So many of the photographers whom I admire took pictures of their friends all the time, which made me think, I could do that! So, I did, and I still do—photographing everything and everyone compulsively. From my friends and my neighbors to strangers I meet on nights out, I'm very nosey and I love "stuff" so other people's lives hold endless fascination for me. I also have a passion for fashion and boobs.

See more of Chloe's work here and here.

 

Photo by Vier Pfoten

In early September, stray dogs attacked and killed a four-year-old child near a park in Bucharest, Romania. That incident highlighted one of the biggest problems facing the capital city today, where about 64,000 ownerless canines roam the streets—in the first eight months of the year, 10,000 residents have been treated for bites, Bucharest City Hall told the Associated Press.

In the days following the attack, the debate over these strays polarized Romanians. A law passed in September allowing shelters to kill dogs left unclaimed for two weeks sparked protests around the world. Meanwhile, some of the country’s more passionate stray-haters launched organized campaigns to exterminate the animals while they still roamed the streets. These vigilantes don’t care about putting the dogs to sleep humanely, either—the dog in the photo was found with his stomach cut on the streets of Galat¸i, a southern Romanian city; sadly, a veterinarian was unable to save his life.

For many, the act of killing seems to be more important than solving the issue. On a Romanian Facebook page whose title translates to “Stray Dogs, a Public Menace,” an antistray activist named S¸tefan wrote, “The simplest and most effective way: a spray can and a lighter and you can take out a pack in under 20 minutes.” Jax Quake, another activist and probable sociopath, responded, “I tried a meat tenderizer, a steel chain, a bayonet, some antifreeze. But this idea is brilliant. There are still two dogs left alive on my block.”

Animal rights activists and NGOs are trying to bring the people who act out their morbid fantasies to the authorities, but that’s easier said than done. “Unfortunately, even though killing or maiming animals is a crime, the judges always give people the minimum sentence, which is a fine of 100 euros,” said Livia Cimpoeru from the NGO Vier Pfoten, or “Four Paws.” “I’ve seen dogs get killed with bats in shelters, electrocuted in ponds, left to starve so they would eat each other, fed bait that had needles in it so their stomachs would rupture. One lady actually had her dog shot in front of her in downtown Bucharest with a hunting rifle. The killer told her that she should get a ‘normal’ dog.”

Elena Blaj of Free Amely 2007, an organization that provides shelter for strays and makes puppies available for adoption, believes that “there are mentally deranged people and deviants who are using the whole dog situation as a pretext to be violent and act out.”

Andrei Stanca, the administrator of a Facebook group devoted to eliminating strays, disagrees. “We have a lot of examples from history when certain people use a social crisis to act upon their own sadistic tendencies,” he said, adding that he’s in favor of more humane killing methods: “Personally, I would put some rat poison in some chunks of meat and feed them to the packs who attack me every day when I leave my house.”

More from this issue:

Did Robotraders Know the Financial Crisis Was Coming?

Physical Singularity

Afternoon Delight

Selfie by the author

It seems like just yesterday when Blake Butler, all doe-eyed and full of weird collections of words, began writing for us on a weekly basis. Over time, what started as a regular space for him to write about literature morphed into something bigger. During the last couple of years Blake has branched out to explore topics as diverse as the horrors and wonders of a Wendy’s Pretzel Burger to the dusty rumors of literary giants to interviews with both emerging and established authors. This is Blake’s 100th post for VICE.com, and to mark the occasion he told us he wanted to write “something more personal” than his usual fare. In that spirit, he sent us the below peek inside his brain.

I have long been a creature of habit and repetition. The more any day feels exactly like the one before it, the more comfortable I am, and the more productive I become in whatever I happen to be working on. At the same time, I hate planning. I never know what I want to do until just before I do it. Plans—even fun ones like having dinner or watching a movie with someone at the house—seem designed to disrupt my concentration. As uptight as this might make me sound, on the outside I feel I’m generally easygoing, even at times when my insides are all screaming.

This daily masking of discomfort has instilled in my person an odd habit of regular stress relief in the form what I’ve come to think of as “Voluntary Tourette’s.” In other words, I make repeating patterns of private sounds that I don’t necessarily have to make the way someone with actual Tourette’s literally can’t control, but that I perform now throughout the day with such regularity that it seems like I can’t stop, or at least haven’t stopped for over a decade. For the most part I can keep myself from doing these things in front of others, though after a few days in the same room as someone I’m on a trip with or whatever they start leaking out, slowly opening into my regular manners of conversation.

Maybe it’s a form of security, a way to prove to myself I am still here, and I still remember the sound I made the day before; my brain is still alive. The tics occupy the same place in me as other obsessive practices in my life, like writing, a daily impulse I haven’t been able to shake off for longer than the oldest of my noises. Sometimes I remember that the neighbor I share a wall with in my loft apartment can probably hear me talking to myself, sometimes shouting, and I wonder what it would look like if she were asked to draw me. Having shared a wall in the past with someone who actually did have Tourette’s (and who liked to stay up until 4 AM most nights doing coke and talking to his dog), I know that reams of random noise and guttural loops can seem monstrous and idiotic.

But while most everything else in the world changes, the sounds are mine. As they mutate, I mutate with them, like a sentence continually revised.

A LIST OF MY MOST LONG-STANDING VOLUNTARY TICS

Meow Mix Jingle

It’s fitting that the first recurring tic I can remember, one I’ve been repeating week in and week out for more than 15 years now, is from a commercial for cat food. I’ve never owned a cat or bought Meow Mix, yet somehow its name rings daily in my brain. I think I started off singing it like the cats in the jingle, and then slowly whittled it down to just the name of the brand¾two monosyllabic, alliterative nouns placed back to back like little knife jabs. I like to say “meow mix” primarily while opening the fridge and when waiting for an elevator after having pressed the button. I imagine whoever wrote this jingle forgot about it not long after, and is likely dead now.

Four Syllable Gibberish Word Beginning with B and Ending in O

The first time I said this word that is not a word at all I was standing in line at a grocery store checkout after midnight, waiting to buy frozen pizza. The sound just came out of my mouth, casually as you please. I don’t remember anything about the feeling of it, or why that syllabic string in particular felt worth repeating, but since then, more than ten years ago, I’ve repeated the sound at least a dozen times every single day. Over time, the phrase has mutated through several different modes, taking random modifiers, recently including “hey, [gibberish word]” (as if I’m speaking to a person by that name), and “[gibberish word] fuck you” (in a sing-song voice). I don’t know what the word means or why I say it.

La Quados Maneos

I often find myself speaking in a fake version of Spanish, because I don’t actually know Spanish. Speaking like this in long strings eliminates the possibility of other thought, kind of like when a kid closes his or her eyes to avoid something they are afraid of, as if their not seeing makes the thing not exist. There’s a whole song that comes out around this one particular phrase, “la quados maneos.” It annoys even me, though once I’ve begun singing it I can’t stop in the middle, and usually need to repeat it more than once. I think it makes me feel like I’m in a room I don’t particularly like but that if the room ceased to exist I would feel nostalgic for it, or for the habit, and so I better repeat it.

Air Drum / “Death Face”

Sometimes the vocal tics are appended with physical motions, like this one where I do my hands like I’m playing a blastbeat on the snare and shrieking at the same time, though no actual sound comes out. This one comes out when I feel really insane or bottled up in a social situation, and eventually excuse myself to the bathroom or to walk around the corner so I can make this face by myself and get it out. It also happens when something I like has happened, like if I’m winning at a sports bet or whenever an event occurs that will make my life easier going forward. The tics seem to come as often with the acceptance of positive occurrences as they do with feeling generally fucked by minor to large things on any given day.

Sorry Fa’ Ya’, I Hate It Fa’ Ya’

A friend of mine in middle school said this—repeatedly and in a fake Irish accent—to everyone, without any indication as to what he felt sorry for you about. In high school, he died in his sleep. Now I find myself repeating the line for him, like the bug got in my blood too. I have some idea today of what anyone might be sorry about. Because as weird as it feels to know you are a person who must repeat gibberish constantly in order to be able to think clearly, you’re still alive, and the time you have left to recur in is disappearing.

@blakebutler

With a population of almost 30,000, Kennesaw is like any other small city in Cobb County, Georgia: friendly, sunny, quiet, and flat. There’s a Walmart, a Starbucks, a Target, and not a whole lot to do. One thing that sets Kennesaw apart from its neighboring towns is that—according to a law passed by Kennesaw City Council in 1982—every household is required to own a gun and ammunition. The ordinance states the gun law is needed to, "protect the safety, security and general welfare of the city and its inhabitants," and for the last three decades, the citizens of Kennesaw have been armed and ready. For what, I’m not sure.

Earlier this year, Quebec photographer Nicolas Lévesque released his short film In Guns We Trust, an elegant and absorbing portrait of Kennesaw gun owners. A mix of photo stills, video, and audio interviews, the film is either a harrowing message about America’s obsession with guns, or a snapshot of a quiet town with downright nice people who happen to nerd out about firearms—depending on what side of the gun debate you fall on. I recently called Lévesque to talk about his experience making his film.

Watch the teaser.

VICE: How did you discover Kennesaw in the first place?
Nicolas: I was reading an article in the Financial Times and it was talking about Kennesaw, Georgia... It said that since 1982, they had a law where everybody who had a household had to own an operating gun and ammunition. I thought that this would be a good photo series, because I wanted to see the daily life of these people.

What were you thinking it would be like going in?
People were trying to warn me, using clichés like, “those people will be crazy,” or “it’s going to be dangerous.” I thought it would be like that the first time, but I didn’t really think about it.

Was it that crazy?
No, but there was a lot of enthusiasm for the guns and gun ownership—a lot of parents teaching their kids about guns, a lot of [gun-centric] events, and a lot of partying around gun ownership. There are a lot of organizations that are pro-gun. I imagined there would be guns everywhere and I imagined people would be afraid of me.

Afraid of what?
Because I’m coming with a camera and a tape recorder, so I thought they would be afraid of speaking to me. I thought people would think of me as unfamiliar or not welcoming. When I wrote to people, gun shops, organizations, or the police, or city councilors... maybe one third of their answers were negative. They didn’t want to see me and they didn’t want to talk about it. But the rest were all motivated people who just thought: “There’s this French Canadian guy coming and now we have a chance to talk about gun ownership.”

It’s funny that everyone thought it would be dangerous, from the looks of things, the town actually seems kind of boring.
You’re right, when you arrive it’s just a boring town. There are shopping malls, big trucks, and big roads. It looked like a lot of towns all across North America. I wasn’t scared at all. You’re always a bit scared when you arrive in a new place and people see you with your photography bags and all that, but you just have to take care of yourself. The Kennesaw downtown is dying and all the local stores are dying and it’s all big Walmarts everywhere and Targets. I just thought it was a very great example of where the world’s going, you know?

For sure. Let’s talk a little bit about the characters you met. What can you tell me about the older, bearded gentleman?
Dent Myers. He’s a very popular guy. When I went into his Civil War surplus store he had a lot of articles written about him by German and American magazines. When journalists go to this town they go to see this guy. Now he’s very old, he’s very tired, and he doesn’t want to see journalists that much—but I was cool with him and he spoke a little bit of French, and that’s why I think he wanted me to come to his place. He had some books in French and he wanted me to translate a couple of things. And his assistant is a young lady—well... about 50 years old—and she was very nice to me. I went there for two or three days just hanging out and looking all over the place because it is filled with old stuff from the Civil War. He was a bright guy; he told me that the civil war was the last honorable war in the world because after that everyone just wanted to make war. He went to Korea and he was saying it was a waste of his time; he wasn’t a very good soldier. But he’s pretty old now and he hasn’t shot a gun in over a year, but he still has four guns on him.

So he’s pro gun?
Yeah he’s super pro gun.

And yet he’s sort of anti-war.
Yeah. Anti-war if it’s not for a good reason. For him, all the wars that are going on right now aren’t for good reasons. He was cool.

Your film doesn’t seem to be explicitly pro or anti-gun. Was that a conscious decision to keep it neutral?
I put myself in the state of a listener, these pro-gun people got to speak about their passion and I gave them a space, but I also feel that the images combined with them talking about it becomes so strong that it can be seen as an anti-gun film. And that’s how I think about it; show things as they are. After I screened the film at TIFF, a pro-gun guy came to see me and said: “I love your film. That’s how it should be.” I didn’t expect that. Then I had other people saying “Kennesaw is a crazy place.” There’s room for both sides. I wanted to present these characters as themselves and to show that they still lead normal lives. I think art is always like that. I never wanted to bring a specific answer.

If you're in Toronto, look out for a screening of In Guns We Trust at the Bell Lightbox on January 7 as part of the Canada's Top Ten Film Festival. 

Watch a few videos we did on gun culture:

Click, Print, Gun: The Inside Story of the 3D-Printed Gun Movement

Guns In the Sun

The Gun Markets of Pakistan

We've been bigging-up Cleveland-born rapper/producer Archie Green for the past few months, impatiently waiting for the drop of his first proper release, The Greatest Pretender. You can finally give the entire album a listen below and bask in all of its splendor. It delivers exactly what we expected—an introspective look into the mind of a black dude who's not a gangster or a pimp or a drug dealer. Instead, the struggle presented in Archie's music is that of trying to break through the glass ceiling and realize his dreams. The whole thing feels like a mixture between the lyrical content and beats of Kanye West's College Dropout and the rapping gymnastics of Jay Z's Reasonable Doubt. Through Archie's combination of disparate styles and influences, it ultimately arrives at a sound that is different and sincerely dope. Check it out for yourself. 

Follow Archie Green on Twitter and check out the video for his lead single, "40 Acres."

The rumors are floating among bystanders in downtown St. Petersburg, where a body lies motionless on the sidewalk, covered by a plastic sheet. Was it over a stolen lighter? Or was it a bicycle? It doesn't matter. Kenneth Robert Sprankle finally snapped. Just like he said he would.

On the afternoon of September 24, Sprankle "borrowed" a red and yellow firefighter's axe from a fire engine responding to an alarm at the Princess Martha Apartments. He started his evening by smoking spice, grabbing the axe, and wandering through downtown. Surveillance video caught Sprankle clutching the axe across his waist as he walked purposefully through the frame, seemingly oblivious to concerned onlookers trailing him from a safe distance. Witnesses recalled seeing him in an agitated state, wandering around nearby Williams Park with the axe for nearly three hours. Nobody bothered reporting him to police until things began to unwind, and Sprankle began yelling incomprehensible threats and chasing terrified citizens down bustling sidewalks.

St. Petersburg police quickly responded to an emergency call. The small group fleeing his erratic pursuit rounded a corner and ran past the officers. Moments later, Sprankle followed, axe raised menacingly. His world was closing in. Ignoring repeated orders to drop the axe, he charged. As Sprankle closed the distance, axe held high, veteran officer Damien Schmidt leveled a pistol at his chest and fired. 

Five shots later, Ken Sprankle's body crumpled to the sidewalk. The holes in his chest were fatal. He was 27.

A mugshot of Sprankle just over a month before his death. Photo courtesy Pinellas County Sheriff's Office

Moving to Florida is like falling in love with a pretty girl who's constantly considering murdering you. It's a bad place to come if you're looking for a fresh start. The warm weather, glorious nature, and endless theme parks are a siren song devised to capture unwary travelers and their money. If given the opportunity, Florida will rob you blind, drive you crazy, and devour you with a creepy smile on its face.

When interviewed by the Tampa Bay Times, his aunt said, “This was his first big adventure. I guess he just couldn't handle it.”

He never had a chance. His problems escalated. He was trapped in the soiled underbelly of St. Pete. He became indigent and frequented Williams Park, a downtown hub for dealers, junkies, and transients. He stopped taking his medication. Got busted for stealing a bicycle. Threw himself in front of a car. Spit in the face of a mental healthcare worker. Strangled himself with hospital equipment. Tried to drown in Mirror Lake after smoking crack.

His public arrest records (insanely easy to access in Florida) list eight arrests since March. In addition, he was confined under Florida's Baker Act twice in the weeks leading up to his death—a total of seven times since March of this year. Sometimes by his own request, sometimes not.

He needed help. If he didn't get back on his meds, he might snap and kill someone.

Somewhere in that chaotic mix, in his most desperate moments, synthetic cannabis came waltzing into his life.

The axe wielded by Kenneth Robert Sprankle during his rampage through downtown St. Petersburg. Photo courtesy St. Petersburg Police Department

This isn't the pot in your mom's sock drawer. In fact, it has very little in common with the sticky green buds she's no doubt toking as you read this article.

Often referred to as spice, synthetic cannabis is really a catchall term for hundreds of synthetic cannabinoid compounds developed in the 80s by Dr. John W. Huffman and his team of scientists, hoping to treat diseases like multiple sclerosis. Many of the first and second generation compounds, like JWH-018 or JWH-007, bare Huffman's initials. Later generations of compounds rock names like AKB48, or XLR-11.

They come in basic powder form, or mixed with herbal blends. Underground manufacturers soak various herbs like damiana, lavender, and blue lotus in a chemical solution of cannabinoids. Often, the solutions include mystery ingredients like synthetic opioids, bronchodilators and insecticides like thymol. Alternatively, they allow the chemicals to evaporate into the herbs. Though this technique has shown to be uneven, creating “hot spots” where chemicals are more concentrated. If you end up smoking a hot spot, holy shit, strap in.

Once their synthetic crop is harvested, they put it in a shiny package and give it a slick brand name like Spice, K-2, Pandora's Box, Atomic Bomb, Ultra Haze, or Toxic Waste. The desired effects range from a mild high to cracked-out euphoria to mind-blasting hallucinations.

The ingredients of these blends are rarely divulged on the packaging. Instead, a disclaimer, “not intended for human consumption,” is printed somewhere on the label. As if that's going to stop someone from packing it in their favorite pipe and blowing lungfuls of smoke until the walls are melting.

Unlike marijuana, which is damn near impossible to overdose on, ingesting too much spice can induce intense hallucinations, palpitations, inability to speak, vomiting, psychotic episodes, near death experiences, paranoia, agitation, tremors, overheating, or heart attacks.

An anonymous Floridian bugging out after smoking spice. Photo via YouTube user o0Nightshadez0o

If you're lucky, it gets you super fucking high. If not. You might end up spasming on the floor of a hospital, or chasing your neighbors down the street with sharp objects.

A new study, “Ischemic stroke after use of the synthetic marijuana 'spice,'” published Nov. 8 in Neurology by medical researchers at the University of South Florida, shows a compelling link between synthetic cannabis and the risk of stroke.

The researchers presented the strange case of two siblings, brother and sister, who both experienced “acute cerebral infarctions,” after separately smoking from the same batch of spice containing JWH-018.  

The study also notes that the rise in strokes blamed on marijuana correlates to the rise in synthetic cannabis consumption. Because many potheads also indulge in legal highs (especially when they can't find weed), and many synthetic compounds are not detected by standard toxicology screens, it's possible that strokes being blamed on marijuana may be missing spice as the culprit.

Essentially, smoking spice is like playing Russian roulette with your brain chemistry. Even if you knew every herb and chemical compound in a blend, you wouldn't be any closer to understanding what will happen if you roll a fat mystery spliff and set its ingredients loose on your mind.

There was a magical time when all kinds of synthetic cannabis were sold legally on the internet and in head shops, bodegas, and gas stations all over the United States. That time has passed. Not really.

The federal government started cracking down in 2011, as they inevitably do when people start dying from having too much fun. That year, the DEA added numerous synthetic compounds, including JWH-018, to the list of Schedule I substances under the Controlled Substances Act.

Despite the continued crackdown, spice is still being manufactured. The shady motherfuckers producing spice by the metric shit ton didn't just roll over and call it quits. To stay ahead of newly created laws, they change and tweak their recipes. Each ban only serves to usher in a new generation of untested research chemicals with unknown effects.

In the years since the crackdown began, avowed drug warrior and Florida attorney general Pam Bondi has issued two emergency rules, most recently in October of this year. Each order temporarily adds new compounds to list of the state's Schedule I drugs. She's hoping the Florida legislature will permanently ban them in the 2014 session.

Regardless of the Law's best efforts, the Tampa Bay area has been a hotbed for the manufacture and sale of synthetic cannabis. In 2012, an ABC Action News investigative team discovered several businesses involved in selling spice by the fuckload.

One business in Tampa, Baba Wholesale, was manufacturing and distributing massive quantities of spice. After being discovered, they conveniently disappeared, likely relocating to a town with less curious reporters.

When ambushed by the ABC team and challenged about the harmful effects his product might have on kids, Baba's boss George Challita cynically asked, “Why would I worry about someone I have no control over?”

It's unknown which brand of spice Ken Sprankle smoked before his axe-wielding rampage. His history of drug use, mental illness, and suicidal behavior only stacked the odds against him when he took that last puff. Though questions remain about the use of deadly force, the officer who shot Sprankle was cleared of any wrongdoing.

In a strange turn of events, Ashton Stottler, a man who claimed Sprankle chased him for no apparent reason, was arrested nine days later for battery against a police officer, and possession of synthetic marijuana. According to court records, he pled guilty and received 35 days in jail, including time served.

Getting chased with an axe wasn't Stottler's only close call this year. In January, he stabbed a man thirteen times after the man barged into an Arkansas home where he was staying with a lady-friend and attacked him. Self-defense, he said.

Oddly enough, he attempted to stitch the man's wounds with dental floss before the cops came. I hope it was mint. 

Unstoppable Death Machines at Present Company. Photo by Tod Seelie

Unstoppable Death Machines are Mike and Billy Tucci, two long-haired, weed-obsessed Brooklyn brothers who play spazzed-out, kaleidoscopic noise-punk in trashy lofts and basements. We try to hang out with them as much as their busy schedule of melting face allows, because they aren't pussies and their music makes us want to smash everything around us.

They just sent in their new video for "Shake It Crazy," which will be premiering as part of a time-based video installation down at Present Company's Art Basel show this week. Naturally, the video is a spasmodic procession of mouth-watering weed plants, and should induce an epileptic seizure if you're lucky enough to be prone:

We asked the director, Nick McManus, how he conceptualized the video, and he had this to say:

Fair enough. You can buy UDM's new vinyl (or download it for free) at their BandCamp page. Plus, if you're down at Basel, you can watch them perform at a handful of shows this week:

Dec. 6 - Miama: Basel Distraction @ Audio Junkie (164 NW 20 St.)
Dec. 7 - Tampa: Tampa Am @ Cuban Club w/Trinidad James and Flatbush Zombies (2010 Avenida Republica De Cuba)
Dec. 8 - Miami: Chocolate Sundays Basel Edition @ Purdy Lounge (1811 Purdy Ave Miami Beach)

Also, feel free to follow these guys on Twitter - @deathmachinesny

@b_shap

Barneys New York coat, Eckhaus Latta top, vintage skirt, Timberland boots; Eckhaus Latta jacket, vintage top, LL Bean shorts, Timberland boots

PHOTOS BY BEN TAYLOR
STYLIST: ALEXANDRA MARZELLA

Eckhaus Latta jacket, vintage top, LL Bean shorts

Prada hat, vintage jacket, Lacoste dress, Just Cavalli skirt

Lacoste top, vintage vest; Prada hat, vintge jacket, Lacoste dress

Vintage jacket; Opening Ceremony jacket, Richards NYC floral top, Underarmor top

Vintage jacket

Barney's New York jacket, Eckhaus Latta top, vintage jeans, Adidas backpack

Vintage button down top, Polo Sport top

Vintage button down top, Polo Sport top, Eckhaus Latta pants; Barney's New York coat, Eckhaus Latta top, vintage jeans, Adidas backpack

Image by Courtney Nicholas

The Disaster Artist is a book about the making of a film called The Room, which came out in 2003 and has since achieved a glorified cult status as possibly one of the worst movies ever made; its director/lead actor/writer, Tommy Wiseau has been called the Orson Welles of bad directors. The book is co-written by one of the actors in the film, Greg Sestero, and the journalist Tom Bissell, who wrote about The Room for Harper’s in 2011, and it gives an insider’s account of how such a strange and strangely beguiling film was made.

The book reads like the combination of two Paul Thomas Anderson film scripts: Boogie Nights in its focus on a group of optimistic outsiders trying to be artistic with a project that defies all artistic pretentions, and The Master with its arrangement around a bizarre mentor-pupil relationship.  The other references that come to mind, and they are mostly film references because it is a book about film and the film industry, are Sunset Boulevard,with the masterful way it takes on Hollywood as a vehicle to talk about the blurred line between reality and performance, and The Talented Mr. Ripley, the Anthony Mingella film (as well as the Patricia Highsmith book) in the way that Tom Ripley transforms himself, or attempts to transform himself, in order to infiltrate a social world that he would otherwise be locked out of. Because this book, The Disaster Artist, is about a bad movie, and because Tommy Wiseau could be so easily mocked, one can see how such a book could turn into a thin recounting of all the crazy things that happened, simply to make fun of them. Instead the book is both a great portrayal of hopefuls coming to Los Angeles to pursue their ambitions, and an even greater examination of what it means to be a creative person with a dream, and trying to make it come true in a form that is just as much a business, and an insider social group, as it is an art. The structure of the novel, alternating the focus of the chapters between the making of the movie, The Room, and the relationship between Greg and Tommy back when they first came to Los Angeles creates a fluid energy that keeps the narrative moving and opens up the implications to more universal applications by making the account about more than just the facts.

Tommy Wiseau is undoubtedly a “character,” a mysterious, self-made man whose origins and age are unknown, who somehow has enough money to spend 6 million dollars making and promoting his own film, buying all the equipment in the process. He looks like he is from Bram Stoker’s Transylvania: ageless, muscled, sweet, and scary; he is part vampire, part Hollywood dreamer, part gangster, part Ed Wood, and super lonely.

One of the keys to the book is its examination of Tommy without simplifying his ineffable qualities, much like Norma Desmond’s portrayed in Sunset Boulevard. There are two major levels within Tommy: on the surface he is a driven madman who wills a movie into being because he knows he will never be accepted by the Hollywood establishment otherwise. This surface-level Tommy is wacky because he has a whole set of beliefs, sayings, and behaviors that don’t match up with accepted modes of socializing. This wacky persona is only intensified when he goes into production because as the writer/director, he is in charge of a group of people and he needs to communicate his vision to them. Normally, out in the wilds of life, people could just stay clear of him, but when he is running the show on the closed quarters of a movie set, his co-workers are forced into intimate proximity to him and must try to engage. And what is more, they get to know him even better because they are filming his screenplay, and taking his direction; they are taken deep into the strange world of Tommy Wiseau. Of course, many on the crew could not put up with the situation and quit, but Greg Sestero, like William Holden’s character in Sunset Boulevard, stays the course and tracks Tommy from beginning to end.

As the authors of The Disaster Artist have chosen to alternate the book’s focus, it touches on two of the major components of being an artist, in Hollywood and everywhere else: trying to “make it,” and bringing your artistic vision to fruition. Here we get a wonderful narrative of attempting both in Los Angeles: the small apartments, the auditions, the weird projects one does just to be able to work. The more personal chapters that follow the making of the movie give us a look at an extreme version of movie-making, one where there is an inexperienced dreamer at the center who obviously needs help but refuses to ask for it because he has been let down so many times before. He is a bull with his vision, forcing it onto everyone because he has learned that the only way he’ll get anywhere is by independence.

This is the deeper level of Tommy: he is just a lonely little boy who wants love. He, like so many people with stars in their eyes, sees film not only as a medium of expression, but the gate to acceptance. It is the place where his work will find like-minded people who will learn to love him through his work, not only because of it. This is the hope of most artists, and the book turns Tommy’s sometimes ridiculous struggle into a paradigm for those wishing to be creative in a world where it is usually too hard to be.    

In so many ways, Tommy c’est moi.

More James Franco:

How to Structure Your Life: A Review of Corey Feldman's Biography, 'Coreyography'

Spring Break: A Fever Dream

Fassy B. Heats Up '12 Years a Slave'

On Saturday, thousands of protesters across Israel and the West Bank rallied against a plan to displace Bedouin residents of the Naqab (or Negev) desert. The day was billed a "Day of Rage" and it certainly lived up to its name, with several of the actions swiftly turning into violent clashes between demonstrators and security forces who used tear gas, water cannons, horses, and stun grenades.

The rage was directed at the Prawer Plan, a proposed Israeli law that would lead to the displacement of up to 70,000 Bedouin living in the Naqab, which is in southern Israel. Many of the Bedouin reside in villages the Israeli government refuses to recognize, and the Prawer Plan aims to destroy their homes and forcibly relocate them to government-planned townships.

According to the government, the Prawer Plan "constitutes a major step forward towards integrating the Bedouin more fully into Israel's multicultural society, while still preserving their unique culture and heritage." Anti-Prawer activists, like Khalil Alamour of the unrecognized Bedouin village of Assiri, have a different view of the situation.

"They [the Israeli government] have many excuses and claims and very, very beautiful excuses to cover their real reasons, which is to concentrate the Bedouin and relocate them in a very minimum space and take all their ancestral lands," Khalil told me.

By the end of the day, there were at least 28 arrests and 15 Israeli police officers were injured, including one who'd been stabbed in the leg. In the largest of the demonstrations, in the Bedouin township of Hura, a 14-year-old Bedouin child was dragged off by police at gunpoint.

Dr. Thabet Abu Rass, the director of the Naqab office of the Adalah Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, said the Prawer Plan prescribes different criteria for construction in Bedouin and Jewish towns in the Naqab.

"We are discriminated against by the state of Israel as Arabs," he said. "This law is going to hit one portion, one segment of the Arab minority severely, which is the Bedouin of the Naqab... the state of Israel is moving to put [in place] new criteria for a specific group of people, the Bedouin, which will prevent the recognition of the Bedouin villages."

The Bedouin have inhabited the Naqab desert for hundreds of years, since long before the state of Israel existed, and have traditionally subsisted on agriculture. After the establishment of Israel, Bedouin in the Naqab have faced a long history of home demolitions and forced relocation. "Displacement is the basic historical experience of the Bedouin of the Naqab," said Gadi Algazi, an associate professor in the history department of Tel Aviv University.

"What is happening now is that the Israeli authorities decided to solve the issue of land ownership and the so-called 'Bedouin question' once and for all. And they are doing it in a style that is actually well known. This is the shock doctrine," Gadi said. "It means, as they imagine it, that within three years all open issues of land ownership are going to be solved. And they are going to be solved in a manner that would leave the Bedouin with next to nothing."

Aziz Alturi comes from al-Araqib, an unrecognized village that has been destroyed and rebuilt more than 50 times in the last few years. Aziz said that by destroying the villages and preventing the Bedouin from practicing their traditional agricultural lifestyle, the Israeli government hopes to force them to take low-wage, unskilled jobs more connected to the Israeli economy.

"The government is looking for a way to change our culture, to change us, to confiscate our land," he said. "When someone has land, he feels like a businessman or a normal person. He doesn't feel like a worker or a slave or something because he cultivates the land and he makes his job in the land and he continues his life... Now when I look around at what is happening with the demolitions, I'm sure the government have the idea to change us to be only slaves."

More dispatches from the West Bank and Israel:

This Palestinian Taxidermist's Stuffed Animal Zoo Is Heartbreaking

Driving with the Female Street Racers of Palestine

Dodging Water Cannons and Sound Bombs at Israel's Catastrophe Day

Miles Howe. via Facebook.

Miles Howe is no stranger to getting arrested in New Brunswick. As a journalist for the independent Canadian news site, Media Co-Op, Miles has been covering the anti-fracking movement spearheaded by the Elsipogtog First Nation for months now. The aboriginal resistance is being headed up by the Mi’kmaq Warriors who made national headlines in October, when their peaceful protest erupted into a clash against heavily armed members of the RCMP. The RCMP officers showed up in camouflage with assault rifles, and there were snipers present. At one point, Molotov cocktails were thrown, and 40 people were arrested. This show of force by law enforcement was an uncomfortable sight for the Canadians who were paying attention, and it didn’t help when an RCMP officer yelled: “Crown land belongs to the government, not to the fucking Natives.”

When Miles was covering the protest that turned violent on October 17^th, he claims that a militarized and armed member of the RCMP pointed him out and yelled: “He’s with them!” A rallying cry that led to several RCMP officers tackling Miles to the ground and arresting him.

Miles’s most recent arrest was last week, on November 26^th, which was the third time the RCMP put him in handcuffs without charge since he began covering the Mi’kmaq resistance. Given the serious consequences and dangerous precedent the targeting of a journalist would set in the province, and in Canada at large, I was somewhat skeptical of Miles’s intent and whether he was truly just being targeted for reporting. That said, given that Miles hadn’t been charged for any of these incidents, there was certainly grounds to investigate further.

That’s why I called Miles Howe yesterday and spoke to him about what’s been happening to him in New Brunswick since he began covering the conflict. I had already spoke to Jullie Rogers-Marsh, a media liaison at the RCMP, who confirmed that on the day Miles was arrested there was a man detained on Highway 11 who had violated a court injunction. While she was unable to confirm that the man was in fact Miles Howe, Miles told me his arrest was due to the violation of such an injunction.

The injunction in question was filed on November 22^nd, and you can read a Cole’s Notes version of the hearing thanks to CBC’s Jacques Poitras who was there taking notes. SWN, the oil company that’s causing all of the controversy in New Brunswick, was in court to restrict six protesters, from coming anywhere near their equipment. In a copy of the injunction (you can download a copy here) SWN insists that the protesters had vandalized and destroyed SWN property. Incidents are described wherein groups of protesters—some wearing masks—arrived at SWN work sites and threateningly ordered SWN employees to evacuate. Another incident describes the destruction of a SWN pick-up truck that had “its windshield and windows smashed, door panels dented and the step-up was broken.” They also insisted, “a drill rig costing $380,000.00 was burnt to the ground.”

Miles Howe was not originally named in the injunction, but he arrived at the hearing and asked to intervene in the proceedings to present some evidence in defense of the protesters—a request that SWN’s lawyer, Matthew Hayes, responded cautiously to. Matthew informed Miles that if he were to intervene, he would essentially be implicating himself as a defendant and by doing so, allowing SWN to sue Miles as well. Miles was evidently unfazed by this warning and, as he told me, presented a video that showed a broken aquifer from SWN leaking onto the forest floor. This is, apparently, a violation of the Oil and Natural Gas Act that—in section 40, under the prevention of loss or damage header—states: “If at any time an escape of oil or natural gas from a well is not prevented or if a flow of water is not controlled, the Minister may take such means as appear to him to be necessary or expedient in the public interest to control and prevent the escape of oil, natural gas, or water.”

While Miles’s evidence would have perhaps provided the grounds to argue that SWN has been negligent to the environment—which in some way would explain the anger of the protesters—the judge evidently did not find his evidence relevant and the injunction was granted to SWN. This means that all of the protesters named by SWN, and Miles, have been ordered to stay away from SWN equipment and have been forbidden from blocking SWN’s workflow.

So, this explains why Miles was arrested last week. It’s an odd move for a journalist to enter a court of law and offer themselves up as a defendant—because at that point, whether it was wrong of SWN to mess with the forest floor or not, Miles legally became part of the Mi’kmaq resistance rather than a journalistic witness in this particular incident.  This injunction, however, did not stop Miles from trying to report on the story he had been thoroughly covering all year.

In the video above, shot by Miles Howe himself, you can see a run-in between the RCMP and Miles that occurred one day before his most recent arrest—after the injunction had been filed. In it, you can plainly see that Miles is being asked to stay away from obstructing SWN equipment and workers, but the officers do not ask him to stay away from Highway 11 where he was arrested the next day. When I asked Miles if he believes he was in violation of the injunction at the time of his last arrest, he told me this:

“I was standing on the side of the road… I was definitely not in violation of it. I wasn't saying anything, doing anything, making any motions. I asked the RCMP three times why I was being told to move myself and my car into a field. I explained the injunction to them and asked them what section of the highway act I was violating. They provided no reason, only saying: ‘move or you'll be arrested.’ I was standing on the side of the road the day before [as seen in the video] and the same officer told me just not to interfere or attempt to interfere with work, and that it would be best to stand on the opposite side of the road from the seismic testing equipment.”

Regardless of whether or not you believe Miles’ voluntary implication as a defendant in the SWN trial calls into question his journalistic neutrality, it’s obvious that the RCMP’s enforcement of the injunction seems abusive. Part of the problem appears to be that the injunction was granted with a very grey definition of how the RCMP should handle any potential violations of the court order. It’s essentially up to the officer at the scene to decide how to handle the arrangement, which accounts for the completely different reaction Miles got on the two days he was on Highway 11 after the injunction was granted.

After being in locked in solitary for 24 hours, he was released and ordered to sign an undertaking that placed further restrictions on him—including an order that he is now to stay 1km away from all protest sites. The RCMP then refused to give back Miles’s phone and camera because they are supposedly part of an open investigation.

It was at this point that Miles’s arrest caused a bit of a shitstorm online. Media Co-Op, the news site where Miles is a paid reporter and editor, posted an article announcing that this was Miles’s third arrest since he began covering the resistance. Then, a branch of Anonymous posted a video of the arrest that we’ve embedded below. In the video you can hear people yelling: “Miles is being arrested!” “He wasn’t even doing anything!” and “Leave Mi’kmaq Territory!” Then Miles yells: “I didn’t interfere!”

Once Anonymous and Media Co-Op began pumping out the news that a journalist had been arrested for covering the Mi’kmaq resistance movement, skepticism ran high—particularly at the CBC. In a segment on CBC Radio Frediction’s morning talk show, Information Morning, host Terry Seguin along with guests Philip Lee (a journalism professor at St. Thomas University) and Dan Leger (a journalist for the Chronicle Herald) argued about whether Miles Howe is a “blogger” or a “journalist.” Media Co-Op has requested an apology for this segment, as they believe it constitutes a “baseless attack” on Miles—and to make matters worse, the CBC apparently did not even ask for Miles to call in to explain his side of the story.

I reached out to Terry Seguin about this segment, and he declined to comment. The CBC also did not provide comment. Dan Leger, who called Miles Howe a “hot-headed fanatic” on the radio, wrote me this in an email:

“I defended Howe's right to write and report whatever he wanted. I also said reporting had often been considered a political act and that at it's most basic, to be a reporter is to be a witness. Howe fits that description. My point, which has been forgotten by people who are taking up Howe's cause, is that he had every right to be at the protest and to write about it. I fully support that right. I would only further add that if was he arrested for reporting I would oppose that wholeheartedly because it would constitute an abuse of freedom of speech and expression. Reporters should be free to witness and to report what they see, whether or not I agree with their politics.”

Then there’s Philip Lee who published a post on his Tumblr, with what some might call an immature title: “For the Halifax Media Co-Op: No Apology Here.” In it, Philip argues: “Mr. Howe is part of the anti-shale gas movement and writes about it. That’s just fine, but he can’t be involved to the extent that he is and be considered an independent investigative journalist.” Adding, “I don’t have anything to apologize for.”

The truth of the matter is that Miles Howe, perhaps misguidedly, placed himself in the midst of a legal battle between SWN and the protesters who had been allegedly vandalizing their equipment. Making oneself an active participant in such a conflict is not the role of a journalist as it removes their objectivity as a witness. For this, I think Miles positioned himself as an activist, rather than a journalist or a blogger. In light of the facts, the CBC’s panel is accidentally correct in arguing that Miles must have done something other than journalism to get arrested—but they did not do the story due diligence to research what had gone wrong for Mr. Howe in the first place.

Hopefully this article clears up the still confounding situation that Miles Howe has found himself in. Evidently he has been lumped in with the Mi’kmaq resistance as some kind of rogue agent—which appears to be an easy label to peg him with given his association with a lesser-known, independent news agency and his active interference in a court injunction. Unfortunately, the legal conditions that have placed upon him have put a huge hole in the already minimal coverage coming out of the conflict between the Elsipogtog First Nation and SWN.

Clearly there is a very tense conflict in New Brunswick that is being covered by very few reporters. Miles Howe appears to have more connections to the Mi’kmaq community than any other mainstream journalist, and that makes him stand out. But other journalists should tread very lightly when it comes to discussing his story in the media, and people should pay close attention to the conflict between SWN—an oil company that admittedly has an abnormally “large and expensive security team”—and the First Nations of New Brunswick. The situation has already gotten violent once, on a fairly surreal level, and the arrest of Miles Howe, a controversial journalist who continuously finds himself in perilous legal grey areas, should be of particular concern to Canadians who are following this story.
 

@patrickmcguire

Previously:

A Canadian Branch of Anonymous Is Standing Up For Anti-Fracking Protesters

The RCMP Ambushed a Peaceful Mi'kmaq Anti-Fracking Protest

Dublin. Photo by Paul Roban

In the early 1980s, a man named Tony "King Scum" Felloni began importing large quantities of heroin into the Republic of Ireland. The drug quickly began to work its way into daily life in Dublin's working-class areas, and thanks to its relatively addictive nature it has remained wildly popular. Take a walk down certain streets in Dublin and you'll get a pretty good indicator of its prevalence in the capital.

Unfortunately, the government's plans for treating heroin addiction nowadays appear to be much the same as they were in the 80s: almost nonexistent. The government at the time paid very little attention to the problem, and—despite the implementation of new, progressive harm reduction laws in other European countries—Ireland's attitudes are still very much lingering in the decade of fax machines and Billy Idol.

According to the 2012 annual report by the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction, Ireland has the highest number of heroin users per capita in Europe. They claim that seven people in every thousand are addicted to the drug, which translates to roughly 30,000 Irish citizens. Worryingly, Ireland also has the third highest death rate from drug use in Europe, behind only Norway and Estonia. The EU average is 21 deaths per million people; for Ireland, it's 68 per million.

But these stats don't tell the whole story. For years, heroin use in Ireland was confined to Dublin. This is no longer the case; usage of the drug has spread throughout the country and is now having an impact in many smaller towns and cities. Unfortunately, while addiction is now more far-reaching, treatment has predominantly stayed within the confines of the capital.

I spoke to Dr. Cathal Ó Súilliobháin, an addiction specialist with the Health Service Executive (HSE), Ireland's national health service, about the problem. He told me that, in some parts of the country, there is absolutely no treatment whatsoever. "In the midlands, there are very limited clinic places and no doctors in general practice able to initiate treatment," he said. "West of the River Shannon, there are none, and that includes Donegal county—not a single one."

Photo via

The lack of services to deal with the growing heroin problem outside Dublin needs to be addressed. There are only six needle exchanges outside the capital (most of which only operate for a couple of hours a week) means that users are likely to end up sharing gear, and, unlike the government's policies, HIV and hepatitis rates didn't decide to stay in the 80s. That could potentially have disastrous consequences on rural communities that have already been adversely affected by the emigration crisis; as Cathal told me, "We are sitting on a time bomb. I would be concerned that you could easily see something like a mini-HIV epidemic starting in one of these areas."

With little or no services in areas outside Dublin, you'd have thought that concentrating treatment in the capital would leave the city well-equipped to help its addicts. But, again, there doesn't seem to have been much progress made over the past few decades. There are roughly 9,200 Irish people undergoing methadone treatment, most of them in Dublin, and that's the only care available. A number of other treatments—anti-opiate implants and buprenorphine, among them—are available in various other modern European states, so why hasn't Ireland adopted any of them?

Because in Ireland, addiction isn't seen as a medical issue—addicts are perceived by most to be criminals who can't be trusted, let alone make decisions for themselves. The state knows best and the state knows you should be treated with methadone. If you don't trust the state's judgement, then you can fuck off out the door and find your own treatment—i.e. score, shoot up, and end up back where you started.

Dr. Garrett McGovern

I spoke to Dr. Garrett McGovern, who specializes in addiction and spoke in favor of the recent Irish cannabis decriminalization bill, which, predictably, was voted down by the government earlier this month. "We really haven’t got a handle on who's using heroin," he told me. "The figures tend to be crunched a little bit, and it all comes from people in treatment. But not everybody who has an opiate habit should be or wants to be on methadone and all it entails, and we forget about them. We don’t provide any services for them. You come up for treatment and we give you methadone. You might not want methadone, and you’re told that we can’t do anything for you."

I also spoke to current heroin user "Zoe," who's taken heroin—she's been using with her boyfriend—for the past ten years. She's been taking methadone for the past seven years, but hasn't received much in the way of treatment beyond that. "We go to see our doctor once every two weeks," she said. "We do a urine test and we get handed our methadone script. We haven't been offered any other help."

Many users supplement methadone with heroin, which means they fail the urine tests they're required to pass in order to get a weekly prescription. If they fail, they have to go to the pharmacist every day to take their dose under supervision. The problem with this is that not everyone has schedules that permit them to make daily visits. "If a heroin addict misses their methadone dose they go into panic mode," Zoe said. "The choice you're left with is to either go through a night of withdrawal, or else score heroin. In this situation, we'd always score."

She continued: "I explained this to my doctor and he said that if I couldn't make it to the [pharmacist] on time, I should work less hours. I told him that my boss couldn't give me that option, so my doctor suggested that I leave my job. My job was the only thing keeping me on the straight and narrow, yet my doctor suggested that I leave a good job and sign on the dole so I could get to the chemist on time each day. That seemed like a really bad idea, so thankfully I didn't take my doctor's advice."

Clearly, not every medical practitioner in Ireland would offer such awful advice—but it does indicate that there's a systemic problem when it comes to the provision of harm reduction treatment in the country. And just to add a little more despair to an already dire situation, budgets for services to treat people with opiate problems are being slashed.

So what can be done? There is no way that Ireland will contemplate decriminalization any time soon. But as Dr. McGovern told me, attitudes must change somehow. "Let me be very clear about legalizing drugs: legalizing cannabis should be a no-brainer," he said. "In terms of heroin, people must be asleep in this country. They don't realize that in Switzerland, there are 23 [specialist] clinics. In England, they have [tried out] heroin prescriptions. Holland and Australia—these countries are already [prescribing heroin] to give safe drugs to heroin users who don’t settle on conventional methods, and it has shown to be very effective."

The recent cannabis decriminalization bill could have acted as an important stepping stone towards rethinking Ireland's drug policy, but it was laughed out of Irish parliament and the proponents of the bill were labelled nutcases by the government. That attitude also trickles down to a number of Irish media outlets, with some adopting the overly simplistic rationale that everyone with a drug problem is a criminal rather than a person with dependency issues who may have turned to crime to support his or her habit.

The solution seems glaringly obvious: treat addiction, cut down on crime. Unfortunately, the government has chosen to keep its blinders on—and until it takes them off, Ireland is destined to keep topping European drug surveys.

Follow David on Twitter: @davidfleming68

More on drugs:

Is Britain Set for Its Very Own Cannabis Revolution?

Mexico's Drug Cartels Love Social Media

The Real Walter White

Hunter S. Thompson's last interview via

When iconic writer Hunter S. Thompson shot himself in 2005 at his home near Aspen, Colorado, Rolling Stone filled an entire issue with speculation about why he'd done it. One article by the historian Douglas Brinkley connects his suicide, spiritually, to the 1961 suicide of Ernest Hemingway in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho. Now, with the revelation that Coloradans are in greater danger of blowing their brains out than having them smashed in by a car wreck, it might be worth taking a closer look at why people are going to the western United States to shoot themselves.

Suicide, whether by gun or not, is on the rise all over the U.S., according to a fact sheet from the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, where I got most of my suicide data. Guns account for 50.6 percent of American suicides. However, Colorado just saw an abrupt 20 percent jump in gun suicides, with 532 in 2012, compared to 457 car crash fatalities.

It's hard to illustrate how unusual this is with the resources available to me and my terrible math brain, but I'll try anyway. Compared to Colorado, where shooting yourself just pulled ahead, the rest of America has a 5.2624 per one hundred thousand rate of suicide by gunshot (Which I got by dividing the overall suicide rate by the AFSP's 50.6 percent statistic for gun suicide), and a 10.4 per one hundred thousand rate of car crash fatalities, almost twice the national average for self-inflicted gunshots. Are you convinced this is a problem yet?

Without further study, it's hard to nail down a cause, but the first temptation is to blame Colorado's apparent gun mania. You've got your Columbines (homicidal and suicidal), and your Auroras (strictly homicidal), but Colorado has a gun ownership rate of 34.7 percent. That's high for most places, but around the statistical median for a US state. Colorado is also one of the least NRA-friendly states, having just become one of very few to require background checks for gun purchases in all circumstances. It's worth noting, however, that Colorado's gun purchases have shot up over the course of 2013, but the suicide data are from before this spike, so a connection can't be made there. 

After vetoing my gun-ownership reasoning, Colorado kept thwarting me every time I tried to nail down another cause. I thought since unemployment is closely tied to suicide, Colorado might have a struggling economy, but it doesn't. I'd heard that military personnel have a higher-than-average suicide rate, maybe Colorado commits a lot of troops to our wars. It doesn't. The recent rise in suicide shows a dramatic increase in middle-aged people killing themselves. Maybe Colorado's population is aging, I thought. It's the eighth youngest, although since suicide is classically a leading cause of death among young people, this might not be completely irrelevant. I thought maybe Colorado is full of sick, or depressed people. Nope, it rates astonishingly high in measurements of health and wellbeing. It was enough to make me want to write the whole thing off as a fluke, and just move my ass to Colorado.

Image via

Then I got clued into a 2010 study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry (as reported by USA Today), which tied suicide to elevation above sea level. They studied twenty years of data and found that the mountainous states of Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, and Oregon all rank among the top 10 in terms of American suicide rates.

They crosschecked their data against suicide rates from other countries using the suicide capital, the very mountainous South Korea as their example, and found that South Koreans living at 6,500 feet above sea level had a 125 percent higher suicide risk.

A few months later, that group refined its study and published a paper in the American Journal of Psychiatry called "Altitude, Gun Ownership, Rural Areas, and Suicide." In that paper, they found, "A significant positive correlation was observed between age-adjusted suicide rate and county elevation," and concluded the following:

"When altitude, gun ownership, and population density are considered as predictor variables for suicide rates on a state basis, altitude appears to be a significant independent risk factor. This association may be related to the effects of metabolic stress associated with mild hypoxia in individuals with mood disorders."

I had never seen a side-by-side comparison of elevation and suicide on maps before, so I made one. Suicide rates are in purple on the left; elevation is on the right:

Image via Wikipedia and the AFSP

Granted, it doesn't line up perfectly, but there's clearly something to be said for this elevation link. Colorado does not have the highest suicide rate, nor the highest rate of gun ownership, but it does have the highest elevation. Considering the health and prosperity of its residents, there really is no reason for Colorado to be plagued by suicides, but it is.

Douglas Brinkley wrote about Hunter S. Thompson going to the mountains of Idaho in the sixties to find out why Hemingway did himself in while "cleaning" his shotgun, only to become Hemingway's spiritual successor, to the very end. Maybe if Thompson hadn't emulated Hemingway topographically, he'd have embraced his transformation into the decrepit "Elder Statesman of the Counterculture" he was turning into when he died.

Thumbnail image via Flickr user ~Steve Z~

@MikeLeePearl

We all know beauty pageants—cosmopolitan competitions based on beauty, makeup, and tiaras. While personality, talent, and intelligence might come second to hair and heels, that is not the case in every beauty pageant, especially when it comes to urban ones.

In terms of the urban beauty pageant, how do cities size up? That is the job for metropolis doctors from the New York-based think tank, the Intelligent Communities Forum, which has discovered (or rediscovered) 126 cities worldwide. Each year since 1999, they decide on 21 top intelligent cities—the winners for 2014 were announced last month—chop down the winners even further to a top seven, and choose one to crown the biggest smarty-pants city of the year.

Since the ICF decides the “smartest cities” are every year, it is interesting to see how they’re chosen and which qualities make the intelligence list. For 2014, the theme is “culture.” Among the full list, the culture-touted cities include Montreal, Canada; New Taipei, Taiwan; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Nairobi County, Kenya, and Columbus, Ohio. Not what you expected?

Whether it’s celebrating Arlington County for its own culture rather than “a suburb of Washington” or bringing a stronger intellectual backbone to industrial towns like Hsinchu City in Taiwan, the criteria for city smarts comes down to five intelligent community indicators: innovation, digital inclusion, marketing, and advocacy. Basically, smart communities invent new ways to connect residents with businesses. What else?

Until the top seven cities are announced January 23 and the most intelligent city is crowned in June, the ICF shops around their ideas at conferences (they speak at Eurocities in Belgium) and releases ebooks (their next book, Brain Gain, which looks into how cities create job growth in the age of disruption, comes out next year).

Louis Zacharilla, the director of development, explains why New York is not the answer, the art of the Mayoral schmooze, the health of a city, and how to carve out community no matter where you are, even if its buttfuck nowhere.

VICE: What is the main goal of the Intelligent Communities Forum?
Lou Zacharilla: We try and reenergize communities and cities for the 21st century so kids can stay home, if they want to. What’s happening around the world is that young people are leaving their hometowns—especially if they’re small—even cities and they’re going places because they’re economic refugees. That is happening everywhere. We felt that rather than rely on national governments, who have not been doing anything except performing dysfunctional acts, that if we dealt at a local level with people and try to make home better, younger people would have a chance to stay there, if they wanted to. That would improve the community, and if it improved the community, some of these people could change things at the higher levels. It’s about looking at the post-industrial landscape and create a new renaissance or at least have a discussion about it.

You just don’t want more people moving to New York.
The rents are already high, I know. But if young people are adventurous, they want to go live in other parts of the world, that’s fine. This year, Prospect and Sunshine Coast in Australia are on the list of top 21 cities and Australians say most Australian people want to come home at some point of their lives, like pigeons. But they didn’t feel like their communities were adequate places to come home to. They built a $43 billion broadband network so people can use digital tools to take their businesses home. That kind of thinking is new and is enabled by new technology. Home has been disintermediated in the past 60 to 70 years. For us, that’s interesting to explore.

So do you think with stronger leadership and community indicators that people will be moving back to places on your most intelligent cities like Walla Walla, Washington has a population 32,000?
Well, people have already started coming home to Walla Walla. The guy who is their president of the chamber of commerce used to be a big-time entertainment lawyer in L.A., he said “I want to go home.” He saw some of our speeches and read our book, he said he would apply some of the principles up in Walla Walla – he said they could build a little paradise, if they do it right. Now, things are starting to happen there.

How do you gauge or rate the intelligence of a city?
Well, we have the criteria; that’s the think tank-y stuff. Everyone likes numbers and metrics. I’m an English major, so I don’t even understand what my research people do. With the five criteria, it seems to be consistent in measuring the bigger and smaller cities. We use the Wharton school of hierarchical analytics (don’t ask what that means, it’s complicated to explain). We apply the five criteria that seem to be consistent in the 126 communities we’ve designated as intelligent – creating jobs, keeping kids home—things we think are virtuous. Those are the criteria which aspiring communities use to measure themselves. We don’t want them to all look like America or Europe, want them to work in their own culture.

Why is the intelligent communities theme “culture” this year? You’ve chosen New Taipei City and Nairobi County. Are some people pissed off you haven’t chosen prototypical “cultural” hubs?
We get a little grief about that. The real action is not in places like New York. We are looking at communities of 120,000, which are really cool cities where people are working together. They’re reactivating their cultures. Here is the deal: Every place has a culture, they do thing that is unique. Culture has been invested in us; nobody can take it away. People like to take it out of us, but if we go back in and pull it out like a natural resource, we can create enormous wealth and opportunities. That is a virtuous thing.

Is there less room for play in the larger cities? In smaller cities, do you think there is more freedom?
And you can take chances, right? It is these smaller communities which are acting as laboratories that young people are doing these cool things. The big cities are run by the older guys. I’m not saying New York is not a great city, I love it here, but it is very siloed politically and it’s very difficult to do the things that are being done in these experimental off-the-radar cities.

An intelligent city is experimental?
They are innovative. So many were hit hard in the post-industrial era and much of it has left. A lot were actually desperate. As Bob Dylan said, if you got nothing you got nothing to lose, they started experimenting with anything that worked. You go to Dundee, Scotland and that is where Grand Theft Auto was created. They developed the largest games industry in Europe. They were the largest ship building city in Europe in the end of the 19th century. They lost it; they went somewhere else. Now it is a haven in life sciences. Some innovative leaders had to make that happen.

There are some controversial selections on your list, like Toronto. With everything in the news about the mayor and his drug use, you wouldn’t necessarily think Toronto is an intelligent city.
The citizens are smarter than the mayor, hopefully. It is interesting because Mayor Ford poo-pooed their intelligent community status last year. He didn’t even attend our event. We had a top-seven cities event and Toronto was one of the top seven. Every city nominated in that top seven had their mayor come to New York to our think tank summit – except Toronto. He distanced himself because it was just those eggheads out there doing their thing. He wasn’t smart enough to embrace the intelligent community status. Toronto does well, despite its leadership. It is a classic case of a city led by a grassroots movement. You have people working on their waterfront project, their arts communities, driving the idea of a better future.

Why was Hsinchu City, Taiwan chosen as one of the intelligent cities of 2014?
They have historically been a manufacturing center, as all Taiwan has become. But they are also the intellectual capital of the country. If you go to Taiwan and you really want to meet their writers or literate class, go to Hsinchu City. Now what they’re finding—and Taiwan is a really innovative place – and they’re saying intelligence and literacy has a lot to do with how they’re going to perform industrially in the 21st century. Knowledge is overlaid over everything they do, from machinery design to performance-enhancing devices they’re making there. Like Apple, they pay a lot to the art. If you were an intellectual, you were sent out to a coffee shop, if you were a factory worker, you were sent to a factory. Now, they are starting to blend them.

This may help these cities with tourism, by no accident?
The economic development people of these cities love us because we point out their city and the rest of the world goes: “What? Where?” Last year we featured Oulu, Finland, location of the Nokia headquarters. When we started talking about how great it is, people start going there. We encourage it because, as one report said, by 2050, the most dominant cities in the world are the ones you’ve never heard of because they’re doing the kind of stuff we’re talking about. I do want people to look at places considered the middle of nowhere, just to see what kind of experimentation human beings are capable of.

New York mayor Bloomberg warned that in 50 years, New York could look like Detroit.
I hope not. Detroit never thought it was going to become Detroit. Windsor, across the water from the Detroit River, could have easily become Detroit, as well could have Eindhoven, where I’m going in January. We better watch out, we better economies now and take the pain now. It’s about arresting the disease before it spreads throughout the body. Detroit didn’t get down that path, now only 30 percent of the kids graduate from high school. It’s an awful problem.

@nadjasayej

Image via.

Part of what it means to be an American is the ability to do whatever the fuck you want inside of your car, unless it involves drinking and driving. This space is a welcomed extension of many American homes. It can double as a portable office, pet or child daycare, a personal movie theatre, video arcade, beauty salon or barber shop. It could also function as a personal storage unit, restaurant, or man cave. For many US citizens, this is the shelter where one can shove a Big Mac and fries down the gullet while “chatting” with their boss over the speakerphone—with the mute button, of course. And hey! They won't know if you’re not wearing any pants! 

But for drivers in the state of New Jersey, a recently proposed law could make productive car activities disappear forever. No more smoking, calling up the American Idol hotline on your cell phone, fidgeting with the radio, or crushing a Double Down in the fast lane. Last week, the New Jersey Assembly Transportation Committee unanimously voted to advance the proposed bill. 

I’m not a resident of New Jersey, but I frequently travel through the place. I’m devastated that the freedom to multi-task inside of one's moving vehicles could become compromised.The current wording of the bill is vague, which has set off a hailstorm of criticism and debate surrounding the potential law. Yesterday, in my own act of protest, I decided to take a fast food joyride around New Jersey to soak in as much mobile freedom and frying oil as possible.  

I’ve been to fast food drive-thrus a million times, but yesterday’s journey to the Bloomfield, New Jersey, McDonalds felt illicit. I felt like some sort of freedom fighter as I slowly drove up next to the menu board. To hear that magical phrase, “Can I help you?” echo from the loudspeaker was the answer to my tax-paying prayers. 

McDonalds has stepped up their game with their menu options. Big time. There’s the bacon habanero ranch quarter pounder, endless wraps, and, what the fuck? Chicken wings? I realized I need to drive to New Jersey more often. 

“Can I help you sir?” 

I snapped out of my state of awe at all the new menu items. “Let me get a double-quarter pounder with cheese, a Coke, and an M&M McFlurry,” I said to the voice on the other end.

I did the great American ritual of fumbling for my wallet while my car hovered in the idle position. I wondered if that could be considered “illegal” if the bill goes into effect, and gleefully paid the pleasantly plump woman at the first window. But when I coasted toward the second window to pickup my food, I met a strikingly young looking guy who handed me my freedom fries. “Did you know that it’s probably going to be illegal to eat in your car while you're driving in New Jersey pretty soon?” I blurted out uncontrollably. 

“Seriously? That’s fucked up,” he responded, immediately recognizing that he just cursed at me. Without missing a customer service beat, he said, “Thank you, come again.” 

When I normally order at a drive-thru, I like to pull over on the side of the road for a solid minute or so to get my shit together and ensure that my order is correct. This time around, I decided to cut New Jersey some slack and keep on rolling out into the streets. It was time to get the hell out of this state, onwards to New York, where it’s still America, goddamnit. With one hand on the steering wheel, I reached for my burger with the other. I smashed the box wide open, like a baboon on Adderall. I took my first bite as my car geared its way up to 40 MPH. “Now this is fucking living,” I said out loud. 

I managed to consume the meal while safely operating my vehicle. Even in the midst of touching my grease-coated steering wheel, I wedged the McFlurry betwixt my legs so that I could dip into its gloriousness without danger. I survived. The only safety precaution I took was denying myself ketchup from the squeeze packet.

A quick belch later, my stomach went into a rumbling mode of gurgles, but I had no regrets. As long as I’m alive, I’ll always believe that eating a damn burger behind the wheel is a freedom that should never be compromised, even in the Garden State. 

@davidrattiner

ALEJANDRO ZAMBRA

Alejandro Zambra has lived in Santiago, Chile, for nearly his entire life and has written two novels, Bonsai and Ways of Going Home. We asked him about his career, and this is what he said: “What I always liked is playing with words, to discover strange words. I started writing poetry very young, but it was a game. Yes, I was such a nerd… I wrote Bonsai for many years, although at first it was a very different book. A poetry book, actually. I think I was 25 and really wanted to communicate something. Writing was still a game, but now it was also a habit, a way of facing reality.” This issue features his story “Thank You” from his forthcoming collection, My Documents.

See THANK YOU

JEAN-RENÉ AUGÉ-NAPOLI

The first time Jean-René Augé-Napoli had a Kalashnikov pointed at him was five years ago in the tiny African nation of Comoros. At the other end of the gun was a policeman, and at that moment, Jean-René told us, he wasn’t scared and decided he could be a war journalist. He’s since spent time embedded with armies in Eastern Europe and has been reporting on Syria full-time since September 2012. For this issue he traveled to Deir ez-Zor, in the inhospitable eastern part of the country, and documented the horrific conditions of the makeshift oil-refining industry run by Islamist rebels with ties to al Qaeda—a dangerous story that took him months of research and reporting to uncover. 

See BLACK-GOLD BLUES

ANDRES SERRANO

Andres Serrano is an internationally recognized American artist most famous for his role in the culture wars of the 1980s, when a bunch of Christians got upset at Piss Christ, his image of a crucifix submerged in the artist’s urine. He has also photographed dead bodies, the Ku Klux Klan, the homeless, and all levels of American society. His most recent work, Cuba, is the result of a six-week journey through the country where his mother grew up. He traveled there for the first time in his life for the project, with the intention of creating a realistic portrait of the nation that has been on his mind since childhood. We’re proud to feature a selection of the resulting photos in this issue. More can be seen at the Yvon Lambert Gallery in Paris at the end of this month.

See ANDRES SERRANO’S CUBAN ODYSSEY

NATALIA LEITE AND ALEXANDRA ROXO, A.K.A. PURPLE MILK

Natalia Leite and Alexandra Roxo are two Brazilian-American gals who met mid-Saturn return and decided to team up to navigate the changes caused by planetary shifts and the whims of the film industry in which they both worked. Since then they’ve had all kinds of successes: They are in postproduction for their web show, Be Here Now-ish, and are prepping two feature films. Bare, Natalia’s movie, will be shot at a truck-stop titty bar in middle-of-nowhere New Mexico, and Alexandra’s film, Out of Range, features an odd romance, a sexy androgynous person, and a fucked-up road trip. They have also co-directed music videos, fashion films, and commercials, as well as Serrano Shoots Cuba, a documentary about Andres Serrano’s trip, now playing on VICE.com. Their website is drinkpurplemilk.com.

See ANDRES SERRANO’S CUBAN ODYSSEY

CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM

When Christopher Ketcham started talking to whistleblowers about child sex abuse and those who cover it up in New York’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities, the lifelong atheist and Brooklynite might have been horrified, but he wasn’t exactly surprised. “Wherever you have organized religion alongside hierarchical authority, sexual repression, and a shame culture, you have little children being fucked in the ass,” he told us. “Catholics do it, Mormons do it—why not Jews?” The details of the way the ultra-Orthodox higher-ups allegedly protect these rapists, however, are particularly disgusting. Ketcham’s work has appeared in Harper’s, Vanity Fair, GQ, Salon, and many other magazines. He also has a website called deathtobrooklyn.com.

See THE CHILD-RAPE ASSEMBLY LINE