Does this hairy face look like a “pitcher” or “catcher” to you? Image via.

I try to abstain from making assumptions about the sex life of other people—because sometimes looks can be deceiving. The little old lady pushing her grocery cart might, against all expectations, like it rough in the sack. The burly, catcalling construction worker could enjoy chamomile cuddle sessions with his special someone rather than jackhammering any piece of tail that walks by. Everyone has sex—except nuns and rollerbladers—and outward appearances aren’t always a reliable window into a person’s intimate preferences. At least that’s what I’ve always thought.

After reading a paper from researchers at the University of Toronto, which was released last month, I might have to rethink that, ahem, position. Dr. Nicholas O. Rule and Konstantin Tskhay asked 23 people to guess the sexual inclinations of 200 gay men based on neutral photographs of their faces. Gay men, scientists have shown, tend to self-identify as one of three sexual types: “top,” taking on the insertive role; “bottom,” being a receiver; and “versatile,” enjoying both sexual roles. It’s also been documented that sexual preferences tend to align with stereotypical gender dynamics; in general, tops tend to be dominant and masculine, while bottoms are more inclined to be submissive and effeminate. It seems pretty clichéd if you ask me, but I guess we all have to live under the patriarchy.

The researchers were testing whether there is a correspondence between the physical markers of masculinity, like facial hair and strong features, and self-professed sexual preference. Nicholas and Konstantin’s study gathered pictures of 200 men, half tops and half bottoms, and showed them to 16 men and seven women selected randomly from Amazon’s mTurk. It turned out that even when faces were taken completely out of context, the study participants were able to guess the men’s preferences at a rate better than chance. All this suggests that our desires might not be as private or unpredictable as we like to think.

Or it means jack shit, because the sample size was so insanely small.

Overall, Nicholas and Konstantin’s paper elicits more questions than it answers. In the study, participants tended to name more tops than bottoms, revealing an innate gender bias toward identifying men of any sexuality with the dominant role. That issue brings up some chicken-and-the-egg questions about the spectrum of “masculinity.” Does its perception dictate the sexual role in gay as well as straight relationships, or is it a reflection of a particular inclination? What does it means that masculinity, a cultural and biological construction, is observable in the human face? I spoke to Nicholas about his past research on women’s gaydar, perceptions of masculinity, and how you might be able to guess what a dude likes by looking at his face.

VICE: The study size was pretty small. Can you really make sweeping conclusions about perception based on the reactions of 23 people you met on the internet?
Dr. Nicholas O. Rule: Great question. I guess N = 23 might seem small. The effects that we tend to get in these sorts of social perception experiments are rather robust, however, so the statistical power needed to achieve reliable effects doesn't require huge samples.

The fact that we had more men than women was incidental. In most psychological research, it's almost always the opposite—women tend to make up a greater share than men. In this instance, we had no reason to believe that men and women would differ in their judgments, and so we didn't make an effort to balance the number of men and women. Rather, we just took what random chance delivered, which here ended up being more men than women.

A previous study you conducted established that ovulation improves the accuracy with which women are able to distinguish between gay and straight men. Is there any proof that this factor affects women’s ability to distinguish between tops and bottoms?
We didn’t explicitly take this into account. We didn’t ask female participants about their fertility. There is certainly reason to hypothesize, based on previous work, that women may perceive tops and bottoms differently depending on their fertility status. For instance, earlier work done by researchers like Neil Macrae, Lucy Johnston, Ian Penton-Voak, and others found effects in which women preferred the faces of masculine men when ovulating and feminine men at other points in their cycles—I am loosely paraphrasing their results here. It stands to reason that women might be more attentive to the faces of tops versus bottoms during ovulation, owing to correlations between being a top and perceived masculinity. That said, their ability to distinguish between tops and bottoms would probably not be affected, as the presumed motivation to distinguish the two wouldn’t necessarily vary depending on which side of the division they are attending to more closely. The two are defined by relative opposition to each other, so identifying one leads to an inference about the other.

In a study like this, how do you separate cultural signifiers and stereotypes of masculinity from biological indications of masculinity? Do you see the categories as interchangeable or inextricable? Is it possible to parse the differences?
In this study we actually didn’t separate the two. I don’t think that they’re necessarily interchangeable, but rather that one serves as a proxy or representative for the other. What I mean by that is there are ostensible biological markers of higher levels of testosterone, for example, which are related both to the development of certain facial features as well as predispositions to particular behaviors.

They don’t correspond perfectly, however, so the perception of the features can serve as an approximation by proxy for what some would define as biological masculinity. That said, the way that we generally think of masculinity is in terms of its behavioral manifestations, apart from the fact that one could feasibly construct a measure of how masculine an individual is biologically.

In a study on perception, we’re typically more interested in perceived masculinity, as derived from behaviors. These would correspond best to the cultural signifiers and stereotypes to which you refer but, of course, would also interact with what is available from the biologically-derived cues as well.

@roseolm

Just when you were over this twerking nonsense, news broke about the greatest twerk ever twerked. An unnamed woman was seen doing the infamous dance outside an apartment building in Brooklyn. Surveillance footage later showed her and a male accomplice stealing the contents of two packages shipped to one of the inhabitants of the building. We got a twerking thief on our hands, boys and girls!

The victim of this theft was Lindsey Riddle, a 27-year-old Graphics Coordinator (huh?) at VH1. Allegedly, she came home one evening to find that two packages mailed to her and her boyfriend were ripped open, and the contents were removed. They looked through surveillance footage and spotted the suspects. The twerking bandit kept watch while the second bandit stole the mail.

Lindsey explained that the best part of getting her stuff stolen was seeing the female suspect twerk outside. She told Gothamist, “Her endurance was rather impressive. I'm not exaggerating when I say she did this for an hour. A couple of my neighbors walked into the building, and she stopped momentarily and then started up hardcore as soon as their backs were to her.” What, you think twerking comes naturally? No, it takes practice. Butts and hips don't gyrate like that magically, and if you think otherwise, you're a damn amateur.

The incident was so amusing to Lindsey, she uploaded a video of sped-up surveillance footage showing the woman twerking her heart out. In the description, she wrote, “Beware Brooklyn, there's a twerking thief on the loose!” Did you hear that Brooklyn? Live in fear. Your precious purchase of yet another tablet is in danger of being taken from you. Can you say, “Worst Christmas ever?”

Usually, I don't find crime to be excusable, but something about this makes me side with the thief. The Graphics Coordinator got her stuff stolen and then found enough humor in it to exploit the woman but also still file a police report. 

The twerking really clouds my judgement. An hour of twerking is a really long time. I'd like to think that maybe this woman was practicing for a national twerking competition where the grand prize was a large sum of money that she desperately needed to pay her grandmother's medical bills. The twerking bandit and her twerk coach needed to steal Lindsey's belongings to get money to pay the entrance fee. Once she won the competition, she planned to save grandma and then reimburse Lindsey for items lost. Wow! What an uplifting tale this has become. Sorry that you're crying about this heart-warming story.

Image via.

I know I suck at creating pseudonyms for people. Although the Weediquette characters may seem cartoonish, they're all real people. That said, I recognize I don't always portray people accurately—when I discuss someone in a story, I simplify a person into a character. There’s a lot more to these awesome people, so this week I’m updating you on a few of their lives.

My Aunt from “Getting High with the Family”
This story shaped my column. I strived to top it, but I couldn't. My aunt remembered the experience as a nightmare, but after reading the story from my perspective, she recognized the lighter side of the ordeal. I tried to get her to smoke with me since then, but she chickened out. I can't really blame her. At Thanksgiving, she expressed interest in edibles, but her kids, my cousins, barred me from giving her any. I guess there's always Christmas.

Marv from “The Amplifier Effect” and “Getting Chased by the Cops”
Although the stories about this college homie always involved drunken shenanigans, I refrained from mentioning his involvement in one of the most serious Weediquette stories. In “I Like to Stay Home,” I described a 14-year-old mugger stabbing me in the throat with a glass bottle—this happened when I was drinking with Marv. He's the one who pulled me out of this shit and took me to the hospital. Marv saved my life, but he hates when I bring it up.

I still talk to Marv on the reg, and lately he’s been telling me that his mom and girlfriend are fervently trying to get him to adopt weed as a substitute for alcohol. They’re tired of his drunken rowdiness and are attempting to make him a mellower man. I'm planning on influencing him in the coming year.

Poe from “Prohibition Smoke Down in Philly”
When I visited the Prohibition Smoke Down demonstration in Philadelphia, I caught one of the last demonstrations to end peacefully. At the following month's event, the police presence was denser, and at the protest after that, a joint force of city cops and park rangers raided Independence Mall National Park. Along with Adam Kokesh, N.A. Poe was arrested and charged. He spent several days in the slammer—as his cohorts protested outside the building, of course—and he subsequently fought a handful of charges. This week, he was sentenced to a year of probation that requires him to be regularly drug tested. It's not that bad, but I'll have to check in with him a few weeks into his forced abstinence.

Egon from “Egon the Blunt Getter”
During college, this goon brought out the worst in me. Egon remained a pebble in my shoe after freshmen year, but I eventually softened my attitude towards him. In retrospect, I realized Egon was the bigger man. I would go off on him for minutes at a time, and he would sit there like Gandhi, staring back at me with blank, peaceful eyes. He’s doing really well now. Right after college ended, he found a great job, and recently he became engaged. I only know this through Facebook, but he does hit me up once in a while, usually referencing some positive college memory. In my memory, experiences with him meant frustration, but in his mind those were little hiccups in our friendship.

My Dad from “My Dad Is Not Down”
After discovering this article, which disses him for dissing my weed habit, my dad gently confronted me about it. He briefly apologized for not understanding my choices but then lectured me about how I needed to quit smoking for health reasons. This made me realize his main reason for disliking cannabis was that he grew up believing weed was bad—he simply didn't want his kid doing something bad. It's a very dad reasoning for hating weed. I'm visiting my dad again soon, and I wonder if the conversation will arise again. I hope it doesn't. Although it's nice to discuss disagreements in the open, I doubt my dad will ever see weed from my point-of-view. There's no point in bringing up a point of contention.

The Old Chinese Man from “Hate in an Elevator”
The old Chinese man still works on the floor below me, so I run into him at least once a week. We always meet in the haunted-ass elevator. He doesn’t speak much English, but we always have a good laugh about getting stuck in the elevator. The vibes in the elevator during the incident were pretty bad, but the vibes of recollecting our survival are always great.

Jummy from “Jummy’s Infinite Stash”
I wanted to include background about my friendship with Jummy in this piece, but it wasn't relevant to the story. When we were 15 or 16, he and I started a punk band called The Fascist Police and wrote a bunch of awful (but awesome) songs together. We also plastered stickers all over town bearing the band’s name and the band's simple logo—a police badge with a pig’s face on it. This may or may not have contributed to our police woes in subsequent summers.

Charles from “The Guy Who was Raped by a Girl”
I didn't know Charles was gay when the Dude raped him. I'm unsure if this made his experience more fucked-up or difficult to cope with, and I wonder if my friends and I would have reacted differently if we knew he was gay. Knowing his sexuality makes the trauma of waking up next to a girl nicknamed the Dude seem much worse.

Bol from “Bol the Acid Tripper”
As a regular reader of my column, Bol immediately recognized himself in this story. He hit me up and apologized for seeming like a psychedelic elitist. We’ve had debates about psychedelics in the past, so he wasn’t surprised his behavior annoyed me. He still indulges in extracurriculars more often than I do, but I think he agrees with me that it’s purely recreational and not the path to a higher plane. If it is, he’s ascending to the sky way faster than I am.

Tal from “P.J. the Narc”
I rarely spoke to former high school classmates after graduation, but Tal resurfaced when I moved to West Philly during college. He lived near my place, and he accepted interesting trades for nugs. My housemates worked at a local pizza parlor, so we occasionally traded whole pizza pies for weed from Tal. All parties were thoroughly pleased with the outcome. I have no idea what happened to P.J.

“Sorry for the clip show. Have no fears, we’ll have stories for years.”

@ImYourKid

Image via 

I knew Nelson Mandela's name almost as soon as I knew my own. Over the hum of Saturday morning cartoons, my South African mother told me Nelson Mandela was her hero. She explained that South Africa was her home, and that was where Mandela came from. As a child, I couldn't comprehend her stories about South Africa and Mandela's bravery—my mother's home seemed like a myth—but as I grew older, I began to understand my mother's stories. 

Over three decades ago, my mother immigrated from South Africa to America. Although as a white woman she was barred from visiting the townships where the government forced blacks to live, she broke the law to visit her friend Carmen. Eventually, the cops found out and began following my mother. Afraid of being arrested for violating the country's racist laws, my mother decided to flee the country.

For years, my mother saw Mandela as a symbol of hope that brave people might one day fight Apartheid and end institutionalized racism. From America, she watched with awe when Mandela left prison and Apartheid ended. In the wake of Mandela's death, my mother has spoken to me several times about her past. This week, I sat down with my mother, Chryl Resnick, to talk about growing up in Apartheid-era South Africa, sneaking into townships, and why Mandela is her hero. 

VICE: What was it like to know that Apartheid existed while you were in South Africa?
Chryl Resnick: As soon as I was old enough to understand what was going on around me—which was pretty early on in my life—I knew that it was dead wrong. I couldn’t understand why it existed. It always seemed wrong to me. I couldn’t understand when I took Spanish dancing lessons with my friend Carmen, why I wasn’t allowed to be friends with her. She wasn’t allowed to come over to my house, because it was illegal. Black people couldn’t come over to white people’s houses. I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t allowed to go to her house.

Did you try to hang out with her when you could? 
I think Carmen did come to my apartment a couple of times. The only time that non-white people could come into the white communities was to work in people’s homes or as domestic servants—they couldn’t come on a social basis. 

What was it like to enter the townships to visit Carmen?
I remember one morning we went there the night after Carmen's brother had gotten the crap beaten out of him by the police—there had been a raid. I remember how uncomfortable I felt that he had to endure that at the hands of the white police.

Was it uncomfortable because you felt guilty?
I felt like it was my fault. I'm white.

Eventually, you discovered the police were following you, because you had visited a township. How did you find out?
A friend called my mother and told my mother that it might be better if we got out of the country, because the telephones were being tapped and we were being followed. I do recall one day walking on Sea Point Beach and feeling like I was being followed. I assumed I would have been arrested if I were caught. As a white person, it was illegal to go into townships. 

Was this around the same time that you became aware of Nelson Mandela?
I was always aware of Nelson Mandela. He's been my hero for a very long time. I always was negative about myself from the perspective that I wished I had the courage and the guts to stand by my convictions—I was too afraid to end up in jail. I looked at Mandela and thought, My God, I wish I could be more like you—more brave like you.

What do you think you would have done if you didn’t worry about imprisonment?
If had I stayed in South Africa, I would have become incredibly politically active. It always seemed wrong to me, and I couldn’t understand it. I have to admit, I was never courageous enough to protest. I was always scared of what would have happened to me.

Do you regret that you didn't stay and become politically active?
I regret having missed the most important events in South African history. When I left in 1976, a lot of people my age were leaving—my generation left. We really left in droves.

What do you think set you apart from people who accepted Apartheid?
I can only look inside my own family. I think my mother set me apart. My father was born and raised in South Africa, and that’s all he knew. That was the system he was raised in, and that’s what he knew. My mother never believed in Apartheid. Another part of it was that my brother never believed in Apartheid either.

Did you ever get the chance to hear Mandela speak?
The only event that I went to where I saw him in person was in 1990 at the Los Angeles Coliseum after he was released from prison. It was one of the most amazing experiences of my life. I looked around the LA Coliseum—which I think holds 85,000 people—and it was packed to capacity. It was overflowing. All I could tell you is that when Nelson and his wife Winnie walked across the stage, tears streamed down my face. I never thought I would see that man alive. 

@GideonResnick

California Attorney General Kamala Harris announced the arrest of Kevin Christopher Bollaert. Image via.

You know how back in the day we could walk into a big-box retail store and buy a few sweatshirts with ease, because we didn't know about the evils of sweatshop labors? Those were glorious days of ignorant bliss, but thanks to Netflix documentaries, our days as happy-go-lucky consumers are over—and now whether you like it or now, the same informed decision-making process has made its way into our sweat soaked computer chairs. We can no longer visit revenge porn sites and convince ourselves we're watching actresses who wanted to be photographed, because we all know that's bullshit. For example, this week, California Attorney General Kamala Harris announcement the arrest of Kevin Christopher Bollaert, the 27-year-old founder of the revenge porn site ugotposted.com, because his site existed to extort young women out of money. In other words, if you're one of those assholes who emails photos of your ex-girlfriend to a shady website because she broke your poor, little heart, you're an asshole. By the way, if you're visiting these sites with this knowledge, you're a dick too. Have some dignity with your spank material, people!

At the heart of medicine is a pile of money. Image via. 

There are many people to blame for breast implant horror stories: men who can't control themselves around a big pair of boobies, women who believe the size of their mammaries correlates to their personal worth, and doctors who say they're participating in a billion-dollar industry to boost women's self-esteem as if they're working pro bono. (Fill in your own pro boner joke here.) This week, a French judge gave Jean-Claude Mas, the founder of PIP, a company that produced implants, his comeuppance and sentenced him to four years in prison for selling defective implants. 

Prison, where poor people are sent to rot. Image via. 

Right when we think Texas can't get liberals' genital garments in a bigger bundle, Texas goes and does this. Some backstory: Over the summer, 16-year-old Ethan Couch stole two cases of beer, downed a decent amount of them, drove 70 miles an hour (30 miles over the speed limit), and then ran into a broken-down car on the side of the road, creating a collision that killed four people. At the crash site, Ethan had a BAC of 0.24 (three times the legal limit) and had some Valium in his system. The prosecution asked to send Ethan behind bars for 20 years, but the judge sentenced him to ten years of probation instead. Yes, that's right.  Ethan won't serve a single day behind bars. Why? Because the defense's psychologist, Dr. G. Dick Miller, claimed Ethan was too rich. His parents gave him too much freedom and didn't punish him when police found him in a parked pick-up truck with a passed-out, undressed 14-year-old girl last year. He was so used to getting away with everything, he couldn't have been expected to not drink and drive and kill people. It should be noted that in the same week, a 13-year-old boy in Louisiana, who killed his sister while practicing his wrestling moves, was sentenced to three years in a juvenile facility. The big difference? The 13-year-old wasn't deemed wealthy enough to commit a crime. 

A map of every pothead's new favorite tourist destination. Image via.

Let's end with a little good news. This week, Uruguay became the first country in the world to completely legalize the planting and selling of marijuana. The law goes into effect on April 11. (Why they wouldn't wait another ten days is beyond me.) However, this might not happen if the UN continues to harsh our mellow by claiming Uruguay is breaking international drug laws. Luckily for us, the UN has little legitimate power. See you in Uruguay!

@RickPaulas

If you're a motorcycle and moustache fanatic, you may have noticed that we ran a contest to find Canada's most fantastic moustache with our bike riding pals over at Harley Davidson and—according to 1,932 clicks driven from the crazy matrix that is social media—the dude at the top of this article is sporting Canada's most tantalizing 'stache. This lucky guy won about $3,000 in Harley Davidson merchandise which just goes to show, if you have a nice enough stache and enough friends on Facebook, dreams truly can come true. 'Stache on, bro.

Scam-baiting is a form of internet vigilantism in which the vigilante poses as a potential victim to expose a scammer. It’s essentially grassroots social engineering conducted as civic duty or even amusement, a cross-cultural double bluff in which participants on separate continents try to outdo each other in an online tug-of-war for one’s time and resources—and the other’s private banking information.

The baiter begins by “biting the hook”— answering an email from the scammer. The “victim” feigns receptivity to the financial lure, engaging the scammer in a drawn-out chain of emails. The most important element of baiting is to waste as much of the scammer’s time as possible—when a scammer is preoccupied, it prevents him from conning genuine victims.

The cover of the issue you’re looking at is a trophy from the most elaborate bait I’ve ever been involved in. Three scammers, spread across Libya and the United Arab Emirates, set the con. They posed as a widow named Nourhan Abdul Aziz, a doctor named Dr. Ahmadiyya Ibrahim, and a banker going by Ephraim Adamoah. From Nourhan’s initial contact with my associ- ate, Condo Rice, to Ephraim’s actually donning an Obama mask and shooting our cover for us, 7,000 words were exchanged over nearly four months of emails. During that time, Condo and I negotiated our way through a labyrinthine net- work of fake websites, bogus documents, and broken English, and ended up with the weirdest photograph I’ve seen in a long time.

All illustrations by Sam Taylor.

Do you ever get the feeling that everyone you meet is lying to you? Well, that’s because they probably are—the world is full of people who will lie, cheat, rob, and hustle, putting on elaborate cons just to snatch a few bucks. An honest day’s work is for fucking losers, apparently, and it’s far, far easier to steal from the 7 billion gullible suckers roaming the earth. We asked our offices around the world to compile some stories of scams and dishonest rackets—big, small, innocent, fun, or despicable acts—and this is what they came back with. (Some names have been changed at the request of our sources because they admit to having committed illegal acts.)

HOW I ROBBED A BANK

I was pursuing the classical career path in the Swiss finance sector. I’d attended business school, gotten work at the cashier’s desk in a bank, then moved up to the private banking department, which got me my own office. Three months before my training as a stockbroker was about to start, I had an epiphany and realized that this life wasn’t really what I wanted. I quit my job, but I was required by contract to work there for another three months.

If you work in a bank and have all that money running through your hands day after day, you will always look for holes in the security system. What keeps people from stealing the cash is the fear of jeopardizing their careers, but that fear was gone the moment I quit.

Places like nightclubs that have lots of cash to deposit put their nightly take in bank-issued pouches and drop them into a special mailbox outside the bank that leads directly to an underground safe. Every morning, a clerk at the cashier’s desk goes down into the bank’s cellar to collect those bags and deposits the money into the appropriate account.

I knew that very early every Tuesday morning, somebody threw two to three cash bags into that mailbox, containing around 100,000 francs (about $109,000) each. There was no camera surveillance on the mailbox and minimal coverage inside the bank. The path down to the bank’s cellar was not under surveillance either. I imagine they’ve changed that by now.

My assumption when I planned the heist was that if money was “lost” in between the time the customer dropped his bag and when it was transferred to his account, neither the bank nor the customer would be able to figure out at what point exactly that cash had gone missing.

I started coming in early every morning so I could be around at the time the vault was scheduled to be emptied. I told my bosses I wanted a few extra hours since I was leaving soon and needed to save up. One morning around 8 AM I casually went to the coffee machine and made myself a cup. Then I placed it on my desk, making it appear as if I had been working and had just stepped out for a moment to go to the bathroom. Then I took the elevator to the cellar, opened the safe, grabbed one of the three money bags, and stuffed it into my pants. I had arranged for a friend to meet me for lunch in the bank’s canteen, where I gave him the bag. He took it to my place and the whole thing was done.

After five days the police were involved and had interrogated the entire staff. The easiest, and what should be the first, part of a heist like that is to find a way to do it and get away with it. The much harder part is the time after you have accomplished your mission and have to avoid suspicion and handling the constant pressure of not knowing exactly how much the police and your boss know.

Eventually, I couldn’t stand the pressure anymore and gave up. I went into my boss’s office and put the money on his desk. He fired me on the spot, and I was charged for my crimes.

“GARY,” AS TOLD TO TILL RIPPMAN
 

SCANNER SCAMMERS

I’ve been involved in criminal activity all my life, since I was 15, and I’ve been in and out of prison since. I’ve gotten [arrested] for selling cocaine, firearms, three assaults on police officers… It goes on and on. If you keep getting arrested for the same crime, you get bigger sentences, so I move on. Now I am mainly involved in fraud. A friend of mine told me about this scam we call electronic pickpocketing. We use a machine called an RFID reader, which reads credit cards. Why pickpocket when all you have to do is walk past them?

Basically, it can scan things as you walk past. On a busy street, you can walk past people, and it’ll swipe the numbers off their bank cards and put them onto the machine. It logs them all. We go out and collect the numbers, then pass them over to my mate who’s a computer engineer. He does his stuff with the numbers we collect, and that’s that.

I go to busy places and walk about, collecting the numbers. I’ve done it at football matches, easy. You need to be close to people—nearly touching them—for the reader to get the information, but no one’s ever caught me doing this. I’m like a space-age Fagin. There’s no real way of targeting people; sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, you just have to try. The most I’ve earned off the reader was 6,000 or 7,000 quid ($9,500 to $11,000) in a session. 

TOMMY “SWIPE”
 

FREE-MAGAZINE WARS

Frenchmen Street in New Orleans is the place for live traditional jazz, which means most nights there’s a crowd of tourists who show up for performances at a dozen different venues. Working these crowds is a guy named Emmett who makes his money scooping up multiple copies of OffBeat, the glossiest and most expensive-looking of the city’s abundant free music magazines, and selling them to gullible out-of-towners for five bucks apiece.

The city is home to a host of more dangerous criminal activities every night, but for some reason it’s Emmett who attracts a lot of anger and controversy. The vitriol against him is intense and ongoing. On neighborhood-association email lists, locals brainstorm ways to have him arrested. One of the founders of Three Muses, an upscale Frenchmen Street restaurant, started a Facebook page on which he uploads creepshots of Emmett and posts as Emmett using inherently disrespectful dialect. (“Just got ass rape… again” and “Dey was like dis yo house?” are recent examples.) A coffee shop off Frenchmen Street put a sign over the stacks of free publications that read ONE COPY PER CUSTOMER, PLEASE. Someone also put big signs on the telephone poles along Frenchmen: DO NOT PAY FOR OFFBEAT, IT IS A FREE MAGAZINE. Despite all of this, Emmett is still hocking his magazines.

JULES BENTLEY
 

NUMBERS GAME

I moved to Stockholm when I was 19 years old. I didn’t have any money, but I did have an ID card that belonged to some girl who looked like me. I also had a part-time customer-service job with a national internet provider, where I got access to people’s personal information and businesses’ tax-ID numbers. 

So my friend and I went to restaurants all over Sweden, pretending we worked at local newspapers. We told the restaurants to send the bills to the newspapers, and I authorized them with the company information I had gotten hold of at work. 

I also used people’s ID numbers to create several user accounts on Tradera, Scandinavia’s version of eBay. Whenever I needed money, I’d sell items that didn’t exist. I’d upload a photo of Kate Moss wearing a fur, remove her head from the photo, then say the fur was from some expensive brand. People would send me money for the fur or whatever, and they’d get nothing in return.

Nothing bad ever happened to me during the year and a half I was doing it, and I earned $3,500. The only hassle was setting up all these email addresses. I had a different one for each item that I “sold.” I think there must have been around 40 of them. 

If I ever got caught, I would have played stupid and told the police that I’d lost my passport and make them believe someone was pretending to be me. 

“MARIA JOHANSSON,” AS TOLD TO CAISA EDERYD
 

CARD CHEATS

In Paris tourists attract street crooks and pickpockets, which means tricksters are everywhere. They’re at the Sacré-Coeur Basilica, in front of Notre Dame, on the square at Saint-Michel, at Châtelet, and especially at the bottom of the Eiffel Tower. It’s there that a group of men—many of them Romanian and Bulgarian immigrants—fool passing marks into playing bonneteau, the French name for the infamous three-card Monte scam.

“The bonneteau is not really a card game,” according to Georg, who lures tourists to the tables where the sleight-of-hand artists hold court. “It’s a game of chance: once the cards are mixed, you must choose one of three cards in front of you. Only one is a king of spades. If you find it, you double your bet.”

Players usually win small bets at first, and then, as soon as they feel confident, will play for 100, 200, or even 500 euros ($135 to $675); the card shark slips the king of spades into his pocket unnoticed and the player loses. It’s the oldest trick in the book, but according to the Paris police, the 80-plus men who work these tables near the Eiffel Tower bring in a combined 2,000 euros a day.

Even if there isn’t a clear link between Eastern European organized-crime syndicates and these low-level hustlers, a spokesman for the Paris police whom we asked about the situation—and who arrested 33 Romanian bonneteau fraudsters in October—suggested it wasn’t so far-fetched: “Looking at the amount of money they make, it is not ridiculous to talk about a true Mafia.”

JULIEN MOREL
 

FAKE KIDNAPPINGS ARE A REAL PROBLEM

One Sunday evening in 2011, a man we’ll refer to as Carlos got a call while eating dinner with his wife. He heard what sounded like his grandson’s voice crying and sobbing. Thinking the 16-year-old had been kidnapped, he met with the criminals to give them what jewelry he had, but apparently that wasn’t enough for the ransom they were demanding. He pulled out 7,000 reals (around $3,000) from his bank account the next morning.

“The guys were professional,” Carlos said. “They were monitoring us, they called throughout the whole evening… You get really stupid in their hands; you’ll do anything they want.”

He gathered together his valuables and cash in such a rush that he didn’t pause to check to see if his grandson was really kidnapped. In reality, he was sleeping peacefully at Carlos’s son’s home—a fact he only realized while on his way to meet the criminals with the money.

This kind of fake kidnapping has become commonplace in Brazil over the past several years: Why actually snatch a child when you can just make some empty threats and trick people?

That said, calls that begin with begging and screaming (the criminals often use recordings) are hard to ignore in a country where real kidnappings are all too frequent, but the military police told me that the best way to deal with a situation like that is to stay calm, not give the person any information, and attempt to contact the alleged kidnapping victim.

Statistics about this type of crime in Brazil are scarce, since many victims don’t report these scams, but in 2007 the Associated Press reported that there were more than 3,000 complaints about fake kidnappings in the first 45 days of that year alone. Worse yet, it appears there’s little the police can do to stop this wave of fraud—if the cops do arrest the perps, chances are they’ll only be charged with larceny.

ANNA PAULA MASCARENHAS
 

YOU’VE ALREADY WON

If Canadians want to make thousands of dollars a week, all they have to do is trick their neighbors to the south into thinking they’ve won prizes. Simple enough, right?

The scheme is called “prize-pitching,” and according to a former telemarketing scammer, it works like this: someone in the US gets a call from a Canadian who has some good news—the person they’re calling has already won! Exactly what they’ve won varies; in one case I heard about it was a “boat with sails of the sturdiest canvas and floors of the richest mahogany.” All the lucky winners had to do was pay the border taxes to have it docked near their homes. These fees might be $300 or $400, but what’s a few hundred bucks when you’re getting a top-of-the-line sailboat, right? And get a boat the victims did: soon after they wired money—usually through Western Union—they received a box in the mail containing a foot-long model boat with canvas sails and mahogany floors.

The targeted victims are mostly elderly folks who are probably just happy to have someone to talk to. Once they lose their money to these fast-talking Canucks, they have little legal recourse—the most successful schemes are those that don’t break any serious laws, like the boat trick, and it’s difficult to prosecute scammers for cross-border crimes. And if the guys in charge are forced to shut one of these small-time scammers down after too many complaints, they can just recycle the fraudulent business in a week’s time, using a different name and setting up shop in a building down the street.

MARTHE CÔTÉ
 

PHANTOM FUNDS

Thanks to the political and economic turmoil still shaking up their country, an awful lot of Egyptians have tried to flee their homeland for the sunnier, more stable pastures of the USA. The options for coming to and staying in America legally are pretty difficult, however. You can get a family member in the US to sponsor you, but that process takes about 15 years to complete. You can enter a lottery for a green card, but that takes an enormous amount of luck. Or you can apply for a short-term visitor visa and keep renewing it.

The major problem is that the US requires any Egyptian applying for a visitor visa to show plenty of assets—businesses in their name and about 100,000 Egyptian pounds ($14,000) in their bank account—in order to demonstrate that they’re coming as a tourist eager to inject money into the American economy. (Having a business in your name demonstrates to immigration officials that you have a reason to return to Egypt.) Most Egyptians don’t have those kinds of assets, so those who wish to leave often take advantage of their country’s corruption.

On my last trip to Egypt, in June, I met a lawyer who ran a racket facilitating visitor visas. For a small fee, he is willing to contact a friend at a bank and bribe them to forge a fake bank account that shows the applicant has enough money to qualify. After the visa application is processed, the bank account disappears just as easily. Everyone wins: the lawyer and the banker earn some money for their troubles, and their client gets to travel to America—where, of course, they’ll have to work illegally since that visa doesn’t serve as a work permit.

ANGELINA FANOUS
 

DOWN AND OUT IN GREECE

There are an estimated 20,000 homeless people in Greece, and they have an economy all to themselves, as I found out when I ended up sleeping on the streets of Athens in 2007. Soon after I became homeless, I was approached by a gang of Georgians and offered work as a drug mule. I know a lot of people who have done something like this, as well as those who pretended to be homeless in order to sell drugs—it’s harder for the police to track you when you don’t have a permanent residence. Mostly, this sort of thing happens in downton Athens.

Gangs will also pay the willing to “protect” their prostitutes, most of whom are from Eastern Europe. I did that for a bit. The job is to keep an eye on the hookers and let the gangs know if anything happens with the clients or the police. Another common practice is getting street people to open bank accounts that gangs can use for money laundering. It only costs $200 to turn a homeless man into an accomplice in a financial crime.

Then you’ve got the professional beggars. In Athens, most of them are well-trained gypsies from Romania, Albania, and southern Bulgaria. They operate in groups, work specific areas, and live in flats or gypsy colonies. If you are not one of them and try to work in their area, you are in big trouble. In certain places you can make up to 3,000 euros ($4,000) per month. Especially during the holiday season, you’ll have pickpockets mixed in with the beggars. They are mainly women, who slice your bag with a razorblade and steal your wallet from right under your nose. 

“THANASSIS,” AS TOLD TO ANTONIS DINIAKOS
 

LOST LUGGAGE

In post–financial crisis Spain, with a youth unemployment rate of 56 percent, there are very few opportunities for motivated young people. In that sort of economic climate, it’s natural for kids to turn to illegal means to finance their vacations.

According to a study published in June by VFM Services, a fraud-consultant company, travel-insurance fraud is on the rise around the world. Insurance claims for lost or damaged baggage rose 140 percent between the summers of 2012 and 2013; a whopping 45 percent of claims that were investigated were revealed as being false. In the UK alone, AXA Insurance flags 20 or 30 exaggerated claims a month.

It’s pretty much impossible to say who is committing all this fraud, but from what I’ve heard Spaniards are responsible for more than their share. A 26-year-old from Barcelona, we’ll call her Olivia, was willing to explain how she tricked the system.

“This was the first time I’d ever done something like this, but the girl I flew with does it every time she travels. We flew to Oslo on the same flight but sat in separate seats on the way back, making sure not to be seen together in the airport.

“Once we landed, my friend made her way to the baggage claim first, picked up her case and mine, and left. After standing around grumpily for a while, I went to the information desk, made a scene [about the “lost” suitcase], and was given a form to fill out. There’s no point listing shit like iPads or jewelry, though, as most insurers only cover clothes. The next step is to ask your friends and family for receipts for their most expensive purchases. You can say they’re for your tax return if you don’t want to arouse suspicion. Send these [to the insurer] along with an online form and wait for them to approve or deny it. In my case, I got a letter a couple of months later with a check for 1,300 euros ($1,800) inside, which isn’t bad.”

PAUL GEDDIS
 

FOOLS IN LOVE

The job I used to have [in Lagos, Nigeria] was very difficult. I worked at a factory from 7 AM to 7 PM and got paid 7,000 naira ($44) for a month of labor. Can you imagine how hard it was? Sometimes I didn’t take buses to save money. I would have to trek all the way from my house all the way there.

One day, my friend told me about internet fraud and how to make money from it, and I started doing it. I wasn’t doing it regularly; I would pop in and out. During the night [the guys] meet white guys online and pretend to be ladies.

They tell them, “I love you, and I want to come over and meet you.” The white guy falls in love, and from there the guy says, “OK, I want you to come over here. What is it going to take for you to come here?”

And they say, “OK, I need to get a visa and passport and ticket and things like that.”

“But how much is it going to cost?”

“Maybe a few thousand dollars.”

The guy sends over the money, and you never hear from them again. The shortest time I got a guy to fall in love with me was only two days. I understand their white life so much that I use their lives against them. They don’t have a choice not to believe me.

JOE, AS TOLD TO ANDY CAPPER

Photos by Aaron Bernstein.

There was once a time when a toy would become a cartoon, and that cartoon would become a movie. Back in the 80s, that sort of movie wouldn’t cost over 100 million dollars to make or stir concerns over racially insensitive robots. It would just be a feature-length cartoon orgy of lasers and action figures duking it out in the name of good, evil to the sounds of epic arena rock. They dependently featured riff flailing soundtracks, and relentlessly uplifting themes. Now, while films based on toys have become the Michael Bay-made blockbusters to beat, somehow they’ve lost sight of what some true fans believe is the best part. In other words: where the heck are all the power ballads?

Enter The Cybertronic Spree, the inevitable hybrid between a cover band and the enthusiasm of Comicon cosplayers. Taking the stage as Hot Rod, Arcee, Rumble, a Quintesson, Spike in a yellow construction helmet, and Unicron’s head, the boxy, brightly costumed six-piece belt out numbers from The Transformers The Movie: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack dressed as Transformers themselves. It’s the most notable resurrection of Stan Bush’s “The Touch” since Boogie Nights.

Their first show was at a FanExpo afterparty, and I caught them this month during another nerd-centric occasion, the launch party for Bit Bazaar, an indie video game winter market, where they blew up several Instagrams of Canadian geeks—especially when comic book artist Steve Manale popped up as Weird Al for the encore, “Dare to be Stupid.” The Cybertronic Spree is a fandemic ready to hit the nerdy world.

I spoke with these humans in disguise, who chatted with me entirely as their Transformers characters, about where they plan to take their act, what modern soundtracks are missing, and generally getting every annoying nerdy question I have about being a Transformers off my chest.

VICE: I was under the impression that Autobots and Decepticons didn’t get along too well.
Hot Rod: I’ve got a statement prepared for that.

Uh huh.
Hot Rod: “Beyond good, beyond evil, beyond your wildest imagination.”

Arcee: Hot Rod, that’s just the movie’s tag line.

Hot Rod: I mean, who are you going to choose as your drummer? Of all the Autobots, of all the Decepticons? Frenzy applied, but he was a death metal guy, and I feel like we’re more hair metal.

So far you guys have focused on playing nerd­centric events: Bit Bazaar, Fan Expo.
Hot Rod: When we got together, we thought we’d just do a night at the Horseshoe. Fan Expo, we love those guys, and who’d have thought that humans would be so receptive to our brand of music. After that first show, we felt that we’d have to do that again. We became a band birthed in battle.

Would you guys consider expanding this into a tour then?
Hot Rod: Well, logistically, it’s really hard to get Unicron into our orbit. When he passes around the Earth every so often, we can do a show. We’re looking into it.

So, do you guys have to get life insurance or auto insurance?
Hot Rod: Auto. Definitely auto insurance. And that shit ain’t cheap.
 

I’d imagine your rates are pretty up there.
Hot Rod: With our parts? You can’t just find them anywhere. They gotta space bridge that shit from Cybertron. It’s a real hassle.

Would you have to rent a tour van, or do you just turn into cars and carry the gear yourselves?
Rumble: I only turn into a tape! You know how hard it is to find a vehicle with a cassette player these days?

Hot Rod: There’s that prick Soundwave, but he’s doing his whole DJ thing.

Rumble: To be honest I don’t really like hanging around Soundwave. He always makes me jump into his chest. Do you know how bad it smells? Do you know how many other Decepticons are in there? You got Ravage, Ratbat, Frenzy, Laserbeak, Buzzsaw, Overkill, Slugfest...

Hot Rod: He should have a shelf Transformer to put them when he’s not using them.

There’s no bookshelf Transformer?
Rumble: The Decepticons don’t have that kind of technology.

What do you like about Transformers: The Movie’s soundtrack?
Hot Rod: The tunes are really catchy. A lot of feeling, a lot of gusto.

What’s your favourite song off of it?
Hot Rod: I think we’ll have to defer to the almighty Unicron on that. Unicron?

Unicron: [After a few moments] “Autobot/Decepticon Battle.”
 

Why do you think soundtracks have changed so much since the 80s? I don’t think any current film uses arena rock in earnest.
Hot Rod: I think it was a time and a place.
Arcee: It was when you would work out to a soundtrack. You’re not going to work out to the soundtracks you hear today.

There’s probably one really serious person out there pumping iron to Hans Zimmer.
Hot Rod: It’s very intense.

Rumble: Here’s the thing about the 80s and movies.  I watch a lot of that stuff hanging around with these bozos, and I love the 80s. Those soundtracks, they got you pumped. You would have this song, and it would just tell you exactly what you saw, summarizing everything in 3 minutes. By the credits, you realize you just wasted, like, an hour and a half because you could have just listened to that song in the first place. That was a time for people like Stan Bush, Vince DiCola, Survivor… That big, ostentatious sound went with movies perfectly. Movies had montages with epic pump-up sequences. We thought this was kind of silly, this was weird, I remember I got the soundtrack, listening to it on a CD player, don’t tell Soundwave, but it sounded great. We thought the music was pretty cheesy, but now that we’ve learned it, we’ve discovering all these neat idiosyncrasies with the music, with the scales, different harmonies, different guitars doing different things. Even time changes within the rhythms themselves. You can write off the whole soundtrack as cheesy, which it is, but when you look at it from a performance level, this shit is pretty hardcore. It’s not easy to do, but it’s really fucking fun to do.

Have you reached out to Stan Bush?
Hot Rod: We actually got an email the other day, it was from a fan. He said he’s already talked to Stan Bush about a collaboration, and he just wanted to let us know that he’s proposed “something” to him.

Rumble: It was the BotCon guys that contacted us.

HR: Yeah, they think it would be amazing if we could sit down and collaborate.

Rumble: You asked if we were going to go on tour. Truthfully, we are probably going to go on tour, we just have to decide what conventions we’re going to go to. This kind of act isn’t the kind you’re going to go see on a Tuesday night at a bar on the side of the road. You don’t want to be a random guy walking into a bar and see THIS happening. I mean, that could be pretty funny, and it’s funny for us to see when people don’t expect it, but we need the right audience. Bit Bazaar is the right audience. We figured this is a good place for us to perform; we could feed off of this vibe. With Fan Expo, everyone there grew up watching Transformers. Everyone knew the words to what we were playing. They were shouting the lyrics back at us, we could hardly hear ourselves. These conventions all over North America are sending us emails, asking if we want to perform BotCon or Charticon, which is something in Charlotte. We’d love to go to Austin.

Hot Rod: We’re not just looking at Transformers conventions, we’re thinking of doing conventions in general, we’re part of fandom. I couldn’t have said it better myself, Rumble. It takes a lot of heart for a Decepticon to say that, but it is about the right kind of people, community, that makes The Cybertronic Spree. Am I right guys?

Kids Telling Dirty Jokes is our new series that features tiny comedians we found on Craigslist. This episode stars Jackson, an adorable tyke who came equipped with his own foul jokes and swear words.

Watch more:

Carla

Gigi

Gabriella

The pro-government protest at Mariinsky park

As anti-government protesters enter their fourth week on the streets of Kiev, this weekend saw the arrival of another group in the Ukraine capital: those who had come to show their support for the country's embattled president, Viktor Yanukovych.

On Saturday, some 15,000 pro-government supporters rallied in Kiev. The gathering took place in Mariinsky Park, not far from the Maidan—the square in the city that has become the hub of anti-Yanukovych protests. Many on the Maidan were concerned that sparks would fly, offering a pretext for a crackdown by the authorities. Yet the weekend passed without any major incident.

By evening, the square where the pro-government rally had taken place was empty. As one observer remarked, all that remained were the porta potties. Meanwhile, the Maidan was packed throughout the night.

Where did these government supporters come from? Yanukovych is not universally hated; after all, he was elected president. But evidence is beginning to emerge in the country's media that many at pro-government protests have been paid for their presence.

Ivan, a young office worker in Kiev, received text messages offering to pay him to attend a demonstration. “At first, I though they meant the Maidan and I was angry,” he told me. “But then I checked who was sending the texts and I realized it was a pro-government organization.”

Busloads of Yanukovych supporters were brought in to Kiev from across the country. On one of these trips, people were offered 1,000 UAH (about $120) to start a fight on the Maidan, one of the participants claimed while speaking to Radio Svoboda. The source told the station that in his region, everyone knows that “the [pro-government] rallies in Kiev are an easy way to earn money... They load the buses to such an extent that there is nowhere to sit.” But when they saw the Maidan, he and his friends changed their minds. They returned to their hometown, covering the cost of their journey themselves.

The Ukrainian media has also reported that people are being forced to go to Kiev to attend pro-government rallies. They are paid for attending, but they can't say no. They fear that if they refuse, they will lose their jobs.

What do Yanukovych's supposed fans think about big issues like the EU? The previous weekend, a Russian reporter spoke to some of them at one of their favorite hangouts, Mariinsky Park. “They say that people are paid to attend these kinds of rallies,” she says to a group of young men. “No, of course not,” one of them smirks. “Why are you here?” she asks another. “To get some fresh air,” he says, walking away [0:58]. She then approaches another youth sitting on a curb and asks: “Are you against the EU?” “We're for it, but not against it,” he replies, ambiguously. The video, which currently has over 160,000 views, also features a young girl who seems to believe she's at a pro-EU rally.

Since the pro-European protests began last month, a new term, titushky, has spread to describe a certain sort of pro-government goon, usually young men dressed in sports clothing. These were the guys who blocked the EU's Kiev HQ last week, remember? There is already a Wikipedia entry for them. The word comes from Vadym Titushko, a sportsman who attacked Ukrainian TV journalists earlier this year.

Almost four weeks into the Euromaidan protests, there is no sign of compromise between the protesters and the authorities. Following the police attack on the Maidan in the early hours of Wednesday, protesters have strengthened the barricades around the square, building towering walls out of snow-filled sacks. The last few days have been calm, but who knows when the riot police will return?

The new and improved barricades on Maidan square

On Friday, Ukraine's three opposition leaders, Arseniy Yatseniuk, Vitali Klitschko, and Oleh Tyahnybok, held talks with Yanukovych, but to no avail. It turned out that a student leader at the talks who was supposedly representing the students at Euromaidan was a fake, and actually a member of the youth wing of Yanukovych's Party of Regions. After the roundtable, Yanukovych rushed off, refusing to answer journalists' questions. (Watch this video of him escaping from a reporter.)

The next day, Yanukovych suspended Kiev mayor Oleksandr Popov and another senior official, in connection with the crackdown on November 30 when police attempted to clear the Maidan. However, it looks an awful lot like Yanukovych is scrambling for a scapegoat.

Over the weekend, Kiev greeted another major visitor from abroad, Republican Senator John McCain. “Your peaceful process and peaceful protest is inspiring your country and inspiring the world,” he said, speaking before the huge crowd on the Maidan on Sunday. “We are here to support your just cause.”

A banner that reads, "Europe yes, disorder no" in Russian and Ukrainian

Meanwhile, the EU seems to be growing tired of Yanukovych's maneuvering. Last week, a Ukrainian government delegation traveled to Brussels to discuss the deal but it seems no headway was made. On Sunday, the EU's top official for neighborhood policy, Štefan Füle, announced that Brussels was suspending talks with Ukraine over the unsigned trade deal, the Association Agreement. He tweeted: “Words & deeds of President & government regarding #AssocAgreement further & further apart. Their arguments have no grounds in reality.” As usual, the Ukrainian authorities acted as if nothing had happened. The prime minister's spokesman said that the Ukrainian government intended to continue talks with the EU about the deal, even as the EU were publicly suspending them.

Yanukovych seems to have other plans. He is jetting off to Russia for another meeting with Vladimir Putin on Tuesday. There is concern in Brussels—and on the Maidan—that he will sign economic deals with Russia there.

Still, Kiev's protesters are standing firm. On Saturday, 200,000 people were filmed singing the Ukrainian national anthem, flashing their mobile phones to form a sea of light on the Maidan. As another week has failed to lead anywhere in terms of the EU deal, the Euromaidan protests do not look set to finish any time soon.

@AB_Chapman

Justin Taylor is the author of Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever and The Gospel of Anarchy. His next book, Flings, will be published in August 2014. Find him online at http://www.justindtaylor.net/. 

Tampa, by Alissa Nutting (Ecco)

Alissa Nutting’s debut novel inspired me to do two things I almost never do. First, I paid full price for the hardcover, despite knowing that I could probably have gotten the publisher to send me a free “review” copy. Why? Well, the right answer is that it’s important to support independent booksellers, and if you want people to buy your books you should buy other people’s—but those aren’t the real reason I bought Tampa. The real reason was that after reading the first five pages in a bookstore, I was hooked. Nutting’s novel is narrated by Celeste Price, a ridiculously attractive sexual predator who has taken a job as a junior high school teacher to gain access to adolescent boys. Celeste is conniving, vicious, amoral, and explicit in a way that would give her great progenitor, Lolita’s Humbert Humbert, a heart attack. Objectified to the verge of dehumanization by her own hotness, her predations are largely ignored by a hypersexualized and hypocritical world that only sees her in terms of its own desires. I finished the book the day after I bought it, which was when I did the second thing I almost never do and is not at all creepy: I went on Facebook, tracked Alissa down, and sent her a fan letter. It read: “Alissa, I just finished reading TAMPA, which I bought yesterday, and couldn't resist offering my admiration & cheers. It's so blistering and relentless and smart. I especially dug the stuff about Celeste's fear of aging; the cultural desire to have/be the Eternal Teenager. (When she thinks about offering beauty cream to Jack! Holy Christ!) The last lines were like a blast of freezing wind across the beach; just perfect. I could go on but I guess I shouldn't. So again: great job & congrats; may it go far and leave burning wreckage in its wake.” (If you’re wondering, she sent a nice note back and does not seem to be that scared of me.) 

The Science Delusion: Asking the Big Questions In a Culture of Easy Answers, by Curtis White (Melville House)

The only thing more irritating than an evangelical Christian is an evangelical atheist. In The Science Delusion, White assails and dismantles the ideological inconsistencies and hypocrisies of the Dennett-Dawkins-Hitchens set, but his greatest disgust is reserved for TED Talks, Richard Florida, Jonah Lehrer, and the broader cult of tech: “The ideology of science insists that… [w]e are like computers, or systems, and so is nature. Therefore, no one should be surprised if our lives are systematized” by our employers, our government, or the various corporations that tell us that our doing their market research and product placement for them is a thing called “social networking.” White’s model for resistance is the Romantic tradition: Schiller, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Mary and Percy Shelley, etc. The Romantics evinced a deep intellectual curiosity about science and the natural world, while still insisting on the primacy of the individual over the polity, the man over the machine. Though White’s tone can be hectoring and smug (which seems to be de rigeur for the genre... not that that makes it any less obnoxious), the book is short, rife with intriguing suggestions for further reading (Schiller’s Essays—who knew?), and, most importantly, will give you everything you need to piss off the people you’re trying to piss off.

The Magnolia Electric Co. 10th Anniversary Reissue, by Songs:Ohia (Secretly Canadian)

It’s hard to believe that Songs:Ohia’s seminal and still jaw-dropping record The Magnolia Electric Co. is ten years old. It’s harder still to believe—and a crying sin—that front man/mastermind Jason Molina did not live to see and celebrate the anniversary (he died in March). Listen: I’m not one of those people who thinks that song lyrics are poetry (the conflation is pernicious to both traditions, excusing lazy readers who get their “poetry” via Spotify, while at the same time devaluing the role of actual, you know, music in music), but that’s not to say that lyrics can’t be poetic—or a poet’s lines musical. And anyway, the real issue here isn’t whether I can justify this record’s inclusion on my list, but rather the fact that the record’s so fucking great this list wouldn’t be complete—or honest—without including it. Molina’s lyrics are rough-hewn and haunted by a set of images and ideas—ghosts, highways, hearts, lightning, the moon, to name a few—that make his records feel a bit like sestinas or pantoums, poetic forms built around recursive variation. The reissue comes with an hour’s worth of bonus material, including demos of the Magnolia songs,plus two tracks from the sessions that didn’t make the album: “Whip Poor Will”, which ended up on 2009’s Josephine, and “The Big Game Is Every Night”, which never ended up anywhere and finds Molina in full-blown Neil Young-circa-On The Beach mode. It’s heartbreaking that Jason Molina is gone, and the only consolation—if it is one—is that the body of work he left behind is like the soundtrack to heartbreak itself.

Even Though I Don't Miss You, and hey, why not, while we’re at it, Heavy-handed, by Chelsea Martin (respectively: Hobart, therumpus.net/)

I don’t remember exactly when Chelsea Martin started publishing Heavy-handed, or when I started reading it, but 2013 was the year I gradually realized that her comic was my favorite thing on The Rumpus. When I saw a small announcement from Hobart press that they had released a book of her poetry (prose? prose-poetry? whatever...), I immediately ordered a copy. Even Though I Don’t Miss You is a pocket-size paperback that clocks in at under a hundred pages. Martin’s a brooding minimalist who is great on relationships, the choreography of neurosis, and the feedback loop between selfishness and self-abnegation: “I momentarily forgot that you were not just an appendage to me and I said, ‘Do you want to make an OkCupid account?’ / You said, ‘What are you talking about?’ / I said something unintelligible while piecing together newly forming ideas such as the fact that you were a separate body from myself, that we were dating, that what I said was unprofessional, and that ‘unprofessional’ wasn’t the right word to use to describe my behavior, since this wasn’t a workplace…” 

Soul in Space, by Noelle Kocot (Wave Books)

Like letters from an intimate but mysterious and transient friend, a new Kocot volume appears every two or three years, always anticipated but never quite expected, and brimming with strange surprise. Kocot is a profound—and profoundly hermetic—elegist and mystic. Since the death of her husband in 2004, Kocot’s poetry has borne the scars off loss—personal as well as cosmic, though Kocot would likely reject the distinction—and has devoted itself largely to the work of mourning, in what has sometimes seemed to be a private language of ecstatic sorrow. It is only in her two most recent collections—2011’s The Bigger World, and now this new volume—that the vice-grip of grief has begun to loosen. The newer poems have embraced a (relative) transparency of image and idea, as well as a playfulness that gives me hope that Kocot’s long winter may be yielding, finally, to spring. “Enjoy yourself,” she writes in a poem called “After the Feeding”: “Encourage / The memory of restoration. Locusts / Ate us, and then they stopped in their / Colorful tracks.” 

Woke Up Lonely, by Fiona Maazel (Graywolf)

I reviewed Fiona Maazel’s second novel in Bookforum this past spring, and since then my estimation of the book has only grown. I’ll happily quote myself: “a deeply felt and wildly original novel that repays the attention it demands, and once read won’t be soon forgotten. There are sharp jokes on every page, luridly bad sex, and a passel of outrageous conceits—a secret wonderland in tunnels beneath Cincinnati, an airplane custom painted with the original cover art for Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, a basement orgy—but unlike in [her also excellent first novel, Last Last Chance], here the darkness is inexorable, and will not be denied.”

Three Older Books I Got Around to Reading for the First Time this Year and Am Putting on This List Because I Loved Them, So There:

Open City, by Teju Cole (Random House, 2011)—I guess I thought that this book was like Sebald for hipsters, and so ignored it when it first came out. I finally picked it up over the summer and liked it so much I made two of my undergraduate classes read it, and the quality of the discussions it yielded—about character development, narrative withholding, the archeology of trauma, writing a city, and much more—made me grateful to Cole for writing it. If the hipsters liked it too, well bully for them.

Garcia: An American Life, by Blair Jackson (Penguin, 1999)—A sympathetic but thankfully not quite hagiographic account of the life of Jerry Garcia, with special attention to the development of his musical sensibility and his many side projects, i.e., the stuff that you don’t hear much about in band-biographies of the Grateful Dead. (Not that you asked, but my preferred Dead bio is Carol Brightman’s Sweet Chaos: The Grateful Dead’s American Adventure.) I was sorry to learn that Garcia’s longtime friend and collaborator John Kahn was a fellow heroin addict, and viewed as a bad influence by much of the Dead family (Vince Welnick apparently considered having Kahn killed!) but it was delightful to learn of Garcia’s later-life enthusiasm for scuba diving. He liked it, Jackson says, because he didn’t feel fat in the water, and looking at coral reefs reminded him of tripping.

Daniel Deronda, by George Eliot (William Blackwood and Sons, 1876)—The friend who gave this to me said it was a lot like Middlemarch, only much, much weirder. It’s a fat Victorian novel with all the usual class and marriage stuff, but complicated considerably by Eliot’s ethos—unique in 19th century English novels, or really, almost anywhere—in which fortunes are ambivalent blessings that create as many problems as they solve. The novel gets weirder still when it starts paying a fetishist’s loving attention to Jewish traditions and proto-Zionist politics, developing what might have been a minor subplot into a central theme. The result is screwy and amazing, something that feels both meticulously organized and radically unhinged. Put another way: my friend was absolutely right.

“Monsters of Modern Literature” trading cards by Lincoln Michel

OK, this isn’t a book either, but deal with it. Lincoln Michel is one of contemporary literary culture’s great natural resources. He writes fiction and essays (sometimes for VICE), draws comics, co-edits the literary magazine Gigantic (which has lately expanded into book publishing, with a literary sci-fi anthology called Gigantic Worlds due out in 2014), and—perhaps most impressively—has a genuinely funny internet presence that never makes you want to kill him or yourself. Last Halloween, Michel drew some fantastic “Monsters of Modern Literature” portraits for Vol. 1 Brooklyn: Cormac McCabre, Bone Didion, and my personal favorite, Haruki Murderkami (author of The Grind-up Bodies Chronicle). The series was so well received that this year Michel made some new ones (Tao Fin, Golem McCann) and put the whole collection out as a set of trading cards. You can get them on Etsy or at WORD Bookstore in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

The Best Book of the Year: Sam Lipsyte, The Fun Parts (FSG)

No hesitation here. No qualifiers or bet-hedging. No worries about overstating the case, or about the fact that I (obviously) didn’t read every book that came out this year, or about the fact that I know and like the guy. The Fun Parts was the best work of fiction by an American author to be published in 2013. The book is supersaturated with humor, depth, acuity, pain, a warped sense of grace, and the rolling thunder of Lipsyte’s matchless prose. A number of these stories first appeared in either The New Yorker or The Paris Review, but you should read them again now. There’s something about the gathering of their energies, the way they feed off and comment on and amplify one another—the recurring character in “The Climber Room” and “Deniers”; the acid fabulist explosions of “The Republic of Empathy” and “The Real-Ass Jumbo”, and I could go on but would end up reproducing the entire table of contents. If you’ve got time for one more book before 2013 is out, make it this one. And if not, well, there’s always next year.

The late Peter O'Toole, who died Saturday at the age of 81 after a long illness. Photo via

“My life, when it is written, will read better than it lived.” So says Peter O’Toole as Henry II in his final, raging soliloquy in the 1968 film The Lion in Winter. O’Toole’s own life was almost certainly lived as well as it reads. Much of what has been written so far about the great actor, who died Saturday at the age of 81, relates to how well he lived. The lunches that turned into four-day parties, the days that began at a church in Leeds and ended in a Marseille bordello, the weeks spent sitting singing at the bar, toasting gods young and old, rich and poor. He already represented the Platonic ideal of “Drunk, hell-raising British thespian,” and now that ideal has been enshrined in obituary.

It was a part he lived up to. When I was ten years old, while batting in a cricket game, I looked over to the side of the pitch to see a tall, snowy-haired man in a long, grey coat stalking the boundary edge. From there, I could hear the cry: “Bowl it at his fucking head!” The man was Peter O’Toole, whose son Lorcan was on the opposing team. I saw him after the game and remembered thinking, “Wow, the guy from King Ralph is amazing.”

Peter O'Toole in The Lion in Winter.

O’Toole brought a wild, sympathetic intensity to everything he did, whether it was performing Shakespeare, drinking with Richard Harris, or watching pre-pubescent boys play cricket. He came onto the scene in the 1950s, the era of method acting, of intense American dudes talking a lot about “sense memory” and how important it was that they say their lines while channelling the pain they felt when their mother had first denied them her breast, or something. O’Toole wasn’t having that. His intensity came from a desire to entertain and enthral.

It might have been that love of theatricality that meant he would always fall short of winning an Oscar. The Academy loves an actor who makes it look like real hard work. It loves the performers who gain or lose 75 pounds, spend a year living in a specially constructed internment camp, or learn the whole Bible in Aramaic in order to say a few lines in front of a camera. It loves Daniel Day-Lewis, or failing that, it loves Tom Hanks, a man who has never said or done anything wrong in his whole life. Peter O’Toole, a man who could make the difficult look easy and who never did anything right in his life, was always going to be the kind of actor they dealt with nervously.

Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia.

He was just too unusual, too alternative, as his acting in one of his best films, Ruling Class, shows. His great performances are a testament to this. Lawrence of Arabia, a film you sit down to watch at lunch and finally get up to leave some time after breakfast, remains his defining performance. It would be anyone’s defining performance. In the above scene with Omar Sharif you can see the distillation of Lawrence’s woes, his estrangement from society and the sadness and defiance that comes of it. O’Toole is stern, sympathetic, and vulnerable in the space of two minutes. He and Sharif spent two years working on the film and both blew almost all of the money they made on it in gambling dens.

O'Toole rides a camel into the Late Show with David Letterman studio.

"I will not be a common man. I will stir the smooth sands of monotony," O’Toole once wrote. And he did, as this camel ride into the Letterman studio shows you. Not content with coming in on the camel, O’Toole gives it a Heineken.

Perhaps what we love about O’Toole is that he represents a lack of careerism, a fantasy that you can have a wild and endlessly interesting life while also doing some pretty great work. In the 70s, in his wildest days, he supposedly went out for lunch with a few friends in London. Bottle upon bottle of wine came and went and as darkness fell over the center of town, someone suggested they go and see a play. The group found a theater, bought their tickets, and sat down to enjoy the show. A few minutes in, O’Toole turned to his companions and whispered, “Bloody hell, I’m in this fucking play,” before rising majestically from his seat, racing backstage, getting into costume, and making his entrance. OK, so maybe this never actually happened but the impression we have of O’Toole’s life is of one that could easily have been packed full of moments like that.

Today, so many young actors are not given the chance to have the life O’Toole had. A friend once told me about going with Robert Pattinson to a private beach miles from anywhere. When they got out of the sea, two press photographers were waiting for them. By contrast, O’Toole did his drinking in public and often talked about how this was important to him. So many young actors today seem to lack the creativity, wildness, and weirdness of the man who played Lawrence; perhaps they would benefit from a bit of public debauchery and shame. Perhaps a conservative film industry and a nosey, prurient society aren’t the best recipe for wildmen stars. I mean, imagine how it’d go down today if anyone had the balls to castigate their director as O’Toole did Wolfgang Petersen, after the pair made Troy together: "That kraut, what a clown he was... I watched 15 minutes of the finished film and then walked out."

Peter O'Toole in Venus.

His Macbeth of 1980 may have only been a hit because people showed up to see how drunk he was, but what people crave from life and art is the unexpected, and that’s what he gave them. He was an Irish migrant from Leeds but you’d think he was a king. The above scene, from in the 2006 film Venus, has a moment 2:09 in where he moves his hand away from his face, the light hits it, and something truly moving happens. Film acting is about these small moments and while O’Toole is celebrated for the grand gestures, he was as good at the small ones, the ones that made his best performances intense, compelling, and heartbreaking. Also—and don’t laugh—his speech about being a critic from Ratatouille has the same quality, a knowledge and insight earned from years of living, years of working, and years of drinking.

And finally, there are his eyes, blue and unreal. Every actor has to work with what they’ve got but there’s no guarantee he will turn his looks or charm into something substantial. O’Toole took his voice and his eyes and turned them into a career that people will remember as being just as compelling as all the mighty, mighty drinking he did. Acting can be a strange, wonderful and sometimes frightening thing and Peter O’Toole was the incarnation of all those acutely human qualities.

Follow Oscar on Twitter: @oscarrickettnow

Illustration by Molly Crabapple

Art Spiegelman needs caffeine.

I'd promised to bring him the strong stuff for our interview, but Art’s local coffee shop had closed since my last visit to his studio in SoHo. Coffee-less, I arrived having failed him already. Art brewed up something weak instead, chain-smoking as he cursed what his neighborhood has become.

“I can’t stand the fact that there’s not one usable store in SoHo. All of them are fashion advertisements in the form of storefronts. I don’t need thousand-dollar sneakers.”

Art was in his Borgesian-library/studio—“The Haus that Maus Built”—surrounded by a century’s worth of illustration books. He climbed a ladder propped against his tall, wooden shelves like a mad archivist, grinning, pulling out the volume that might best speak to my ink-stained heart.

I'm a lucky git to be getting this sort of attention. Art is a busy man. While he's sarcastic and unassuming, Art's widely considered one of the greatest living comics creators. Not only has Art been eminent for decades—he is responsible, more than anyone, for the notion that a comics creator could be eminent.

If Will Eisner popularized the term graphic novel, Spiegelman made them respectable. New Yorker respectable. Museum of Modern Art respectable. Maus, the story of Spiegelman's Holocaust survivor father, showed the world that words and pictures together, could express the most subtle and serious of horrors.

But Spiegelman is not just Maus.

In a time when artists are brand bots, obediently self-plagiarizing from their last success, Spiegelman has done everything. A contemporary of R. Crumb, Spiegelman dropped acid, drew depraved sex acts, and published his work in zines and independent comics as a young underground artist in the 1970s. In 1985, he invented Garbage Pail Kids, making a fortune for its parent company and leaving years later when he wasn't given enough of a cut. “They offered me a bonus,” he told me. “The word comes from bone. As in throwing you a bone.”

Art has been a cartoon historian, teacher, and art critic. From 1980 to 1991, he published, with his wife, art director Francoise Mouly, the ultra-experimental periodical comics anthology RAW. He illustrated the forgotten Wild Party, a girls-and-guns love letter to Bohemia. He has been ripped off by Steven Spielberg in Fievel: An American Tail. This is all documented in Art Spiegelman's Co-Mix: a Retrospective, at New York's Jewish Museum.

Over inferior coffee, Spiegelman told me what you do when you can do anything.

VICE: How does it feel to do a retrospective and see all your work tied up with a bow like that?
Art Spiegelman: It’s dangerous to have a retrospective while you’re alive. I don’t know what I’m doing. I haven’t drawn for a few months, except a thing in The New York Times. I feel as rusty as I can feel. It’s like, Oh good! Now I can get back to the agony of facing a white sheet of paper with no clear idea of what happens on it.

How do you deal with that agony?
There’s something called howling in pain. It’s what happens. I get very bummed out. It’s happened many times in my life. Usually between project A and project B. Because even though everything probably comes out always looking the same, I have to reinvent the wheel to get there.

There’s an idea that artists have one style and do one thing. Your career disproves that. You’ve done everything from Garbage Pail Kids to Maus to Wild Party. What is the Spiegelman style?
Style is the residue of trying to do it right. Decades ago I read a Picasso quote about the difference between perfect circle and what you do. That’s style. You have to search for what you’re making and why you’re making it. Then you find out what it should look like. The alternative is Roy Lichtenstein, where style is like a corporate logo.

You grew up in New York. What do you think of how the city has changed?
Don’t get me started. If there was another New York, I’d move to it.

Is New York still a place where a young artist can get started?
You can’t. Go to Germany kids. Maybe Budapest if you’re not Jewish. But this is something that I’m remembering from interviewing Al Hirschfeld. He had lived in Paris for a number of years when he was just out of college.

I asked "Did you know Picasso?" And he says, "Yeah. I’d see him at Gertrude’s House."

So we were off and running and I said, "What was it in Paris? The graphic design was good, the painting was good, the writing was good, the architecture was good. Was there something in the water?" He goes, "Nah. Cheap real estate. I got that place I was living in for the equivalent of $300 a year." At those rates, you can find out if you’re an artist or not.

That’s what’s gone from New York and that’s an irreconcilable loss. Though in New York one should always be grateful for the rapid degree of change. Maybe SoHo will become a slum. It’s possible.

You said that you liked comics being lowbrow and disreputable. But you’re one of the people who made comics respectable.
It’s a Faustian deal. I was attracted to comics because they were outside the culture in a weird way. There wasn’t a canon and that meant that it was all open for me to explore my own continent, which was useful for somebody who was only partially socialized.

If you were in college and you were my age, you’d read Marshall McLuhan. He was saying when a medium stops being a mass medium, it either dies or becomes art. Comics were on that path.

 It wasn’t like comics in 1900. It wasn’t like the comic book in 1940. All those idioms, including the newspaper strip, were withering away. It seemed like we needed to have a new deal in the world because if we wanted to get grants like poets got, we had to be considered as valuable to the culture as poets were. So this meant the Faustian Deal. You consciously try to make a liaison. Not just with the head shops, but also with the bookstores, libraries, museums and universities. That way, one can build a support system. If you have a support system, the medium stays alive.

 Then there’s room for the Johnny Ryans and everybody else talking about vaginal infections or cutting a skull off and fucking it because that’ll upset somebody.

What art forms now do you think are in that place of disrepute—that have no canon, so they are a place of freedom?
I don’t think there’s anything in the post-internet world… there’s nothing but the internet itself that exists because it has freedom as well as fascism floating all the way through it.

I become a leafleteer cause I couldn’t figure out how to get my work around exactly except in the underground papers. I would do a comic, print it up at the newly invented instant print shops where you could get 100 copies for $1. Then I’d go around like it was a leaflet for a massage parlor or a deli and I’d just give them to beautiful women, people who looked interesting. Just the idea of a leaflet that wasn’t selling anything including a specific political ideology was unusual. That was a means of using the new technology to do what I needed to do. I suspect that that’s now strictly electronic because even a beautiful DIY zine…there’s already a community that can form around making money from it.

So if you are doing a DIY zine, your secret hope is that your DIY zine is going to be enshrined and be worth $10,000 a copy. And I can say with great sincerity that that wasn’t the case for me when I was working.

I was lucky enough to get a job at Topps Bubble Gum that fulfilled a childhood dream to be able to work with MAD artists and art direct them and edit them and write for them and do the rough sketches that they do finishes on. It was the best job in the world so it didn’t count as alienated labor. By working one day a week, I could earn a little bit more than a secretary would working 5 days a week. That meant that I had 6 days to do whatever else I wanted to do.

You told me that your publishers of Maus were afraid of it getting out that you were doing Garbage Pail Kids.

Garbage Pail Jews.

Why do you think the world has such trouble understanding that someone can both do the Garbage Pail Kids and Maus?

I can’t be the person to answer that because [at the retrospective at the Jewish Museum] you come into this rather stately museum. There’s a big chunk of Garbage Pail Kids and something that looks like a glorified candy store exhibit and then right around the bend there’s Maus and somewhere in the middle, there are these slightly unsavory comics that we were just talking about. Then there was my experimental stuff. It’s all in one place. I can’t make the common denominator. But I know that there is one. It probably has to do with wanting to find out what a limit is. How far can you go in some direction?

Wayne Koestenbaum described Susan Sontag as a “world eater”: someone who was engaged in everything and did not see boundaries between types of work that others might have. I see that in your work too- the diversity of projects you've done. Why don’t you see boundaries?
Probably poor vision. The same thing that made me not play baseball. It just never occurred to me. One of the things that was a real surprise to me was, after Maus first came out, there was this thing just forming called the Second Generation. Kids of [Holocaust] survivors who were carrying the guilt of their parents that they never experienced. People sought me out because I was doing something really forbidden, which is to be pissed off at your parents. To me it’s the only way you can possibly become an adult.

I didn’t know that you weren’t supposed to do that. I was pissed off. So it was necessary for me and it became central to the project. I wasn’t going to try and turn [my father] Vladek into some kind of martyr. I think that gave those second generation people permission to reanalyze. The basic sentence you were given was, “I’ve suffered so much, you’re not allowed to make me suffer.” And I get it. I understand why a parent doesn’t want to suffer.

You wrote about the Danish Mohammad cartoons and the power of cartoons to shock. Right now in Syria, cartoonists are being executed by Assad. What is it about cartoons that make the powerful so angry?
By their nature, they are not respectful. As a result, a lot of wild shit comes through. Even when people are trying to do pro-Assad cartoons, there’s all this stuff that leaks out. Because his version of the public narrative of what he’s about is too dissonant with the actual narrative.

What do you think about comics as a medium for journalism?
I’m impressed by what’s been happening in it. Because of Photoshop we all know that photographs lie every second that they open up their mouths. You can’t really trust a photograph. It could have just as easily been a photoshopped collage. So, it’s probably more plausible to trust an artist. You get to feel whether you trust them or not.

The problem with it is that [comics are] slow. You can’t do what a video camera can do. A video camera is like a vacuum cleaner. You suck it in and then you spit it out on the night's news; cutting for the most intense images. But the person holding the camera could never have really seen what he was seeing. And the person seeing it on the news has it as part of the barrage.

Artists tend to have to reveal more of themselves even when they try to be as scrupulous as Joe Sacco. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/11/joe-sacco-the-great-war-interview.html It has a place insofar as concentrating on something has a place. We're living in an ADD universe. The computer encourages that second-to-second dopamine rush as you go from click to click. What's valuable about comics and print is they actually are a venue where you end up spending time.

Mausis one of the most iconic works of comics. When you were on the Simpsons, your character even puts on a Maus mask. Do you ever feel constrained by Maus? 

Absolutely. It’s been the subject of my last 10 years of work. I was actually very grateful when I saw the picture that I made for the New York Times. The Maus mask is central but it’s very very small. It’s the size of a zit in the center of my nose. But there is a face there. And it used to be that the Maus mask that I would draw was a full body.

How do you keep eminence from smoothing off all your jagged edges?
I’m too a-hedonic to appreciate a lot that I should be really grateful for. I’m an insecure mess. I guess that keeps it honest. I’ve learned how to have a surface at this point that doesn’t have me getting wounded as often or as easily as I used to be. Within all that, there’s still room for me worry ceaselessly.

I wrote one thing for Artforum. And I did that self-portrait [for The New York Times]. With both of those, I was really scared that the people wouldn’t like them. I hate that moment of going, they are going to ask me to change it. I don’t want to change it. It is what it is. And then in both instances, 'oh thanks'! So you know, that was a relief. But I find it very hard to submit work because of that. Like I would rather set up a system where I have enablers.

Enablers?
Instead of editors. It’s like, "OK, you want to do something? Here’s some space. Do it." Now it’s not practical. I’ve been an editor. You can’t run a railroad that way.

I get it but I have a very hard time fulfilling my part of it, which is submission. "Here! Take me! I’m yours!" I can’t do it. Usually the more freedom you get, the less money you get. Fortunately for me, because it still sells like a new book, Maus acts as an ongoing grant that lets me do other things. That means I’m in a position now where I’m grateful for it. But it also means that I still have to go through that thing that we started talking about at the beginning. There’s me. There’s a blank sheet of paper. I’ve got to find out if I can do anything anymore.

Why do you keep confronting that sheet of blank paper?
It’s the only compass I have. Either you remember your dreams and write them down or you make your dreams and see what they were after you’ve drawn and written them.

@MollyCrabapple

Art Spiegelman's Co-Mix: A Retrospective runs November 8th - March 23rd at the Jewish Museum (1109 Fifth Avenue, New York City),

Swampin' with Swampy T. Fox.

I was first introduced to the wild world of quicksand fetishists while listening to an episode of Radiolab about the proverbial rise and fall of quicksand in pop culture. Even though the report didn’t linger much on the subject of “sinking” fetishists, I couldn’t shake the thought of people fapping to bodies slowly disappearing in a puddle of mud. So, after spending hours looking at pictures of large-breasted, topless women sinking into quicksand, I was ready to move on to the harder stuff. Quicksand fetishists had nothing on my previous fetish du jour, Shitting Dicknipples, until I dug a bit deeper.

After initially discovering the quicksand porn world, a friend of mine showed me a music video by contemporary digital artist Jon Rafman. Jon’s video is a strange mixture of filthy, sticky computer workstations and IRL anime soft porn. At one point I locked eyes with a giant furry fox sinking in mud, slowly struggling to pull himself back to the surface. My interest had been piqued.

Quicksand fetishists who get off on humans sinking into the abyss aren’t all that weird—it makes sense to me why people get bonerized by it i.e. probably some damsel in distress/power play thing. Getting off on furries sinking in quicksand, however, is way more complex and fascinating. The community that’s interested in the intersection of anthropomorphized cartoon animals and quicksand is pretty small, and it comes as no surprise that the content they create is pretty fucking shitty. It ranges from drawings of distressed sexy foxes sporting balloon-like furry tits floating in mud, to poorly written quicksand furry erotica. I started wondering if the footage used by Jon Rafman was one of a kind—a shiny, fuzz-covered pearl buried in a North Carolina mud pit.

Using my newfound expertise at wading through the swampy waters of essential websites such as quicksandfans.com, I managed to track down the genius who made the original furry quicksand clips; a man who goes by the name of Swampy T Fox.

Swampy’s video collection is fairly limited but offers a satisfaction beyond anything I had ever encountered on furry quicksand forums before. Swampy sinks repeatedly, trying to hold on to a few branches. The most disturbing part is hearing Swampy’s heavy breathing as he sinks deeper and deeper. The videos are bizarre and a bit scary, yet I find it impossible to take my eyes off the screen.

I’m not going to lie. I have been physically attracted to a cartoon character in the past. But just as sexy dreams of riding Aladdin’s “magic carpet” still haunt me to this day, I’m secure in saying that I’ve never wanted to bone characters with animalistic features, let alone ones getting sucked into wet dirt.

I expected Swampy to be one of those sex-crazed maniacs I had pictured roaming the internet for that perfect piece of mud-covered furry ass. After a quick exchange, I came to realize that Swampy is a fairly normal dude who just enjoys making fursuits. Fed up with the elitism and drama of the furry community, he set out to show how durable his suits were at the risk of enraging those who deemed fursuits too precious to handle a romp in the mud. His videos were inspired by his desire to produce real life cartoons, “and featured 60s and 70s slapstick humor with a touch of 90s subject matter,” as he later told me.

While his first video (which depicts a classic Nickelodeon-style slime dumping) created quite a stir in the furry community, it’s the subsequent mud videos that had people from both the furry and mud/quicksand communities riled up against him. The thing I came to understand is that even though giant furry animals sinking into quicksand arouse these people, they have some stringent quality control standards just like any other obsessive porn fan. “It seems when you don't give people their expected porn then they get extremely indignant at you,” Swampy told me.

The uninitiated fool I am thought Swampy’s videos would be the ultimate boner-inducer for those interested in furry quicksand action. But it seems like the only people he managed to please were myself, and the handful of freaks who love to dip their furry tails into muddy swamps. Even though Swampy stopped making videos a few years ago, his dirty legacy lives on through his incredible Vimeo channel. As I close my eyes tonight to dream of Aladdin, I’ll pray that someone picks things up where he left off.

@smvoyer

Because marketing people are, as ever, desperately trying to justify their existence, they are loath to leave one annual budget dollar unspent. That mentality leads to a yearly December blizzard of hastily and stupidly conceived ideas, and this year’s shit-batch is especially stinky.

When Jay Z introduces a fragrance for his fellow man, it should be both EPIC and SOMETHING YOU’VE NEVER SEEN BEFORE. Unfortunately, here we get a lazy rip-off of Goldfinger. But then, most of you youngs have probably never heard of the film, or Sean Connery, other than the “shoon” meme.

“This is Jay Z’s signature fragrance, so we wanted to capture the power and style of the man but also the sensuality of the fragrance at the same time,” says kirshenbaum bond senecal + partners co-chief creative officer Izzy DeBellis. “We needed to find the right balance of personality and product to make it all work, since it’s easy for anything associated with him to be dominated by the mere mention of Jay Z’s name.” DeBellis then inserted his tongue back into Jay Z’s asshole.

SiblingRivalry creative director Joe Wright (it takes at least two creative entities to properly craft a Jay Z ad) added: “The agency and client were as excited as we to produce something that is part art film, part brand launch.”

Thirty seconds of dumping gold paint on a model (Heidy De La Rosa) = art film.

Continuing in the “art film” genus, Marc Jacob’s president Robert Duffy thought it would be arty to make fun of stutterers. I guess some would say he’s empowering stutterers with the above edgy lip-syncing announcement about a holiday photo booth outside of the designer’s Bleecker Street store. But the extra-idiotic “nailed it’ ending says otherwise.

Duffy is apparently a full-on moron, according to details from a lawsuit by former Marc Jacobs chief operating officer Patrice Lataillade. This creepy video makes me want to change my last name.

Staying with speech impediments, Special K this month created a special clothing store called “Shhhut Down Fat Talk.” The “experiential” video ad shows unwitting women (no, they’re actors) “ambushed” by “fat talk” labels and signs. The feel-good payoff? There is none; you’re a fatty, fatso, HAHAHA! Now, eat our cereal and start losing weight, you stupid blimp.

Forget for a second that this is an awful piece of STUNT-vertising on its own, and remember Special K’s previous fat-shaming ad campaigns. Now ask the question: who the fuck do you think you’re kidding, Kellogg?

Would you want Scott Hoy of Sioux Falls to be your personal injury lawyer? Would you want Scott Hoy to be your anything after watching his special incomprehensible holiday ad? He says:

“We’ve seen a series of one-car accidents recently involving rollovers and serious injuries to passengers. I don’t know if it’s video games or what, but it’s so unfair to, after something like this, to blame people in the backseat or say ‘they deserved it’. I don’t like consoling these parents about what’s happened. But I’ll do it, until it stops! Will you please stop? I’m Scott Hoy…”

Video unearthed by Tim Nudd at AdFreak. (Note: some genius has made a floating disembodied Hoy head version of the ad.)

Maybe the “O” stands for Japanese Zeroes? This month’s Social Media Dipshitis the person(s) responsible for the SpaghettiOs Twitter feed. Maybe Campbell Soup can try to get SpaghettiOs named the “official meal of the USS Arizona Memorial?” Maybe get it renamed the “Uh-Oh Memorial?” Tora! Tora! Tora!

Runner-up for Social Media Dipshit of the month is the person(s) responsible for the Turbovite (a New Zealand energy drink brand) Facebook feed. The “like” grubbing is bad enough. But to not even know who the fuck Nelson Mandela is while using his clan name is tragically, ironically hilarious. RIP, Mr. Freeman (Via Condescending Corporate Brand Page).

These two billboards went up on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood last month. 138 Water’s tagline is “The first fashion water.” It comes in colors. The bottle, not the water. The 138 name comes from 1=unity, 3=trinity, 8=infinity. The model is Carmen Ortega, who is “famous” for having allegedly fucked Kim Kardashian’s ex Reggie Bush, and claiming to have been LeBron James’s mistress.

Naked women selling things on billboards where their nakedness has nothing to do with the product or its benefit is of course nothing new. But combining artless sexism with the fact that the naked woman here is selling the worst product ever, within one of the worst product categories ever, and you get yourself posted here.

(Images via Daily Billboard)

Lastly, in rapey ads, we have this thing for a place in Bangkok called Ozen Shop that sells “natural male enhancement” products. See two more rapey rape ads from the campaign here. Ad agency: Soho Square/WPP, Bangkok.

@copyranter

Hello Comical Comrades, 

This is the semi-regular VICE column about comics, art, illustration, zines, fan-related stuff, and general art/nerd shit as written by me, Nick Gazin, a self-proclaimed comics expert. Mostly, it's just comic reviews.

Did you hear about how Spaghettios tried to commemorate people who died at Pearl Harbor? Copyranter did, and so did Johnny Ryan, who made hilarious parodies where other junk foods mourned tragedies:

Check out his Tumblr for more goodness.

Has anyone else heard about this supervillain called Snowflame who is powered by cocaine? Apparently he's a minor meme already. How did I not know about this? I guess this is next year's Halloween costume.

And about those reviews—here are nine of them rated roughly from what I think is the best to what I think is the least best:

#1
Enjoy the Experience: Homemade Records 1958 - 1992
Gregg Turkington, Will Louviere, Johan Kugelberg, Michael Daley
Sinecure Books

Before people were releasing their albums via Tumblr and before the idea of independent music as a thing, there were a whole lot of losers putting out vanity records. They were made by people who I can't imagine were totally reputable or in love with their jobs, but they did produce some amazing album sleeves. This book collects a lot of the obscure and bizarre images made to accompany the musical product of people who no one else believed in.

Here are some things in the book that grabbed me:

Get it here. 

#2
Infomaniacs 
Matthew Thurber
Picturebox

Matt Thurber made a graphic novel that has a lot of the same themes as Videodrome, in which people's relationships to the internet become magical and metaphysical. I don't know how to describe it, but I enjoy it very much. The art is OK, but he concepts are big. BIG.

Get it here. 

#3
PURR
Rosie Simmons and Jessi Lembo

This is a retarded zine made by two young ladies who intern at Mishka. It's really badly xeroxed and laid out. It reminds me of the terrible zines I made when I was their age. There's an interview with Johnny Ryan, and some other people. Then there's some interviews with the other people who work at Mishka. Anyway, I highly recommend this zine. Its amateurishness makes it charming. 

Get it here. 

#4
The Fifth Beatle: The Brian Epstein Story
Dark Horse 

This big colorful graphic novel tells a very stylized and interpretive version of the life of Brian Epstein starting from the point in his life when he began managing the Beatles. I love the Beatles and you love the Beatles and this book looks really nice but ultimately I fucking hate it. Here's why. 

The Fifth Beatle is kind of about Brian Epstein and it's kind of about gay issues, but ultimately they're just used as excuses for someone new to come and rehash Beatlemania. 

I had problems with this book before I even cracked it open. Titling it THE fifth Beatle is sort of wrong because there were about 20 people who were referred to as the fifth Beatle at one point or another—Brian Epstein is just one of many. Personally I think it's a stupid term, but if there were a fifth Beatle it would be George Martin. 

The next thing that feels off with this cover is the subhead. It's not the Brian Epstein story, it's the story of the Beatles as told from Brian Epstein's point of view. None of Brian's life is covered before he discovered the band.

The third thing that bugged me before even opening the book is the sexy girl hanging out in the top left corner. Brian Epstein was famously gay—why's that girl there? We often associate the Beatles with screaming girls but those girls are clothed high school kids. The woman on the cover doesn't remind me of the Beatles or Brian Epstein, but she does remind me of Mad Men. In fact, this whole book reeks of Mad Men. It feels polished, but fake. The art is done by someone who is a very professional illustrator but not a good comics artist. All of the drawings look very well done but the characters are all wearing the same expression in every panel. 

The biggest thing that doesn't really get addressed is that Brian Epstein loved John Lennon and a lot of his devotion to the Beatles stemmed from his adoration of John. There's a part in this comic which portrays the time that John and Brian went on vacation to Barcelona together, but in the comic it shows John rebuffing Brian's advances. According to what I've read they actually messed around and you can read speculations as to what might have happened on this site here. There was even a famous slash fiction movie about it.

To sum it up: Don't get this book if you're a Beatles fan. 

Buy it here. 

#5
Permanent Smile 
Anthony Cudahy

This is a little squad shaped zine by Anthony Cudahy made of blue images printed on yellow paper. Anthony's a real talented guy but you wouldn't know it from this zine. It's not terrible, it's just a whole lot of nothing. 

Check out some of Anthony's work here. 

#6
As You Were: A Punk Comix Anthology Issue Two
Various People
Silver Sprocket Bicycle Club

As You Were is a comic anthology about punk stuff. The first issue was about house shows. This one is about mosh pits. The first time I met Glen Friedman he told me that he brought slamming to the East Coast. He went to LA and all the punks were skunking and stuff. When he got back he was seeing the Bad Brains at the Ratcage and kept doing some sort of sprawling backstroke from one side of the room to the next. He told me that the idea of organized mosh pits and circle pits are the antithesis of what he was trying to do, which was sort of individualistic and chaotic instead of some ritualized rough stuff. 

My old friend Jim Kettner did a comic in here in which he says "I friction' love to mosh." I don't understand why a man in his 30s would use that wordage. Using weird halfway swears past a certain age seems kind of weird to me. 

The comics in this book are all pretty amateurish. If I could give any of the contributors to this book artistic advice it would be to quit drawing. 

Buy it here.

#7
Various Zines
James Ulmer

James Ulmer does some very basic little childlike drawings with ballpoint pen and some ink wash stuff. He's not awful, but there's nothing here that I'm not getting from other artists who draw like retards on purpose. My favorite guy who doesn't try is probably David Shrigley. All the other people who try not to draw well need to not try even harder. 

Check out some more of his stuff here.

#8
Polar: Came In From The Cold
Victor Santos
Dark Horse

There's nothing wrong with ripping off Sin City. People have been making some great work by trying to mimic Frank Miller for decades now. The problem with Polar is that there are no new concepts in here—every scene and every visual concept feels lifted from Sin City. There are a few drawings that also remind me of Darwyn Cooke and Paul Grist, too.

What's exciting about reading the first Sin City book is watching Frank Miller try new techniques. The book begins with the main character having normal human proportions, and by the end both his body and Miller's drawing style are completely transformed. This book is just a pretty good work of fan fiction. It could be better, but Victor Santos needs to work on several things. He can't draw feet, the faces are crappy, and the character design is generic. 

Buy it here. 

#9
This Envelope Full of Garbage
Anonymous
Science Painted

Every now and again people mail me these envelopes of paper scraps. I don't know if it's the same person or different people with no real ideas. Either way, keep it up!

See you guys next week!

@NicholasGazin

In episode four of Fresh Off the Boat - Season Two, Eddie explores the different neighborhoods of London by hanging with a some of the cities' oldest gangsters, learning to play the "gentleman's game" of cricket, and by meeting with the multicultural youth who are fighting to break the barriers of race by telling stories from a different perspective. Part one airs Monday, December 23.