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Photos of Madrid's Teenage Posers

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All photos courtesy of the author

A few weeks ago, I was in Madrid on business and ended up staying at a hotel near Plaza de la Ópera. One thing that really struck me was that every night, around 7 PM, a hoard of kids in designer clothes would invade the square.

I wanted to know what that was all about so I decided to eavesdrop by sitting down beside one of the groups and pretending as if I was waiting for someone. Some of their conversation was quite nostalgic, other parts were a bit stressful: Who were they going to beat up next Saturday? Who'd serve them booze? Did their mate Ali still have any of his counterfeit Nikes? In comparison, my childhood banter seemed pretty tame.

The more I studied the teenagers, the more curious I grew. Why were they hanging around this particular square? Where did they get the money for such fancy clothes? Were they from the neighborhood? I approached a girl who had bummed a smoke off me five minutes before to ask. She was about 16 and was wearing a pair of Jordan sneakers, worn-out shorts, a really tight top and about four kilos of makeup. As I approached her, she took a drag of her cigarette and started screaming about how some girl called Jenny was "such a slut" for having tried to steal her boyfriend.

I asked her what the allure of that particular square was and she explained that they'd started congregating there earlier that summer so they could "pose." Whatever that meant. I thanked her for the information and headed towards the hotel thinking about who I was going to talk to the next day. I had to find out more about this posing.

I returned to the square the next day with my camera under my arm. To my surprise, the place was once again completely rammed with teenagers. I sat myself on a bench and started trying to map out the different groups and figuring out who was talking to who. They were largely segregated but there actually seemed to be a guy connecting them all. A boss of sorts. I walked up to him and started asking questions. It wasn't that hard to win his trust—all I had to do was pretend I was totally in-the-know about his sneakers.

He began explaining that the square was a regular meeting point for almost 100 teenagers. As he was telling me this, people would constantly interrupt us to shake his hand. It was like a stereotypical mob movie scene, only filled with kids. According to him, most of the young people on the square didn't live in the center of Madrid: they mostly came from suburbs like Orcasitas, Villaverde, Entrevías, and San Blas.

He said his name was Ateniko and that he was 16 years old. It was hard not to be mesmerized by his look—piercings all over his face, ridiculously skinny jeans, a rake of tattoos, the most modern haircut I've ever seen, and top-to-toe knock-off garb.

Apparently, the police never leave them alone either. Which may have something to do with the fact that the kids in the square—even though they aren't from the city themselves—don't like outsiders and end up getting into a lot of fights. There was even a fight scheduled for the same day but Ateniko wasn't sure if the others would show up.

I asked why they gathered in such a crowded area. He answered in a split second—"posing." They use the square to show off their dance moves and their clothes; Gucci caps, Diesel jeans, Chanel T-shirts, Louis Vuitton backpacks, Nike sneakers. All fake, of course, but still. Hanging around Plaza de la Ópera is all about showing off. Oh, and "stealing" McDonald's wifi.

Ateniko was feeling his role as a leader, especially when some of his curious minions came by to find out why I was poking around. I took advantage of my newfound audience and began bombarding him with more questions. Even the cigarette girl came over for a listen. I suddenly found myself surrounded by teenagers who wanted to tell me their stories.

Related: Watch our documentary, 'The Struggles of One Black Trans Man':

They all love trap and hip-hop and the Spanish band Los Pobres (PXXR GVNG). And they all agreed on one thing: They want to get rich without having to actually work. "Just like all those celebrities on TV," one of them insisted. Ateniko wants to become a music producer but he intends to teach himself.

Finally, everyone seemed to pride themselves on knowing "the law of the street." They talked openly about posing, weed, knives, and their mates who landed themselves in jail.

As soon as my camera came out, they all started preening themselves up. At the end of the day, we're probably all posers but at least these kids are honest about it. A little later, two police vans rolled in and everybody scattered. I had a ton of questions left for the posers but I guess I'd have to save them for another day.

Scroll down for more pictures.


Jamaica, Gangs, Guns, and Black Hobbits: A Talk with Booker Prize Winner Marlon James

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Photo by Jeffrey Skemp

Jamaican gun crime has declined significantly since 2005, when the island had the highest murder rate per capita in the world, at 1,764. Still, the streets in the country are wild, with 2015's murder count at 1,107 as of November 21. The lion's share of the victims are young disenfranchised men from areas such as Spanish Town, a neighborhood in St. Catherine Parish where organized crime has a heavy influence on the day-to-day lives of the poor.

In 2013, the leader of the notorious St. Catherine-based Clansman gang, Tesha Miller, was jailed in the US for illegal entry after going on the run from the law in his home country. Since then, there have been many clashes between the guys who want to take control of the group. Miller's own brother was killed in such a fight earlier this year.

Tesha Miller

Miller is set to be released from US custody in January 2016, which has Spanish Town residents feeling twitchy. He is such a feared figure in the neighborhood that when his imminent release was mistakenly reported earlier this year, Jamaican police asked residents to remain calm and assured them they had a plan for Miller's return.

An important factor in Miller's power and reputation on the island are his alleged connections to people high up in the Jamaican establishment. This narrative of street gangs with ties to the government dates back decades, most famously to the 70s when there was nigh-on civil war in Jamaica, with the People's National Party (PNP) and the Jamaican Labour Party (JLP) recruiting street gangs to help them sway voters, dividing areas of the ghettos up into orange (PNP) and green (JLP), with gunfire crossing from one area to another.

Gang leaders, known as dons, would have their soldiers virulently encourage their constituents to go to the ballots on voting day. In return, the dons were allowed go about their business (mainly drugs, and these days lottery scamming), largely unbothered until they stepped out of line too much.

This story of street life and government corruption is one of the main themes examined in the incredible writing contained in the recent Booker Prize Winner Marlon James's book A Brief History of Seven Killings. The book adapts true stories of Jamaica, including the shooting of Bob Marley, gang politics, drugs, and how politicians often become embroiled in the underworld of the island. It then personalizes these stories, creating new characters based on figures such as Marley and Lester Lloyd Coke, who started the Shower Posse, a street organization that controlled a garrison at the Tivoli Gardens housing project in Kingston. Jamaican-born Marlon is a good friend of his fellow countryman, Storm Saulter, a young filmmaker from Negril whose 2013 film Better Mus Come explored a similar story. Both are brilliant pieces of work, so we taped a phone conversation between the two men. They talk about success, black Hobbits, gangs, guns, and Marlon being an openly gay man in what a lot of white people love to call "the most homophobic place on Earth."

- Andy Capper

Filmmaker Storm Saulter

Storm Saulter: It's great to talk to you, my friend. How have you been since winning the Booker Prize?
Marlon James: I'm actually really shocked and overwhelmed by winning that prize. When you look at the people who have won and then gone on to win the Nobel Prize and all these other prizes, it's really pretty astonishing when you hear my book was the unanimous decision. Even walking up to the podium I felt like someone else was walking up. I'm like, Oh, my god. Do not fuck this up; people will realize you shouldn't be here .

What are you working on next?
My next novel is actually part of a fantasy series based mostly on African history and mythology. I just got tired of all these discussions about the diversity in sci-fi and fantasy—people complaining about why there isn't a black Hobbit. They say, "Well, Lord of the Rings is European." And I'm like, "Err, Lord of the Rings isn't real."

I'm just tired of that fight. I'm like, you want to keep your Vikings, keep your damn Vikings. I'm gonna go in another direction and focus purely on African stories because they have all of our monsters and our witches and our beasts and our mad kings and plotting princesses and magnificent cities. It'll be an invented kingdom and probably more magical realist than fantasy. But it's me trying to write a story based totally on African origin.

That's powerful, and it's amazing how fresh that work will be to the world. As a storyteller you're always looking for that place full of new possibilities, new archetypes.
I'm not necessarily doing something particularly new. For one, there are many African writers who are already writing these kinds of stories. My argument is that the African imagination can be grounds for any form of work. I'm not trying to write history. I'm not trying to get to this accurate African story any more than Lord of the Rings is some accurate Celtic story, or the Thor comic is accurate Norse. I'm just arguing that there is enough in the African literary imagination that you can spring off into any direction you want, including superheroes.

As source material.
Yeah. This is how "Beowulf" and Celtic lore and the stories of the Norse kings were a base for Lord of the Rings, and you can clearly see the influence. That is how I plan to use African myth and history.

I was thinking about parallel worlds between the 70s, 80s, and present day Jamaica. The singer, Bob Marley, like the sun, would have been a center of energy with all these elements moving around him—including the two political parties and their constant scheming to maintain power. Bob was a polarizing figure. Do you think there is anyone else who has come along and had that kind of influence on the Jamaican populace? Who would the singer be in this era?
That's a good question. On paper Vybz Kartel is the most fascinating figure we've had in decades. But he hasn't really made that many great records, and now he's embroiled in a whole heap of stuff, including a murder conviction. But he is fascinating. Look at the ways in which he is contrary, look at the way in which he turned skin bleaching into a kind of performance art. I'm not saying he should be a hero, but you don't have to be a hero. The Rolling Stones were the "bad boys."

I wanted to talk a bit about Jamaica's hyper masculinity and the homophobia that comes along with that, but also the irony of it all. I remember going to a party called Fully Loaded, and you could tell that lots of dons and gangster types were rolling through in their flashy cars and clothes—it was a place to be seen. What stood out to me was that the toughest guys were always dressed in like pink suits with their pants stopping way above the ankle. It was a strange parallel between how tough you are and how effeminate you are at the same time.
It's funny you bring that up. As an experiment, go on YouTube and find any group of Jamaican men dancing, any video. Cut the sound and start to hum Madonna's "Vogue" and see what happens. It's amazing. I remember an American choreographer who used to go to Passa Passa [a street dance in Tivoli Gardens] every Wednesday night. I said to her, "You always observe the women, how come you don't observe the men who are always making up new dances?" She said, "The men are too delicate, it's too intricate. It's almost like watching traditional Indian dance," or it's like watching vogueing because Jamaican male dancers vogue. The thing is, the dance floor was always a place to get your sexuality fluid. And that ties into a very African aspect of our culture, because that sexual fluidity on the dance floor through performance, in footwork, that's a part of our African identity, too.

I know that you've wanted to adopt your work to the screen, and now it's being optioned by HBO. Are you excited about how that's going?
I'm super excited about it. It wasn't hard for me to adapt to the screen because I really love that language. Ultimately I'm a voice guy, and the novel is driven by voice. Yes, there is a lot of thinking, but it's really more talking. So writing a script isn't necessarily hard for me. I don't think I'm a very cerebral writer even though I spend a lot of time in people's headspace. My stories still have to move, they still have to have momentum, things need to happen. I'm still very much a big plot guy.

And you can live with characters for a long time in episodic television as well. You can go really deep with them, which is exciting.
I think that's how I ended up making a long novel because I didn't want to let go of these characters so quickly. I ended up following them for 20 years. Also each of these scenes is one day, so the coiled intensity of that moment and living in that moment is something more you can expand on in film.

'A Brief History of Seven Killings' by Marlon James

One of the first times we met I asked you who your favorite filmmaker was and you said Wong Kar-wai. I was really surprised by that, because he is my favorite filmmaker too, and it's pretty rare that I can have a real convo about his work. What is it about Wong Kar-wai's films that you love?
I think that he is really good at telling these internal, almost closed-off stories in these really big situations, these really big environments. It's interesting seeing a big city reinforce a claustrophobic drama like in Happy Together, which, with all due respect to Brokeback Mountain , is the greatest gay film ever made. But he does Buenos Aires in a way where you know this story couldn't have happened anywhere else.

What I love about Wong Kar-wai's work is the air feels thick—not thick in a muggy way, but you can feel it, you're living in it and you're floating in that space. I also love how he treats his characters. I see a connection to some of your characters in that he has the same ones reappearing in different films, but they are at very different points in their lives. They seem like totally different people, to the degree that the viewer can barely recognize it's the same character from the last film. I was interested in your character Nina Burgess and how she seems to be living different lives but is essentially on a single trajectory. Can you talk about that?
I knew I was telling a story that was dominantly male, and I wanted a female character. I didn't think Nina was going to survive the whole book, but she actually is the survivor of the whole novel—she makes it until the very end. One of the things I am really interested in is the afterlives of people who go through an instantaneous traumatic event. I would love—and probably would do it—to check in on 9/11 survivors 20 years from now.

Nina never really rebuilds, but she sort of reels from a single event and it takes her through these different mutations over decades, and the thing that is guiding all these mutations is fear. It's a desire to change to the point where she doesn't even realize it anymore. I just wanted to write somebody who was a survivor.

But also Nina comes close to having my worldview, and certainly my view on the hypocrisy of race and class in Jamaica. One of my favorite scenes to write was when Nina comes across an old schoolmate at the Terra Nova Hotel, and the person is talking about how the Timex watch Nina has on is something she would've given to the maid. As someone who is not from uptown but spent a lot of time in uptown culture, I came across that type of woman and that type of man all the time.

I'm happy you pointed out that scene. That kind of social energy uptown and the whole class divide that is really magnified in Kingston and the different Jamaicas in thought and behavior, I feel it's very much at the heart of what ripples out from Jamaica. To me it's the most pressing space to explore, because that's really what runs Jamaica.
I come from that as well, where I have the education and school background to pass as "upper middle class," but I never had the money. Nobody wants to talk about how race and class intersect in Jamaica. Everybody says it's not a race thing, it's a class thing, which is true to a point until it becomes utter bullshit.

Because I have worked with Jamaicans whose entire social circle is white. I'm like, "how do you do that without deliberate effort?" I went to a party once in either Norbrook or Cherry Gardens, and the only other black people there were the women having sex with the Irish guys from Digicel. Either that or the person going, "Would you like me to freshen up your drink?" All the Jamaicans there were white or at least Lebanese Syrian passing for white, which became a running joke in my book. So the idea that race doesn't figure into the class argument, if that's true then that might have been some of the most incredible coincidences in history; that somehow just by coincidence everyone at this party is white but it's all about class. I mean, come on. And Nina was a great character to expose all of it.

I made a film that was set in the 70s looking into the experience of a single individual in a dark moment in Jamaican history, which is the same moment that you are describing in parts of your book, and people responded to that. From the reaction to Better Mus Come I've been encouraged to do more work in that way, but I'm really interested in trying to expand and look into other areas of our culture and history. But I'm always interested in how people are hungry for the darkness. Do you think people are just naturally drawn to darkness, or do they expect to hear a certain type of story from a certain place?
I don't know if people are drawn to darkness. It's funny, because when the Booker judges were responding to why they picked Seven Killings, a lot of them talk about how it's dark and violent, but it's also funny and they actually thought the humor is what was most impressive. I think a horror film, for example, for it to scare you it has to seduce you first. For darkness to grab a hold of anybody it has to seduce you, and I think the great thing about film, art, and books is that you can end up living vicariously through lives that you wouldn't want to spend much time with otherwise. I remember in 1991 all of these homeless kids in LA, their anthem was Metallica's "Enter Sandman." And when asked, "That's a song about a kid being killed in his sleep. Your life is so horrible, why would you like this song?" They would say there is a warmth in coming across something darker than what you live in and there's a kind of thrill in knowing that there's an outcome that's even darker than yours.

There are people who tell me they could never handle the experience of reading my novel, and I'm like, "Yeah, but I'm guessing your experience is slightly better than the people who had to go through it." Like: "I can't read a novel about slavery. It's too bad I cant handle it!" And I'm like, "Yeah, but you probably handle it a little better than the person who was a slave." People who don't respond to so-called "darkness" have to check themselves a little bit.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: A Fake Federal Air Marshal Was Caught with a Bunch of Guns and Ammo on Long Island Yesterday

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Mark Vicars after his arrest

Around 7:40 Thursday morning, police pulled over a 2014 Dodge Durango on the Jericho Turnpike in Syosset, New York, a sleepy hamlet in Long Island's Nassau County. The car was being driven by Mark Vicars, 49, a man who lives in a gated community called The Knolls. Nassau County cops—in conjunction with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and the federal Joint Terrorism Task Force—had apparently been conducting surveillance of Vicars after receiving a tip about him. But when pulled over, Vicars flashed emergency lights and showed a federal air marshal ID, which turned out to be phony, as a local ABC affiliate reports.

Also in the car: a loaded .380 pistol, a gravity knife, a loaded assault rifle, body armor, a tactical vest, az high-capacity magazines each containing 30 rounds of ammo, the latest terrifying stash of weaponry unearthed by law enforcement in America.

A search of Vicars' Syosset home turned up more weaponry—five handguns of various calibers and approximately 8,300 rounds of ammunition.

At a Friday news conference, federal officials said there is no threat of terrorism in this case, which is being headed up by the Nassau County Police Department. Vicars—who, authorities say, even had his wife convinced he was a federal marshal—had no permits for any of the guns found in his home or car. He was charged with multiple counts of criminal possession of a weapon and criminal possession of a forged instrument, and pleaded not guilty at his arraignment Friday.

Follow Brian McManus on Twitter.

Countdown to Zero: How the Drug War Accelerated the AIDS Epidemic in Black Communities

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Henderson, North Carolina. 2006. Kids read the instructions for how to use the condoms given to them by a worker from the Northern Outreach Clinic. Photo by Christopher Anderson/Magnum.

When the Center for Disease Control and Prevention first officially recognized the existence of AIDS in the 1981 publication of its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, it was described as an epidemic among gay white men. A great deal has changed since then. Thanks in part to the devastating impact of mass incarceration as a result of America's war on drugs, HIV/AIDS has become a plague in poor communities of color in the United States.

Men and women of African descent in the US report more new HIV infections annually than any other race/ethnic group. There are more blacks living with HIV and more of them are dying from HIV/AIDS-related deaths than is the case for whites, Hispanics, Asian Americans, or Native Americans. Specifically, blacks in the US represent only about 13 percent of the population, but account for 44 percent of the new adult infections reported annually to the CDC. Blacks comprise a bit less than half of those currently living with the virus in this country. Particularly hard hit are gay, bisexual, and transgender black men, but increasingly, black women are also falling victim to the virus, representing 64 percent of all new infections among women in the US in the year 2010.

The disproportionate impact of HIV/AIDS on black Americans has its roots in poverty and severe disadvantages in the urban communities, where the epidemic has had its most enduring impact. But in my own research that dates back to 1986, I've been increasingly focused on understanding the role that prisons and our national policies of mass incarceration have had in creating a high-risk environment that HIV/AIDS exploits.

In the 1990s, rates of HIV infection among inmates in the nation's prisons and jails was five to seven times that observed among all non-incarcerated American adults. The source of this concentrated pool of infection was the war on drugs that began in earnest under Richard Nixon in the 1970s and sent so many people behind bars that America's incarcerated population grew from fewer than 200,000 inmates in state and federal prisons in 1971 to well over 1.5 million at the end of last year. Roughly half of federal inmates were imprisoned for drug-related offenses and more than half of them were black and Hispanic. In effect, at the moment that HIV was making an unannounced but significant appearance on the American scene, the country was also pursuing a set of policies that resulted in the imprisonment of a population at the greatest risk for exposure to HIV: intravenous drug users, and later, in the 1980s, those caught up in crack cocaine-related sex work.

The cycling of this highly vulnerable population in and out of prisons for the past 40 years has had a powerful impact on rates of HIV infection in the communities to which these men and women returned, and an equally massive impact on the prisons to which many were remanded as recidivists. But, more significantly, the loss of so many adults—particularly men—to their communities dramatically weakened the social infrastructure that is so essential for maintaining the health of the public. This population has often been deprived of the human and social capital necessary to raise children and usher them into successful adult roles.

VICE on HBO: Watch the trailer to 'Countdown to Zero':

In an April New York Times piece entitled "1.5 Million Missing Black Men," graphic statistics are presented describing a national pattern in which major urban areas in the United States report having, on average, 83 black men for every 100 black women not behind bars. (In Ferguson, Missouri, there were just 40 black men for 100 black women.) Mass incarceration and premature mortality among black men account for this significant disparity between black men and women, and it is this incarceration-fueled instability that has helped drive the HIV/AIDS epidemic into the heart of black America. We must address the policies that perpetuate mass incarceration if we hope to prevent the continued onslaught of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

We've had effective medications for HIV disease since 1996. But the fact is that, as a nation, we still report between 40-50,000 new cases of HIV infection each year, and blacks are disproportionately affected. To end this devastation, we need more than treatment and more than a cure. We need to start to address mass incarceration.

Robert E. Fullilove, MS, EdD is a professor at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University.

We Asked a Fascism Expert if Donald Trump Is a Fascist

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Sometime just before Thanksgiving, some Establishment Republican flaks began voicing the opinion that immigrant-bashing presidential candidate Donald Trump is a fascist. Libertarian-leaning pundits had begun levying that accusation over the summer, but something about the attack from members of his own party helped the label stick this time.

Now bear in mind: Fascism is not the same thing as Nazism. Contrary to much of the internet chatter around use of the term to describe Trump, this is not a debate about whether or not Trump is a racist or an anti-Semite. The question is whether the policies that Trump is sort of proposing could lead to a marriage of business and government in which ideals become uniform, dissent is swiftly punished, with the whole thing centered around a personality cult similar to that of the National Fascist Party headed by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.

Op-ed writers have explored the question extensively over the past week or so, but because I'm definitely no expert in European political movements of the 20th century, I thought it might be wise to run the question past someone who is. So I reached out to Cornell University professor Isabel Hull, a historian whose work focuses on Europe's fascist movements, and is one of America's leading scholars on the role of fascism in history.

In an email exchange, Hull and I discussed where Trump fits on the sliding scale between "Fascist" and "Republican," and what that might mean for the future of the American conservative movement in 2016 and beyond. Below is the lightly edited text of our conversation.

Interested in dictatorships? Check out one of our classics: The VICE Guide to North Korea

VICE: People are beginning to use the word "fascist" to describe Donald Trump. You seem like an expert in this area, so I thought you might be a good person to ask whether that label is correct.
Isabel Hull: My first reaction is that he is not principled enough to be a Fascist. He strikes me more as a nativist-populist. That is, some one from the right wing, angry about various aspects of the present, longing for a golden past, and focused primarily against his own government, but not equipped with a set of adamantine principles to be put into practice, no matter what, and no matter the cost. Perhaps a more interesting question for you would be to ask if there is a genuine conservative running amongst the Republican candidates, as opposed to what in European history would be known as "revolutionary conservatives."

Commentators have used Umberto Eco's definition of fascism as a kind of litmus test for Trump's fascism. Is that a good approach?
Eco's seven signposts of fascism are an OK start, but Eco wasn't an historian, and most historians would be more specific than that. Douthat pointed out, is that he does not have anything to do with the normal right wing Republican base, especially on such matters as religion and economics.

Related: Wait, What Would Happen If Donald Trump Actually Became President?

If Trump doesn't fit the classic definition of "conservative," why is he so popular with people who identify as conservatives?
The problem is that surveillance of presumed domestic enemies, xenophobia, anti-immigrant sentiment, and fear-mongering all have an unfortunately long history in this country. I would say that Trump is interesting more for his methods: the Big Lie—which he refuses to retract, the violent uncouth language that passes for "truth"in some circles, apparently, and the encouragement or at least acceptance of minor violence—pushing and shoving—against dissenters, whether they're journalists or just vocal critics. These things do tiptoe into the extreme right-wing. They all were characteristic of fascist movements before they assumed power, though the violence in that case was much, much more extreme.

Would you say his stated policy positions are fascist?
There are only really two interesting issues: mass deportation of illegal immigrants, which George Will recently described as "ethnic cleansing," and changing the 14th Amendment on birthright citizenship. Both of these are peculiar and worrisome as indicators of what Trump thinks is apposite for a democracy.

You mentioned a "genuine conservative." What does that mean right now?
Surely it would mean cleaving to the constitution and the Bill of Rights for everybody, rather than wild, interpretive interventionism à la off from the world, while bombing much of that world to bits. On one hand, they decry government involvement in people's personal lives—absolute freedom to own anything short of atomic weapons, absolute freedom of property use, and on the other, they want the government to regulate the most intimate details of women's reproductive lives.

So what does this new discrepancy in American conservatism mean for the Republican party?
It may mean that the far-right Republican base is, in fact, through with the party, but hasn't realized it yet. I really hadn't thought of it in that way before.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Leslie's Diary Comics: Leslie's Flight Gets Canceled in Today's Comic from Leslie Stein

Cry-Baby of the Week: A Man Was Arrested For Handing Out Fliers on Jury Rights Outside a Court

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It's time, once again, to marvel at some idiots who don't know how to handle the world:

Cry-Baby #1: Judge Peter Jaklevic

Keith Wood. Screencaps via Fox 17 and Google Maps

The incident: A guy handed out fliers about jury rights in front of a courthouse.

The appropriate response: Nothing.

The actual response: The man was arrested and charged with a felony.

Last week, 39-year-old Keith Wood handed out fliers from the Fully Informed Jury Association outside the Mecosta County Courthouse in Big Rapids, Michigan.

The fliers contained information on jury nullification, which is when a juror delivers a not-guilty decision for someone they believe is guilty because they think that person shouldn't be punished for the crime. This is usually when the juror thinks the law is immoral.

According to the Fully Informed Jury Association, most judges do not include information about jury nullification in the instructions they provide to potential jurors.

After handing out about 50 of the fliers, Keith told West Michigan'sFox 17 he was approached three times by various court employees and asked to go inside the courthouse. He says he declined the first two times, but went inside on the third occasion after being threatened with arrest.

Once inside, Keith claims he was approached by Mecosta County District Judge Peter Jaklevic. "Judge Jaklevic came out of his chambers, he looked at me, he looked down the hall, I didn't know who he was looking at, and then he looked back towards me and the deputy and he said, 'Arrest him for jury tampering,'" Keith said.

Keith was arrested and charged with felony obstruction of justice and attempting to influence jurors. The penalty for the obstruction charge is up to five years in jail and a maximum $10,000 fine. The influencing charge comes with up to one year in jail, and a maximum $1,000 fine. His bond was set at $150,000.

"When he told me the bond, again I was speechless," Keith told Fox."$150,000 bond for handing out a piece of paper on a public sidewalk? Speechless."

"It's free speech for goodness sake," Keith's attorney, Dave Kallman, told the TV station. "The judge directly ordered him to be arrested for jury tampering for tampering with a jury that didn't exist—now wrap your head around that."

"If you don't use your rights, you lose them," Keith told MLive."It's not illegal to fully inform jurors, it's just that judges don't do it anymore."

Cry-Baby #2: An unnamed man in Australia

Photos via Wikimedia Commons and Google Maps

The incident: A guy saw a spider in his house.

The appropriate response: Killing it, or escorting it from the building somehow.

The actual response: He freaked out so hard that his neighbors called the cops because they thought a woman was being murdered.

According to a post made on Facebook by the New South Wales Police Force, they received multiple reports of a violent domestic dispute in Wollstonecraft, Sydney, on the 21st of November.

According to the callers, they had heard a woman "screaming hysterically" from inside an apartment, followed by a man yelling, "I'm going to kill you, you're dead! Die die!" The sound of furniture being thrown around could apparently also be heard.

Police say they went to the man's apartment and asked to speak to his wife or girlfriend. He told them that he did not have either, and lived alone.

After explaining to him that they'd had reports of a domestic dispute involving the screams of a woman, police say the man "became very sheepish."

"It was a spider," he reportedly told them. "A really big one."

The noise had apparently been the man chasing the spider around his apartment with a can of insecticide. "I really, really hate spiders," he said.

After checking the man's apartment, the police left.

Who here is the bigger cry-baby? Let us know in this poll down here:

Previously: A woman who allegedly attacked a waitress in a dispute over all-you-can-eat pancakes vs. a person who vandalized the sign of a store called Isis.

Winner: The pancake lady!!!

Follow Jamie Lee Curtis Taete on Twitter.

Madeintyo Is Making Some of Atlanta's Best Hip-Hop from His Parents' Kitchen

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Photo via Madeintyo

Madeintyo, short for "Made in Tokyo," only has one proper EP and a few videos to his name, but he's already managed to carve out a spot for himself between Future, Young Thug, and Migos in the crowded Atlanta hip-hop scene. His bass-heavy production is right in line with the Atlanta scene, but it seems like spending his formative years in Japan inspired Madeintyo in more than just his name. His style is more playful and breezy than we usually hear out of Atlanta.

The guy's not rapping about his money or drug use, either. He's a modest rapper—the closest he gets to talking himself up is his EP's stand-out track, "Uber Everywhere," and even then he seems like he might rather walk if prices are surging.

Madeintyo spent six years in Tokyo, moving back stateside after high school where he wound up joining an art collective started by his older brother, Royce Rizzy, called Private Club. The 23-year-old Madeintyo and Private Club have already been getting buzz from the "Uber Everywhere" video and Royce's collaborations with Jermaine Dupri, so I figured I should sit down to talk with him before he blows up any bigger.

I caught up with Madeintyo while he was in New York for a show with the rest of Private Club. We took an Uber together from Brooklyn to the venue in Manhattan and chatted about his music, his newfound fame, and why he's still living in his parents' house and driving around in Ubers everywhere.

VICE: So what's the scene like in Japan?
Madeintyo: I would go to a club over there and see five guys dressed up like Soulja Boy, with the exact shades and everything. That's how they show their dedication to their favorite artists. I'm pretty sure there are even dudes in Japan dabbing to Future. The scene out there is everything.

How were things different when you moved to Atlanta?
The vibe is different. It's so calm and peaceful and chill in Japan. Over here, you have to watch your back. In Tokyo, you can be on a plane or in the airport having an argument with my ex and everyone would mind their own business. I respect that. Japan is safe, too. It's good vibes. I'm ready to go back.

Nice. How'd you first get started doing music?
Me and my brother, Royce Rizzy, have always done everything together. We used to look up to our cousin who was rapping, and we'd go watch him record in his room and write our own stuff. He would turn the beat off and we'd still be rapping. He started setting up sessions in his room to record us. Our voices sounded super light and pip-squeak. My mom used to play it—she'd pull up in her Lexus blasting it and be like "these my babies!"

And then how'd you and Rizzy get started with Private Club?
We got Phin Tha Weirdo, who's from Houston but I met him in Japan. Rizzy met Salma Slims in Atlanta when he moved out there. She was in a girl group but started turning up and rocking with us. Then there's Noah Wood$—he's dope and gives that boom-bam, hip-hop vibe. Smokers music only. Nephlon Don is just straight up Philly street. He probably won't do many interviews because he's a straight street dude. That's the squad.

How'd you come up with "Uber Everywhere"? It seems like that's the song everyone is stuck over.
I recorded that song in my kitchen. We were piped up and it was lit. Actually, my mom was in the kitchen, too. My whole crew was there in the kitchen, doing what Private Crew does, and it just came up. "Uber Everywhere" was just a random line that I said and then ran with. I didn't really feel like it was a song until a day later when I listened to it and said, "Yo, this shit is hard. I think people are really going to mess with it."

What's it mean to be piped up?
Piped up is like turned up.

I see. What's it like having fans now?
It feels weird as fuck. I'm still trying to come up. I still stay in my parents' crib. My mom always says "you don't have fans until you can pay your rent," and I feel that way. I don't have my own crib and I'm still in an Uber because I don't have a car. I don't think any fame is going to sink in until it's my living—but I'm glad it's starting to pay off.

What's next?
None of this stuff was planned. We just created it. You never know when it's going to happen that people will start to mess with your music. I'm just all off the vibes—whatever I feel like doing next is what I'm going to do.


The Graphic Novel 'Baddawi' Looks Back at Life in a Palestinian Refugee Camp

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All images courtesy of Leila Abdelrazaq

Leila Abdelrazaq was only a freshman at DePaul University in Chicago when she began turning anecdotes from her father's life inside a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon into a webcomic. Four years later, Baddawi has evolved into a 128-page graphic novel told from the perspective of a young Palestinian boy living amid the backdrops of the geopolitical drama of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the Lebanese civil war. Tales of schoolyard games of marbles and high school crushes are sandwiched between anecdotes about military raids by the Israeli and Lebanese armies and acts of insurrection against both governments.

Just World Books released the graphic novel last spring, and Abdelrazaq has just come back from London, where she was promoting it at the Palestine Literature Festival. The book has received praise from many, including VICE contributor Molly Crabapple, who compared it in style to Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis and wrote that Abdelrazaq "transforms the style, infusing it with design elements from Palestinian embroidery."

VICE spoke to Abdelrazaq about her book, the situation of Palestinian refugees, and how telling stories can be an act of resistance.

VICE: The book is a graphic retelling of your Palestinian father's life in a Lebanese refugee camp. How was it conceived?
Leila Abdelrazaq: When I started working on it, it was just a web comic and I really didn't mean to write a book. That's just something that happened later. I was just writing anecdotes from my dad's childhood, like the kinds of stories that your parents tell you until you're sick of hearing them. I just wanted to share those stories because they were stories that people outside of the Palestinian community didn't necessarily hear very often.

I was also using it as a way to inform people on the Palestinian refugee issue. I was posting the anecdotes—the serialized comic strips—to my blog and to my Facebook page, and somebody from Just World Books saw the comics and they reached and said, "Would you have any interest in turning this into a graphic novel?" I, being 19 years old, was like, "Hell yeah, I'm going to turn it into a graphic novel!" It took three years.

How did your dad react to the web series and the book?
He was so nervous. There was a while where he was like, "You have to use a pseudonym! I have to have a pseudonym! Everyone in this book has to have a pseudonym!" He was extremely nervous, partially because you spend your whole life with the stigma of being a Palestinian refugee in Lebanon and having to hide who you are and hide that part of your identity. So I understood where he was coming from.

There were also stories in the book about a crush he had in high school. That was the most sensitive material. The girl's name was the only one in the book I changed.

Within the specific Palestinian narrative, what can image communicate that language has failed to convey?
People open up to stuff visually that they normally wouldn't engage with. Even if you're not necessarily predisposed to reading a book about , the comics and images make it more accessible to people. You can use comics to break down ideas or subjects that might seem complicated or hard to understand. It's not this weird distant thing.

You deploy Palestinian embroidery, or tatreez, throughout the book, sometimes as chapter markers and sometimes in between panels, in the gutters. Why did you choose to invoke that traditional imagery?
Part of it was a resistance to cultural appropriation, laying claim to certain elements of Palestinian culture. I wanted to intentionally elements of traditional Palestinian culture. The tatreez was just one way. But it was also an aesthetic choice.

You use other Palestinian iconography as well, prominently on the front of the book, which is a reinterpretation of Naji Al-Ali's famous Handala image . Why did you choose that reference?
Handala is a symbol of the Palestinian refugee child, and I wanted to pay homage to Naji Al-Ali. I used his drawing as a primary source. Making that connection to Handala was asserting that this was not just my dad's story, it's also bigger than that. But I wasn't saying, "This is the story of every Palestinian." I wasn't trying to be reductive. I was just trying to emphasize that it's not a standalone story.

How do you think the current debates on refugees leave out or include Palestinians?
If you think about what the contemporary conversations are around Palestine, refugee issues often get left out of the conversation. On the flip side of that, when people are talking about refugees, they almost never mention Palestinian refugees. I don't know why. Maybe because Palestinian refugees aren't handled by UNHCR. They have their own organization. I've seen so many articles that don't even mention Palestinian refugees because they're using UNHCR numbers.

In the introduction on Baddawi, you talk about preserving the past in order to reinforce the existence of Palestine, especially in the absence of a recognized state. Were you conscious of that mission while writing the book?
One thing I thought about was this idea of Palestinian history. When you talk about the history of Palestine—shit, Palestinians live all over the world. The civil war in Lebanon was hugely impacted by the presence of Palestinian refugees in the country. Who's to say that aspects of what happened in the Lebanese civil war are not part of Palestinian history? That's something that I was thinking about a lot, how Palestinian history transcends borders in that way and transcends the construct of the state.

To read more excerpts from Baddawi, as well as order a copy, visit the graphic novel's website here.

Follow Tasbeeh on Twitter.

Comics: A Comic That Shows the Tough Reality of Getting an Abortion in Brazil

'Discount Saints' Imagines the Last Supper with Chinese Takeout, Snapbacks, and Hoop Earrings

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'Papi Jesus.' All images courtesy of Melanie Gonzalez and MediaNoche New Media Gallery

Melanie Gonzalez knows the saints pretty well. Growing up in a strict religious Latino household in the Bronx, she was surrounded by Catholic rituals and iconography; in art school, she got into Renaissance and Baroque art and later traveled to Italy enough that she became fluent in Italian.

All these influences show up in her newest photo, video, and sculpture production, Discount Saints. For the show, which will be on display at Medianoche New Media Gallery in Spanish Harlem until January 30, Gonzalez transformed the gallery space into a "hood chapel" complete with a mini nave that holds a crucifix assembled out of gold door-knocker earrings and hairpins. The imagery includes traditional Renaissance motifs, but in her version of the Last Supper the Saints dine wearing their dollar-store regalia at a table littered with Chinese takeout, grape juice, and soda bottles.

It's an art history nerd's modern adaptation of the Catholic paradigm, not dissimilar to Kehinde Wiley's juxtapositions of historical references and modern-day cultural tropes.

This is Gonzalez's second major solo show after her exhibit Letters to Armando at BCAD Art gallery in 2014. Recently, VICE talked with Gonzalez about her art history influences, the interpretation of her work as an art photographer, and the gospel of "the bigger the hoop, the bigger the attitude."

Last Supper

Excerpt 'Last Supper'

VICE: Considering the work of female artists such as Ana Mendieta or Cindy Sherman who used the self-portrait for political statements in their art, does the inclusion of your image in your work have any political or feminist statements?
Melanie Gonzalez: Not necessarily. As a whole feminism influences me, but I don't try to speak on any particular point in my work. I want my work to be universal. Although obviously Discount Saints is personifying a very niche character—a Latina from the Bronx—I want my work to be universal, so that someone who is not from the Bronx can still appreciate it.

I started photographing myself because I was tired of auditioning for stuff and not getting the parts. I was like, you know what? I'm going to shoot myself because I want to be in photos and videos. Obviously, that has a feminist connotation which is fine and great, but my initial thing was: I'm tired of not seeing enough people like me and my friends, so I'm just going to shoot them. Why do I have to wait?

Who are your models?
My models? Oh, I love them. They are all creatives I know from different aspects of my life. Jesus is Joel Suarez, a muralist, painter, and influential guy in the Bronx and uptown scene. Mary Magdalene goes by Jar. Her name is Julissa and she's a tattooer, body painter, and artist. Athen Wade, who played St. Peter, is a photographer. Chazz Giovanni Bruce is an actor who played Pontius Pilate, and I was a theater major with Paula Diaz, who played St. Elizabeth, in high school. Most of them are from the Bronx. And one is from Harlem. Everyone is from uptown Manhattan.

The symbols you use in the photos—dollar store objects, rollers, du rags, gold costume jewelry, chains, a Louis Vuitton head scarf—can be interpreted as signifiers of race and class. Do these objects have anything to do with the lack of diversity and representation for people of color in the art world?
I feel like that would be the critique on it, which is fair, but that's not my take on it. My intent is to show my version of black and Latino identity in the outer boroughs—people who are from the Bronx and uptown, but who could also be from Brooklyn, Queens, Harlem, or the Heights. But yes there is a lack of representation in the art worlds. I love shooting people of color but not consciously like I'm trying to make a statement. It's just natural. It's not that I'm excluding anybody else. These are my friends and my neighbors and I think they're beautiful, gorgeous, and I want to shoot them.

'Doorknocker Altar Cross'

Is there any irony in the fact that you're referencing these Renaissance–style images we normally associate with wealth and power to get some people of color in front of the camera?
Going back to Renaissance art, all of those artists used models from the street. Someone who saw the work pointed out that I was shooting "everyday people." Caravaggio used prostitutes or beggars—the everyday person—as models, and made them saints and mythical characters. That's literally what I just did but with photography and digital form.

Some people might interpret your work as a subversion of the Catholic Church, but I don't see a critique of religion. I see you using a recognizable avenue in order to elevate the people you want to elevate.
If I was Hindu, I would use Hindu gods. If I was Muslim, I would use Muslim attributes. I was raised in a Catholic home, so I feel like I have the permission because I know enough about the religion to properly use it as a tool for the art. I'm not religious or practicing, but I was raised in a very strict Hispanic Catholic household. I was forced to go to Catholic school and forced to take my communion and confirmation.

I was actually held back in Sunday school because I didn't want to go, but I love the art. It is so exaggerated and dramatic and circus-like. I appreciate religious art's iconography and symbolism. I love how a painting can have so many objects that mean things, like pomegranates being symbols for fertility.

Your mom is still really religious, right? Was she offended by the show at all?
Yes she is, but no she wasn't offended, thankfully. Other people have asked if it's blasphemous. If you're offended, you're not looking at the artwork. It's also a production, a photo shoot that involved lots of editing. If that's how you feel, you're not looking deep enough.

La Pieta

'Pieta'

Can you talk about some of the symbolism in the portrait photographs of the characters?
Well Pontius Pilate has no crosses or symbols of Christianity because he was a Roman. Adding him was creative curiosity. I wanted to include a villain, and the model is from Harlem when everyone else is from the Bronx. So if they lived today, they would have beef .

St. Peter was the first Pope and it was a conscious decision to make him a black guy. There are none of us in religious depictions even though all of the people of the Bible were people of color, but I don't really want to talk about that.

I wanted Mary to be that woman in your apartment building that you love and respect but who knows all the gossip. I wanted her to be every mother— not just a Virgin Mary, but everyone's mom or titi. I wanted her to be wearing rollers, long nails, and makeup—but with the blue vata (housecoat) that makes her a recognizable Mary figure.

MARY

'Mary with Lipstick'

The cross made out of bamboo door-knocker earrings has so many connotations to culture and a very specific woman. Are you expressing an ode to someone, and if so who?
As a black and Latina person growing up in the Bronx, we're always in the salon! Hairpins and hairnets are important objects to a woman there. Gold is also important. But the piece is not about excluding men because a man from the same area knows exactly who that cross is referencing—that's his ex-girlfriend, his cousin, or his aunt or his mother. Those objects are important to everybody, not just women. And this can relate to many people—not just New York Latinas.

The Last Supper is one of the most satirized images in the world. What makes yours unique or different?
Mine is different because I include women. The whole point is that Mary is the narrator of this story. This is her point of view. Most Bible stories are told from a man's point of view, and I wanted to have women in there. I replicated the idea but not the actual painting because I didn't have all the disciples there, just a select few. Also if the Last Supper took place in the South Bronx, it might have Chinese food, beer, and soda. Maybe St. Peter would be wearing a snapback, and maybe Jesus would be Puerto Rican and drinking 40s instead of wine.

Melanie Gonzalez's Discount Saints is on view at Medianoche Media Gallery in Spanish Harlem through January 30. She will also talk about her artistic process at the gallery on December 5. See her website for more info.

Visit Barbara's website here.

​We Spoke to the Artist Making the Longest Movie in History

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Above, a still form 'Ambiance.' All images © Anders Weberg

Film history is littered experiments in endurance. In the 1960s, we got a handful of marathon-length Andy Warhol projects like Empire (1964), an eight-hour slow-motion shot of the Empire State Building. In the 2000s, we saw filmmakers utilize the transition into digital filmmaking to push the formal borders of a feature's running time, best exemplified in 2011's Modern Times, the Danish project currently holding the title for the longest film of all time at an epochal 240 hours.

Swedish artist Anders Weberg wants to break that record. He's worked in visual media art for over 20 years and has also experimented with artwork defined by its dimensions. In the mid 2000s, he coined the term peer-to-peer art, meaning work that was only available to be viewed or shared through digital peer-to-peer networks. He's also toyed with temporality, with his longest video project running at 12 hours. Now Weberg is bidding adieu to visual media (though not art entirely), and his last hurrah is aiming for a place in film history. Ambiancé is a 720-hour film over six years in the making.

It's described on IMDB as a film in which "space and time are intertwined into a surreal, dream-like journey," and for Weberg, it comes to stand as something between a memoir and a career retrospective, fused with the energy of a fever dream. When pressed for a synopsis, Weberg is at something of a loss. "This is the most asked question," he says. "How do you one explain a 30-day-long film?" Instead, he uses a variety of big abstract themes to describe the project: life, quest, power, death, escape, rest, love.

Ambiancé may be hard to put into words, but its visuals are lush: From what little I've seen of it, the film takes textured shots of the natural world (bees pollinating, water flowing, fog overtaking the silhouette of a lighthouse) and fuses these with surreal snippets like the dreamlike movements of ballet dancers or the unnerving details of a human eye.

Read: Michael Moore Traveled the World and Came Back with Big Ideas

It sounds like an attempt to make a modern, personalized Koyaanisqatsi, or perhaps a great PR stunt to get the internet to pay attention to his other art: After simultaneously screening the movie on every continent in 2020, Weberg plans on destroying the film, making its one screening its only screening. Ambiancé's experimental marketing has followed a similar pattern. The first teaser, released in July 2014 and clocking in at around 72 minutes, has since disappeared from the web. Last month, Weber shared a one-minute excerpt from a trailer, which will be released sometime next year and will run for about seven hours and 20 minutes.

Here's the rest of my conversation with Weberg about time, art, and what goes into the making of a 720-hour movie.

VICE: Can you discuss why you wanted your final film project to be such a formally rigorous experience?
Anders Weberg: This will be my last film, so how does one end it in style? It's so personal and since I have done longer films before, this has to be very special. It's also a way for me to find my focus again and really dig into the filmmaking process that I love so much one last time.

How do you personally prepare for such an undertaking? Can you explain the pre-production process, as well as what the construction of the film has been like so far?
I spent many hours in my head just thinking about this and continue to do so. The film is divided into a number of parts and scenes, all of which are roughly written down, but since it's an ongoing process it changes all the time. I have a chaotic note system in my computer where ideas and sketches are kept.

There are different approaches to the pre-production depending on if there are actors involved or not. If it's just me, it's no problem. When I filmed the seven-hour and 20-minute trailer, I had to struggle a lot to make it happen the way I wanted. It had to be in one continuous take for the whole duration, and the equipment is not really constructed to do that today.

How large is your crew have you worked with them on any of your other projects?
For this film, the crew contains mainly of me. I produce, direct, shoot, edit, and am behind most of the post-production. When needed, I'll bring in a MacGyver. The most important person on a shoot is someone that can make magic with duct tape, baby oil, and tin foil.

How would you describe the process for a film of this nature?
My process is that I collect glimpses of light with a camera and take that with me into the computer, and that's kind of where the real work begins. It's about taking all these glimpses and arranging and rearranging them into a flow that I feel represents the emotion I'm trying to express. There is a lot of post-production behind Ambiancé, where I run all the captured material through numerous processes.

Is it meticulous in its planning, or is it free-flowing and improvisational as well?
My whole approach to filmmaking is to try and express emotions with pictures, and those are pretty hard to plan out exactly since they change all the time. I have never done a storyboard in the past and have no intention of starting now. I like to enjoy what I do, and for me that means being in the moment and just following the flow. I always have a rough plan of what material I need in order to get the scene done, so I start with what I need to capture that moment. After that, it's just free styling and enjoying the creative process.


Anders Weberg

Are there actors in the film?
In the finished film there will be around 100 actors, dancers, and performers involved in different ways. Some of them are from my past productions in the past, but most of them are here just for this film.

As of now, there isn't a single line of dialogue in the film. Perhaps that will change, but there has not been the need to use dialogue yet to explain anything. It's a visual medium I'm working with. I think dialogue in film is a bit overused. It's like beats in music—these things aren't always needed. There will be a score for the full film composed by German composer Martin Juhls, who also goes by Marsen Jules.

The people in the film are using their bodies and expressions, and that is a bit of a challenge to get right. But rule number one is always to film in a joyful, relaxed environment. Somewhere we could all have a good time. The experience should remain a good memory for everyone forever.

You said this will be your last film. What inspired you to step away from the visual medium?
For the last couple of years I kind of lost the lust for moving media. I'm just not so sure about the future of screen-based media and decided to think about a way to phase it out.

Can you tell me about your plan to simultaneously screen the film on every continent? How do you imagine this taking place?
The locations have yet to be set, but the film will start on December 31, 2020, in the different time zones. After it's screened, I'll travel to all the locations and physically destroy the medium used to show it. I consider it part of the performance to make sure all the originals are deleted. Then I'm going to have a glass of wine.


The idea of ephemerality is a key difference between the analog era and digital era, especially in filmmaking. By destroying the film, are you attempting to link the two distinctly different principles together?
Spot on. For me, the film is just one part of the project. The creation and destruction has the same value in it. I think it was around 2002, when my oldest son was ten and he started to use the computer more frequently, I saw a change in how the young ones treated all different kind of media. Music, films, and games were sped up, downloaded, deleted without any emotions attached to it. With this film, I'm inverting and transforming that.

Who's paying for the film?
It's 100 percent self-funded. I have learned through the years that the minute you start using other people's money, you lose control and have to compromise. For Ambiancé, I will be the only one who will have final cut on every frame. I don't know how much money this will cost, but it will be a full-time job for at least five years, plus production costs. But I do come from a DIY background; it's in my veins. And since I've never been in the film "business," I don't know anything else.

As an artist so interested in time, is the film's ultimate "destruction" a way to capture the idea of finality, of your being finished with this medium as whole?
It's a huge goodbye. After that I will spend my time on something else and need to have a clean slate. I'm already looking forward to it.

For more on 'Ambiancé,' visit thelongestfilm.com

Follow Rod on Twitter.

What It's Like to Take LSD in High Security Prison

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Inside the belly of the beast isn't the ideal place to take a hit of acid. Prison involves most things people associate with bad trips: enclosed spaces, law enforcement, ugly rooms, and bleak environments—plus, violent people who might fuck with your psychedelic-stuffed head. For lack of a better comparison, it's more Shawshank Redemption than Alice in Wonderland.

Prisoners like drugs, though. When you're locked up, it's easy to want to escape reality through any means possible, and drugs are an effective method to make that happen. Many will settle for weed, hooch, or synthetic shit, but name a substance and chances are there's a way to smuggle it into your cell unit, regardless of where you're incarcerated.

I was a nonviolent offender who got sentenced for an LSD conspiracy, and met a variety of psychedelic enthusiasts during my 20-plus years behind bars. I found a way to get my hands on some acid when I was in jail, and it was a severely fucked experience. For other people, though, taking a hit didn't just expand the mind, it expanded the prison walls. It's a far cry from a rave or a Grateful Dead show, but it can be a life-changing experience. Below are three stories about what it's like to trip while living in a high security prison, starting with my own experience.

Seth Ferranti
44 Years Old
Served 21 Years for an LSD Conspiracy Charge

You could say I'm an acid veteran. Prior to spending over 20 years behind bars for an LSD conspiracy conviction , I had taken legitimately thousands of hits. After I ended up in prison, though, I didn't really think about tripping much, likely because it was what got me locked up in the first place. Instead, I became a weed man. I would smuggle it in, sell it, smoke it; I didn't let a 25-year sentence stop me from selling drugs in any of the seven prisons I lived in. Regardless of where I was locked up, I'd manage to smuggle in bud by swallowing balloons full of the stuff.

Fast forward a couple years, and I began thinking about changing my outlook on life in prison. A hit of acid sounded like the necessary remedy. Being in prison can feel like having blinders on reality, and sometimes you just have to open the doors of perception. It was time for me to expand my awareness outside of the bubble of incarceration that I found myself trapped in.

In 2005, I was at the Federal Correctional Institution Fairton, New Jersey, and my girl was supposed to bring some balloons of weed for me to swallow during a visit. I asked her in advance if she could bring me some acid, too.

When I hit the dance floor, what prisoners call the visiting room, my girl arrived with bad news. She couldn't score any good pot to balloon up in time, but she did have a tab of "Blue Unicorn" LSD for me. She went to the vending machine, bought me a hamburger, put it in the microwave, and put the tab of acid in the mustard she spread on the snack. I greedily devoured the sandwich, expecting to be tripping in the visiting room with my girl very soon. But things turned out a bit differently.

It felt like a movie, but it would take a seriously twisted individual to imagine a more existentially fucked psychedelic experience.

I had been bringing a lot of weed in to Fairton, and this happened to be the day a compound snitch ratted me out to the correctional officers. Not even an hour into the visit, they pounced on me, made my girl leave (after searching her and coming up empty handed), and dragged my sorry ass to the hole. The spiked burger was likely settling in my big intestine by the time they made their move.

As my pupils began to dilate and my vision got funny, I was brought to what they call a dry cell in the Special Housing Unit: No running water, no mattress, no pillow, no toilet... nothing. They stripped me naked and checked my orifices to make sure I wasn't concealing anything before giving me a bed sheet and a pair of underwear. They had a big window in the front of the cell so they could observe me, and there was a video camera set up to keep an extra eye on me, too. I'm not sure what the guards manning the camera were expecting to see, but the footage probably only showed a terrified inmate who happened to be tripping balls on the low. It felt like a movie, but it would take a seriously twisted individual to imagine a more existentially fucked psychedelic experience.

I splayed my sheet on the metal bed and laid down under the bright lights that were shining on me. I was familiar with the narc routine, even though I'd never been in a dry cell before. Over the next 48 hours—longer than the trip itself—the guards would make me defecate at least five times in a plastic bowl lined with a clear garbage bag so they could search through my shit and look for drugs.

As the prison lieutenant searched my shit bowl, I anxiously watched him as the acid toyed with my senses. I knew I was clean (for once), but the drugs triggered an inescapable paranoia that they'd find something. What if there were balloons in my shit? What if there was one baggie that somehow got stuck in my gut and was finally coming out now? I was fucking losing it. By the time I passed every possible inspection, my psyche felt like it had been put in a microwave alongside that burger. To say the experience was a living hell would be an understatement.

I chilled out a bit once the hallucinogen wore off, but it's not like you can immediately snap out of something like that. For the remainder of my time in the hole, I mostly laid down on the cold, metal bed and tried not to melt into a puddle as the cameras continued to watch my every move and the fluorescent lights remained on.

I imagined my first psychedelic experience in prison to be an escape outside the barbed wire-lined walls, but it ended up bringing me deeper into the incarceration abyss. Needless to say, I have never taken a hit of acid since.

For more on prison, watch our doc 'Murder, Mayhem, and Meditation':

John 'Judge' Broman
35 Years Old
Serving 16 Years for a Bank Robbery Charge

I was a Deadhead while living on the outside—a yoga-loving, marijuana-smoking, LSD-tripping hippie fool. I also dabbled in heroin, and that's how I ended up in federal prison with a 16-and-a-half-year bid for a bank robbery that was committed to feed my habit. I smoked tons of weed and drank massive quantities of hooch in jail, but I'd never come up on any acid until I was eight years into my sentence.

I believe that LSD is a sacrament. It should be used as a tool to "get you there," but where you go is all a matter of perspective. I was locked up in United States Penitentiary Pollack when I had the chance to take that journey after my conviction. A Deadhead buddy of mine had already done time in the feds, and he knew how to get all sorts of contraband into a prison like the one I was in. When he sent me a healthy stash of LSD through the mail, though, it looked like the most obvious shit in the world: a Dr. Seuss card that said, "Oh the places you'll go!" with a huge, noticeable splotch on it where he'd squirted the acid. He had tried masking the splotch by using markers to color around it, but that made it even less subtle. Regardless, it still made its way into the prison and into my hands.

Pollack was a pen where violence was common, and walking around during the day with a head full of acid was not a reality I wanted to experience. They say you can turn your back on a man, but never turn your back on a drug. In jail, I didn't want to turn my back on either. So I schemed in advance and gathered a crew of trusted cellmates and planned where and when we'd eat the psychedelics. The gang included my celly, fresh in for drug trafficking with a couple life sentences under his paisley bandana, and a 20-something former tweaker who had never done acid but always wanted to. We planned to drop the LSD at night, after they locked us into our cell unit where it was safe and secure.

They say you can turn your back on a man, but never turn your back on a drug. In jail, I didn't want to turn my back on either.

Around 9 PM, the drugs started kicking in. In our cell, we had two acoustic guitars, a bass, and a bumping sound system with an amp and stolen speakers we racked from the laundry room. With the acid coursing through our bodies, we needed something to vibe on.

We turned off the lights and lit homemade candles and incense throughout the cell. The three of us then started playing punk songs with the volume down low so we wouldn't get caught, and we spent the next couple hours jamming quietly into the night. It felt like a séance with live music.

After a certain point, my celly fell into a depression as the fact that he was doing a life sentence started to seep into his brain. I, on the other hand, got back to "me," and started thinking about the eight years of prison I had ahead of me. For the first time since being locked up, the idea that I'd eventually get out felt real. I was stuck in the penitentiary, but not forever. I had a date. My incarceration wouldn't define the entirety of my life—an epiphany that was life-changing itself.

The rest of the trip was smooth, but the experience marked a checkpoint for me. The remainder of the time I had left to serve became shorter. When people would ask me how long I had left, I'd reply, "I'm going home soon." They'd ask how long and I'd say eight years. They'd laugh and tell me not to hold my breath, or whatever. When you are doing multiple decades as a young man, the sentence seems endless. But thanks to that Dr. Seuss card, I knew "The places you'll go!" line meant anywhere other than the pen.

Tim
47 Years Old
Serving a Life Sentence for an LSD Conspiracy Charge

In 1993, I was stuck in a county jail, waiting to be sent to the feds for a long time for an LSD conspiracy charge. I had been there six months and was spending my time sleeping 22 hours a day and eating Twinkies from the commissary nonstop to help me cope with the severe depression I was feeling about my impending sentence. In less than six months in the county jail, I gained 55 pounds.

I knew if I could get some acid then I'd have a chance of living before going to the pen. My birthday came, and friends on the outside sent me 30 hits of acid through the mail—six of them under each postage stamp like how the Deadheads would send LSD across the country. I took three tabs later that night.

As I tripped, I imagined seeing a world stage with the Grateful Dead there, along with a man I'd identify as President Obama years later, believe it or not. This was before he was president and I didn't know who he was at the time, but I believe I saw him, or someone who looked like him. I imagined walking on to the stage and shaking his hand. It was an eye-opening experience and it snapped me out of the malaise I was drowning in. The next day I started exercising and decided I wanted to live again, despite the time I was facing.

When I went to actual prison at USP Atlanta in 1994, a friend was sent an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of paper that was covered with hits of acid. Somehow they missed it in the prison mailroom. There had to be over 1,000 hits on the sheet. After that, me and my prison friends were tripping all the time. It was like being on tour with the Dead.

For the most part, I only took LSD at night in prison so I could remember the band and appreciate the drug as a sacrament. One time, though, my friends talked me into taking some at 7 AM. As fate would have it, they called me into the Lieutenant's office at nine. I'd taken three hits and was flying. I played it cool, but it was enough to make me think before taking it so casually in the pen again.

Several years after tripping in the county jail, I received a book filled with a dozen hits as another unreal birthday gift. When I took this acid, I saw the same stage with the president and the Dead I had imagined nearly two decades priors. I recognized Obama this time, and came to the conclusion that it must have been him I envisioned during that first trip in prison. Maybe it had to do with fantasies of being granted clemency from Obama—cause that's the only way I'm getting out of my life sentence. If I didn't eat those three hits hidden under the postage stamps so many years ago, I don't think I would have survived this long.

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This Body Modification Expert Invented a Gory Technique to Manipulate Flesh

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All images courtesy of Yann Brenyak

Swiss-born and London-based body modification artist Yann Brenyak's face features micro dermal implants, manipulated eyebrows, swaths of ink and scarification (sometimes layered on top of each other), a giant skull on his forehead, and a bifurcated tongue that he can wiggle like a serpent. If you scroll through his Instagram and Tumblr, you'll find detailed shots of him peeling the skin of his clients like a fleshy potato or inserting metal implants into their chests. Because the artist's work pushes the boundaries of body modification, he has developed a cult following and frequently travels to do residencies at different body art studios around the globe.

Though skin removal and scarification are not new practices, Brenyak is experimenting with these forms through "graphic skin portraits," a process that involves giving a client a sleeve of ink before the artist carves a silhouetted image into the tattoo with a scalpel. The resulting art, often portraits of human faces, looks like an inverse tattoo, completed through skin splitting, peeling, carving, and removal.

I wanted to learn more about how the artist got into this undeniably niche field and then created his own space within it. So I reached out to Brenyak, who elaborated on how he built a career following his passion.

Image via Yann Brenyak's Instagram.

"Everyone thinks, Oh my god, you're destroying your body in a painful way. You look like a fucking freak... blah, blah, blah, " Brenyak told me over a Skype call as he was in between appointments during a visit to a tattoo studio in Sacramento. Not only was the artist candid and open to my curiosity, but I'd also describe him as a spirituality-minded sweetie—even when he opened his mouth and playfully flicked his tongue(s) at me. "My mother doesn't even know I have a split tongue," he said.

I asked if he felt like the public misunderstood the goals or motivations behind getting one's body modified. "This is not any more extreme than someone getting plastic surgery, and it's less painful," he told me through a thick accent. "You could say shaving an eyebrow is extreme, after all."

He continued in a tone that felt more educational than defensive. "People go through much more pain by going to the gym every day trying to be a mass of muscle, and to many, covering your body with ink or scars can be more helpful or beneficial when it comes to making people feel good in the skin they were born in."

Brenyak got interested in body modification when he was a kid and saw an image on the internet of someone who was heavily tattooed performing body suspension. He was immediately enchanted by the idea, and asked his father if he could get a tattoo. When told he was way too young, his stepmother began covering his back in henna ink. His passion only snowballed from there. "Changing my body has been a desire deep inside me for my entire life," he told me. "It's always been exciting to me that you can alter your body however you'd like and make fantasy a reality."

For more on extreme body acts, watch our doc 'World of Suspensions'

Brenyak trained as a body piercer at the studio Tribe Hole in Switzerland, where he met the body mod artist Lukas Zpira and became his apprentice. He quickly learned a variety of BM techniques, such astransdermal implants, scarification, reconstruction skills to restore the earlobes of clients trying to reverse their gages, and flesh branding—a procedure he prefers to avoid due to the foul scent of burnt skin. He moved to London in 2011 and worked out of a variety of shops like Hammersmith Tattoo, Body Temple, The Lacemakers Sweatshop, and Iron & Ink, where he honed his skills even. Eventually, he started to develop graphic skin removal.

"I was told it could never be done," he said about the part-tattoo, part-surgical scarring technique. But his former partner and dear friend Delphine Noiztoy of The Lacemakers Sweatshop encouraged him to keep experimenting with how he could push the boundaries of body modification. "She was once told she could never successfully create dot portrait tattoos, but she kept trying until it was not just do-able, but perfected. She taught me that nothing is impossible with body modification and my obsession with mastering the idea of eventually came to fruition. Through her, I learned there are no limits to my art."

After practicing extensively on his own legs, Brenyak completed his first successful graphic skin portrait, an image of Björk, in 2013. He's since used the technique to create a variety of faces and geometric designs that look like ghostly forms emerging out of someone's skin. While performing this technique, he says he feels as if the "outside world shuts off and I enter a state of grace. I lose myself in the craft."

I reached out to Lefio Bardolph, a 26-year-old mycologist in London who's worked with Brenyak several times and received the artist's first graphic skin portrait. "I hadn't seen many refreshing ideas like Yann's for some time and I think his passion and dedication for his art form is what attracts people from all over to him. You can recognize it when you see it: Someone who appeals to a market or someone who goes against odds to stay true to their vision. He's a hell of a guy and he's got a shit ton of character to go with that pretty 'ol mug of his."

After getting pointed ears and lobes from Brenyak, Bardolph got the portrait scar of Bjork on his upper arm. "I was slightly anxious before the procedure because I'd never had a dorsal scar before," he remembered. "I was more scared, so I'd jump or twitch during a decisive cut from not being used to the sensation."

Bardolph described the seven-hour procedure as a collaboration, and noted that deciding when to take a break was the only topic they disagreed on. "I get real crazy hungry when under the knife, but he likes to keep going, but it's a joint effort after all!" Bardolph also added that the BM artist helped with final design and pattern formation (with a myriad of potential options to choose from). "He's influenced the body mod ideas almost as much as myself."

The two have collaborated on other body work since, the most recent being an ink rubbing into skin removed on his shoulder blade that depicts the profile of a woman's face.

"The atmosphere created when working together—whether it's an earthy ritualistic energy or a more bold and focused wave—is always where it needs to be for me to endure any challenging procedure we'll tackle. I'll always remember that, plus his teasing after I'd yelp from an unexpected snip."

Image of two graphic skin portraits via Lefio Bardolph's Instagram

I talked to another BM artist named Shiva, who's been a friend and colleague of Brenyak since the Swiss artist moved to London. Shiva also does scarification and inverse tattoos, but told me Brenyak is the pioneer of the graphic skin portraits he's become known for.

"The graphic portrait style is his baby and he's the master of it," Shiva said over email. "I have seen a few people try to do it, but never to the same effect."

When asked what people in the BM community will associate with Brenyak's legacy, he replied, "This motherfucker will be most remembered for being my little brother, always asking me to borrow blades or equipment he forgot to order. But jokes aside, Yann's among the few artists who are advancing the scarification industry."

"The graphic portrait style is his baby and he's the master of it. I have seen a few people try to do it, but never to the same effect." –Shiva

V. Vale is the founder of publisher RE/Search and creator of the seminal 20th-century body modification text Modern Primitives. The fringe amateur historian, known for covering the re-emergence of body art within Western society, said it appeared as if Brenyak had a promising career ahead of himself. "I don't want to say anything too exaggerated, but he seems to be seeking to expand the palette, scope, directionality, and visual vocabulary of what can be done to a body."

Creating the graphic skin removal images is a bloody, gnarly affair and Brenyak describes it as the type of job that only serious enthusiasts with a deep knowledge of the subculture will commit to.

"There are two types of people who are interested in body modification," he said. "There are those who find it trendy, and then there are people who are interested in the history, culture, and origins of body modification. The second tend to be more interested in the rituals and subcultural intricacies, compared to just altering their body to 'fit' a certain role or perceived identity. I don't think you'd get your skin peeled by a man with a scalpel unless you were really serious about this lifestyle."

Follow Yann Brenyak on Instagram and Tumblr.

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Here He Comes: Michael Moore Traveled the World and Returned with Big Ideas

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Portrait by Katie McCurdy

This story appears in the December issue of VICE magazine.

Michael Moore doesn't really need an introduction. He's that lefty American documentarian whose movies screen at multiplexes. After a six-year hiatus, he's back with Where to Invade Next, which has him "conquering" foreign countries to steal their good ideas—whether it's reducing schooldays to three hours and giving students gourmet lunches, decriminalizing drugs, letting maximum-security inmates enjoy decent accommodations and retain the right to vote, or putting bankers in jail and women in charge of everything from banking to government. Moore's previous film, Capitalism: A Love Story, came out in 2009 and was notably ahead of the curve—as he and I discussed, many of that project's criticisms of our economic system are finally getting a mainstream hearing. Let's hope his new offering is similarly prescient and that all the good ideas he pilfered will eventually take root.

VICE: I kind of went into the film thinking I would know what was in it, but I was actually surprised at how much I was surprised.
Yeah, it's one thing to say, "Oh, they have universal health care in Germany." It's another thing to actually learn that any German with their health-care card and a prescription from the doctor, because of stress, can go to a spa for three weeks.

I wanted to know—where do the spa workers go for three weeks?
That's a good question, because you don't want to go to the place you work.

There was a section about Tunisia that was really fascinating too, especially the fact that Tunisian women have access to abortion.
Oh, not only access, but free—free of charge, no stigma.

At the beginning of the film you say you are going to pick the flowers, not the weeds. In other words, you don't show the downsides of the social policies you feature.
Well, because there aren't any, really. And here's why. There were. They started fixing this back in the 70s, and they made a lot of mistakes. The German health-care plan, they made a lot of mistakes. They made 20 or 30 years of mistakes and then fixed it. We can benefit off their trial and error. They've made the mistakes for us.

Given the emphasis you put on labor unions, and their seeming perpetual decline in the US, do you see any other forces that could pressure for the kind of changes you advocate for in the film?
there is this huge card—this is a union-made film—and I have all the logos of the unions in my film. I didn't wait for people on my staff to unionize. I just went to them and said you should unionize and I'll support it.

Good for you.
But like with the Norwegians who aren't just doing the 21-year morale.

Right, this is the self-interest argument.
I've actually thought about writing a book. A business book. What I'll say in the preface is: "I am not ever going to ask you to do for my liberal, bleeding-heart reasons. I'm going to ask you to do it because it's good for you." I understand the American mind.

But maybe that attitude is losing ground. All the talk of socialism today—doesn't it feel like a huge shift?
Huge shift! Done. It's over. Shift has happened. Shift is happening. There was a poll two or three years ago...

Which said young people like socialism, it's cool.
Look up the poll from last week. They polled Democrats: positive or negative view about socialism and capitalism? Forty-six percent had a positive view about socialism; 37 percent had a positive view of capitalism.

It's a major theme of the presidential debates.
what Hillary said in the debate last week. They asked her directly, "If 2008 happened again, would you bail out the banks?" And she said, "Absolutely not." "You'd let them fail?" She goes, "Yep." And I went, "Wow."

She's a sort of weather vane, and the wind is more liberal now, so she has to spin that way.
That's correct. So she's saying that the banks should know that the people like you and I, the next time we're coming to Wall Street, we're not going to Zuccotti Park, we're not going to sit over at the child's table at Thanksgiving. We're going to be at the adult table on Wall Street, and we're going to shut you down.

I think the challenge for the left is that we have to build political organizations so we can be prepared and actually pull that off.
It's so important. We have to be ready for when it happens.

This film is so optimistic in a way.
Don't you think my other films were too?

In the sense that if you made them you must give a shit.
Yeah, I believe by making this film, things will change!

You've embraced being entertaining to help the cause.
Well, it's redundant to say I'm entertaining, because I've chosen to make movies. You know, I'm not going back to the seminary to give sermons. I'm not running for office. I'm not organizing a political organization to give speeches and rallies. I've chosen to be a filmmaker... By the very nature of that, I've chosen entertainment to, you know, put forth my message, which means first and foremost I need to focus on making a good film, not on having good politics. I think my politics are OK, but if I make a lousy film, I've done my politics a huge disservice.


VICE Shorts: This Haunting Short Film Is a Meditation on American Violence

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On April 5, 1968, the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed, Senator Robert F. Kennedy made a speech that is still haunting and powerful. The "mindless menace of violence," as he referred to it, is what is damaging our lives and ruining the United States. It's troubling that violence, especially gun violence, has become so commonplace that I can easily refer to multiple mass shootings in the past week in California and Colorado, or go back just a month and discuss the 16 wounded at a New Orleans playground. It's not hard to see how America's culture of violence has remained perilously unchanged.

To illustrate that lack of change, filmmaker Terry Rayment used Kennedy's speech in his recent short film, which shares the speech's name, The Mindless Menace of Violence. Rayment juxtaposes the speech with subdued wide shots of gun violence in different neighborhoods, between different people of different ages. As the violence peaks and subsides within his short three-minute film a long final shot settles on an empty bed as Kennedy continues, "Whenever any American's life is taken by another American unnecessarily—whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of law, by one man or by a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence—whenever we tear at the fabric of our lives which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, whenever we do this, then whole nation is degraded. Violence breeds violence, repression breeds retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can move this sickness from our souls."

Not present in the film is how Kennedy began his speech, which is also the vital takeaway: "This is a time of shame and sorrow. It is not a day for politics." After watching the short above, I encourage you to listen to Kennedy's entire "Mindless Menace of Violence" speech.

Jeffrey Bowers is a tall mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as a film curator. He's the senior curator for Vimeo's On Demand platform. He has also programmed at Tribeca Film Festival, Rooftop Films, and the Hamptons International Film Festival.

The VICE Morning Bulletin

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National Front leader Marine Le Pen (Photo by Remi Noyon via)

Everything you need to know about the world this morning, curated by VICE.

US News

  • New Intel: IS Not Contained
    A new intelligence report commissioned by the White House predicts that the Islamic State will grow in numbers unless it suffers significant loss of territory. It indicates the US-led bombing campaign has been outpaced by the militants' ability to attract new followers. —The Daily Beast
  • Shooter Taught Fundamentalist Islam in Pakistan
    Tashfeen Malik, one of the two San Bernardino shooters, studied at an Al Huda religious school in Pakistan, learning a fundamentalist strain of Islam. Malik, originally from Saudi Arabia, pledged loyalty to the Islamic State in a Facebook post hours before the killings. —The Los Angeles Times
  • DOJ Investigates Chicago Police
    Attorney General Loretta Lynch is expected to announce a Justice Department investigation into the Chicago Police Department. The federal probe will focus on potential civil rights violations as well as the use of deadly force by officers. —Chicago Tribune
  • College Presidents See Pay Rise
    Student debt may be on the increase, but college presidents' pay also keeps on rising. According to a new report, median salaries rose nearly 6 percent to $436,429, and five Ivy League presidents earned more than $2 million in a year. —CNN

International News

  • Earthquake Hits Tajikistan
    A 7.2 magnitude earthquake has struck Tajikistan, shaking buildings as far away as Pakistan and the Indian capital of New Delhi. The epicenter was 65 miles southwest of the city of Karakul. The number of casualties is not yet known. —Reuters
  • Far Right Storms Ahead in France
    France's far-right National Front (FN) has made huge gains in the first round of regional elections, three weeks after the Paris attacks. Leader Marine Le Pen said it was a "magnificent result" proving the FN was "the first party of France". —Al Jazeera
  • Syrian Soldiers Killed in Strikes
    The Syrian government has claimed an air strike carried out by the US-led coalition on an area mostly held by the Islamic State has killed three Syrian soldiers. A coalition spokesman has denied its forces carried out strikes in the area. —BBC News
  • Venezuelan Socialists Defeated
    A coalition of opposition parties has claimed a majority in the country's National Assembly, winning 99 out of 167 seats. The results overturns nearly two decades of dominance in Venezuela by the Socialists of President Nicolas Maduro. —The Guardian

(Screen shot via)

Everything Else

  • London Responds to Underground Attack
    A violent stabbing attack on a London underground station that injured three people has spawned the trending hashtag #YouAintNoMuslimBruv. It's a quote from a bystander who shouted at the attacker, who is believed to have said, "This is for Syria." —Newsweek
  • Turkey Still Won't Let Our Journalist Go
    VICE News journalist and fixer Mohammed Rasool has now been held for more than 100 days without trial in Turkey, and our team's Turkish lawyer was shot dead in the street one week ago. Find out the latest. —VICE News
  • The Teens Who Pretend to be Kidnapped For YouTube Views
    The "My Kidnapping Story" video tag brings up thousands of teenage girls talking about being snatched. But the vast majority of stories are actually about getting "almost" kidnapped. —Broadly
  • Christmas Presents for Astronauts
    The Cygnus spacecraft is on a mission bound for the International Space Station, delivering much-needed supplies, hardware and Christmas presents for the crew. —Motherboard

Done with reading for now? Hey, that's fine. Instead, watch our new documentary, The Real 'X-Files'?

​Was 12-Year-Old Tamir Rice Really an ‘Active Shooter’ When Police Killed Him?

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Tamir Rice. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Last week, Cleveland Police Officer Timothy Loehmann offered up a rather startling phrase in explaining his mindset when he shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice at a public park in November 2014.

"Active shooter."

It's a term that has been inescapable in recent weeks across America. Tragedies in San Bernardino, California—where the FBI on Friday designated the killing of 14 people an act of terrorism—and Colorado Springs—where just days earlier a lone gunman killed three people at a Planned Parenthood Clinic—are just the latest active shootings to have gut-wrenching consequences. That Loehmann would use the same phrase to explain his actions to a grand jury seems, at first blush, bizarre. After all, not only had no shots been fired by the child that day, Rice's gun turned out to be a toy.

A year has passed since Rice was killed on November 22, 2014, but the case has remained a local and national flashpoint, the child's death joining a constantly growing roll call of police brutality against people of color. Neither Loehmann nor his partner Frank Garmback have been charged so far in the episode. They refused to cooperate with the Cuyahoga County Sheriff's investigation of the case, and when called last week to a grand jury, the officers read sworn statements and did not answer questions about the incident.

So what makes someone an "active shooter"? And is it even remotely legitimate for the officer to describe Rice that way?

According to the Department of Homeland Security, an active shooter is a "an individual who is engaged in killing, or attempting to kill people in a confined and populated area." Thomas Aveni, a former cop who's been researching police use of deadly force since 1995, says the definition contains just enough leeway to apply to the call that led police to confront Rice. Although the dispatch call didn't mention gunshots or victims, it did mention a suspect waving a weapon.

"If someone's in a public place, reported to be brandishing a firearm and when you arrive, you see what you believe to be a firearm, that Homeland Security definition... 'Either actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people,' that gives (police) a little bit of wiggle room," says Aveni, who heads the Police Policy Studies Council , a New Hampshire-based organization that studies police use of deadly force.

"If they arrive and Tamir Rice has this replica gun in hand and let's say he brandishes it... in such a way that they think somebody is in imminent danger, I could see where they could use this definition," Aveni continues.

According to Loehmann's statement, the officers were at a neighborhood church when they heard the dispatch of a "male waiving (sic) a gun and pointing at people." The officers' statement said they were closest to Cudell Park, a city recreation center, so they took the call.

As Loehmann recalled, Rice was sitting alone at a gazebo, and the police saw him pick up "an object" and stick it in his waistband. They said they thought he was going to go inside the recreation center, but when they rolled up, instead of heading toward the building, Rice turned toward the squad car. According to a report commissioned by Rice's family and released Friday, Loehmann shot Rice less than a second after opening his car door, and the child was not reaching for the toy at that time. (Reports released by Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Tim McGinty suggested slightly more time elapsed and concluded that the shooting was justified.)

What the police should have done is warn Rice to drop the object, according to JC Shegog, a law-enforcement trainer who's worked for Dyncorp and Blackwater and is based in Nashville, Tennessee.

"If there are no shots being fired, if no one is being hit, you don't respond with deadly force," he said.

That Rice turned toward the squad car seems to have escalated the situation in the officers' minds. "The suspect had a gun, had been threatening others with the weapon, and had not obeyed our command to show us his hands," Loehmann said in his statement. "This was an active shooter situation."

Check out our documentary about a serial killer who terrorized Cleveland and exposed flaws in local policing.

Of course, if Loehmann really believed he was in such a situation, he may have also thought he had little time to save himself or potential victims. The DHS says active shooting episodes are short—typically only ten to 15 minutes—and extremely volatile.

That's why Aveni—like many observers—can't help but think how differently things might have gone if the dispatcher had relayed the original caller 9-1-1 caller's suspicion that the suspect was probably kid playing with a fake gun.

"If somebody told me that the person I'm dealing with might be 13... I'm going to weigh that in before I arrive. If somebody tells me that (the weapon) might be a toy, I'm certainly going to weigh that in... before I arrive."

Afi Scruggs is a freelance reporter and content creator who lives in suburban Cleveland. Follow her on Twitter.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: Former President Jimmy Carter Says He's Now Cancer-Free

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Cheery Jimmy photo via Wikicommons

Read: How Jimmy Carter Made Me Want to Become a Better Person

In August, Jimmy Carter released a statement announcing that he had cancer and was seeking treatment. Now, only a few months later, the 91-year-old former president is in the clear after a brain scan confirmed that he was cancer-free, the Associated Press reports.

"When I went this week, they didn't find any cancer at all," Carter told a Georgia church on Sunday. "So I have good news."

Carter had been taking a newly-approved cancer drug called Keytruda along with the standard radiation treatment, and will continue to take doses of the drug every three weeks while doctors continue to scan his body for new cancer cells.

"The majority of patients can tolerate these drugs extremely well, even patients of an advanced age," Dr. Douglas Johnson, a Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center melanoma specialist, told the AP. "It's very different from traditional chemotherapy."

The Englishman Who Celebrates Christmas Every Day Looks Back at 2015

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

2015 has been fucking weird, to be honest. It hasn't been nearly as good as 2014. 2014 was bomb. The World Cup was on and I just got shitfaced every single day and hung out at my mate's houses smoking myself to sleep. Now I have a job and I have get up for shit all the time and everyone is trying to explode everyone else and the ISIS and the FIFA and blah blah blah. Let's face it, it's been a roundly depressing year. Not for one man, though. For Mr. Christmas, the year has gone like every year before since 1993, because he celebrated Christmas every day.

Mr. Christmas, or Andy Park, is a friend of VICE. Last year we sent him on a triple blind date with our writer Gavin Haynes and a goth. But we didn't want to plunge The Spirit of Christmas himself into another sticky situation (unless by sticky you mean eating a lovely Christmas pud-pud!). Between planning his own funeral, where he wants Slade to play and the Pope to deliver his eulogy, and posting a Christmas card to himself every day, we got him round to do a little taste test. Mince pies, puddings, and of course some party food, from Waitrose, Sainsbury's and Iceland. After rating each one on how Christmassy it was, we asked him about key points in the year, how they affected his daily drive for an eternal festive tiding, and what he would do if he were the UK prime minister. He also has a single out (he releases one every year) which is, I say without a shred of irony, actually pretty good.

MINCE PIES

SAINSBURY'S

Oh my god. That ain't a bad start. Sainsbury's you're winning. The fruitiness, very good. The firmness of it as well. I remember last year the kind of mince pies they crumble in your hand. These are very firm. I would say they were very Christmassy. They were very good. I can only buy mince pies up until the end of January, so I get a lady locally who makes them for me all year round. But they're as good as these pies, to be honest.

CONSERVATIVES RE-ELECTED (MAY)

This was one hell of a shock to me because I had no idea they would get in. I honestly thought one of the green parties would get in, because we've had Labour, we've had Conservative, but they've done no good, I don't think. It's just the same sort of thing like people always say the Conservatives are for the rich, Labour are for the poor, they tried Liberal and Conservative together, that didn't really make much difference. I really thought the Green Party would get in, or what's his name, Nigel Farage, I thought he would do well. I was so shocked. So I actually voted for Nigel Farage and unfortunately it didn't happen. He was very upset, obviously, because he put his heart and soul into it. I mean David Cameron, alright he's there for a purpose, he does do a lot of good things but a lot of things I disagree with him about.

ICELAND

If you've got your family to Christmas dinner and they see some holly on the top like that, look, see that's good. It's nice to see a bit of a holly.

This is stronger, this has even more fruit than the last one. Oh wow! Yeah, there's certainly a lot of difference here. I'd say they're better than the Sainsbury's one. Sorry Sainsbury's! I think there are more currants in these. This is the Iceland one isn't it? I think it's got more currants in.

SEPP BLATTER RESIGNS DUE TO FRAUD ALLEGATIONS (JUNE)

That was a bit of a shock to me as well. Who would have thought he would have done that? On the fiddle, telling lies, making money behind people's backs, making decisions without consulting all the presidents of the FIFA—I couldn't believe he'd done that. How many houses has he got? How many fast cars has he got? He's got a Rolls Royce. He's got a great big Mercedes. Five- or six-bedroom houses everywhere. Loaded with money, but where's it all coming from? Let's hope he loses it—it's not fair. I've always wondered about that guy: When I saw him on the national news, or when the World Cup took place, I thought he don't look a very kosher guy, but that's all I thought. Then when that came out on the news, I couldn't believe it. It is quite upsetting, you know. Everyone in that football organization trusted that guy. Even I did. I'm not much of a very close football fan but I do know what's going on. When you hear something that's happened like that, you think, "Crumbs, all these people paying for tickets and all that stuff, they're supporting him in a funny sort of way, some of the money's ending up in his back pocket." Yeah, it's not fair.

WAITROSE

To be honest I've never seen a mince pie that looks like this. I eat thousands of mince pies every year, as you know, but I've never seen them like this before. If you'd shown me that in March I wouldn't think it was a mince pie. But, the proof is in the pudding, or should I say, the proof is in the pie—let's taste it. Mmmm! Wow. Wow. Not bad so far. It's certainly different, that's nuts on the top there is it? I'd be in trouble if I had an allergy, wouldn't I? It doesn't look Christmassy but it certainly tastes Christmassy. If I was going on taste only I think I would go for the Waitrose one.

GAY MARRIAGE IN IRELAND (MAY)

Well I think as the years go by, there's more gay people coming up front, admitting that they're gay and also lesbians as well. It's not the way God made us but if that's the way they are, so be it, let them be. If they're happy, let them marry—no problem. I don't think they're hurting anybody at all, so I'll go along with that, it's not a problem in my eyes. I entertain in pubs in clubs, and where I entertain—and I know there's lots of gay people go there—and they're friends, some of them talk to me. I make it plain that it doesn't bother me whether they're gay, straight, normal, I don't care. I am what I am. I'm not like that, but to me they're people, and it's what they want to do and it's what they are—nothing will change them on this earth. So it makes no difference to me and Christmas at all.

PARTY SNACKS

SAINSBURY'S MINI QUICHES

I think the Sainsbury's quiches look like normal pieces, nothing out of the ordinary. They smell nice and they certainly taste good. I just tried the cheese and bacon. Amazing. Really nice. Not very Christmassy though, but to fill a buffet spot up, I'd use them, if it's just to make a buffet look good, that's what I'd go for. Sainsbury's could have made them a little bit bigger, put something Christmassy on top just like the mince pies did. You could have a nut flavor, maybe have a little bit of turkey in there to enhance the smell. Very nice, but not very Christmassy. You could give me them in March and I'd eat them as normal. But December they should honestly be a bit more Christmassy.

RUBELLA WIPED OUT IN THE USA (APRIL)

I think honestly we should spend more money on things like you just said, rubella. I think eating a roast dinner every day is good for you. Turkey is white meat, sprouts is vegetables, so is carrots, swede, it's all good stuff. The things that aren't so good for you are things like mince pies, Christmas pudding, lots of cream, lots of drink. But if you drink a little bit of wine or a glass of sherry, in moderation, you can't go wrong. And not only that, how often have you heard that a glass of wine a day is fantastic for you, especially red wine? Bear in mind I don't go out and have Chinese, Indian—it's always Christmas dinner, and I think it's good to always eat white meat, chicken, or turkey or duck, it doesn't matter.

ICELAND LUXURY MINI COQUILLE ST. JACQUES

They look very unusual. Never seen them dished up in a shell before, but being a seafood I'd have thought... what is it, crab? I must admit, very nice. But then again, it doesn't look very Christmassy, and I don't think it is very Christmassy. But to fill a buffet space, it would look good. All in, I don't think that's very Christmassy at all.

REFUGEE CRISIS (ONGOING)

I feel sorry for the refugees that are trying to get in this country, because they've got no room to live in. I really do think, if I had a massive big house, I'd try and put some of them up, it would be great you know. It's so sad to see these people on the news. All they carry is a sack—that's their whole life. Because they've lost everything else, and it is sad. And I would do all I can to help.

WAITROSE VOL-AU-VENTS

They look like a Christmas tree don't they? They're called vol-au-vents you say? I think this would do it. It's got the looks and it's got the taste, lovely. I'm thinking that's it's nice, I could imagine eating these in people's houses over the Christmas period. It tastes lovely, tastes nice.

GERMAN WINGS, OR HOW OFTEN DO YOU FEEL THE STING OF SADNESS (MARCH)

To be honest, not a lot. I always try and wake up happy, I try and stay happy throughout the day. I make music, I do a radio show. I'm a DJ in a local pub and play the guitar, play in a band, singing, playing with the guys. That makes me very happy. Going to nice restaurants, nice places, I like classy meals, I like having Christmas dinners and that. A real classy pub's fantastic. If I feel as though I'm a little bit down, I do something quick to boost myself up. And it works. Try it.

CHRISTMAS PUDDING

SAINSBURY'S TASTE THE DIFFERENCE CHRISTMAS PUDDING

It looks absolutely fantastic, really smells good, going to pour some cream on. Smells very fruity, very rich, but that's how a Christmas pudding should taste. O-M-G. Nice, very nice. Tastes good.

GREEK ECONOMY (ONGOING)

I wish I knew the answer to that question. Because if I knew it I'm sure the government of Greece would know it as well. So I can't answer that question, because how come it's only happened in Greece then? How come it hasn't happened in any other country? Can't understand that. Something's not happening there, is there, Greece. If they celebrated like me they wouldn't have time to get themselves into a turmoil. Maybe they need to boost up the turkey produce!

ICELAND CHRISTMAS PUDDING

Wow, I've got a funny feeling it's going to taste exactly the same! Mmm, it's a bit hotter. About the same as that one. Currants are bigger in here. Nice big currants. Look at the size of the currants. Wow. Yes, to be honest, it's a little bit weaker flavor-wise that the other one. Still a Christmas pud, still tastes good, I wouldn't say no to that. Still lovely.

WHAT TO DO ABOUT ISIS

Well that is... ISIS is a massive club, if you like. You don't know where they are, they could be in any country any time. You could see four or five ISIS people walk down the street, you wouldn't recognize them. You could put a bomb in Piccadilly, it could go off, boom. Next day could have a bomb in Manchster or Bristol, you don't know. I don't think we'll ever get shot of them. I don't think we'll ever get rid of ISIS. Because that's what they do. Who would have thought this problem in France would have happened. France blown up? One hundred twenty-nine people dead? I really couldn't have believed it.

WAITROSE CHRISTMAS PUDDING

Here it is again, what I just said. That tastes the same as what I just tasted. Maybe a bit more doughy. . Definitely more dough in this, more doughy, needs more chewing, but for looks it just looks the same as others. The doughiness makes it less pleasant. It's my least favorite out of the three. It wouldn't stop me from buying them, of course.

CHARLIE HEBDO (JANUARY)

Well sometimes I get questioned about this kind of thing and I get stuck for words. It doesn't change the fact that I still want to celebrate Christmas every day but my heart goes out to those people, injured, and some people died, and you know, it doesn't change people, we can't stop living, I still think we got to go on doing what we do, doing what we like doing. I like celebrating Christmas everyday, and it's not going to stop that but I do feel for people like that. Over the years a lot of people have come up to me and said Andy, it's about time you stopped celebrating Christmas everyday. People will think you're mad, you're crazy. But I don't care what they think. I'm having a good time and I meet a lot nice people through it. And I make records and enjoy doing all that sort of stuff. And it's got me well-known for some reason. No one will stop me doing it, no matter what, no matter what.

So there we have it. Mr. Christmas will not bow down to ISIS, and they sure as shit won't make him stop doing his thing, which is celebrating Christmas every single fucking day of every single fucking year. The food changes, the times change, the people change, but if we can put our confidence in one thing, it's that this mad cunt from Melksham, Wiltshire will be eating a roast dinner every day, and watching the Queen's speech another 8,000 times from now until eternity.

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