Inside one of Egypt's polling stations. Photos by Amanda Mustard

For the past two days, Egyptians have been taking to the polls to officially pass judgment on the latest iteration of the country's constitution. As with most "yes" or "no" questions, there are only two outcomes. A "yes" majority would force interim President Adly Mansour to call for elections (either parliamentary or presidential) within a period of 30 to 90 days from the new constitution coming into effect. But, incredibly, there are no guiding procedures in the event of a "no" majority.

That might seem presumptuous, but, thankfully for the interim government, they have history on their side—there's never been a "no" majority for any constitutional referendum in Egypt’s modern history.

The new constitution is widely perceived as an improvement on the 2012 version, which was drafted under ousted President Mohamed Morsi. But it's not really all that different from its predecessor. Instead of starting from scratch, as was originally expected, amendments were made to contentious provisions in a long, drawn out process that finally ended with Mansour’s declaration of the referendum on December 12 of last year.

Despite the increased clarity about discrimination and violence against women, as well as a lengthened list of socio-economic rights, the draft still contains a number of articles that have worried analysts—like the one that could potentially weaken labor rights and freedoms—and maintains provisions that protect the continued use of military tribunals for civilians. Nevertheless, some are absolutely certain that the contents of the constitution are exactly what Egypt needs.

"I’ve read the entire constitution!" one man exclaimed proudly outside a polling station in the Cairo district of Shubra. "This is the constitution for Egypt. God bless Egypt and God bless [General Abdel Fattah el-] Sisi! I’ve written my favorite bits from the constitution here," he smiled, showing off a piece of paper covered in writing.

The bomb-damaged front of the courthouse in Cairo's Imbaba neighborhood

The opposition Anti Coup Alliance immediately declared their intentions to boycott the vote, worried that pushing for a "no" would somehow legitimize the incumbent powers and their new draft constitution. However, nothing resembling a boycott movement managed to work its way into the public consciousness. Instead, the "Vote Yes" campaign snapped up all the attention and advertising space.

By the first day of the vote, almost every lamppost along Cairo's major bridges was adorned with a "Yes to the constitution!" poster. And giant billboards tenuously connect a "yes" vote to the 2011 revolution and the June 30 uprising that led to the fall of Islamist President Mohamed Morsi. The message was clear: this isn’t just a vote for a constitution, this is a vote for the revolution and the martyrs.

The first day got off to a bad start, when an explosive device went off outside a courthouse in Cairo's Imbaba neighborhood, some two hours before the polling stations opened on Tuesday morning.  Although no one was killed in the blast, it prompted an increased security presence—the worry being that there were similar acts planned for throughout this referendum period.

Despite the violent start, voter turnout for the first day was relatively high, with Egypt’s minister of administrative development claiming that 28 percent of the country's registered voters had cast their ballot that day alone. However, scattered fighting in various governorates turned deadly for some—the Interior Ministry put the death toll at 12 at the close of the first day's voting, and 250 were arrested.  

Crowds outside a Cairo polling station with a poster of General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi

On state TV, multiple feeds from polling stations all over Egypt showed long lines, with everyone smiling or waiting patiently.

Outside a school in the affluent neighborhood of Zamalek, a mother and her two teenagers strolled out of the polling station. Their fingers still wet with the voting ink, they responded to a question about how they had cast their votes. "Of course we all voted yes!" exclaimed the mother, Dina, apparently taken aback that there was even a possibility someone might vote no.

"This constitution is better than the one before. I didn’t vote in the referendum last year, but I knew it was my duty this time. It really is much, much better," explained her son, Abdel Aziz, before she interjected: "There is justice here," she said. "There is a future!" Her daughter Noor nodded in approval to what her brother and mother were saying. "We want everything to get better and this is the first step to that. No more fighting, a better economy, some stability," she said.

"Stability" is a promise that seems to come back around during every voting period, and after three years of turmoil, death, coups and changing governments, the offer is more tantalizing now than ever. "The most important thing for Egypt right now is stability," explained off-duty officer Mohamed Abdelmaher outside an Imbaba polling station. "Political stability, economic stability, social stability. Stability is absolutely the cure for all of Egypt’s problems."

He held his young daughter's hand tightly as he talked about the future of his country, repeatedly bringing up the need for stability and security. "I just voted 'yes' in the hope that there's no more of that," he said, pointing to the damaged facade of the courthouse. "God willing this is what the country needs."

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A woman in jeans was cuffed to a metal railing inside San Francisco’s Tenderloin police station when I walked in late Friday afternoon—prepared for just about anything during my ride-along through one of the most notorious open-air drug markets on the West Coast. 

The woman in cuffs had been arrested on suspicion of selling drugs, and was about to be strip-searched. A few feet away from her, in the cramped station interior lit with fluorescents, a plainclothes cop counted bills and crack that he’d seized. Strip-searches are standard procedure for drug arrests.

Men and women (most of the dealers in the Tenderloin are women) hide drugs in every orifice in the human body, including lady-parts; a tactic that the Tenderloin cops nicknamed “the Vault.” It’s also why most dealers in the neighborhood are women. And often dealers will sell directly from the Vault, insisting their buyers put the secreted drugs into their mouth. “Chipmunks,” they’re then called.

“Welcome to the Tenderloin,” said Sgt. Shaughn Ryan, the cop I’d be paired with for the night.

If you aren’t familiar with the Tenderloin, it’s a tiny triangular neighborhood located downtown, just a few blocks from San Francisco’s City Hall and about a five-minute walk from Twitter’s HQ on Market St. It’s famous for the drug trade; a trade that's not controlled by gangs. Dealers operating within its boundaries are relatively free to offer drugs without paying tax to gangs. 

The Tenderloin is unofficially organized kind of like a department store for drugs. Each corner has a different specialty drug, which is constantly rotating. For example, at the time of going to press, Turk and Taylor Street is where you’d go to buy crack. Turk and Leavenworth Street is a good place for prescription drugs. Along other streets it’s possible to score meth, coke, weed, heroin, anything else you can think of. And, like a department store, regulars commute from other parts of the Bay Area to score or sell.

It’s worth noting that along with the drug trade and the oft-decrepit, vermin-infested residential hotels, about 4,000 children go to school in the area, several hundred of whom walk home alone.  The neighborhood houses families, often immigrants, who are struggling to make their way in the city.

Sgt. Ryan is an interesting cop. Originally from the Northeast, he’s been at the Tenderloin station for three years, and in the SFPD for 17, about 12 of which were spent working as an undercover cop on the narcotics beat in some of the most dangerous neighborhoods in San Francisco. 

He looked like what I would have expected: clean-shaven, bulky with the body armor on. He spoke, and told stories with the cadences and patterns of a career officer, used to dealing with crooks, liars, and dealers for nearly a quarter-century. When I asked what makes him serve, he told me, “I don’t like bad guys, and I don’t like bullies."

“Nowadays, you can’t just be tough either, you gotta be smart,” Ryan said, adding that he’s got to be part medic, psychologist, lawyer, drug counselor, and cop to deal with the range of cases he encounters. “San Francisco doesn’t tolerate ignorance from its civil servants.” From what I saw, it was all true.

Sgt. Ryan kicked off the evening with a tour of the neighborhood, angling his big SUV in a tight, circling patrol along the neighborhood streets. With no traffic, it takes less than five minutes to drive from one end of the Tenderloin to the other.

A couple of right turns from the station later, we rolled through the intersection at Turk and Taylor Streets; the place to buy crack in San Francisco.

It was straight out of the The Wire. It looked and felt like Hamsterdam would if it were real. There were dozens of people—some dealers, some addicts, some just hanging out on the street. It’s hard to tell who’s doing what; buying drugs, selling drugs, drinking and smoking, or just shooting the shit. Ryan said nice shoes usually indicated a dealer. It smelled like cigarette smoke and cheap booze, with a bit of moisture from San Francisco’s famous fog.

I found out later from another cop that there’s a well-understood system of social behavior, and that if you observe from a building above for an hour or so, it gets a lot easier to figure out what’s going on.

When on patrol, cops in San Francisco drive with their windows down, so they can hear everything going on outside. Ryan, to waved and called out to people from the driver's seat. The cops have an odd, friendly relationship with the crooks.

Out of the throng, a black woman with wild, frizzy hair, short-shorts, and a bit of a potbelly started screaming in our direction. “Fuck you, I’ll fucking kill you,” she shouted into the open window on the passenger side, a foot or so from my face. I flinched.

“Yeah, yeah Janet,” Ryan said totally taking it in stride. He just kept right on driving slow. He must have seen shock on my face because Ryan immediately said, “Don’t worry, I won’t put you in harm's way.” I believed him.

The cop hads nicknamed the screaming woman “Janet Jackson.” She was a well-known Tenderloin resident, and harmless according to Sgt. Ryan. “She was just putting on a show for you,” he said. The next time we pulled around—and we did so more times than I could count during the evening—she didn’t scream at us. As much.

The first call we responded to was a suicide threat. I didn’t really hear the call come in over the radio, but mid-sentence Ryan gunned the engine, and sped through Friday rush hour traffic. 

The call came from a halfway house for the chronically homeless on Mason Street, just a couple blocks outside a deeply entrenched part of the drug market. Ryan figured out who the suicide threat came from in about half a second. The guy wasn’t in good shape: White, in his twenties, with a scruffy beard a ratty clothes. He looked at me uneasily.

“How did you plan to kill yourself?” Ryan asked. 

"Hanging," the guy said.

“Are you in any treatment programs? Or on drugs?” 

He mumbled something about being in a treatment program. 

A couple other officers arrived on the scene, one of whom was a negotiator. One of the cops asked again, “Are you planning to kill yourself?” After a second "yes," the officer unhooked cuffs from his belt and, without asking, the victim turned around as if it wasn't his first time.

As it turns out, he probably knew the routine. Once we got back into the SUV, the sergeant explained that people in need of drug or other kinds of medical treatment know they can get a ride from the SFPD if they act as though they are a danger to themselves. 

That fact didn’t bother Ryan. The guy had a legitimate problem. What annoyed him was the fact that trips to San Francisco General Hospital tied up two of his officers for several hours; transportation through rush hour traffic, paperwork, waiting times at the hospital. The frustration was that there was no other government mechanism to deal with these problems. That night there were a total of three cars in the neighborhood. Now only one of them was free.

“If I have only two cops responding to a multi-subject incident such as a shooting or a domestic violence call, those officers might be outnumbered and in danger,” Sgt. Ryan said.

A second dispatch came in, interrupting our conversation. We received a report of a man lying unconscious outside the New Century Theater, a strip club on the Tenderloin’s outskirts. 

It was growing dark when we arrived, the sky pink as the sun dropped over the horizon. The unconscious man was a white guy, with short black hair, wearing a gray hoodie. When we found him, he was unconscious on the street; his head partly propped against the side of the club’s outside wall. Blood was oozing from a wound in the back of his head. Sgt. Ryan checked him out, but waited for the paramedics from the San Francisco Fire Department to show up and handle his medical concerns. 

Dispatch had reported the guy got shoved into the wall, but according to surveillance footage quickly retrieved by other officers who arrived moments after we did, the guy was drunk—maybe high—and had been stumbling down the street, until he ran into the wall, and collapsed.

I watched them load the guy onto a stretcher and into the ambulance. The club owner had gotten chatty with Ryan, and they exchanged business cards as this was all going down. 

It was eerie how routine it all felt. Sgt. Ryan said that the paramedics were worried about the guy—it showed—and were rushing to get him to the hospital. That was going to be one hell of a hangover, if he ever woke up.

Sometime after dark, shit got heavy. “At night all the real scary bad guys come out,” he said, adding a quip about how when the big predators come out to hunt, the little guys crawl under rocks.

As if to illustrate the point, when Sgt. Ryan pulled our SUV around the corner of Golden Gate Avenue and Taylor Street, he spotted another truck, parked, tinted windows mostly down, beats thumping. 

He crept our SUV up along the passenger side slowly. At the same time, he brought his right hand to the pistol on his hip, ready to draw and shoot. At that moment I realized how volatile the Tenderloin really was. 

It turned out to be nothing. Whoever was in the SUV rolled the windows up and turned the music down. Satisfied, we drove off.

Cops in the Tenderloin have an interesting relationship with people they know are criminals. First, cops know a lot of names and the dealers (or at least the smart ones) know the cops. Many of them are informants, too. Dealers don’t like violence, it’s bad for business, so most of them don’t mind telling the cops when people start shooting each other. 

Later on, we pulled up to a corner where three guys who he said were probably slinging pills or crack. He stopped the truck. The sergeant just sat there in the SUV and waited, window down. “How you guys doing tonight,” he called. No response. Two of the guys lit smokes, one guy took off right away. After thirty seconds or so Ryan commented that he was impressed the dealers played it so cool. Usually, guys split right away. After another minute, the corner was empty.

One of the last calls we responded to was a taxi fare dispute with a particularly uncooperative, and potentially dangerous, passenger. Ryan really hauled ass to get there—driving the wrong way down one ways, hitting bursts of the sirens while we crossed an intersection—it was some real COPS shit, except all very, very real, and I was in the front seat.

By the time we arrived, a half dozen squad cars and a whole bunch of cops were trying to cuff the suspect. The entire block was shut down. The guy was wearing a dress shirt and suit pants, and he was screaming. He was yelling about the cops, that he had a broken arm, then started saying that he wanted his lawyer there. Ryan didn’t jump into it. Too many cooks in the kitchen, I guess.

The reason for the seemingly overwhelming response is that the block was a dangerous one for police, Sgt. Ryan said. It’s because 111 Taylor Street is a halfway house for federal and state parolees; guys who don’t like cops much. “It’s like having several hundred people in a prison without bars.” It was “not uncommon” to have an anti-police mob form, or have a toaster oven drop from several floors above.

Just as the cops were cramming the suspect into the car, Janet Jackson showed up, checking out the commotion. Still wearing her short-shorts and t-shirt, she started to loudly admonish the cops. The dozen cops half-listened for a moment, and then, at the same time it seemed, turned back to their business, waving her off, or telling her, “get outta here Janet.”

The rest of the night was quiet—at least for the Tenderloin. But, as Sgt. Ryan and I were parting ways, a confessed meth addict, “new in town,” approached us about helping the SFPD with a buy bust; something he was hoping to get paid to do. Sgt. Ryan told him to come back tomorrow.

The neighborhood has unmistakably changed in the last several years. Its borders are slowly shrinking as the surrounding gentrification slowly creeps deeper and deeper into the neighborhood. There are tech companies such as Twitter and Square that have set up offices on nearby Market Street. Also, Wework, a New York based co-working company just bought a building at Turk and Taylor Streets—the crack corner—and is converting some of the upper levels of a theater into office space for startups. And there’s a two story brewery and restaurant opening on that corner in the future too. 

The feds have apparently gotten serious about “doing their part” and have begun to crack down on the drug trade. A few weeks ago, the US Attorney for Northern California announced 11 grand jury indictments of alleged dealers. The indictments are serious, and because most of the Tenderloin is within 1,000 feet of a school, the penalties are severe: a mandatory minimum of a year, with a maximum sentence of 40 years, and up to a $2 million fine. It’s clear, Uncle Sam has put the dealers on notice. 

It’s hard to know how much of an effect crackdowns and enforcement have on the neighborhood. According to Sgt. Ryan what will change the Tenderloin isn’t more cops, or stricter enforcement, or even federal drug raids, it’s gentrification. He thinks that rising tide of new money has had, and will have, a far more profound effect on the neighborhood’s character. That’s debatable, considering the proliferation of drug treatment centers and harm reduction techniques.

Regardless, don’t hold your breath. The small section of the city patrolled by the Tenderloin police continues to be a neighborhood wracked by violence and drugs, with a transient population made up of some of San Francisco’s very poorest residents. 

On my way out of the station for the last time I heard one of the officers quip, “It’s a dump, but it’s our dump.” 

“Good cops need to have pride,” Ryan said, by way of explanation. “Tenderloin officers know that this is a hard and unforgiving place. But there are a lot of good people here, even if we, the police, don’t interact with them much.”

@chernandburn

The back hatch of our bird gaped like a big hungry mouth—its tethered machine-gunner leaning out over the void, scanning for muzzle flashes. One out of every three flights over the city of Sangin, Afghanistan, takes fire, my Marine escort Lieutenant Parry mentioned as we dove onto the landing zone in a cyclone of yellow canister smoke.

“Sangin is the front line,” Colonel Fitzpatrick had explained at my briefing. The Colonel was everything you would expect from a Marine officer. He looked like he could bite a metal bar in half if he got angry enough. “Of course, an insurgency has no front lines, but over there, both sides are staring at each other.” Occupying the confluence of the Helmand and Musa Qala rivers, Sangin overlooks the world’s most productive poppy fields—lush expanses of red, white, and purple. Whoever controls the region controls the bulk of the world’s opium trade. These fields had been a major source of funding for the Taliban, and I had come to witness the Afghan National Army (ANA) taking over the fighting here as US troops finally withdraw.

The Marines of Forward Operating Base Nolay, where we would be staying, were clustered in a bunker when we landed, protected from a rim of high ground in the distance from which attacks sporadically came. With a practiced casualness, Sergeant Amaker mentioned that just a few days ago, a round had bullwhipped past his face here, spilling out the gravel-filled HESCO barrier that stood beside him. I later saw him pause over the remains of that barrier, looking down a beat too long, gazing the way somebody else might gaze at a sunset. Amaker and the rest of the Marines there had relieved their predecessors at Nolay only a month before, but most of them already had at least one story of a near miss to tell when the subject came up over MREs the following afternoon in the mess tent.

As our engines choked off, the Marines hustled out into the open. Their outstretched palms reached us first for a quick exchange of rock-solid handshakes before we all turned and trudged off to the hilltop base overlooking Sangin and its 14,000 inhabitants. Only a few years ago, Nolay was packed with thousands of coalition troops. Now it is almost entirely in the hands of the ANA. By the time I got there, the Marines only retained a skeleton crew operating out of a small compound in a corner of the facility. The Marine compound is sealed off from the ANA side by an encircling mud wall.

“A properly-maintained mud wall is surprisingly strong,” the burly Captain Naughton said. “I saw a wall like this stop an RPG.” The problem was that the fortifications haven't been repaired since the compound got seized from a drug lord five years ago. The walls had begun collapsing recently and had to be buttressed by prefabricated concrete blocks since none of the occupants were familiar with Afghan mud-building technology.

We dropped our packs in a tent before meeting up with Naughton and several other Marines for a tour of the ANA sector. On the way out, we passed a little plastic Christmas tree. Instead of ornaments, there were empty chewing tobacco tins of red and green. Naughton opened the padlocked gate that divided the two sections. It was purposefully made to look minimally-secured. “We don’t want the Afghans to think we don’t trust them.” he explained.

Later, as we passed a soccer field on the way to the perimeter, I asked if the Marines ever played matches with their Afghan counterparts. “There have been green-on-blue attacks over things like that,” Naughton replied. “We’d stand a good chance of winning, so we don’t play.”

If he was concerned for his safety, Naughton never showed it. He strolled around like the mayor of Nolay, with a joke or a friendly greeting for everybody. We stopped for a moment in the sunlight to chat up an Afghan infantryman. Everyone laughed as Naughton and the blue-eyed infantryman playfully squabbled over who looked more like Alexander the Great. A gunshot swallowed our laughter. The round snapped just over our heads—not the cordial POP of distant fire, but the rude CRACK of a near-miss.

We darted into an adjacent post, a concrete bunker furnished with sandbags and loosely fitted slabs of bulletproof glass. The windows were nearly opaque from the cobwebbing of intercepted lead. “That was close!” Naughton shouted into the side of my helmet. My ringing ears made everything sound far away. The Marine’s grin glowed white in the dusty dim as we crouched like giants under the low ceiling. Abdul, the sentry on duty, grinned back, standing unbent with his M-16. Everyone exchanged Salaam Alaikums and shook sweaty hands.

Abdul was too young to grow a beard, but he had been fighting long enough to have developed a soldier’s version of perfect pitch: He could tell what guns were firing and from where by sound alone. “PKM” he said, naming the type of machine gun that had fired at us—a Russian model. With his finger, he traced back the trajectory to a hill about a kilometer away, where a Marine sentry later mentioned that he saw our shooter through binoculars peeking out from behind a building. A little girl was playing out front—placed there, the Marine assumed, as a human shield. Her presence ensured that fire could not be returned.

We stood behind the sandbags for a while listening to AK-47s pop in the distance followed by the canned thunder of RPGs. “It’s good to hear the boom,” Abdul quipped. “Refreshes the mind.”

That night at Nolay, everybody’s mind became very refreshed. Under a stone-age sky of infinite stars, the sounds of battle raged unceasingly. It sounded like the Fourth of July. The spiced-earth smell of gunpowder drifted through the tents. Just a week prior, I had been told by one of the men that an interpreter had half his skull blown off by a round while he slept in this tent. “I think about that every night when I go to sleep,” the man added. “Will I ever wake up again?”

“Sleep on your side,” another Marine joked. “Makes a smaller target.”

I laid half-asleep in my rack, listening to the cadence of the gunfire and its ever-changing rhythms. As the sound merged with my dreams, sometimes it sounded like the insistent knocking of an unwanted guest, sometimes like a galloping horse, or ripping fabric, or Morse code, or like a skipping record—a song that can’t quite get started.

I had learned earlier that day why the Taliban preferred night fighting. They can change positions at will, while the Afghans remain attached to their guard posts and road blocks. The ANA sentries had nothing more than flashlights to shine out into the blackness. “These guys need night-vision goggles,” Naughton lamented. “The Taliban fix their rifles on the Afghans’ positions during the day and then wait for the flashlights to go on to adjust their aim. It takes five seconds.”

I bundled up and walked out of my tent during the gunfight’s crescendo, doing a circuit of the sleeping Marine complex. The stillness was a testament to how much things had changed here. A couple of years ago, it would have been the Marines doing the fighting. Now it was the ANA’s battle. The only men awake inside the mud walls were the sentries and a handful of technicians monitoring the action from overhead with an unarmed drone that roared like an industrial vacuum cleaner. “Whenever we send this up,” the controller explained, “it sends the Taliban running. They probably think it shoots laser beams.”

The next morning, I awoke to the sound of Amaker’s big lungs belting out old drill instructor hymns just for the joy of it. His voice was an instrument of terror and he loved it. “I don’t know but I’ve been told: Fuck you Corps, now gimme some more! Eennie-meenie-meiney-mo-mo!”

As I washed up in the sink, the water ran beige off my face with a night’s worth of dust. I swallowed a cup of black coffee on my way to the ANA’s Battle Update Brief. The officers met for a PowerPoint presentation in the basement of a captured mansion. The exact numbers were unclear, but several soldiers and policemen had been killed by gunfire and IEDs in a series of six Taliban ambushes. Insurgent casualties were unknown, but presumed to be high. Afghan General Zamarai sat with folded hands behind a desk that looked as though it had been dragged through the mud. He had the last word—he stood and congratulated his men on a successful battle and then harangued them for the squandering of ammunition. “The soldiers get scared and fire without seeing the enemy. And for one Kandak (battalion) to fire 83 82-mm mortars is wasteful.”

When I later requested a detailed account of the previous night’s fighting from the Marines, spokesperson Major Paul Tremblay responded: “From our perspective now as Advisors rather than out on the ground participating directly in the combat, it can be difficult to piece together the specifics of what happens during any given firefight. What I can say, however, is that the ‘sporadic ineffective’ fire that came in that day was met with accurate, overwhelming fire from the Second Kandak soldiers and Recon Tolai soldiers respectively.”

On my last day in Nolay, we piled into dinosaur-sized armored vehicles (known as MRAPs) for a drive to an Afghan artillery emplacement atop the adjacent Heran Hill. Orchestrating the encounter was Captain Dewson, a soft-spoken man with a broad, hair-trigger smile. I had variously heard him described as the Justin Beiber, the Jay-Z, and the Keith Richards of Nolay, because the ANA soldiers supposedly loved him so much. Around his neck was a bullet medallion that Massiallah, one of the Afghan artillerymen he was training, had made for him.

When we clambered out of our vehicles at the summit, it wasn’t just Dewson who got the celebrity treatment. The Afghans flocked around all of us, shaking hands and patting backs. They handed us cellophane-wrapped cakes with tea and offered to slaughter a goat for dinner. Massiallah and his friends proposed arm wrestling matches and dance competitions. The Marines shook their heads warily and smiled. The Afghans settled for having their pictures taken with us in a hundred different combinations.

“I respect these men a great deal,” Dewson confided as my shutter snapped away. “These are the toughest men in Afghanistan and you can see how proud they are about it. Look at their uniforms. They live in these squalid conditions, but their uniforms are always clean.”

That night the Osprey came for us again. In the darkness, it grew—a black menacing shape that you could only see by the stars it blotted out. The roar was apocalyptic. I shouted my goodbyes. Nolay’s Marine commander, the fatherly Colonel Douglas, was there to see us off. I thanked him and wished him well. “Stay safe, sir!” I yelled into his ear. A smile broke through Douglas’s usual expression of benevolent concern. “It’s not about staying safe,” he bellowed, “it’s about the mission!”

With that, we lifted off from Nolay, heading back to the city-sized Camp Leatherneck 20 minutes away. Our hosts had confidently called it, “The safest place on earth.” I gazed back through the open hatch of the Osprey down into the Sangin night. The only thing keeping me from tumbling into oblivion were the taut straps running over my shoulders. The horizon rocked back and forth as I watched the muzzle flashes of the insurgents and the tracers of the ANA below playing out their endless call and response in the dark. Strange signs of life, of a great and mysterious vitality.

I thought of how Massiallah had greeted Dewson that morning on the summit of Heran.

“How did you sleep last night?” he had asked. “Did our guns keep you awake?”

“I never sleep better than when I hear your guns firing,” Dewson replied, “I know that you’re protecting me.”

Roc’s new book, And, was released recently. You can find more information on his website.

Photo via Flickr User MingleMediaTVNetwork

Welcome to a special #newslaves edition of This Week in Racism. I’ll be ranking news stories on a scale of 1 to RACIST, with “1” being the least racist and “RACIST” being the most racist.

-It's finally Oscar season, which can mean only one thing: Salon.com's editorial staff has taken up residence in a bunker deep under the Earth's surface in order to monitor the public statements of every single nominee 24/7 in case they say something "problematic." Salon wants American Hustle director David O. Russell to check his privilege after telling the New York Daily News that he likens Jennifer Lawrence's highly lucrative stint as the plucky heroine Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games movie series to the experience of a 19th century African-American slave.

“I personally think they should give her a bit of breathing room over there because they’re printing money. But she’s a very alive person. I’ll tell you what it is about that girl—talk about 12 years of slavery, that’s what the franchise is. And I’m going to get in so much trouble for saying that.”

Russell absolutely got in trouble for saying that and subsequently apologized, but I know he was just being pressured by J-Law's slavemaster to keep quiet. Being the good samaritan that I am, I called the LAPD to alert them to the fact that Hunger Games director Francis Lawrence is savagely whipping Jennifer Lawrence and making her eat moldy food. He's forcing her to sleep in barns, shit in the woods, and wear tattered clothing, like, on the reg. What kind of a country do we live in where we treat our movie stars like this? It's shameful and it has to stop before all our movie stars are outsourced to China or something. If you'd like to donate to this worthy cause and help fight back against celebrity slavery, please click here to give whatever you can spare. If you ever need to hire a blonde woman who may or may not have ADHD to say wacky things to a camera, I have someone I can recommend to you. She could use a job. 7

-Speaking of the barbaric historical stain of slavery, a firefighter in Orange County, Florida, made a name for himself by painting a Confederate flag on the axe he uses when he's on the job. I can't figure out why, but a black man in the American South was shocked and disturbed when a large white male in a position of authority came storming into his burning house with a deadly weapon covered in a symbol of his ancestors' oppression. Talk about an overreaction!

The firefighter, the son of Assistant Fire Chief Jeff Holton, claimed he was not a racist. According to a report by WFTV, Holton told investigators that the flag "signified his small-town roots and core values of family and hard work." Oh, that's what that means! I could have sworn the Confederate battle flag pictured above symbolized an attempt by rogue American states to break from the Union in order to escape federal intrusion into their right to hold other human beings in perpetual bondage. Maybe the next time you want to symbolize "hard work," you draw a dump truck or two dudes carrying a big sack of bricks. It's less confusing that way. By the way, did you know swastikas are the international symbol for hugs, and Anne Frank was just down in that annex so she could concentrate on finishing her book? RACIST

Photo via Flickr User Peter Hutchins

-Another big fan of the Confederate flag, Kanye West, beat a man to a pulp for calling his baby mama, Kim Kardashian, a "nigger lover." The victim (or assailant, depending on your perspective) was holding the door open for Kardashian at her chiropractor's office in Beverly Hills when he launched into his verbal attack. (At least he held the door open for her?) Some people don't know how to a treat a lady these days. It's nice to know that chivalry isn't dead.

Kim called her man, who arrived on the scene to kick the shit out of the alleged racist. KTLA reported that the man was actually an 18-year-old boy and Perez Hilton claimed that West punched him more than 30 times before his bloodlust was satiated. "It was a little bit of an incredible reaction, but probably warranted," a witness told KTLA. Calling someone a "nigger lover" is not illegal, but battery is, so West is currently under investigation for the incident. If Kanye is cleared of any wrongdoing by the police, I really hope we get as many "Yeezus Walks!" headlines as possible. Don't let me down, fellow media elites. RACIST

Screenshot via KABB Facebook page

-As we approach Martin Luther King Day here in the United States, I think it's a good time to remind black people of Dr. King's non-violent methods of bringing about social change and combating racism. Mike Hernandez, a weatherman in San Antonio, Texas, "unintentionally" made mention of Martin Luther Coon Day. He said it was a "mispronunciation" of the civil rights leader's last name. It's a terribly unfortunate situation, and the station issued the above apology. If Dr. King was alive today, I'm fairly certain his first instinct wouldn't be to find Mike Hernandez and beat the crap out of him. Maybe Kanye West could have taken a page from MLK's book and responded in a more civilized fashion... or at least hire someone else to beat up stupid teens who insult his wife. 6

The Top Racist Tweets of the Week: 

What does pontiac stand for? Poor old nigger thinks its a cadillac.

— The Funny Racist™ (@TheFunnyRacist) January 1, 2014

Watching Lone Survivor made me hate those damn sand nigger Tali's more than I already did

— Adam Wallace (@a_wall41) January 13, 2014

Is this dumb cracker really trying to smoke weed on the bus-_-

— hector lucatero (@hlucatero23) January 16, 2014

i struggle with opening my eyes in pictures. #chink

— dylan kay (@dyl_iciouss) January 13, 2014

Since when did girls ever like a guy with a beaner name like juan pablo... Theres like 50 juan pablos at esco hahaha

— Dylan Wood$hank (@dylannasty) January 7, 2014

Very un-Jew like behaviour from the Spurs fans throwing money.

— David (@TekkaBooSon) January 5, 2014

@dave_schilling

Cry-Baby #1:Saverio Ballante

screencaps via

The incident: A guy allegedly used an illegal move in a game of chess.

The appropriate response: Consulting the internet.

The actual response: His opponent stabbed him to death before attempting to eat his heart.

Earlier this week, Italian born Saverio Bellante phoned emergency services to report a murder at the house he shared with his landlord, Tom O'Gorman in Dublin, Ireland.

Police arrived at the house and found Tom's mutilated body. Saverio told them that he had murdered Tom and eaten his heart. 

When asked why he'd killed Tom, Saverio said that they'd fallen out over a game of chess they'd been playing for over a year. Apparently Tom had tried to use an illegal move.

During the dispute, Tom asked Saverio to leave the house, so Severio stabbed him multiple times in the chest with a kitchen knife. He also beat him with a dumbbell.

A post-mortem examination of the corpse revealed that, though Tom's heart was still present, one of his lungs had been removed. Police said that they were "unable to locate" it.

They added that the post-mortem was unable to determine whether or not Tom was alive at the time his body was mutilated.

Saverio declined assistance from a state-funded attorney, and will be representing himself in court.

Cry-Baby #2: Curtis Reeves

images via and Facebook

The incident: Someone was texting in a theater during the movie previews.

The appropriate response: Nothing. It's the previews. 

The actual response: The man sitting behind the texter fatally shot him. 

On Monday, a married couple, Chad and Nicole Oulson, took some time out of their schedule to go on a date. After, dropping off their three-year-old daughter at a daycare, they ate lunch together and went to see the movie Lone Survivor at the Grove 16 theater in Wesley Chapel, near Tampa, Florida. 

During the previews for the movie, Chad texted his daughter's daycare provider.

Curtis Reeves, 71 years old, who was sitting in the row behind the Oulsons, was not impressed by this, and said something to the young couple.

It's not totally clear what happened next. But, after "exchanging words," with Chad, Curtis pulled out a .380 auto handgun and fired at Chad. The bullet passed through the hand of Chad's wife Nicole, who had reached out to try and protect her husband, and hit Chad in the chest.

The shot turned out to be fatal. According to witnesses, as Chad was dying, he said, "I can't believe I got shot."

During his preliminary court hearing, Curtis' attorneys claimed that he shot Chad in self defense. "The alleged victim attacked him, at that point in time he has every right to defend himself," Curtis' attorney, Robert Escobar, told the court. Adding that Chad had thrown an "unkown object" that may have been a bag of popcorn at Curtis.

Luckily, Judge Lynn Tepper didn't buy the defense. "It may or may not have been popcorn," she said in court. "An unknown object does not equal taking out a gun... It doesn't warrant taking out a gun and firing it at someone's chest."

This, apparently, was not the first time Curtis had overreacted to a movie-watching texter. An unnamed woman contacted police  to say that she witnessed Curtis in the same theater last month, yelling at a woman who had been texting during the previews. She claims he also followed the woman to the restroom.

Curtis is being held without bail.

Which of these alleged murderers is the bigger cry-baby? Let us know in this poll right here:

Previously: A woman who had a tantrum because her plane seat wouldn't recline Vs. A guy who went on hunger strike against gay marriage

Winner: The hunger striking homophobe!!!

@JLCT

Iceland at night via.

My friend Einar is a native of Iceland, the place where virtually nothing grows, but the people make do. They bake bread by burying it near the centers of geysers, hunt the Fin whales that migrate to laze along the coast, and roast adorable little puffins. Einar—though he is nearly thirty and possesses a degree from an Ivy League university—believes in elves, or, as they are known in Iceland, “hidden people.” At first, I thought it was just Einar’s personality, until I realized that Icelanders are not like Americans.

A few years ago, Einar lived in a duplex apartment on a dingy Lower East Side block in NYC with a few of our mutual friends. They threw the occasional party, and I always ventured from my house in Northern Manhattan to attend. One evening, Einar came out from his basement lair, brandishing a sea-glass green bottle with a black label that read “Brennivín.”

“Want to drink some Black Death?” he asked.

“What the fuck is that?” one of our friends blurted.

Without waiting for the answer, the four people huddled in the kitchen unanimously agreed that we did. Visions of my Nordic former-roommate staring at his computer screen licking flecks of dried fish flakes off his fingertips flashed before my eyes while he opened the bottle. It seemed unlikely to me that anything out of Einar’s homeland would be delicious. I recalled too, the urban legend—I could only assume it amounted to as much—of fermented slabs of shark served for dinner. I don’t remember what we drank the Black Death out of—glasses, shots, or swigs from the bottle perhaps—but it tasted like licorice. I later learned that it is known as Brennivín, an unsweetened schnapps made out of potato mash that is flavored with caraway seeds, cumin, angelica, and a slew of other herbs native to Iceland. What I do recall from that evening involved hightailing it out of the party and into a cab back to my house in Northern Manhattan where I, inexplicably invigorated, spent the next two hours trying to master the complicated clapping rhythm that begins around 4:26 of Nina Simone’s “Sinnerman.” Einar never explained why it’s locally referred to as the “Black Death” amongst Icelanders, but perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the name, Brennivín, translates into “burning wine.” The beverage tastes more like mild rye licorice than liquefied bubonic plague.

Above, a bottle of Brennivín. Photo by Bryndis Frid @Fridphoto

I was recently shocked to discover that soon enough, many Americans will be able to spend hours alone in their bedrooms doing jigs with a low-grade hallucinogenic buzz, because the Black Death is coming to American liquor stores. This is all in thanks to an intrepid one-man distribution outfit named Joe Spiegel. I couldn’t believe that this (once) illegal import will be entering into our booze market, so I decided to call Spiegel himself to see how he managed to overcome the importation hurdle. Spiegel told me that the idea to import Brennivín came to him during his frequent work trips to Europe when he was a video game consultant and investor. 

“All the cheapest flights are through Iceland, and I found myself bringing back more and more Brennivín for friends,” he said.  Eventually, he decided that there was a market for the liquor, and figured that he might as well import it himself.  After three months of negotiating with Ölgerðin Egill Skallagrímsson, the sole beverage producer of the schnapps, Spiegel struck a deal to import the Black Death into the United States. In Iceland, the Black Death is imbibed at the traditional winter festival of Thorrablot, which has its roots in paganism but now—in essence—is an excuse to eat nightmarish feasts of sheep’s testicles, headcheese, and liver pudding. Imagining how it will be received and enjoyed in the United States will probably differ from the Thorrablot experience, but only time will tell.

Unlike Americans, Icelanders are not big into marketing. I tried to get a sense of the reason for the cultural gap, but the only three Icelandic culture academicians that don’t focus on medieval Nordic civilization neglected to respond to my emails.  

The country has a long and uptight temperance tradition that has only recently slackened over the past couple of decades. Wine was outlawed until 1921, and liquor was non-existent until 1935, after which it was produced solely by a government-owned monopoly called ATVR. Beer was illegal until March 1st, 1989—a historical day now referred to as “Beer Day.” But even today, you won’t find brews sold in Icelandic grocery stores that exceed 3.2 percent alcohol. Advertising liquor is, in particular, still heavily regulated, so the idea of a press packet lauding the glory of Viking liquor is as foreign to Icelanders as halting construction to save the local fairies would be to Americans. 

Spiegel’s plan for world domination is more faithful to low-key Icelandic style than the capitalist approach to advertising. Rather than creating a 360-degree assault on the American consumer, he is relying on word-of-mouth grassroots efforts to promote his Black Death import. The production is going to be released on a very small scale, with only 1,1000 1-liter sized bottles sold to a select few establishments in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, New York, and San Francisco. And while Brennivín is 80 proof in Iceland, the US version will only be 75 proof, due to the American government’s prissiness. 

Above, Black Death hangover via.

As far as stateside cult status goes, it’s more NXIVM than Scientology. The handful of fans include Anthony Bourdain, who chugged it during an episode of No Reservations to wash out the taste of rotten shark, Quentin Tarantino, who made Michael Madsen’s character drink it throughout Kill Bill Vol. 2, and Dave Grohl, who shows up everywhere in Brennivín t-shirts and says that it makes you feel “like you’ve done acid… like you can’t feel your feet.” Grohl spoke publicly some years back about wanting to bring Brennivín to the United States. He envisioned a marketing campaign that would feature a metal rocker “walking down a city street, picking up a trash can and throwing it through a window.” 

Joe Spiegel occasionally arranges tastings around the country, and agreed to set one up for me when he passed through New York during a recent visit. I have to admit that it wasn’t what I had envisioned months earlier when I recalled my first experience with the beverage. The setting was a spacious rooftop in Brooklyn with a stunning view of the Manhattan skyline, and there were buckets of Pellegrino flanked by plates of artisanal cheeses. Guests sampled original cocktails like “the Katla,” made of Brennivín, Kahlua, and lemon seltzer, and “the Northern Lights,” a combination of Brennivín, amaretto, seltzer, and grapefruit juice. The cocktails were actually delicious, and the guests were chuckling and conversing coherently. I heard a friend say, “My mom would really like this one,” while Spiegel told another guest, “It’s the very definition of small batch.” I had assumed that after a few shots, at least two attendees would have thrown themselves off the rooftop, while the remaining drinkers would be left babbling schizoaffective nonsense, daring each other to smash bottles over our skulls while listening to the best of the Black Circle on high volume. With any luck, the next morning, we would have been forced to set up a website documenting the various places and states of undress we ended up in later in the evening, a la FourLokoStories.com. But the night ended calmly, with thanks given, hands shaken, and nary a head injury in sight. Nina Simone hand-clapping and visions of fairies were nowhere to be found, so I soberly hailed a cab, and headed home.

Read more from Kelsey Osgood at KelseyOsgood.com.

Editor's note: Once every season or year, as the case may be, we put up a batch of "best of" photos from our resident comic dweeb and amateur picture-taker, Nick Gazin. Typically, he gets these images to us about a week after the last day of the season and/or year. That sort of lag is what is known in industry terms as filing "late as fuck." This year, however, Nick decided to push the envelope even more and shoot over his best-of-the-year photos a whole two weeks after the end of the year, and typing simply "You want this?" into the body of the email. They say to make it in the photo biz you need to have chutzpah. Maybe Nick is trying to show us his by flexing his balls a little bit, or maybe he's just not good with calendars. Whatever the case, we're suckers for tradition, so here is Nick Gazin's Best of 2013 photos, published on January 17, 2014.

Like most of the previous years, I took a lot of photos. These are my 30 best. I DJed a lot of parties and went to a lot of places and I hardly ever saw daylight. Looking at the pictures, I realize that the major themes of my photography are pictures of girls doing stuff and garbage I see on the street.

In 2013, I saw a lot of women. They were all beautiful. I also saw a lot of garbage. It was beautiful too. I don't remember seeing all that many men.

@NicholasGazin

By H. Elrasam, via Wikimedia Commons

Most of the time Faisal (name changed to protect his identity) forgets he has shotgun pellets lodged in his head. They sometimes throb when he plays soccer and occasionally keep him up at night, but only now, with a new fear of infection setting in, does he worry about his inability to seek professional medical help.

“If I go to hospital I’ll be arrested for sure,” the tall, thin, slightly sallow 25-year old told me in a hushed tone when we met in a small neighborhood café late one evening.

Faisal is more than slightly paranoid. He repeatedly glanced at the café’s other customers and nervously massaged his hands when an armored personnel carrier passed nearby. But he has good reason to be fearful: Hospital personnel allegedly reported dozens of wounded Muslim Brotherhood supporters to the police, and Faisal’s keen to avoid their fate.

He was first wounded on August 14 as the police cleared supporters of ousted Islamist president Mohammed Morsi from Rabaa. Two months later, he was shot three times more during demonstrations accompanying commemorations of the 1973 war against Israel, as he and hundreds of other Muslim Brotherhood supporters sought to force their way into Tahrir Square.

A doctor friend and fellow Morsi sympathiser has dealt with his more manageable wounds- removing 14 pellets and a bullet from his arms and shoulders, but the metal shots trapped in his jawbone, another just below his hairline and a third to the side of his left eye socket will require more complicated procedures than can be performed in a clinic.

I bumped into Faisal shortly before he was shot for the first time while reporting on a brutal clash in an affluent Cairo district. Several hundred Morsi supporters evicted from one of the camps in the shadow of Cairo University had angrily smashed their way through a thin cordon of police, killing several officers, stealing their riot equipment, and burning a police bus. They were furious at the brutality of the security forces and intended on camping at a traffic circle in the middle of one of Cairo’s main intersections.

It was never going to end well, and the clashes between Morsi supporters and police forces soon transformed the local mosque into a makeshift morgue.

At some point amid the mayhem I lost track of Faisal who had arrived late on the scene to a thick pall of black smoke from burning tires that offset the effects of tear gas. Fearing the worst, I checked every one of the morgue’s roughly 20 corpses, which had begun to stink in the scorching afternoon heat after the air-conditioning was knocked out. A few of the bodies were scarcely recognizable, but he wasn’t there.  People told fantastical tales of bodies being carted off to conceal the soaring death toll, and I wondered whether something similar had happened to my engineer acquaintance.

But Faisal, unlike at least 700 other Morsi supporters and approximately 50 policemen, didn’t die that day. His body was peppered with birdshot (clusters of pellets fired from the shotguns that many Egyptian thugs use) and a live bullet, which was fired, he said, from a residential balcony.

Weak from loss of blood and his ears still ringing from the noise of the army intervention to clear traffic, he stumbled back through the empty side streets and past the military checkpoints. When he finally got home, he collapsed and slept for 18 hours.

Faisal’s family disapproved of his politics, but they were afraid of the inevitable late-night door knock from the police, so they moved him out of Cairo.

For two weeks he laid low and recovered from most of his injuries in a distant coastal town. He threw away his phone, fearing—in a fit of extreme paranoia—that the security services were tracking him. He shaved his scruffy beard when told the police were paying extra attention to long-bearded men associated with ultra-conservative Islamism and wore long sleeves to conceal the telltale gashes and furrows in his arms produced by birdshot.

Faisal is very small fry in the Morsi-supporting ‘Anti-Coup Alliance’ that organizes weekly protests calling for the deposed president’s reinstatement. He’s never formally joined the Muslim Brotherhood and back when I first met him in April, he evinced little sympathy for the now-banned organization. “Morsi’s useless,” I remember him telling me, but the popularly supported military coup changed all that.

“Morsi’s a democrat,” he now said, rehashing the most familiar Brotherhood talking point. He steers clear of discussing the much-maligned president’s failures and denies having disparaged his rule in the first place. Much of the time I have to crane my head to hear his low whisper, but there’s no containing his disdain for the army’s actions.  “The military just woke up one morning and thought, we have guns, let’s become president,” he shouted, which only attracted suspicious stares from those around us.

But, when I asked him about Islamist attacks on Christians—which escalated during Morsi’s yearlong presidency, before peaking in the midst of this summer’s mayhem—that confidence disappears. His face blanched. He ducked off for an extended bathroom break before launching into another conspiracy theory. The security services were responsible, he said. “They burnt the churches so that while everybody’s looking there, they could kill us all in the camps here.”

It’s a frequently told tale in a country with a weakness for outlandish plots. Faisal might happily mix with non-Muslims, but many of his compatriots aren’t so accepting. “[Christians] are traitors to Egypt,” student Hossam Ali told me on that desperate day in August, as I frantically dashed around looking for Faisal.

Back then, many Morsi supporters felt it would only be a month or two before their president was ushered back into office. “We cannot be stopped,” one Brotherhood member confidently told me as I tracked a protest in September, but Faisal’s not so certain.

His once close-knit group of friends has splintered between those resigned to or happy with military rule, and an ever-shrinking number intent on pressing for Morsi’s return. Mahmoud, Faisal’s best friend, was conscripted into the army for his mandatory military service only days after he was lightly wounded during the dispersal of the Morsi supporters’ camps in August. The often pitifully small number of protesters who turnout after midday prayers on Friday has left him painfully aware of his side’s weakness.

Still, he insisted that he has no intention of accepting another president. “Rain or heat, I’ll continue struggling for my president,” he said.

This week on the VICE podcast, Reihan Salam sits down with Jason Q. Ng, author of the book Blocked on Weibo, which examines the keywords blocked on China's most important social media site, Sina Weibo. Jason is a research fellow at the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, where he studies information controls in social media. He is also a research consultant for China Digital Times and was a 2013 Google Policy Fellow. His writing and work have been featured in Le Monde, TheAtlantic.com, Foreign Affairs, and Tea Leaf Nation.

Turns out Andrews is quite the art collector, too. Photos via Angela Hennessey.

This is Don Andrews, a self-described white racist and the leader of the Nationalist Party of Canada. He co-founded far-right white supremacist group the Edmund Burke Society and waged war with Toronto's communists in the 70s. His front door and car have been bombed by various resistance groups, and a house he owned was burnt down while he was on vacation in Mexico. Andrews' other claims to fame include being the first person in Canada to be charged with promoting hate and having Toronto's laws changed specifically because of him—he came in a distant second in the 1974 mayoral elections, but that scared council enough to change the law, from where the runner-up would take the mayor's place if the position became vacant between elections, to one where council gets to choose the replacement, probably one that didn’t believe in the superiority of the white race. He's run multiple times since then, his previous attempt being in 2010.

After hearing that he had put his name in the race for the 2014 election, I decided to visit Andrews in his home near the Beaches area of the city. As a little Asian girl who used to hang out with anarchists, you can imagine that I was a little apprehensive meeting the guy at his home. What I wasn't expecting was to be welcomed into the house by a heavily limping, 71-year-old man who's fairly well versed in history and geography. Nor did I expect to have a civil, in-depth interview with Andrews that lasted over an hour. The following is an edited excerpt of our conversation.

VICE: On Wikipedia, you're identified as a Neo-Nazi. Do you agree with that label?
Don Andrews: Well what does “neo” mean? “New” or “like”? I'm not a new Nazi, okay? That's one. Like a Nazi? Well the Nazis were imperialists. They took off and tried to subjugate other peoples. I'm against that. I'm a nationalist. So I'm a racist, I'm a white racist, I'm a white nationalist, and I'm just a man.

When did you start developing a white-supremacist attitude?
Well, let's say over a period of time where I saw the city changing. The whites were disappearing, and anyone who complained about it was immediately attacked as being something worse than a war criminal. A racist. Not to be a racist is to be an idiot. Everyone's a racist, and if they say they're not they're liars.

Is it true that your father was killed by Nazis while fighting in Yugoslavia?
It's hard to say who my father was, in fact. My mother was a real, shall we say... party girl. She enjoyed herself plenty, plenty. She had more men than she could shake a stick at, and they had to be just right dressed and all of that stuff. She ran 'em with like whips and things. She was a real Zsa Zsa Gabor. She was a good person in the end, though.

What are you campaigning on?
My message is to maintain white society standards in Toronto. And as for the non-whites, my message to them is: “You have many reasons to vote 'cause you came here for those standards.” Not to be lowered down to a third-world standard. And that means no cutting of services, doubling the welfare, and making sure that the Canadians that lost their jobs here because of globalism and the rich shipping the jobs out to Thailand, Mexico, the factory islands of Japan, which are finished now, they're radiated. I mean, these people deserve to be compensated. They were brought here as cheap labour to begin with. I want to maintain that the mail services are kept. It's disgusting to think they want to cut that out. That's a mainstay of white society standards—daily mail service. Our mailman.

What would you define as white society, or white values?
Well, there are standards. You can go from England to Russia, and from Scandinavia down to Italy and still expect a certain attitude, towards prisons, if you're arrested, what your rights are, the kind of cleanliness you expect, you know? I'm not saying they're all exactly the same, but when you go to the Third World, these aren't their standards and their rules. And they don't consider the things that we consider important, as important. And don't forget that every white nation, black nation, yellow nation, whatever colour nation, race-mixed people, all went off in different directions 'cause they had a special way that they wanted to live. That's why there's Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians. Side by side, but totally different. Different languages, and different religions, and different attitudes for sure. That's basically a natural order.

For the future of Toronto, it's already half non-white, we have to deal with the people who are here and maintain the society standards that we still control in this country. And that's my attitude and anywhere that I rule. I believe in common sense, good will and fair play.

Some non-white stuff Andrews has around his house.

Do you think any other cultures or any other races have those values?
Of course, that's where we can get along. Wherever their values coincide. Where they don't? There'll be a situation to resolve.

Can you give an example of when they don't coincide?
Well, I don't even like eating on the subways and on the streetcars. I'm going to cut that out. It's messy, I don't think it's white man standard or white man's way. I don't like torture, for instance. Anyone who tortures, as far as I'm concerned, is not a white man to me. So I'm not for the bigots. I don't tell bigot jokes. I sometimes tolerate them and listen to them and give a chuckle, don't want to hurt the guy's feelings, but otherwise, there's no point in that. I enjoy other people, other races, other cultures. You can see around my house, it's not just Vikings or something like that. I'm not a skinhead, although I've had tons of skinheads around me, you know what I mean? I try to moderate and edumacate people.

You're a racist but you say you respect other races—how does that work? That's a little mind blowing for me.
Well you're here talking to me. If I was a bigot, I'd say, “I'm not talking to you!” That's part of it, okay? I treat you as an equal. I think you got a maybe smarter brain than me, maybe less information, but that's it. I have black “friends,” I have Chinese people, and other ones who give me bottles of wine…

Wait, you put “friends” in air quotes.
Friends in the sense that I consider them as friends. I don't know how they feel. 'Cause I don't know their mind. People are a little different, believe it or not. That's why we went off in different directions. It's a whole psyche.

If you go back far enough, this was originally Aboriginal land. How do you feel about that?
I feel sorry for them. They're a good-looking people... A lot of Indian women start off really looking good when they're young, then they plump out because they can't take this diet. They were meant to be in a survivalist society, not having chips any day you want.

Uhhh wow. Okay, so how do you feel about the LGBTQ community in Toronto?
They're interesting if nothing else. Hey, there's a limit to public morality, but…

Where's your limit?
Well, I think ejaculating on the streets should be forbidden.

That's your only rule?
Don't ejaculate publicly pals, please. You'd be surprised how many homosexuals are racists. Yeah, they're snotty. They have standards.

A portrait of Andrews while he was in the Young Pioneers. He says it was done by a black artist.

You also feel strongly about helping the poor. Why?
I want to help the poor, that's right. I want to double their welfare. $597 a month? That's impossible. An average room is $500. You're supposed to live on $97 for the whole month? What if you got some habit you're trying to kick? This is like a serf society. As far as I'm concerned, every vote is equal and everyone is equal as a consequence.

Should you win the 2014 race, how do you plan on maintaining these standards?
Whether it takes shaming guys like Harper, or Kathleen Wyne, yelling about it, embarrassing them, whatever it takes. And I'm not buying into the attitude of, “Oh, this is not your department or protocol.” These are all just games that the rich put in for the poor people here, and there's plenty of them.

How do you feel about Rob Ford?
I'm totally against him. Not for his smoking crack, or marijuana, or hanging around with, you know, rough people. I'm plenty guilty of that. It's just for his lying and that officiating attitude of, “You didn't ask me the right question.”

But if you look at Rob Ford, he's pretty clearly white.
Of course he's white. He's just a white renegade. Isn't he anti-racist? Ask him. He's probably anti-white racist.

Actually, he’s been caught making racial slurs.
He's a bigot. He's probably just as racist as me. We'd probably get along just fine privately if we met somewhere in a bar as long as he didn't muscle me.

Have you ever smoked crack?
Yes, I have.

How'd you like it?
I liked it, but of course, it's a date with yourself. It's very dangerous. You should totally avoid it…It’s a sex drug. It makes you so super sexy that you feel guilty for being that sexy around anyone else. And you can go start hugging lampposts. It's that bad.

What other drugs have you done?
Just cocaine. I sniffed it but you end up talking a lot and it's pointless and ridiculous and you feel stupid doing it. And, let's see. I think that's it.

It sounds like you have bigger ambitions than just the city. Do you have any plans to run for provincial or national politics?
My ideas, if they get spread, are the real underlying base of what people really feel. Oftentimes I have to kick people's asses and say, “Don't be afraid.” Because people have been intimated. I've been convicted of the notorious hate laws, for spreading hate. Woo! First I went to penitentiary for two years. By the way, if you ever get the choice of two years or two years less a day, choose the two years, they'll treat you like a man in the federal prison. But that was for violent activity during my heyday. I had three or four dozen people, we drove the communists out of the east end, stuff like that.

How did you drive them out, exactly?
Firebombs, shot guns [laughs]. Excuse me, but I paid for it. And after that, I was charged with... I was pretty good with chemicals and they caught me with some chemicals in my trunk which didn't pass for a chemistry club.

You were also charged with hate speech, but you think it was freedom of speech?
Totally. There's no such thing as hate speech, please. If I can't say I don't like you, then I don't have freedom of speech. You know what I mean?

Do you think freedom of speech has any limits to it?
Well, would you like to be in a relationship where you had no freedom of speech, to say anything you wanted to, to your partner? You wouldn't like it too much. You'd be living under pressure and anxiety. And that's not the white man's way, living under pressure and anxiety.

What do you think your chances of winning the 2014 elections are?
One percent.

Special thanks to Angela Hennessy for accompanying me to the interview.

@xjackiehong

Archive photos from the film courtesy of Margaret PR

Seventy years ago, teenagers didn't exist. I mean, they did, but nobody called them that—they were called "our future workforce" and wore suits and smoked pipes and took elocution lessons when they were 13. You went to bed one day a child and woke the next morning an adult. But by the end of WWII, the idea of adolescence had evolved from a few years spent getting ready for a life as a coal miner or a lawyer into the Best Years of Your Life. Then, in 1945, the New York Times published an article defining this bizarre new word—"teenage"—and the concept became a part of the public consciousness.

A few years ago, music writer and cultural historian Jon Savage wrote a book about all that called Teenage: The Creation of Youth 1875-1945. The film adaptation of his book, directed by American filmmaker Matt Wolf and with an original score by Bradford Cox, gets its UK cinematic release on January 24. I gave both of them a call to talk about youth movements new and old and how great life is when you're a teenager.

The trailer for Teenage

VICE: At the beginning of your film you say that the idea of the teenager is a wartime invention. Were there any pre-war youth movements that you left out?
Jon Savage: They weren't pre-war, but the ones who didn't make it in are the Zazou. They were a French group in occupied Paris in the early 1940s who loved black American swing music—which was forbidden—wore English clothes, threw hidden parties, tried to avoid forced labor and, you know, annoyed the Gestapo. They also did something else fabulous: When the laws came in about wearing the yellow star, they made their own stars that, instead of "Jew," said "Swing." Then there were others that we didn't get into too much detail about—the back-to-nature movements of the 20s, like the Wandervogel.

Oh yeah, the German proto-hippies who got naked and hung out in forests. Did that movement start during the First World War?
Jon: No, they actually began in about 1900 in Germany.

So it wasn’t a reaction to the war?
Jon: Well, it was a reaction to the militarization and industrialization of German society. There was also a generation gap between adolescents and their parents, and by the 20s there were lots of different groups. In fact, it's bewildering the amount of groups there were by then, ranging from proto-fascist groups to hippies.

So would you say the Wandervogel were the first youth movement, in the modern sense at least?
Jon: If you consider a youth movement as something where youth try to find some degree of autonomy and try to define for themselves what being a young person could be, then I’d say yes.

Some "wandervogel" kids.

So if that was the first youth movement—and this is before the term "teenager" even existed—what do you think was most instrumental thing in introducing the concept of "teenagehood" as we know it today?
Matt Wolf: I think the "teenager" was really born as a sort of democratic consumer during the war in the 40s. It was when young people were starting to work and earn money. They weren't dependent. And also they had a new power to define themselves by buying music, fashion, cosmetics… They recognized their value as democratic citizens who could be positive contributors to society, but also their influence and power as consumers who could buy things and drive marketplaces.

It's funny how, early on, youth was defined by the establishment and the marketplace. Adolescence is supposedly about freedom and rebellion, but even the word "teenage" didn't become part of the wider lexicon until the New York Times wrote a huge feature codifying it and establishing what it was—as you show in the film.
Jon: Yeah, it was that balance of adults accepting that teenagers are going to have a say while also keeping some sort of control over them.
Matt: Definitely. I think that's a productive and useful compromise, because if young people had no supervision they would probably be out of control. But the film also shows that when young people are regimented in the way that Hitler and the Nazi regime did, it’s extremely destructive.

I noticed in the film that both wars spread youth culture—bringing music and ideas from America to Europe—while also crushing it, in that everyone was being sent off to die.
Jon: Absolutely. The swing and black American bands were still quite a minority phenomenon before the war; it didn't immediately take over the UK—it was more avant-garde. Then the Americans came over and British adolescents suddenly got to see this other life.

Swing itself is completely fascinating, because it’s the first Western international youth culture and it's just got everything. It's amazing how it was used, as I was saying, by the Zazou—and the Hamburg Swing, who were like German Zazous—during WWII as a method of resistance. It wasn't political; all they wanted to do was what kids do now: listen to music, hang out with their friends, have sex, and be a bit naughty. And for doing that in Nazi-occupied Europe they were sent to forced labor [camps], beaten up, sent to the Eastern Front, sent to concentration camps… It’s a very stark divide.

Some swing kids.

Yeah. When swing was finally embraced, it looked like everyone wanted to be part of it. But later on—in the 80s and 90s, at least—it seems like people weren't so eager to join the mainstream, that they were more interested in trying to be "individuals."
Jon: That’s not my experience of being a young person entering youth culture, but I think what you’re describing has accelerated in the past ten years. I think it’s to do with the privatization of the self, caused by social media and electronic devices, the fragmentation of consciousness and the fragmentation of the youth cohort in general. What’s fascinating to me is—I’m 60, so when I was a kid it was hippies, then glam rock, then punk rock—and punk rock talked about all this acceleration of information and privatization of the self. So now we’re living in the science-fiction future that was prophesied when I was a young man.

And that's resulted in there being no new proper youth subcultures for basically the last decade—ones that have all the music and clothes, but also a distinct set of ideals that people identify with, like the hippie movement, or punk, or rave.
There are several reasons for that. I was your age in 1977 when I got involved in the music industry, and it was for kids—it was a playpen—not adults. Then, in the 80s, the music industry stopped targeting adolescents—the 15-to-24 range—and began targeting older people as well, meaning all that consumer nonsense was no longer just the preserve of teenagers. So young people lost their special status, which I think is part of the problem.

Also, beginning in the 80s, there began a political attack on adolescents, starting with the Thatcher government and certainly continuing into this government with the social downgrading of young people, youth unemployment, university fees… and all this makes my blood boil. If a country doesn't invest in its youth, then it's going down the pan. That's the message of Teenage—adolescents are fucking great, listen to what they have to say. So what's going on makes me absolutely furious. Some kids are angry at people of my generation, but it’s not my fucking fault! I didn’t vote for Thatcher and I didn’t vote for this government either!

The only real outcry against all that is the proliferation of left-wing protest groups, which don't quite have the same reach as music- or art-driven movements, because not many teenagers want to sit in the rain threatening rich people with cardboard signs.
Matt: But I think it's really hard to identify with those [art- and music-based] movements as they're happening in real time. There are distinguishable and definable youth movements from the 90s, but that's because we can see them in retrospect. I can’t reflect as well on the present, because it’s happening right now, you know? I think there’s a youth culture online for sure, but I think it will present itself in a very different format from some of these things we tend to romanticize, like underground culture and punk.
Jon: I have a lot of theories about this. I was very passionate about Nirvana, and I just wonder if Kurt killing himself didn’t sort of kill the idea of rock music being challenging and subversive and dangerous. After that, you had Britpop, which had some great records, but it was kind of reheated 60s, really. You've had really good acts since then, like the Arctic Monkeys, but it doesn’t mean very much in a wider context. There are fantastic bands and they write great songs, but it’s like they’re in a kind of vacuum.

Yeah. It's odd—there's plenty of stuff to react to, but a lot of the reactionary stuff nowadays just seems a bit contrived.
Every generation faces its own task. Your task is very different to mine. Your generation’s task is dealing with unsustainability: climate change, shrinking resources, how to make the transition from high progressive capitalism into something else—another way of living on this planet where you don’t have to throw out the good things that we have in our society. My generation’s challenge was to deal with WWII damage, really, which scarred all our parents and literally scarred the landscape when I was growing up.

The Hitler Youth, history's shittiest club.

What about the idea that the internet crushes subculture? That, as soon as something happens, it's instantly all over the globe and doesn't have the time to grow organically.
Jon: What you also have now—and you've had for at least 25 years—is aggressive marketing and targeting. Punk rock really did develop underground for a while; people from advertising companies didn’t take it seriously for about 18 months, until the middle of '77.
Matt: I think it's more like the distinction between what's considered mainstream or underground is much blurrier, and that’s empowering for artists and young people who live in remote areas without access to urban resources. It confronts, yeah, but it also completely obliterates some of these distinctions that have evolved between mass consumer culture and independent culture.

Good point. Finally, I've seen the film described as a "living collage." What does that mean?
Matt: Something Jon told me early on in the process is that punks in England took clothes from previous youth cultures, reassembled them with safety pins, and made something new. That image was really evocative to me and, in a sense, it's what I did with the film. I took clips, images, and quotes from teenagers from all these different eras and countries and tried to find a way to collage that together to create this new work. Because while Teenage is about the past, really my aim is to reflect on the present—to understand how conflicts between generations endure—and to show that we should have a very optimistic attitude towards youth today.
Jon: It’s time we start giving adolescents a bit more respect. Not in terms of being consumers, but in terms of being human beings who will be living in the future, and so might have some ideas about how they want the world to be, you know? Which we’re not getting from this benighted government, who seem perfectly happy to write off anybody under 25, as well as anybody who’s poor. It’s completely disgusting. Don’t get me started.

Follow Jamie on Twitter: @jamie_clifton

A lot of towns try to seem unique, but Portland is genuinely strange. During my ten-day visit, crows were virtually the only birds I saw in the sky. At the pad where I crashed, my old high school buddies keep multiple dream machines running at all times. And around the corner from their house, there's a store that deals in animal bones.

Another thing that keeps Portland weird is that you might just bump into Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk. He took a break on Saturday from hitting up every Safeway within a 50-mile radius of Portland to chat with me. Chuck was looking for a particular eight inch, heart-shaped box of chocolates to include in promotional mailing to independent bookstores, hoping to bolster sales of his friend Suzy Vitello's new novel, The Moment Before. In between Safeways, Chuck met me in Portland's Albina neighborhood. He took one look at the cafe I'd suggested—full of young Portlanders squinting into laptops—and decided it wouldn't do. “I know a place,” he said.

Chuck knows Portland. He lived in the city for more than two decades and still returns periodically to visit old haunts. His Portland travelogue, Fugitives and Refugees, published in 2003, is a bit dated but still full of off the wall spots Lonely Planet won't tell you about.

“North Portland used to be the part of town you didn't drive through,” Chuck remarked on the recently gentrified neighborhood as we headed for the nearby Outlook Family Restaurant. “You ran all the stop signs. You couldn't stop without a drug dealer or prostitute coming to your car.”

It was just after 2 PM but Chuck chowed down on a steak dinner in the dimly-lit diner. I nibbled pie, sipped at a bottomless cup of coffee, and listened to the author wax poetic on Stumptown, "liminoid events," Occupy Wall Street, and reading his father's pornography. I began by asking him about a mysterious troop of pranksters he ran with in Portland who served as the inspiration for Fight Club. 

VICE: So, tell me about the Cacophony Society.
Chuck Palahniuk: It started in San Francisco in the 70s. It's based on a short story by Robert Lewis Stevenson called “The Suicide Club,” where people decided their lives wouldn't be forever, so they should have a variety of dangerous, thrilling experiences. They would stage different adventures. Suicide Club started doing that and it gradually morphed into the Cacophony Society. It was a very loose organization where the members with a concept for an adventure or a prank or an artistic stunt could put it out through a newsletter and anyone who wanted to participate in this huge themed act of chaos could show up and have a role. It was vaguely scripted, just enough to get people started—big spontaneous games people played in public.

It started in San Francisco but spread up to Portland. Sounds like some kind of syndicate.
It branched out to Seattle, it branched to Portland. It branched to Los Angeles. It was a chance to be anonymous too, because so many of the events were costumed. But many of the events became co-opted because they were such spectacles, like Santa Rampage where you'd get 1,800 Santas.

Yep, we have something like that in New York now, but it's been taken over by frat boys.
Exactly. Cacophony also started Burning Man, which has been taken over by a kind of frat-culture, people who go simply for the party of it. They're not creating the event so much as they are exploiting it. In a way, that's kind of a metaphor for Portland. Portland used to be a D-I-Y city where people had freedom and could live really cheaply and they were out of the public spotlight so they could fail a lot or they came up with some amazing idea.

I read you moved out here because of the rain?
It's an excuse to stay indoors and work. It also fosters a more intentional social life. When people go out they go out because they've been inside all day alone. When they get together its a little more intense.

In Fugitives and Refugees, you discuss how Portlanders lead three lives. Do you have three lives?
Writing would definitely be one. And staging events on tour, which kind of slops over into promoting. 

Describe these events. Are they readings or what?
No…. Last October I went on tour for my book Doomed. We staged adult bedtime story parties. I shipped these two feet in diameter beach balls to the events and each beach ball came with glow stick. As people waited to enter the event they received this project of blowing up the beach ball and putting the light sticks inside. Once the whole thing was put together, it made these glowing brilliant orbs in these different florescent colors. Throughout the events, as we read or played games or threw things at the audience, we would cut all the lights and play some idiot piece of music and everyone would have this enormous glow-in-the-dark dodge ball game. All you could see were these glowing, beautiful things. Visually it was just breathtaking.

Is that something you took from you Cacophony days?
That lack of pretense was a big part of Cacophony. When you're young, looking good is so important. Your only real resource is your physicality, your attractiveness. You're trying to accentuate those things all the time. Cacophony allowed you to step away from that and be an idiot, an idiot who looked really ridiculous and pathetic.

So much of my work is about giving people the opportunity to fail. That was one of the big homework assignments in Fight Club. People were told to go out, pick a fight, and loose—to loose really badly. It's such an exercise when you fail, when you're rejected, when you're denied and you realize it's not going to kill you.

It's a rite of passage.
Exactly.

A lot of your work centers around characters who are on the fringe, who don't fit into society's social exceptions. Where does that come from?
The man who taught me to write, Tom Spanbauer, says that writers write because they weren't invited to a party. At one point in their childhoods they were left off some guest list, so they kind of collapse back into entertaining themselves. Maybe that aspect [of my work] just comes from the fact that I'm a writer and that writers aren't sure how the game is played so they are continually inventing a game of their own. Many people in Cacophony were that way; almost socially autistic, never really sure what the script was.

So they wrote their own.
And they wrote a different one all the time so that they could experiment with different social models and ways of being.

Is their a political dynamic to your work?
Not overtly. Not in relation to current politics.

One of my favorite people to read is a man named Victor Turner who was kind of a cultural sociologist and wrote a lot about what he called “liminoid events”—these short-lived events, typically you pay to engage with, but where there's no social hierarchy. Everyone enters as an equal. It could be a rock concert. It could be Burning Man

He called them liminoid events to distinguish them from liminal events, culturally institutionalized events like Christmas, Halloween, or a honeymoon. Halloween is a cultural inversion liminal event where typically dispossessed people, people with no power—usually children, but not always—would go door-to-door and demand tribute. If you didn't pay them tribute your property would be destroyed. The same with Christmas caroling. Originally peasants would go to wealthy people and sing Christmas songs. If the wealthy people did not come out and pay them tribute, the poor were allowed to pull down fences, to slash tires.

That's not very Christmas-like.
Well, there was a big movement in the 1920s. So much damage was being done at Halloween that candy manufacturers got together with newspapers and they started to promote the idea of candy as tribute. Trick-or-treat became what we know of it as now. Not this social power inversion ritual—which is what Lent is also. The Catholic Church would give up power, at least on Mardi Gras, and allow people to eat in the church, allow people to do profane things for a small period of time so that when power shifted back they could maintain the status quo.

The congregation would get their decadent urges out of their system.
Exactly. Like the Amish do with Rumspringa.

These cultural inversion rituals, I find them fascinating. They're all designed so that the suppressed culture doesn't turn over the whole thing. One day a year or several days a year, they get a little tiny taste of power. That's liminal events because they tend to fall on thresholds in a year.

Liminoid events, like Cacophony did, could be performed anytime, but typically they happen just once. It's a sort of a social laboratory, allowing people to behave in a different way. If it really serves people, it will be adopted as the next institution. Burning Man runs itself now. Santa Rampage runs its self now. Bacardi commercials feature people in Salmon costumes running upstream during the Bay to Breakers Marathon. That was originally a Cacophony event. 

What did you think when all those fight clubs started popping up across the country?
I thought this is exactly what a liminoid event is supposed to do: Offer and model this attractive way of being and seeing if people would adopt it.

It does seem like it got diluted. That it got taken up by guys who just wanted to burn off some testosterone.
Halloween is deluded. Christmas caroling is deluded. That's always part of the process. The thing becomes deluded, becomes comforting. I've been really curious about—what was it called on Wall St.?

Occupy?
I thought by now Occupy would have come back—in lesser and lesser form until it became a kind of weeklong community campout.

These days every time authorities see a tent, they freak out.
I think for a liminoid event to work there has to be an element of fun to it. It can't be overtly political. It has to be something done for the sheer joy of doing it and being with people. Occupy was really frayed by politics. That's one reason maybe why it hasn't comeback.

It did have pretty dangerous politics, though—taking down the one percent.
But that doesn't equate to fun.

That could be fun.
But for people to give up their free time to do this thing its gotta have a re-creative quality to it so that it's more fun than anything else they could be doing. Giving people a model that brings them joy as opposed to a noble political heel-clicking thing is a more effective way to serve people. The joy is what's going to keep them coming back.

Our dominant culture provides models for joy, too, like television. You'd have to present something more joyful, right? To give them a taste of life?
Church used to be that joyful thing. That place where you could go and present your worst self and confess out loud to your community and people would accept you back despite your worst behavior. But church has lost that function. It's lost the joy that used to be associated with that freedom. Twelve step groups are so popular because they fulfill that function.

What would your Fight Club anti-hero, Tyler Durden, say about Occupy?
He would say it functioned exactly as it should. In these kind of social experiments another thing that happens is people identify themselves as leaders. The organization itself is meant to fall apart and disappear as long as it leaves behind people who have a greater idea of their own capacity, their own potential, who go on to do other things.

I hear there is a sequel to Fight Club in the works.
A graphic novel. I've fallen in with a lot graphic artists who live here in Portland. We ended up throwing enough parties that we finally talked enough to put something together.

What's going to happen?
I don't want to talk about it, just cause it could change so much.

How have you evolved since you wrote the original?
I have a greater understanding of what I was doing. With a novel, especially a first novel, you're doing it kind of intuitively without a full understanding of your own motives, what it's expressing for you. And a lot of times you're not even certain what it's really about until you go on tour with it and you realize you've told some deep, dark, horrible secret to millions of people that you weren't conscious of. You seduce yourself into revealing things you can't deal with head on.

In the sequel I'm explaining the kind of Joseph Campbell and Robert Bly things that went into Fight Club that I wasn't really aware of. I'm also taking the characters to a different level, with a different resolution.

Fight Club has really stuck around. I saw on Twitter that US soldiers in Afghanistan had stenciled images of Tyler Durden to a wall over there.
That's the liminoid thing. You create a character or a social model that people want to live into. It gives them another option. You know when you create a phrase and you hear people using it. I can't tell you how often I've heard, “The first rule of blank is you don't talk about blank.” That's a fantastic feeling of power. But it comes with a certain sadness. That this rhetorical device I invented is going to outlive me.

You gave birth to something. It's out in the world now.
The next challenge is creating something different, that is more effective, that eclipses the earlier thing.

Do you feel you've done that yet?
Next year's book will do that. It's completely icky in an over-the-top way. I describe it as “gonzo-erotica.”

When I was little I was asked to get something from my parents closet, a pair of shoes or something. And I came away with these books that were called things like Girl on Girl Ranch Studs and Gestapo Pussy Ranch. They had these lurid covers, these really suggestive titles. I started reading them and they made no sense whatsoever. I couldn't understand anything that was happening in them but that's one of the things that made them so compelling. I finally took them to my mother and said, “What are these books about?” She was furious because apparently they were my fathers. But at the same time she was reading books, harlequin romances, that made no sense either. Their euphemisms were completely alien to me.

I thought, “What if you could write a kind of Marques de Sade pornography, really brutal stuff, but write it in the euphemisms of Barbara Cartland, so that you can depict these fantastically over the top things in soft focus ways.” It makes it really funny. Poorly written erotica is laugh-out-loud funny. That's next years book, Beautiful You. There's always the next thing.

Has Portland changed since you wrote Fugitives and Refugees?
Down in the Sellwood neighborhood in Southeast Portland there's the Colombia Memorial Mausoleum. It's this enormous complex of buildings—above ground, below ground. It used to be you could go in there at anytime and there was never anyone there. It was empty and confusing and vast; miles and miles of corridors lined with tombs.

You mention in Fugitives that you wrote some of your novel Survivor in there.
After I put it in the travel book, the sad thing is it became a popular place for people to have goth sex and commit suicide. Because it's so giant, people would go hide in these curtained alcoves. You could wait until late at night when they had no security and have the whole place to yourself. People would either kill themselves and be found in the morning or they would have sex and set off alarms leaving the building.

I guess that's the dark side of a liminoid event.
They remove dysfunctional people from a culture, people who go to Burning Man and overdose. 

Liminoids remove those who go too far.
Extreme people.

Portland seems to accumulate them.
I have to really wonder about this sort of Portlandia mentality.

What do you think of the show?
I watched one episode. I like what they are trying to do, but they take their gags a little too long. Maybe I'm just too close to the subject to enjoy it.

Kind of makes the town seem kitsch or novel.
Novel in the same way that Austin or Lincoln, Nebraska wants to be novel. So many towns go for that, you know, “Keep Lincoln, Nebraska weird.” But with this current crop of people, I wonder if, as their parents age, if they won't be pulled back home to take care of them. That's the historical model. Or when they have a child and they need childcare from that older generation.

Seems easier to survive Portland than in other counter-culture hubs.
But it's also easier to get pulled into the Portland Open-Mic Vortex, where you never really do anything with your life. It's just, “I got a showing at this cafe. My paintings are up at this veterinarian’s office.”

You broke out.
I'm still not part of the pantheon of famous writers. I think being in Portland will always give me an outsider's status.

You wanna come check out a dream machine?
I have to go to Safeway. 

@JohnReedsTomb

Being possessed, it turns out, is exhausting work. Just ask Mambo Edeline St. Armand. While popular culture portrays Vodou as full of curses and sticking pins into little dolls, the religion has in fact played a central role in Haitian cultural identity since the country's birth, a result of the New World's first and only successful slave rebellion.  Since Brooklyn is home to the largest Haitian population outside of Haiti, we sent Thomas Morton into our own backyard to witness the realities of being possessed by Vodou's multitude of rowdy, rum-thirsty spirits.

A montage of media coverage in the aftermath of Sean and Shireen's Climate Justice protest. Courtesy of Shit Harper Did.

On January 6^th, during a public event at the Vancouver Board of Trade where Stephen Harper was set to conduct a supposedly softball Q&A session, climate justice advocates Sean Devlin and Shireen Soofi (from No One Is Illegal) hopped on stage after sneaking past security, dressed as catering staff for the event, and held up signs like “Climate Justice Now”—side by side with the Prime Minster, a powerful man who spends tens of millions of dollars of the public’s money on his security detail. This disruption caused an immense amount of media attention that focused on the lack of security for the Prime Minster, while the protestors’ proximity to the Prime Minster was described as “spitting distance,” “striking distance,” and “stabbing distance” by various media outlets.

Ultimately, while the apparent lack of reliable protection for our country’s leader is a concerning issue, the underlying story to this disruption is climate change itself; along with the growing discontent and dissent in Canada for the politics of a government that appears to favour short-term economic gain over long-term environmental protection. While Sean and Shireen’s disruption was able to start this conversation in small circles, the conservative media machine pushed a separate agenda to discredit the action.

A day after the disruption, in an act of pathetically biased gotcha-journalism, Sun News’ Jerry Agar called the protest’s coordinator—Brigette DePape from Shit Harper Did—without any pre-warning and placed her live on the air early in the morning. While Brigette eloquently defended the protest’s purpose and the climate justice cause, despite being put on the spot on live television, Jerry slammed her on air for being “not very willing to have a conversation” after she hung up. I’m sure if I called Jerry at his house and livestreamed the conversation, told him he was live on the air, then asked him to discuss why he was placing climate justice activists in that unfair position, he wouldn’t have a very polite response. Nor would Sun News ever place a Conservative politician, or an energy industry employee, in the same boat.

Beyond Sun News’ embarrassing interview tactics, Bob Runciman, a Conservative Senator, stated that Sean and Shireen “should face indictable offences with serious fines and/or imprisonment.” Further, Runciman claims he will be pushing an agenda to establish “new laws to deter similar future protest.” Attitudes like this are incredibly dangerous for the future of a country where people should be able to freely protest a government that apparently allows its secretive surveillance agency to spy on behalf of the energy industry, while Stephen Harper has publicly declared that the job of extraction from the Alberta oil sands—the land Neil Young likened to Hiroshima—would be an epic undertaking akin to the pyramids or the Great Wall of China.

Limiting the population’s right to protest and demonstrate radical, anti-government attitudes damages the cornerstone of successful, revolutionary movements; and these actions and privileges have been greatly neutered in North America, post-9/11. One of the greatest casualties of the mysterious, hyper-Orwellian surveillance state that we now live under is its iron-fisted approach to protest and dissent. If you, one day, want to demonstrate in a similar fashion to Shireen and Sean, you’re now in a society where everything you’ve said and done for the past few years is likely recorded somewhere—whether online, in public social media channels, or clandestinely, in government data centres. Meaning, if you suddenly fall under the microscope of government or mainstream media outlets that act as instruments of the state, your entire personal history and background can be called into question.

This isn’t conspiracy or fantasy; it’s how activists are discredited on a regular basis. Case in point, the Vancouver Sun recently reported that the federal Tories were able to “connect the dots” on Sean Devlin’s past as a supporter for the Vision Party in Vancouver that is currently running City Hall; this paranoid dot-connecting is alleging that the party was somehow behind the disruption, and is therefore using its political clout to damage the Harper Government out west. Geoff Meggs, a city councilor for Vision in Vancouver, called a spade a spade when he described this allegation as a “neurotic conspiracy theory,” but it indicates the level to which a protestor can and will be smeared in Canada for his or her political action.

Since this disruption, Shit Harper Did—an activist group that grew out of a website started during the last federal election by comedians and political advocates alike to inform the public of the shitty things Stephen Harper has buried on his resume—started a petition for “direct action.” Meaning they are looking for people to pledge that they’ll conduct similar disruptions or protests against the Harper government that will put them at risk for arrest. At the time of this writing, they have 295 pledges out of their goal of 500.

I called Sean Devlin yesterday to speak to him about the disruption, as well as the media reaction since he was able to protest alongside a pensive Prime Minister on stage in Vancouver. He told me he wasn’t pleased with the “disproportionate media focus on Harper’s security versus climate change” as the disruption was designed to “put climate change on the agenda this year, because the Prime Minster and his government have forced it so far off the agenda.”

To be fair, Sean, Shireen, and Shit Harper Did were very pleased with CBC’s Power and Politics coverage, a show that held several debates on climate change that resulted in one of the country’s first Conservative politicians, MP Peter Braid, admitting that the planet’s extreme weather is, in fact, due to a mutated climate. This debate would have never happened on Power and Politics were it not for Sean and Shireen’s demonstration, which should indicate the importance of such protests in advancing the national discussion on issues that the government chooses to ignore; despite the disgusting condemnations from politicians like Senator Bob Runciman, who would rather see people like Sean and Shireen in Canadian prison.

Sean says the impact of direct protest and activism has “come to define many of the choices I’ve made in my life” and is holding workshops to teach groups about the “people’s history” of other revolutionary movements. With the Shit Harper Did pledge, for example, Sean and his fellow activists aim to create a “spark” that will “encourage people to form into small groups, with close friends, and plan around the issues they’re most passionate about; and find opportunities that exist locally for them to do something about it.” “The reason we’re going that way,” says Sean, “is because we feel that small groups are sustainable, and can be highly effective and agile, and relatively autonomous.” He wants people to “risk arrest” to “disrupt the Conservative agenda.”

With such clear motivation to disrupt Harper’s status quo, it’s no wonder that Sean has been met with such resistance from the conservative media machine. Sean says “there’s been a lot of fear mongering… the motivation behind [this media campaign] seems clear to me, it’s to discourage people from taking this kind of action by discrediting it; by suggesting that it’s not legitimate or through bizarre leaps in logic trying to equate this action with the action that terrorists take… This unfortunately glosses over the role direct action has played, especially in the last century [of enacting social change].”

While Sean calls the anti-protest coverage “laughable,” and it certainly is a joke to the circles to which Sean belongs, the wide net that the conservative mainstream media and the Conservative government cast in Canada is a large one that prevents the full scope of the story from being properly discussed in public. There is a palpable amount of dissent in Canada for the way in which our federal government and the energy industry is recklessly developing our natural resources for economic gain. Meanwhile, the Federal Government recently announced a $24-million dollar campaign to advertise the benefits of the oil sands; but in reality, as the New York Times pointed out in 2012, “Canada’s tar sands… contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history.”

With extreme weather impacting countries the world over, specifically in developing nations, we’re seeing flooding, ice storms, and other insane weather effects in Canada that will likely worsen. The impact of climate change will not disappear; but to have a government that denies it’s real, that simultaneously promotes policies that will no doubt worsen it—just as they diminish and attempt to erase the right to protest—is a recipe for disaster. The ostensibly small protest from Sean and Shireen is proof of the chain reaction minor (but successful) demonstrations can cause. But if we allow our country to discredit activists like them, we are willingly signing up for a version of Canada where free speech comes hand-in-hand with unacceptable political fine print.

@patrickmcguire

We traveled to Cleveland with Thomas Morton to meet with Satanism authority, Eric Freeman.

Above, a cannoli being made via.

Welcome back to our food column, Hot Links, where VICE employee Dan Meyer explores the neglected culinary stars of YouTube. Each week, Dan presents a selection of videos highlighting specific food themes, from amateur cooking to local restaurant commercials, elderly drinking buddies, kitchen disasters, to the infinite supply of odd YouTube wonders in the food category. We encourage you to fall into this culinary video k-hole, and include your own comments and contributions below.

Sometimes, when one is willing to fall deep into a serious YouTube-hole, it is best to pick a word that is bouncing around in your head and run with it. Cannoli is the Italian confection that we all know a love, a sweetened ricotta filling that’s placed inside of a crispy, deep-fried shell. But beyond the regular saccharine-coated baking videos on this topic, there is an unending bounty of entertaining cannoli videos that push far beyond the basic notion of the sweet recipe. After taking a look at these videos, you will never be able to look at a cannoli the same way. You’re welcome. 

Is Cannoli Cream the Stuff of Goddesses?

Don Imus, Howard Stern, and Rush Limbaugh are all combined into one YouTube personality here. Stu, our host, is a man who looks like Larry Flynt shortly before he was shot and paralyzed. It is clear that Stu is a man who is grappling with some rage in his basement, because he is screaming as loudly as he can at the camera. When he is not visiting national feminist conventions, Stu can be found at restaurants consuming seafood risotto, or “riz-ott-o.” He believes that, when done correctly, seafood “riz-ott-o” is like—well just skip to the 0:33 mark of the video and see for yourself. He “banged” and “backed out” two meals in one night, because he likes to multi-task, even when it comes to dinner. He ordered five cannolis, which caused a bit of a stir with his wife, who thought that he was possibly cheating on her with a man. But after eating two of the cannolis, Stu was convinced that, “if God is a woman, she came inside of my mouth.”  

Filling Cannoli Shells 

This is an extremely sunny woman from California who is filling cannolis for the first time. She also decided that she will instruct the viewer(s) on how to make them. She thinks that the filling—which is always made with ricotta cheese, confectioners sugar, and sometimes marscapone cheese—is like marzipan. To be clear, it is not, whatsoever. "Squeeze it down into the tip," is a spooky moment, but I'm mostly excited about how excited she is to be sharing her new skill with her mysterious audience. The whispering that takes place at the very end of the video makes me feel both perverted and hungry at the same time.

1st Cannoli

The perfect cannoli is a cold filling of sweetened ricotta cheese in a fresh, crispy shell. Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, I decided to look for someone who was having a great “first cannoli experience.” After deliberating for a long time about the right one to include, I chose this one that is as short and sweet as a cannoli itself. She speaks intimately to her viewers, and feels that the crust is more delicious than the filling. Her final review is concise, when she explains that, “They’re kinda good, they’re kinda cheesy, but I don’t know if that’s normal.” 

Owner of Oley's Pepperoni Cannoli Explains Restaurant Name

What I’ve learned about the Eastern side of Milwaukee—a place I have never been before— is that there are old people who have to hustle all sorts of jobs, which includes sticking entire pepperoni links inside of cannoli shells in the hope that college drunks will buy them on their way out of nearby bars, where they are trying to take home some sort of available bed partner for the evening. Who knew that this simple act of financial need could inspire restaurant names?

Pizza Box Magic Trick by Mike Sexton Magic, "The Great Cannoli"

I often wonder what would happen if David Blaine or Criss Angel fell off the magic scene altogether. Would they attempt to rise again on casting calls, or settle for local opportunities? This man calls himself the “Great Cannoli,” but I get the impression that he lost his confidence at some point on the circuit. That could be—in part—because of these children, who are too old enough to realize that his magic tricks and equipment (a wooden pizza box, in this instance) can only truly surprise a one-year-old audience, but I'll give him credit for trying. It’s loud as hell due to the age of the kids, so turn the volume down for this one. 

Uh Oh Cannoli-Oh

The audio sounds like it has been snipped from an adult film, but it’s only eight seconds long, which makes the viewer feel confused as to what is really going on here, or understand the purpose for uploading it to YouTube altogether. My best conjecture is that the video creator wanted the universe to understand what you shouldn’t do when you make your shells too thick, which all of us can apply to many scenarios in life’s unpredictable journey. It also feels as if the viewer is flipping through TV channels to only catch a snippet of a segment, but in reality, this is all there is to it. I recommend that you watch this at least five times in succession.  

Previously: Hibernation Meals

US, Italian, and French aircraft carriers. Photo via

For the past few weeks, China, India, France, Italy, and the United States have engaged in a large-scale promotional campaign, complete with exclusive photo ops. Glamour shots were snapped in exotic locations. Entourages were spotted. But in large part, the only fans who took notice were a handful of naval-warfare nerds. Because the photos were of aircraft carriers.

In the ongoing international game of “Who Will Rule The World?”, these photographs represent a focused and deliberate attempt to communicate to each other—and to the rest of the world — that these countries intend to be dominant world powers this century.

China started it off with a photo op of its new carrier and some support ships. India, not wanting to be outdone, took some pics of both of the country's carriers at sea, side-by-side. The US and some of its allies responded with a picture of a US, French, and Italian carrier sailing with each other. Even when using a pretty generous definition of the term “aircraft carrier,” there are only a few dozen of them in the world today, so the fact that a sizable percentage of the operational carriers have been shown off in recent weeks is more than just coincidence.

National militaries are sometimes as much about image and symbolism as they are about killing enemies. But a nation building an aircraft carrier isn’t the same thing as a dude buying a muscle car. For starters, a lot of the effect of having a big, scary military isn’t about testosterone—it’s about deterrence. And while deterrence involves persuading others that you’re a badass, the functional consequence of deterrence is peace. Convincing some mouthy goofball that picking a fight with your country is a losing proposition is just as big a part of preventing war as diplomacy.

A Chinese aircraft carrier leads a battle group. Photo via

Among the many tools of military posturing, aircraft carriers are king. While they are indeed warships, they're not simply for fighting other navies. Aircraft carriers are, first and foremost, airbases. Of course, they can never be a one-for-one equivalent to an airbase built on land, but navies work very hard to replicate the functionality as closely as possible. And they are also mobile, able to park themselves within range of an awful lot of the world's potential targets. For months on end.

If a navy can do these things effectively, an aircraft carrier can be a potent political tool. There’s nothing quite like a floating airbase carrying 75 or more aircraft (which are perhaps in turn carrying nuclear weapons) appearing off-shore to encourage an end to hostilities. While other things may pose a bigger practical threat, it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to guess how people would react if, in the middle of a diplomatic crisis, China parked a carrier battle group bristling with weapons 30 miles off California beaches. So even though aircraft carriers are potent weapons systems designed to break things and kill people, their day-in, day-out use is mostly about political signaling.

So if carriers are used to send political messages, what have these countries been trying to tell each other for the last few weeks? First off, the Chinese wanted to show the world that their first entry into the world of aircraft carriers—it’s actually an old Russian carrier—can go to sea, coordinate with other ships, and operate—rather than just decorate—a dock. What the analytical folks saw was a carrier that isn’t very good at being an airbase. Based on the photo, experts don’t think the Chinese would be able to send that carrier very far, and they don’t believe that it could operate at sea for very long. So as far as surprise airbases go, China’s would get a C for airbase and C for surprise. This isn’t unusual for a first entry into aircraft carriers, but it’s pretty clear that this first entry is more of a warm-up than an actual threat.

Indian aircraft carriers. Photo via

The Indian photo-op featured both their carriers, which was a none-too-delicate way of showing up the Chinese as a bunch of newbie upstarts—even if the Indian carriers are a positively ancient British carrier and an old, modified Russian ship. The Indian display featured some highlights—like the presence of refueling and support ships—that allowed India to demonstrate they were better equipped to use the surprise airbases in practice, not just in theory. So India would get a C for airbase, but a B for surprise.

The most recent photo breaks this mold a bit, and that’s the interesting part. It is widely acknowledged that the US is the superheavyweight champion of the world when it comes to carriers and power projection. In the surprise airbase category, the US has walked away with A grades in both areas for decades. There’s nothing new here. What made the US photo op interesting is that it didn’t focus on just the US. The photo included an aircraft carrier from France and one from Italy. And the picture didn’t include any of the support ships that are usually shown in such photos. What the US and its allies were signaling downplayed ratings for surprise airbases, but showed off the real concrete manifestation of the diplomatic and functional relationships between the NATO allies. The point wasn’t that one of these three countries can go toe-to-toe with other navies—it’s that many countries can, and that those countries are allies.

And so in essence, what started out as China trying to display emerging capabilities morphed into India one-upping China, and then resulted in a message from the West reminding both of those rising and competitive Asian powers that while they’re up-and-coming contenders for global dominance, they’re still a lot more up-and-coming than they are contenders.