reefs, and unremarkable tubes. They're almost a foil to those mystified metaphors we use to describe the web.

"I like playing with the idea that here's a photograph of this thing that is literally invisible—you can't see this [massive surveillance infrastructure]. As hard as you try, you will not see it, but I have all this documentation and research that points to the fact that it exists in this giant tap on an underwater cable," Paglen said.

The artist has visualized certain "weapons" the NSA uses to spy on society and has also obliquely geo-tagged where they operate. But photographing these tools doesn't get us any closer to answering what the NSA is doing with them. "I'm more interested in these things not being resolved," Paglen admitted. "The art isn't about these one-to-one relationships."

For him, the series is about "that failure of vision—or that failure of the way the world works to line up with your ability to perceive it." The photographs expose the net, the web, as something like a physical trap.

Trevor Paglen's latest exhibition is open at Metro Pictures in New York from September 10 through October 24. For more information, visit the gallery's website here.

Follow Zach on Twitter.


Abdul Abdullah Photographs the Isolation of Australian Muslims

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Abdul Abdullah Photographs the Isolation of Australian Muslims

Photographer Mick Rock Looks Back at Ziggy Stardust's Takeover of the Universe

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All photos courtesy of Mick Rock and Taschen Gallery

Part of getting old is that you become deeply uncool. Your mind loses a step, your body careens into states of decrepitude you'd heretofore only read about in H. P. Lovecraft novels, and you lose touch with whatever crap the youth find trendy. This is especially true in the world of popular music, where relevance is paramount and the average age of its luminaries hovers around, like, 12.

A glaring exception to that rule is David Bowie, who has not only managed to resonate with new generation after new generation, but whose current work maintains an unflagging quality that renders the enigmatic, 68-year-old Brit seemingly bulletproof.

Though he may seem monolithic now, it wasn't always that way. Despite the critical success of his 1971 album Hunky Dory, Bowie was still a relative cult figure as he plotted his reinvention as the androgynous, alien rockstar Ziggy Stardust. The Ziggy persona was the first of several stylistic overhauls Bowie would undergo as his ever-expanding palette drew from influences as diverse as they were expected.

The years of 1972 and 1973 would find Bowie nearly taking over the world, doing two tours, cranking out three albums (four if you count Lou Reed's Transformer, which he and his guitarist/arranger Mick Ronson produced), and forming an alliance with fellow rock iconoclasts Reed and Iggy Pop.

One of the first photos Mick Rock shot of Bowie

Looking back, Mick Rock can fully appreciate that transition from "Starman" to bona fide star. The acclaimed rock photographer worked closely with Bowie during this period, accompanying him on his tours and capturing countless images of the star.

"David was such an amazing subject," he said over coffee at the Taschen Gallery in Los Angeles, where his show Mick Rock: Shooting for Stardust. The Rise of David Bowie & Co. debuts tonight. "He was like a gift. Not everybody appreciated it, but once they did you couldn't rid of the bloody photographers."

Now in his 60s, Rock's another one of those guys who has remained cool despite the test of time. In addition to his work with Bowie, Rock shot the covers for Iggy and the Stooges' Raw Power, Lou Reed's Transformer, and Queen's Queen II—in short, he's photographed nearly every big name in music you can think of.

Related: My Dear Friend Lou Reed, by Mick Rock

As we thumbed through The Rise of David Bowie: 1972–1973, his book of Bowie photography tied to the show, Rock took care to point out details—a banana on the makeup table here, Bowie subtly wielding a harmonica under a kimono there—whose importance is only evident to those who lived the images.

"Most of these pictures didn't see the light of day at the time," Rock said of the collection. "No one thought to publish them. What looked pretty throwaway at the time has become iconic."


VICE: When Bowie first debuted the Ziggy Stardust character, did people realize it was going to change rock 'n' roll in a very real way?
Mick Rock: I don't think it was quite as straightforward as that. When I first met him, the Ziggy album hadn't been released. I was an admirer of Hunky Dory, which started to get some positive critical feedback. His rise was more organic. He had a following, but quite a small one. It was a few hundred people. When that guitar fellatio shot happened, there are a thousand people at Oxford Town Hall. It was a day or two after the release of Ziggy Stardust and it was his biggest audience to date. At that moment, the world wasn't clamoring to photograph him.

You see this look on Mick's face in the photo of Bowie going down on his guitar letting you know how unexpected that shot was.
David biting the guitar was deliberate, but it was the way that Mick swung his guitar that forced him to go down. But once he knew it created an effect, it was like Jimi Hendrix burning his guitar or Pete Townshend smashing his guitar. But with overtones, of course.

It's almost submission to the idea of rock 'n' roll.
However you want to interpret it, I'm sure David would love it [laughs]. I don't claim to know what he was going for.

This was only a few years after homosexuality had been declared legal in Britain.
Barely! He was working it. David had a lot of fucking balls to go around dressed the way he was. That wasn't today. The idea of "gay" made people want to kill. Ziggy had a femininity, but it wasn't drag. There was a space element to it. And he was influenced by Japanese Kabuki theater, where all the female roles are played by men. It was really '73 when the full-tilt Japanese thing came in. He knew about mime, and he certainly knew about Kabuki theater.

I think Bowie had a 15-year period that was as fertile as any musician ever.
He revolutionized not only the music—he did that in collaboration with Lou and Iggy—but the culture. The Velvet Underground and the Stooges had zero success. In Lou's case, he'd had one album and his label was thinking of dropping him. He'd sold about 30,000 records—it wasn't looking good. I mean Iggy, those first two Stooges albums, even Raw Power, were total duds. He's said three months after it was released he found it in the 50-cent bin in the record store. But the upheaval, it was a completely different way of approaching music.

What was the creative relationship like between Bowie, Iggy, and Lou Reed?
David produced Transformer, along with Mick Ronson, and that did transform Lou's life. He injected a positive aspect into their careers. With Iggy, it took a few more years. Iggy was in the looney bin and David went to rescue him.

He didn't produce Raw Power—if you look at the original release, no one gets a credit for producing it. It was put together in a fairly anarchic way. Nowadays it does say "produced by Iggy Pop." But the production...

It was raw.
Yes!

You shot the cover for that.
And Transformer. It was like bing-bang.

They're similar shots.
Not only are they onstage, they're in quiet moments. Both Iggy and Lou are looking away and are actually quite static. Who knows? I just shot them, and they became the covers. You've got to remember that David wasn't such a big hit at the moment, and neither was I. But no one cared about Iggy and Lou either. And David had also done a rescue job on Mott the Hoople. He wrote "All the Young Dudes" for them. He was good at rescue acts. As someone whose career was roaring along, he would play mummy a bit. He was very likable.

How often was he having bad ideas? When you look back, it seems like just a string of genius ones.
You could argue that his first album wasn't so good. But that was '67, and it wasn't a bad album. It just wasn't what David would become.

How did Bowie feel about himself?
He was confident and very ambitious. He would verbalize that. There was a shift out of the hippies, but you still had a lot around in 1972. The expression of his ambition was very unusual.

Bowie really expanded the scope of what a pop musician could do.
He did it on his own terms, as did Iggy and Lou. David was definitely different in all senses. His references were much broader, whether it was Kabuki the living theater, [the famous mime] Marcel Marceau, 2001: a Space Odyssey. He was sucking in all kinds of things and blending it all together. Even in the music, you could hear strains of all different things. Whereas with Lou and Iggy, you couldn't really find anything before them that sounded anything like them. David was a magnificent synthesizer. And he was very quick—you showed him something and [if] he liked it, he was on it. He had a certain innate genius from the beginning. Once he smelled it, he was off to the races. In the totality of that 20-month period when I shot him regularly, I think he had 74 different outfits. That was kind of unusual. And then the makeup became more exotic. There was a guy called Pierre Laroche who did certain makeups for him, like the big gold splodge. He did the "Life on Mars" makeup. Pierre did the zig-zag [from the Aladdin Sane album cover], too—I believe under David's direction.

Were there anything Bowie ever did that caught you off guard?
I was quite nimble. I wasn't on anyone's payroll. I was a free radical. But one morning in the middle of the American tour, he shaved his eyebrows off. I was like, "There's something different about you, yeah... He's totally gone Martian! He's shaved the eyebrows." The nice thing about David was that he was a pleasant person to deal with. He wasn't really moody. Lou did moody incredibly well. David was kind of the opposite. I always saw him and Lou as being two sides of the same thing. David was bright and sparkly in London, and Lou was down and dark in New York.

Lou and Iggy gave me the vibe of being self-destructive, but David never did. He was very positive, which I think turned those two on. They'd had these careers that had gone nowhere, and they came to London and there was David being bright and charming. Neither of them had "bright and charming" down.

"I think his PR people in London told me they're basically paid to neither confirm nor deny rumors." —Mick Rock

But Bowie also has a mysterious side.
He's very active still. I like the idea of him as the Greta Garbo of rock n' roll. But Greta stopped, and David's got all kinds of stuff going on. Retro albums being released, new albums... There appears to be one in the pipeline, or at least (Bowie producer) Tony Visconti was talking about one a while ago. I'm sure it'll be fabulous. For someone who had so much attention heaped on him for years, he can disappear. It's not like he's locked away, but he does what he wants to do. People don't see him. That's part of his genius—when he wants you to see him, you see him. When he doesn't want you to, you can't.

I think there's a certain amount of freedom with that power.
It works very well in his favor. I think his PR people in London told me they're basically paid to neither confirm nor deny rumors.

Do you think there's somebody who's close to a modern Bowie?
I think it's hard to be close to any of those characters. Part of the reason is there's so much information out there. There's no such thing as an underground. There was in those years, and people like Lou and Iggy and David released albums and there was time for a mystique to build. It took you a long time to get the amount of information you'd get today. It seems to be what you don't know is more titillating than what you do know. People would imagine all sorts of things. You get down to David, Lou, and Iggy, and there was something to that combo which influenced the culture in a massive way. The summer of '72, that was the moment.

Which of these shots are you most proud of?
I think "proud" is the wrong word. It's David. He was a great character and a great subject. I don't make any grandiose claims for myself. I think, Boy, oh boy, what a beautiful subject.

Follow Drew on Twitter.

VICE Vs Video Games: What Would the World be Like if Peaceful Video Games Were More Popular Than Hyper-Violent Ones?

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A screenshot from the original 'Myst'

A few weeks ago, in the middle of August, the top-selling game across all formats wasn't a shooter, a sports simulation, a movie tie-in, or a Hollywood-indebted action adventure. It was Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, a digital-only release exclusive to the PlayStation 4, made by UK-based indie studio The Chinese Room.

You can be forgiven for missing it, especially if you don't own a PS4. No physical copies were produced, so Rapture wasn't rubbing shoulders in Sainsbury's with discounted copies of Tomb Raider and stacks of Skylanders figures, and it didn't have any kind of mainstream marketing push. It was only available on the PlayStation Store, with an attractive discount if you were a PS+ subscriber. But the timing of its release was perfect, arriving in something of a summertime slump for bigger-budget (and bigger-bang) experiences.

A screenshot from 'Everybody's Gone to the Rapture'

Rapture is a quiet, meditative game, one that doesn't force its story upon you but lets it unfold in an order the player determines, by wandering the verdant hills and village halls, lookalike public houses and abandoned homes of a small corner of rural England. I really liked it, though I can also see its flaws (limited replay value, more unremarkable characters than not, no real puzzles to speak of, those identical boozers), and playing it made me wonder what the gaming landscape would be like if this sort of release were more the default than the exception.

What sort of world would we be living in, and what kind of social media circus would we be a part of, had violent shooters not become the most popular genre with the releases, in the early 1990s, of id Software's Wolfenstein 3D (1992) and, more pertinently, the same company's incredibly successful, genre-defining first-person shooter (FPS), 1993's DOOM?

Earlier in 2015 I spoke to Sean Murray, managing director at Hello Games, the Guildford-based studio currently finishing the endless outer space epic No Man's Sky. He's a FPS fan, but when discussing the current state of independent video games—the scene, the community, that's helped to make the likes of Rapture a relative hit—he began to draw parallels between today's non-mainstream releases and what might have been had a certain other game of 1993, Cyan's danger-free first-person puzzle title Myst, been a greater influential force on what commercial gaming became in the following years than id's seminal slice of digital ultra-violence.

"I think video games kind of grew up really, really fast, and became about money and business really quickly, before they really had a chance to form," Murray said. "And I think indie games are taking them back quite a few steps, almost like they're creating these alternate realities. That's how I see it. There are loads of indie games where you'll look at them and think about how it'd be if we went back to the Atari phase, or the Commodore 64 phase, or the SNES phase, whatever—but knowing what we know now to create this alternate history, almost.

"You see games that are coming along now that are like the second or third generation of that alternate history. Like, (Braid-maker Jonathan Blow's forthcoming game) The Witness looks like a triple-A game, but it's come through this alternate history where there were more sequels to Myst, and we all went down that route rather than the first-person shooter route."

Another screenshot from the original 'Myst'

Myst wasn't exactly unpopular. It was the highest-selling game across PC formats until 2002, when The Sims surpassed it. Yet its critical reception across its many ports has been mixed, and it's not aged very well. Its story reveals itself through investigation, much like Rapture and another Chinese Room production, Dear Esther. There is no easy fail state, no health bar to monitor, no enemies pumping bullets in your general direction. Completing the game required time and no little lateral thinking. It did spawn sequels, four in total, and even a parody game in the form of Pyst (oh, ha ha). But its stroll-around-at-your-own-pace gameplay has never attracted gamer interest quite like the alternatives, games that might let you slice up zombie soldiers with a chainsaw on a demons-invaded Mars.

Richard Stanton, a contributor to the Guardian and Eurogamer, mentions Myst in his recently released book, A Brief History of Video Games, actually in the same chapter as DOOM. "Myst is often hailed for its huge sales," he writes, "which tends to obscure what a forward-thinking design the game had." Playing Rapture today, or something like the Fullbright Company's revered drawers-rummager Gone Home of 2013, that design has clearly left its mark on developers not especially interested in guns and gore. I asked him for his thoughts on Murray's imagined alternative reality of indie gaming.

Battling a Cyberdemon in the original 'DOOM'

"Myst showed there was always commercial demand for different first-person experiences," he tells me. "Even before Myst, in fact, Bill Gates was heralding (early 1993 'interactive movie') The 7th Guest as 'the new standard in interactive entertainment.' The difficulty I have in imagining the alternate reality where Myst's heirs run free is what replaces shooting as a mechanic.

"Shooting is so popular in gaming because it's a versatile and extremely impactful interaction—putting aside the value judgment, it is a reliable way to make a player feel powerful. Consider a modern first-person adventure like Dear Esther, where you walk around an island triggering audio recordings. To me that's not an especially engaging design. It's something that does make me excited for The Witness, because really well designed and tactile puzzles could provide that extra depth of engagement players like me want."

Article continues after the video below


Related: Watch VICE's latest film, 'Gone: The Story of Paul Alexander'


Dear Esther actually began as something of an experiment: a shooter without the shooting, in a way. Dan Pinchbeck, founder of The Chinese Room, told me a little about that mod-that-became-a-game.

"Dear Esther started as a research project: If you rip out all the traditional call-and-response gameplay, and just have a story, is that going to be something players are still into? And that was it. So it never was a conscious thing, to 'change gaming' or anything like that. People loved the mod, so we made it as a game."

Dear Esther is a quintessential example of what some gamers like to call a walking simulator, as that's really your primary interaction—you walk your (unseen) character onwards, to interact with objects and 'unlock' more of the story, in an order that the game's makers are not determining. Head over to Steam and "walking simulator" has earned itself a category, collecting together (actually very different) games like Beyond Eyes, Sunset, and Among the Sleep. These are everything the DOOM clones aren't—steadily paced affairs, mostly with nothing trying to kill you, and definitely no body count targets for the player to meet to guarantee progression. They've become a divisive breed of video game, and I understand where people who don't like them are coming from, especially when there is no real element of challenge to proceedings. Personally, though, I enjoy these relaxed adventures, which often feel more personal, more intimate of atmosphere and lingering of impression, than anything where the sole part of "you" on screen is a hand with trigger finger primed.

A screenshot from 'Dear Esther'

"I've never really paid much attention to the people saying how Dear Esther is 'destroying gaming' or any of that crap," Pinchbeck says. "More diversity can only be a good thing, in any medium. The greater spread of experiences available to you, the better. I am massively obsessed with Far Cry, but I can also play Proteus, or a Tale of Tales game, and I have that choice. That cannot be a negative. Not every game has to do everything, and it's OK to have games that are just big dumb stupid shooters. In the same way, when you start to read a book, you can decide what type you want, what content. And games are getting closer to that point."

"Big dumb stupid shooters"—your Call of Duty, Far Cry, and Halo games at their best, your Duke Nukem Forever-style wastes of everybody's time at their worst—are the most dominant dominant power in gaming, though. A new title in an established FPS series, had it come out the same week as Rapture, would have obliterated it. No doubt about it. People prefer to play violent video games than ones that ask you to explore a family's past through the trinkets of an empty house, or uncover the mystery behind a community's disappearance by following spirit trails to clue-laden locations. The sales figures don't lie. Last year's lukewarmly received Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare witnessed sales well below previous entries in the series, yet still shifted enough copies to be named the best-selling game of the year—and it was released in November. In contrast, Gone Home sold an impressive 250,000 copies in six months, but that's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it blip at the very edge of a commercial radar that only registers millions.

New on Motherboard: Nintendo's Forgotten Console

"You had space marines and corridor shooters, and they became huge," Murray tells me. "They became the main focus of the industry, to the point where you could look at the line up—even now—for Christmas releases, and it'd be Halo vs Crysis vs Gears of War or whatever. But if you took a layman to those games, they might not be able to tell what screenshot came from which game, pretty much. We became super generic in those terms, to an outsider at least.

"We're trying to explore other ideas. About openness, and vastness, and freedom. More about feelings of real exploration. That's our alternate history. It's not like it's better or anything—it's just that style has been forgotten a little bit."


A screenshot from 'No Man's Sky'

Stanton notes that shooters don't need to be macho, marines-filled experiences, citing Splatoon as a fine example of a game using third-person shooter mechanics in a, let's say, friendlier fashion. "But I think it's true to say that the big-budget side of the games industry turned away from narrative design in the early 1990s," he says, "and with few exceptions has never really returned to it in a meaningful sense. Perhaps Myst's heirs would have changed that and, who knows, they yet might."

So the answer to the "what if" of this piece may naturally, albeit perhaps belatedly, present itself soon enough. Shooters aren't going away—the DOOM model will always be a powerful force in game design. And it's not like that's a bad thing, entirely, as titles like Far Cry 4 and Wolfenstein: The New Order bring intelligence and warmth to the ruthlessly recycled mechanics of murder. But Myst's legacy is palpable in Rapture and a spread of similarly minded new video games, which prefer to stoke the fires of your brain than demand swift reflexes to prevent bloody death by ballistics. And there are only going to be more walking simulators—some of them in space, no less.

Would the last 20-odd years have been different—for games and those who play them—had Myst been the template upon which more titles were based? Would gaming culture have been less male dominated, a friendlier place to tweet in? Would video games have avoided being dragged through the tabloid press in the wake of the Columbine massacre and Anders Behring's rampage of 2011? Perhaps. Maybe we'd all be a little friendlier to each other right now, in person and online, with multiplayer games emphasizing cooperation over annihilation. But then, you have to admit that finally getting the better of a rockets-chucking Cyberdemon, right before your ammunition was reduced to nothing, and watching that bastard explode in a cloud of red, was a raw thrill then and equally electrifying now. And that's the kind of power trip no amount of walking around a handsome hamlet can provide.

Richard Stanton's A Brief History of Video Games is out now—click here for further information. The quotes from Sean Murray and Dan Pinchbeck represent unused material from a book project by the author, which he'll no doubt be tweeting about nearer its publication.

Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.

I Got a Lesson in Gender Equality at a Romance Writers' Conference

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All photos by the author

"The one with penis biting," the woman to my left says, explaining the plot of the romance novel, Shadowheart. "Or is it penis scratching?"

"Penis biting," another woman to my right confirms.

I'm sitting with blogger Kat Mayo at the 24th annual Romance Writers of Australia (RWA) conference.

Kat runs a popular romance novel blog called BookThingo. She explains that while the genre is broad—spanning from biker romance to billionaires with babies—every romance novel needs to tick two boxes: "They have to get together in the end," she says. "And I have to believe they are not going to split up in two months."

More than 300 writers, publishers, and fans of romance mill around the lobby of Melbourne's luxe Park Hyatt hotel. It's almost all women, 95 percent I'm told. The only men I can spot are the photographer and the guy behind the lighting booth.

Everyone is a little worse for wear, mingling over much-needed coffee after last night's gala ball. No fewer than ten people tell me I missed out big time on the gorgeous half-naked buff butlers who were serving drinks.

"The toilets on this level are all women's; we've converted all the toilets to women's," the emcee announces from the stage. "If you're a male you'll need to go upstairs. It's your turn to be inconvenienced."

Glancing around the room filled with writers, editors, and publishers, I realize the idea I'd had of the romance genre was just completely wrong. I'd promised my editor a funny piece about the people who write and read romantic fiction—David Foster Wallace's Big Red Son without the porn and footnotes—but what I found wasn't a joke, nor was it a niche hobby for middle-aged moms. It was a huge business.



Related: Watch Broadly's documentary about the mom and daughter who run an erotic publishing empire.


Thirty-one million print copies of romance novels were sold in the US in 2014. Demand for new books is so high that publishers at the RWA conference spend much of the weekend sitting with writers in the plush lobby, listening to their story pitches, and often picking up the books on the spot.

Over lunch Deb Werksman, an editorial director at New York publisher Sourcebooks, tells me about Nora Roberts. One of the top-selling novelists ever with over 200 published books, Roberts is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Every novel she's released since 1999, under both her name and her crime novel pen name JD Robb, has hit the New York Times bestseller list. I've never even heard of her.

There are Australian authors, too, with staggering numbers of titles under their belts: Melanie Milburne, Anne Gracie, Stephanie Laurens, Marion Lennox—even though most Australians, myself included, have never heard of them.

"Why don't Australians know about these authors?" keynote speaker Anita Heiss asks. "Because the books we write aren't seen to have value, literary or otherwise."

This is a sore point for many romance writers, that their work is so often mocked by the mainstream. Romance is dismissed as being badly written and overly descriptive. Formulaic plots just connecting the dots between metaphor-laden sex scenes: "He withdrew his glistening sword from the warmth of her sheath."

Kat says these criticisms are usually leveled by people who've never read romance beyond 50 Shades of Grey. You want originality? She suggests Nicholas by Elizabeth Amber, where the hero has two penises.

"After he comes, this tongue thing comes out and cleans up after itself," Kat explains. "How can you get anymore female fantasy than that?"

Writer and biographer Jennifer Kloester tells me that in literature, "Value is correlated with having male readers."

We've developed ways to talk intelligently about so many parts of pop culture. Why when we can distinguish between "smart" blockbusters and Fantastic Four, does romance all get lumped in together and dismissed as trash?

No one at RWA seems surprised that books written by female authors for female readers are trivialized. Even in a time when feminism is being discussed by more people, in a more nuanced way than ever before, writer and biographer Jennifer Kloester tells me that in literature, "Value is correlated with having male readers."

"We need to make room in our literary culture for something that really values the feminine," conference director Cate Bell says. "We need to be telling women's stories through women's eyes. That's the only way to change a lot of our stereotypical views of what women are and what they can and can't do."

As I head home, backpack full of books "I just have to read," there's one thing I'm still wondering about. Why do romance writers even care what mainstream literature thinks of them?

They make more money and have more passionate fans than most fiction authors. And while mainstream publishers are struggling with dwindling readership and revenue, romance is generating well over a billion dollars a year. The mainstream, it seems, should instead be taking a page out of their book.

Follow Maddison on Twitter.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: There Was a Tea Party Anti-Iran Deal Rally in DC and It Was Bonkers

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Read: Everything You Need to Know About the Iran Deal

Hundreds of people congregated on the US Captol's West Lawn today for a rally against the Iran Deal headlined by the reddest of red-meat conservatives: Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, and Glenn Beck, among other speakers.

Republicans generally object to the deal on the grounds that Iran is going to either dodge inspections and acquire a nuclear weapon, or will get a weapon lawfully after some of the deal's provisions expire. And speakers at the rally were portraying this critique in the most apocalyptic terms possible.

"There is no greater threat to the safety of America. There is no greater threat to the safety and security of Israel than a nuclear Iran," exclaimed Cruz in a speech that you can watch in a video posted by Yahoo.

"A nuclear Iran poses an existential threat to the nation of Israel," he said to cheers, echoing a position held by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. "And let me be clear: When he says existential, he doesn't mean a bunch of Frenchmen in black berets chain smoking."

He continued: "People will die. Americans will die, Israelis will die, Europeans will die."

Trump agreed. "They will not let Israel survive with incompetent leadership, like we have now," he said. "Israel will not survive." Trump remained on-brand, bringing up his business expertise: "I've never seen something so incompetently negotiated," he said according to CNN. "And I mean never."

Sarah Palin found the time in her speech to take a jab at the Black Lives Matter movement.

"Since our president won't say it, since he hasn't called off the dogs, we'll say," she said, according to Mediaite. "Police officers and first responders all across this great land, we've got your back."

The protest aside, President Barack Obama has enough votes in support of the Iran Deal as of last week, meaning the opposition couldn't override his veto if Congress voted to disapprove of the deal. And as of today the House GOP is divided on how they should fight the deal, with some members wanting to focus on alleged "side deals" between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Thumbnail image via Flickr user JoshuaMHoover

Genero Sound Is Adding a Feminine Thread to the Electronic Music Tapestry

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Genero Sound Is Adding a Feminine Thread to the Electronic Music Tapestry

The VICE Guide to Right Now: Woman Who Wakes Up Each Day Believing It's October 15, 2014 Is 'Fit to Work'

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Screencap via ITV

Read: The Woman Who Woke Up in the Future

On October 15, 2014, Nikki Pegram, a woman in Northamptonshire, England, went to a doctor's appointment. Afterward, she fainted, hitting her head on the floor and suffering a head injury.

She's woken up every day since then believing it's still October 15, 2014. The condition is called anterograde amnesia, and it interferes with the brain's ability to form new memories. Her partner, Chris Johnston, gives her a diary to read each morning—like a real-life iteration of 50 First Dates—to recap the past year of her life. "She lives her life on a day-to-day basis—she doesn't know what she did yesterday, last week, last month," Johnston told the BBC.

But even though Pegram's mind is jammed on the day of her fall, she has been declared "fit to work" by the UK's Department for Work and Pensions. The decision means Pegram is no longer entitled to the $600 monthly disability allowance she was receiving before, and will have to seek a job to make ends meet.

"She won't know where's she working, what she's doing, you'd have to train her every day," said Johnston.

Earlier this year, the British Psychological Society called for a reform of the Department for Work and Pensions' Work Capability Assessments, which are used to determine disability benefits. (Pegram was determined "fit to work" because she could independently walk 200 meters and speak without prompting.) In a press release, the British Psychological Society considered the "significant body of evidence that the WCA is failing to assess people's fitness for work accurately and appropriately, with people who are seriously physically and mentally ill being found fit for work and those with acute, transient episodes being assessed as lacking capacity and treated in the same way as those with a longer term prognosis."

Pegram can appeal her decision with the Department for Work and Pensions. It's possible to partially recover from anterograde amnesia, though Pegram has not received a prognosis on her own recovery.

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.


'Homo Naledi': A New Human-Like Species Could Change Our Ideas on Evolution

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'Homo Naledi': A New Human-Like Species Could Change Our Ideas on Evolution

The VICE Guide to Fashion Week 2015

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Photo courtesy of MADE

Fashion week and the deluge of runway presentations and parties that come with it can be divided up into three clear sections: crap that's easy to get into, crap that's impossible to get into, and those truly amazing moments you'll be bragging about to your grandkids. ("Grammy, what's a Telfar and why do health goths sound so scary?")

To maximize the stuff in the last category, we hit up some of our international contributors to break down the keys to surviving fashion week in their hometowns. Surprisingly, there was a lot of overlap. It turns out Anna Wintour will be front row at all the shows that matter and nobody—from Milan all the way to New York—likes fashion bloggers.

Here's how you can shutdown fashion week in 2015 with your dignity and your sanity intact.

New York Fashion Week:

Who to be seen with?
Downtown kids who ephemerally work in fashion. They don't appear on magazine covers unless they're bi-annual foreign publications with hard-to-pronounce names and zero web presence. They live in Chinatown, modeled for Ryan McGinley in college, and have a radio slot on Know-Wave. Richard Prince appropriated one of their Instagram uploads. They're so cool, they only give one little fuck about fashion, despite walking for Eckhaus Latta and Hood By Air because, you know, those are the homies.

Off the top of the dome: Dev Hynes, Jeanette Hayes, Juliana Huxtable, Hari Nef, Venus-X, and India Menuez. Also, it's never a bad look to kick it with famous rappers or the clothing designers themselves. The peak entourage? Jeremy Scott, North West, and a hologram of A$AP Yamz (RIP).

Who not to be seen with?
Modeling managers with shitty coke. Reality TV stars. Anyone representing a "corporate sponsor." Finance bros who are rich enough to buy themselves and their girlfriend into a fashion show, but won't invest in your clothing line centered around anti-social personality disorders.

What not to wear?
Anyone can get noticed at fashion week, but you want to be noticed for reasons other than looking like an asshat. Piling on layers of gaudy shit looks desperate, unless you're going to see the Blonds. Also, don't wear clothes by the designer of the show you're attending, cause being a kiss-ass is lame.

What to bring along?
Embrace being a digital nomad and put two chargers in your bag—one of those immediate-refill ones, and a regular one. Also pack an energy bar so you can avoid food that stains your gear, a shit ton of gum so your breath doesn't reek after all those hors d'oeuvres, a medley of prescription pills (or nootropics if you really want to be en vogue), and maybe a change of underwear since runway shows can get sweaty and no one wants to be sitting around with swamp ass. Also, it goes without saying, if you have drugs, everyone will want to be your friend. There will be plenty of shady dealers on call all week if your guy is MIA.

What parties to avoid?
Any party that's co-sponsored by a tech company should be avoided—unless it's an e-cig brand or hoverboard start-up. It should come as no surprise that pretty much all the best parties are invite-only, so you better have friends who work in PR.

Also, be wary of going to parties just to catch a special guest performance by a rapper or band. Chances are, it will be a drunken, three-song set. Everyone knows the best performances won't be announced in advanced. Here are some safe bets: the Alexander Wang party, the Opening Ceremony party, anything hosted by Purple Magazine , Refinery 29's 10-Year Anniversary, and anywhere Venus-X is DJ'ing.

What shows should you see?
We're in it for the spectacle—the presentations that give rival designers FOMO. If history has taught us anything, it's that Jeremy Scott, Hood by Air, the Blonds, and Eckhaus Latta are surefire hits for putting on crazy, creative shows. We're gonna check out Lauren Conrad's runway debut too, though we can't explain why.

Photo by Walter Porter Pearce

London Fashion Week

What to wear?
I have a feeling that London fashion is returning to quite an "I buried this linen smock in my garden for four years" place. But if you didn't remember to do that in 2011, then literally anything with adidas trainers is fine.

What not to wear?
Definitely nothing 70s unless you want the bouncers to ask you for your LFW bloggers accreditation pass every time you walk through the holy gates.

Which shows to attend?
The ones that will actually be good: Claire Barrow, Marques'Almeida, Molly Goddard, Ashley Williams, Ryan Lo, Fashion East, Simone Rocha, Gareth Pugh, JW Anderson, Thomas Tait, and Christopher Kane. Good luck with that.


For more on clothes and glamor, watch our video 'Old at Fashion Week':


Who to hang out with?
Anyone who's willing to speak to you, otherwise you'll do a lot of hanging in the back of crowded rooms on your own wondering if a glass of champagne and the chance to see a dress with some plastic bits on it is really worth the stress. You can't be picky; past interns, your ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend's best friend, some people who once didn't give you a job—they are all suddenly your closest confidantes and yes you will eat lunch with them possibly every day if they'll allow it.

Who to stay away from?
Fashion breeds a specific type of maniac who appears really intimating and successful but actually wants to go to dinner with you, a stranger, tonight, and blabber at you for hours about their completely trivial problems because they have no actual friends.

What's the story with drugs?
If Paris is snow-white cocaine and sticky hash, London is a crumbly pill pulled out of someone's damp jeans and if you're lucky a bump of something that makes your tongue ache.

What to eat?
You would expect to dine on complimentary tiny burgers and tacos of salmon sashimi, but in reality, you will eat your next 15 meals at the Pret on the corner of the Strand and Waterloo bridge.

Which parties to crash?
The i-D party if there is one, a house party totally unrelated to fashion week if there isn't. London throws great parties, but they have nothing to do with the tradeshow applauded by the sociopaths who descend upon it twice a year.

Which invites to pass up on?
Any that you didn't explicitly ask/beg for.

Who'll be front row?
Me.

Photo by Conor Lamb

PARIS FASHION WEEK

What to wear?
The first thing to know about the Paris Fashion Week is that a proper French person would never prepare their outfit too far in advance. There is absolutely nothing worse than someone who overthinks things—just wear basic jeans, discreet sneakers, and a marine blue sweater.

What not to wear?
Please avoid manicures, elaborate hairdos, and leaky lipstick. These tacky things are characteristic of fashion bloggers and American people, and no one wants to be mistaken for either.

Which shows should one attend?
You don't really get to pick which shows you're going to attend: There are the events you can't avoid because someone paid you a lot of money to write about it, and there are the events that you would actually like to see but don't have time for. This year, the most exciting shows are Vêtements, Courrèges, Lea Peckre, and Paco Rabbanne—as well as shows from the big brands like Vuitton, Chanel, and Dior, mostly because they're never afraid to be excessive.

Who to hang out with?
If you really want to show off, try to go backstage and show how friendly you can be with designers, fashion journalists, and models. Tell them to meet you at the after-show, loud enough so that everyone around can hear, but quiet enough so that no one thinks you're a crazy street-style blogger.

Who to stay away from?
Make sure to stay away from the street-style bloggers who who seem to glue themselves in front of every show entrance. If you're not wearing the last multicolored Prada jacket, they will probably shove you out of the way to get a good angle for their selfie with Anna Dello Russo. And if they actually want to take a picture of you, please try not to rattle off the brands you're wearing as if you were some sort of sandwich board man. Actually, you don't need to be seen with anyone at the Paris Fashion Week—French people are smug enough to be sufficient unto themselves, especially when they have an accreditation that allows them to do so. And you perhaps shouldn't bother to come if you weren't invited by anyone—mainly because each year, hundreds of people dress impeccably well and sometimes come from faraway countries to try their luck.

Where to get drugs?
If you want to score anything, you have to know loads of Parisian people. Contrary to what pretty much everyone thinks, there aren't any bowls of coke at the after-show—that died out in 2003. But there is an ecstasy revival in the fashion microcosm. People consider coke corny these days.

What to eat?
Obviously, like pretty much any other fashion week, people don't really eat. Instead, they take hard drugs and start drinking at around 10 AM. Sometimes you'll find people nibbling on a plethora of baby-sized portions of pretentious food—stuff like strawberry coulis, beans with ricotta, or basil pana cotta.

Which parties should one attend?
Any party that hasn't been organized by a brand is worth a look. The best one is definitely the Cicciolina at Folie's Pigalle—which is basically the Berghain of the Parisian Fashion Week. The music's great, people go nuts, and you have a good chance of meeting Alexander Wang, Shayne Oliver, and perhaps Xavier Dolan (if he manages to get in).

Which parties should one avoid?
Again, any party that has been organized by a brand, even though the freebies are tempting.

Who'll be sitting in the front row?
The same people who'v been sitting there for years—Anna Wintour, Emmanuelle Alt, and a bunch of rich people.

Photo by Koury Angelo for MADE

Milan Fashion Week

What to wear?
Wear your mom's vintage platforms. They're back in fashion, just like everything for the 70s: flared pants, vests, disco suits.

What not to wear?
Avoid heels, otherwise you'll end up getting stuck in the cobblestones. And please, leave your trainers and tracksuit at home. You don't look health goth, you look like you're going to the gym.

What shows to go to?
OK, let's face it: If you come to Milan for fashion week, it's not for the clothes, celebrities, or bloggers. Fashion shows are boring. But if you really want to go to some, pay a visit to Gucci (head of the 70s clothes revival) and Prada. Damir Doma is cool. Jill Sander if you're into minimalism fan.

Which shows to avoid?
Philipp Plein. We've had enough.

Who to hang out with?
Don't forget that your main obligation as a fashion enthusiast is to be seen with the right people and the right people to hang around with are artsy fartsy types. They are a particular breed of human beings, who are all working on "some projects" and attending the "showcases" of their "friends." Whatever happens, make sure to be there—you'll probably hate everyone, but the funny thing is they hate each other, too.

Who not to hang out with?
Philipp Plein aficionados—you definitely don't want to be seen with them.

What should you eat?
People don't really eat.

Is it hard to find drugs?
Drugs shouldn't be a problem, just ask the models.

Which parties should you be going to?
Every club is going to have a fashion week special night. If you miss one of these, beware: You are making a statement and everybody will notice it, so make sure you have a good blasé tone while saying "I remember when this was an exclusive party, now it's so overrated."

Which parties should you avoid?
At some point someone will try to convince you to attend Vogue Fashion's Night Out. "Everyone is going to be there!" they'll say. Yes, everyone. Probably even your mom.

Who'll be sitting in the front row?
Anna Wintour, who else?

The Fight to Stop Canada's Annual Grizzly Bear Hunting Season

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The Fight to Stop Canada's Annual Grizzly Bear Hunting Season

The VICE Guide to Right Now: China's New Disneyland Will Have Blue Skies Thanks to the Closure of 153 Nearby Factories

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Disneyland California. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Read our in-depth coverage of Disney Theme Parks:

Disneyland Paris Is Being Investigated for Overcharging Foreigners

The Punks of Disneyland

The Feral Cats of Disneyland

It's a sad fact that China's air isn't great, but come next year it will be a bit cleaner thanks to the opening of a new Disneyland park in Shanghai.

4,400 people die every day from breathing China's poisonous air, and just about everyone who has visited The Bund, an ostensibly scenic district, in the past decade or so has been disappointed to find that the sky in the area looks like something that came out of the vagina of the wizard lady from Game of Thrones.

That won't be happening at Shanghai Disneyland Park when visitors arrive toward the end of 2016. That's not because China's huge shift toward renewable energy is working already. It's just that the Shanghai Municipal Commission has taken a look at the specific factories neighboring the theme park and resort, and decided to shutter 153 of them (link is to a Chinese news site).

Shanghai Disneyland Park—not to be confused with Hong Kong Disneyland, which has been open for almost ten years—is still under construction at the moment in an unassuming residential and industrial suburb of Kangqiao, which itself is in the bustling eastern Shanghai district of Pudong.

According to The New York Times, the Shanghai Park is nothing like its tiny sibling in Hong Kong. Construction in the Kangqiao suburb involves putting up six theme park subsections, a pair of hotels, a theater described as "Broadway-style," and a castle that Disney is calling their "tallest, largest and most interactive castle" ever.

Disney only owns 43 percent of the new park. According to The Hollywood Reporter, a company called Shanghai Shendi Group is the majority owner, with 57 percent. Disney nonetheless claims that visitors will experience a "truly magical place that is both authentically Disney and distinctly Chinese."

Early visitors to the park will probably have to deal with gray skies, though, since its doors are expected to open in spring of 2016, and the last of the 153 factory smokestacks won't be corked until the end of that year.

The factories being closed were described by the Shanghai Municipal Commission as "high pollution, high energy consumption" facilities, which they claim are on their way out anyway. They say this is just part of an effort to "improve the city's image, even without the Disney project."

The number of paying visitors expected in the first year is about 20 million.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

How to Invest Money When You Don't Have Any

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Illustration by Wren McDonald

For months after college, my job was to sit in a windowless warehouse with dozens of other schlubs and type summaries of meetings dictated to me over the phone. The shift went from midnight to 6 AM. I'd eat the free Dominos my employer provided, slowly erode my insides with Red Bull, and slip into a fugue state while transcribing the alien-sounding phrases spat out by the MBAs on the other end of the line.

I never learned about "mutual funds" or "index funds" or "money market accounts"—it all seemed as relevant to my broke-ass existence as theology is to a goat. But these days I wonder if I missed out on a chance to turn a bad job into the equivalent of night business school. I've become increasingly aware that, like a lot of twentysomethings, I don't know what the hell I'm doing when it comes to money. A $3 coffee will turn into a $30 thanks to interest payments on my credit card. I'll wake up after a night out with a crumpled receipt for pizza in my pocket and worry I just overdrew my checking account. I've contemplated simply stopping payment on my laughably unmanageable student loans.

Related: A Millennial's Guide to Planning for Retirement

So I've decided to embark on getting an informal financial education that so many of us sorely lack and document the results in a series of articles. Hopefully I'll learn how to manage my money; failing that, I'll at least find out why I ostensibly make some but never have any.

The first question I decided to ask was, I thought, a pretty simple one: What's the best way to invest $1,000? The answer, boringly, is "it depends," so I'm going to break it down by how much risk you want to take on.

Low-Risk Investments

If you Google "Charles Schwab Roth IRA," you will get this form, which takes 15 minutes to fill out. You have no excuse.

First, I called up Ben Carlson, a chartered financial analyst (CFA) and finance blogger and asked him what I should be doing with my extra cash besides buying booze and sneakers. He told me what I didn't want to hear—that I should be taking a portion of what little money I have and putting it away where I can't touch it for a long-ass time.

Carlson said the safest bet was to set up a Roth IRA, something I could do in 15 minutes by walking into a Charles Schwab and filling out a form, or by just going on the financial services company's website. "IRA" stands for "individual retirement accounts"—the idea is that you automatically send before-tax money every week, month, or quarter into one. You can then pick a target date when you'd like to retire, and it will choose investments for you.

While that all sounded great—necessary, even—a Roth IRA is technically not an investment but rather a place to hold investments. Perhaps more importantly, retirement is a loooooonnng way away for me—what if the sea rises, or I die from an overdose of processed cheese before then? I asked Carlson, and he asked me to consider my "time horizon."

"I want to be able to buy a PS4 before the sun explodes," I said.

"I think something like an online savings account where you can earn a little bit more money would work," he offered. "At a savings account at a bank, you might earn 0.1 percent, whereas with an online savings account you might earn closer to 0.5 or 1 percent back on your money. The reason these places are able to provide higher interest rates is because they don't have a brick and mortar bank, so they are just online, and don't have any overhead costs."

We also talked about CDs, or certificates of deposit, which you can also get through a bank. If you put your money in them, they accrue more interest than a savings account, but you can't cash them in for three, five, or ten years, depending on the CD.

Even these seemingly safe investments aren't guaranteed, however—if inflation is higher than the interest you're earning from a savings account or CDs, you'll have more money but it'll be worth less than the pile you originally invested.

What about playing the stock market? That was the type of investment I was familiar with from the internet and movies about men with suspenders and slicked-back hair. Could I be like those guys?

"I think for that kind of shorter- or intermediate-term goal, you don't wanna mess around with the financial markets, because they're just too unpredictable in the short term," Carlson told me.

OK, I'm sure that's good advice—but what if I did want to mess around with the financial markets?


Watch: Inside America's Lucrative Divorce Industry


Medium-Risk Investments

In the old days, diving headfirst into stock trading usually meant finding a financial adviser. Market novices still need some guidance, but that doesn't mean you have to rely on a human—nowadays "robo-advisors" are a cheaper alternative to meat-brained money managers.

Michael Batnick, the director of research at Ritholtz Wealth Management, a financial planning company that provides robo-advisors, told me that they're a great way for young people to get returns on investments and get a feel for how the markets work.

"This software is a perfectly viable replacement for humans with two caveats," he explained. "You must be able to emotionally handle wild market swings without someone talking you off the ledge, and you have no financial planning needs. As most people earn more money and have a family, their needs become more complicated and advice from a human starts becoming very necessary."

This is what your Betterment account looks like before you add any funds to it. You can automatically send a portion of money to it each month, and the service will put it into an index fund for a small percentage in return.

There are tons of robo-advisor services out there, and some of them require no minimum balance or monthly contribution, like the one I went with. All you do to sign up for Betterment is go to their website, input your age and income, and select what your goal is. You can pick "retirement," "safety net," or "general investing," and they stick your money in an index fund—which is made up or 12 different funds in order to minimize risk—and give you a goal. For this service, they take out between 0.15 percent and 0.35 percent of your principal every three months. (There are several other options, and you should try to figure out which one is the best for you.)

Given that I was already setting up a Roth IRA for retirement, I went with "safety net," which meant that I'd be working toward having six months' worth of income saved.

But still—when the fuck would I be able to buy a PS4?

"Understand that if you are speculating, whether it be in stocks, bonds, commodities, or currencies, there is an army of highly trained, educated, and experienced CFAs and PhDs trying to make money in the market," Batnick warned me. "They are the sharks, you are the guppies."

High-Risk "Investments"

To be quite honest, until maybe a week or two ago, my idea of finance was entirely derived from the end of Trading Places, in which Eddie Murphy and Dan Ackroyd yell a bunch, wave some paper in the air, and manage to make enough money to go live on a yacht together.

Personally, I love both yelling and yachts, and I think Trading Places is one of the greatest comedies of all time. But I have also seen this movie 20+ times without being able to figure out how short-selling orange juice futures works. Both Carlson and Batnick were not really down to help me with this—for understandable reasons.

In The Intelligent Investor, a 1949 book that's considered the Bible to people like Warren Buffet, economist and investor Benjamin Graham spends pages and pages explaining the difference between "investing" and "speculating." What I wanted to do is the latter, and it's considered very, very stupid.

Basically, investing is putting a percentage of income into a variety of businesses and financial instruments that consistently perform well while not succumbing to get-rich-quick day-trading schemes or pulling out money because of a market hiccup. Speculating, on the other hand, is trying to hit a home run and letting emotions dictate how you play the markets. You should never, warns Graham, try to beat the market, but should instead trust that over a long enough time scale, as long as you're consistent, you will get a decent return on your investments.

Still, for the learning experience if nothing else, I decided to give it a shot. There are a couple of ways you can follow me in my folly, which, again, you should not do: You can go through a site like TD Ameritrade and pay a broker $7 per trade, or use the app I just downloaded that will make the trades for free. It's called Robinhood, and it's supposed to ~disrupt~ the brokerage industry.

You just download it and add cash to your account. It's as easy as playing the scratch-off lotto, and in the long run about as profitable. (According to the app's FAQ, Robinhood plans to make money on the interest of the money users have in their accounts and don't invest.)

If you download the Robinhood app, you can buy and sell stocks without paying a fee.

"Picking stocks is really difficult, you're not just fighting your own psychology, but you're also fighting the fact that the majority of stocks just stink," Batnick told me.

It's true—most stocks are terrible investments. As Batnick put it, "Since 1980, roughly 40 percent of all stocks have suffered a permanent 70-percent decline from their peak value. Also, two out of every three stocks underperform the index."

Using the Robinhood app, I purchased two shares of Calloway Golf, which was picked basically at random, although I guess I thought hitching my wagon to a golf company would be a good entryway to the world of wealth. Also, it was like $10 a share and I was only willing to put like, $25 into this experiment.

After two days, I was down 2.77 percent. This did not seem like a path to riches, or even a PS4. Investing in your financial future is, day-to-day, about as exciting as transcribing other peoples' meetings—it's a slow process by which a tiny nest egg grows by fractions of percentage points until you're ready to retire, at which point you'll be able to buy whatever video game system you like, and can you even imagine how intense Halo 65 will be?

The trick, Michael Badnick advised me, was just to reinvest my dividends every year, and to remember that you have many years ahead to learn more and to grow your accounts.

"The problem for millennials is it's hard to think long-term," he told me. "The unfortunate reality is that time and compound interest are an investor's greatest asset, yet so few are able to leverage it."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

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