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RIP Joan Rivers

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Photo by Michael Loccisano/Getty Images

Joan Rivers died on me—literally.

I’ve loved Rivers since I first saw her on Kathy Griffin’s My Life on the D-List in 2007, the same year Britney Spears shaved her head and Lindsay Lohan posed for her first mugshot. Rivers lacked decorum, which is a fancy way to say she believed in cursing in public. For years, I’ve wanted to interview Rivers, and a few weeks ago, I learned I finally would speak to the grand dame herself. In between making fun of Fashion Week guests’ hideous outfits on Fashion Police, she would have sat down for an interview with me.

But then she stopped breathing during surgery on August 28 and died a week later on September 4 in New York's Mount Sinai Hospital. She was 81.

Joking about Rivers’s death may seem tacky, but that’s what Rivers would want us to do. Shortly after her husband, Edgar Rosenberg, killed himself, Rivers went to dinner with her daughter, Melissa, at Spago. Looking at the prices on the menu, Rivers reportedly said to Melissa, “If Daddy were here and saw these prices, he'd kill himself all over again.” They bursted into laughter, and the other customers looked at them like they were insane.

But as one of the first ladies of comedy, Rivers understood that humans—especially outcasts like women and gay men—must laugh at unfortunate circumstances if they want to survive.  

River’s rise to prominence started on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in the 1960s, where she would perform stand-up and, in the 1980s, occasionally guest host. On April 23, 1967, Rivers performed stand-up on The Ed Sullivan Show and mocked the way society treated women.

“The way the styles are today, I’m glad I’m married because if I was single, I could never get married looking like this,” Rivers began. “I feel sorry for any single girl today—the styles and the whole society is not for single girls. Single men, yes.” Through comedy, she discussed gender issues on one of the most popular television shows in America.

These comedy sets made Rivers a household name, she never quite got the the respect afforded to male comics like George Carlin. When Rivers got her own talk show on Fox, The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers—which her husband produced—Carson stopped speaking to her and barred her from appearing on The Tonight Show—an embargo that lasted for a quarter century, until Jimmy Fallon invited Rivers onto the show this year.

Her show failed to get an audience, and Fox fired her as a host in May of 1987. Three months later, her husband killed himself. To heal, Rivers and her daughter played themselves in a NBC TV movie about the suicide called The Joan and Melissa Rivers Story.

“People keep asking me, 'Why are you doing this project?’” Rivers told People magazine in 1994. “Because it heals. The more you talk about anything, the better it is.”

In the past ten years, Rivers has remained relevant through making fun of pop stars on Fashion Police on E! and screaming on Celebrity Apprentice 2, where Rivers went haywire on her D-list co-stars after Donald Trump kicked off Melissa. The comedian called Playboy model Brande Roderick a “a piece of shit and a stupid blonde” and told poker player Annie Duke, “Poker players are trash, darling!”

“[I’ve had a] 43-year-old career!” Rivers screamed at one point. “I don’t work with scum!”

Some people might turn up their noses at that kind of reality TV dialogue, but Rivers didn't give a shit. Her comedy was resolutely lowbrow, or no-brow. Talk shows, reality shows, TV movies, standup sets in casinos, guest spots on Louie—she did it all, and was funny everywhere she went, along the way crafting jokes for, and about, the single girl and other people society disrespects. She never shut her mouth, and for that we should be thankful. 

As recently as last month, Rivers sparked controversy for giving her honest opinion when asked about the crisis in Gaza: “[Palestinians] started it,” Rivers said. “They didn’t get out. You don’t get out, you are an idiot. At least the ones that were killed.”

For what's it's worth I disagree on Rivers’s views on Palestine (I never pick my celebrity role models for their political beliefs), but I admire her willingness to state her opinions in the age of basic bitches and thinkpieces.

If there’s a lesson to learn from River’s life, it’s to fuck decorum and stay lowbrow.

Follow Mitchell Sunderland on Twitter


This Genius Lunatic Has Recorded 16,000 Songs About Everything from Poop to Ellen Degeneres

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This Genius Lunatic Has Recorded 16,000 Songs About Everything from Poop to Ellen Degeneres

VICE News: Russian Roulette: The Invasion of Ukraine - Part 74

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As the Donetsk People's Republic opened up a new front to the south of Donetsk, Ukrainian forces continued their artillery bombardment of the city. With the pro-Russia rebels also using artillery to push back the military, civilians are often caught in the deadly crossfire. VICE News headed to the Donetsk train station to see the destructive aftermath of the shelling, and later spoke with the chief coroner of the city's central morgue to hear how he and his staff are struggling to manage the influx of bodies.

 

This Mathematical Model from 2006 Shows How Ebola Could Wipe Us Out

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This Mathematical Model from 2006 Shows How Ebola Could Wipe Us Out

Stress and Sociopathy at Denver’s High Plains Comedy Festival

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Denver comedian Kevin O’Brien hot-boxing his lion-mask. Photos by Ryan Brackin unless otherwise noted

Comedian Ben Kronberg is telling a story about performing fellatio on a dog. Large swaths of the audience at Denver’s High Plains Comedy Festival are feeling awkward, and their discomfort drives many of us to laugh still harder. The show is called Competitive Erotic Fan Fiction, a Nerdist Industries podcast that is kicking off this three-day festival with lewd short stories involving Rancid and The Goonies. Before the weekend is over, 3000 people will filter in and out of the bookstores, bars, DIY venues, and a black-metal brewery that host the festival, enduring ab-crunch laughter from comics like Pete Holmes, T.J. Miller and Kumail Nanjiani.   

Kronberg was supposed to have written a carnal story about Woodrow Wilson, but he characteristically twisted it into a cringe-worthy erotic nightmare involving incest and beastiality. This Denver-native-turned-New Yorker has made a career of awkward silence, driving Roseanne Barr to shout “go fuck yourself” at him when he appeared on Last Comic Standing in May. Kronberg attracts the kind of people who enjoy being an artistic minority, as does this Erotic Fan Fiction show. In the other words, the kind of people who fetishize uncomfortable public situations.

"My Dad asked if he could smell my fingers.” Ben Kronberg exploring the audience’s boundaries

But it’s more than just Kronberg’s story—particularly the part where the dog ejaculates into his mouth and his father hands him a knife, telling him to murder the beast—that has so much of the crowd squirming in their seats. This is hour one of 72-hour comedy odyssey, and many of the 65 comedians performing are in the audience. There’s no shortage of laughter, flirtation and intoxicated merriment, but running through it all is a thick tension with both the comics (who have a marathon of performances ahead of them) and the audience, whose expectations for this festival and this scene couldn’t be higher.

This is only High Plains’ second year, and yet it already feels like an institution on par with Portland’s Bridgetown or Austin’s Moontower Comedy Festival. High Plains’ 2013 debut exceeded expectations by making a profit (virtually unheard of for first-year comedy festivals), with Reggie Watts headlining and an unscheduled appearance by Marc Maron. This year’s festival has been expanded from two days to three (well, four, if you count the set T.J. Miller headlined on Wednesday at Deer Pile, a DIY venue above a vegan restaurant), added 25 percent more comedians, and is hosting the final night inside a newly-renovated arts venue owned by the state of Colorado.

In the last three years Denver’s stand-up scene has developed a bit of national relevance, while also maintaining the regional economy of countless standup shows sponsored by local businesses. Many of these comics have spent years doing open mics, perfecting their craft while observing one another’s progress—thousands of hours whittling down the art of talking. Industry attention has flanked festival co-founder Adam Cayton-Holland, landing him on Conan and @Midnight. His comedy collaborator, Ben Roy, recently performed a one-hour set at Montreal’s Just For Laughs—arguably the rough equivalent of a top-billing slot for a musician at Coachella.

Things are going pretty well in Denver, a state of affairs that usually terrifies comics. For the local veterans—and supporters of Denver comedy—much is riding on this festival being a sustainable success. But acording to headliner Pete Holmes, there’s nothing better for the cause than a little bit of tension.

Pete Holmes

“It’s good to be a little bit anxious before going on stage, a little hungry and horny,” Holmes tells me when I ask him about a comment he made (on his recently-cancelled TBS talk show) about no longer meditating before going on stage because he needs to be stressed to be good. “Anxiety is a bell-curve: Too little is no good, and too much is no good. You want to be just a little nervous. It’s a pilot light that takes you onto the stage.”

Chuckle-fuckers (comedy groupies) line the sidewalks outside of the multi-venue festival, spreading rumors about a secret Dave Chappelle show (his birthday performance was the following Sunday at Red Rocks, and he’s known to drop in for stage-time at small shows when he’s in town).

Stars of HBO’s Mike Judge comedy Silicon Valley T.J. Miller and Kumail Nanjiani signed on to the festival before their sitcom became the network's second-biggest hit of 2014 (just behind Game of Thrones.) The two of them receive a lot of points and stares from starstruck fans over the weekend—though, like Kronberg, Miller is a Denver-native who achieved mainstream success after leaving his hometown.

There's some (largely unspoken) resentment floating around toward those who abandoned the pot-haze firmament of Colorado for the escalators-to-the-stars that are Los Angeles and New York. But there isn’t a soul here who hasn’t considered leaving, particularly after seeing Kronberg on late night TV and T.J. Miller in a Transformers movie. This sophomore year of High Plains Festival is a kind of State of the Union for the Denver comedy scene, a moment of validation for all of those who begrudgingly refused the dangling carrots of the coasts and held tight to the mountains.  

“It makes me feel more justified [for staying] every time my friends come and experience this scene and tell me, 'I get it. I'm jealous of this,'” festival co-founder Adam Cayton-Holland tells me. “At High Plains I get that all weekend long. I think people are starting to realize the scene is strong, so Denver is a bit more on the comedy radar.”

The necessary ribbon of tension throughout the comedy shows is eventually snapped by German-satire electro-trash band, Total Ghost, performing within Mutiny Information Cafe bookstore. Partying in a bookstore at 3 am is pleasantly surreal, somewhat like the Barnes & Noble scenes in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. My friend Taylor Gonda from the “These Things Matter” podcast is nervous about her DJ set following the show, wondering if there's style of music universally appreciated by comedians and comedy fans. She’s prepared a set centering on David Bowie and The Smiths, but after some rumination she throws the gameplan out the window and improvises two-hours of vintage hip-hop, which appears to be the great musical unifier of the comedy scene.

Total Ghost at Mutiny Information Cafe bookstore

High Plains is a festival run by comedians, and if there’s one tool most comics know how to wield, it’s improvisation. Minutes before the headlining sets (hosted by Kristin Rand) are supposed to begin, festival co-founder Andy Juett is riding in a pedicab down the Sixteenth Street Mall, a margarita blender from the Hard Rock Cafe resting in his lap. The appliance is for comedian Howard Kremer, who broke the one he’d planned to use in his set—a bit of prop-comedy where he makes a smoothie for the audience. Juett visited a half-dozen bars, offering cash for their blenders, before Hard Rock agreed and he was able to rush it back to the venue.  

The bit ends up falling on its face when Kremer can't get the blender to work on stage, but he turns the awkwardness to his advantage, gaining the audience’s sympathy before skewering them with a bit of wit and charm. That kind of setback might've buried a less seasoned comic, but Kremer knows how to dance with that devil and turned it around.

“For me, it’s not so much the jokes or the punchlines [that make a show],” Pete Holmes tells me later. “It’s me exposing my soul, or my essence, to people. There is something mystical about it. It’s sexual. It’s an exchange of energy that results in people’s brain chemistry’s changing and causing them to make involuntary noises. A male’s sex drive is often tied to tension and anxiety. The audience is also usually a bit anxious; they paid for a ticket, they might be fighting as a couple… I often will feel horny before a show, and then not horny afterward.”

Andy Juett attempting to troubleshoot Howard Kremer’s blender

Aside from not masturbating, Holmes says he never drinks before a show and rarely gets high even offstage. Though this is Denver’s first major comedy festival since our fully-legal cannabis laws went into effect last January—and while I don't run into anyone smoking anything more than a pen vaporizer inside venues, a surprising level of restraint—there are certainly a fuck-ton of marijuana edibles and tinctures bandied about.

Just before Saturday evening’s headlining show begins, Holmes hosts a live version of his podcast “You Made It Weird,” where fellow comedian Nick Thune offers him a taste of some THC-infused soda. “I only took the babiest of sips,” he tells me after, “and it hit me really quickly.”

Holmes is scheduled to close the festival that night, but the pot-soda gets so on top of him that he asks to open the show instead. He explains that the tension of watching set after set while the Tetrahydrocannabinol fairies dance in his skull (paraphrased) might’ve tipped him over the edge and turned him into a crippled, unfunny bag of nerves.

Holmes says as much on stage, giggling his way through an impressively freewheeling set that crushed. This no doubt provides a bit of tension (healthy or otherwise) for the remaining comics who didn’t anticipate following the biggest name on the bill.

“I wasn’t expecting to be your headliner tonight, but it seems like some people can’t handle they shit,” Denver’s Josh Blue jokes in his festival-closing set. Like every other night of the weekend, the festivities on Saturday jitter on past 4 am. Once all the comics have fulfilled their duties to Andy Juett and Adam Cayton-Holland, a narcotic wave passes over the lot of them. Around 1 am, an improvised baseball game breaks out in the green-room, with a hacky-sack serving as the ball and a rolled-up pizza box as the bat. The rules are loose and the game devolves into a kind of dodgeball with bases, and the crowd of off-hours comedians exudes a childlike enthusiasm for every play, falling apart with primal merriment. They know that the clicking ascension of the festival roller coaster is behind them, and there's nothing but a duty-free playground of fun stretching into the horizon.

Comedians Chris Charpentier (right) and Sam Tallent (left) playing green-room baseball. Photo by Kevin O'Brien

Follow Josiah M. Hesse on Twitter.

Meet the Girl Who's Crowdfunding Her Abortion

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Photo via Bailey's GoFundMe page

Crowdfunding is all the rage for folks who are hungry for potato salad, or in need of some dough for their stupid orchestra, but sometimes people reach out to the masses out of desperation. Meet Bailey. Bailey needs an abortion. So she went to GoFundMe.com (tagline: “Crowdfunding for Everyone!”) to ask for $2,500 for the operation. Like anything remotely related to fetuses, it’s drawn some considerable attention in less than a week and was even removed from the site for a while.

Her GoFundMe page, originally titled the "Stop Bailey From Breeding Fund," informs visitors that “Bailey is currently unemployed, completely broke, in debt, and in no position to hold down a job due to severe symptoms of a rough, unplanned and unexpected pregnancy.” Having just moved to Chicago from Phoenix, Arizona, Bailey says she’s 23, likes to read and go to shows, and really, really doesn’t want to be a mom.

In the past, GoFundMe has been used for some pretty noble projects, such as collecting donations for one of the victims of the Boston Marathon Bombing, and helping raise money to operate on the brain tumor of a morbidly obese 12-year-old. Somewhat more controversially, GoFundMe was used recently to support Officer Darren Wilson, who famously shot and killed unarmed 18-year-old Mike Brown, resulting in the Ferguson, Missouri demonstrations. I guess you could say the operators of GoFundMe aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty.

I called Bailey to ask about her plans to kickstart the termination her fetus.

VICE: Hi Bailey, how are you doing?
I’m doing pretty well. How are you?

Can I ask who is the father? 
Can I say no to that?

Yeah, sure.
OK, cool. 

Sorry for stalking you, but Facebook tells me you’re dating someone named Lücifer Ryzing, right?
Oh, no, that’s totally fine. I understand. There’s some other people who have figured out stuff, that don’t have any sort of good intentions, and they're doing more intense things. [laughs] But yeah, Lücifer Ryzing is someone I’ve known for a long time, that I’m sweet with. He started the GoFundMe page. He’s the one that’s really managing that.

How far along are you with the pregnancy?
I just got the ultrasound on Tuesday, the second of September and the ultrasound said 19 weeks and five days, but ultrasounds can be anywhere from seven to ten days off. It could be about 19 weeks, or I could be 20 weeks along exactly.

Why did you choose to use GoFundMe for your abortion?
We’re broke kids who really need to have this abortion, and you see crowdsourcing for all kinds of things. You see it for things like, "Help me press this record!" or "Help me pay my rent!" We saw that Kickstarter that made a bunch of money for the potato salad thing. If people want to donate, they can, which is a lot easier than going and asking people. 

I’m hoping people will [donate], but it’s also totally fine if people don’t. I know if I saw something like this I’d be like, I want to help this person to make sure they live the life they want to live. It’s more time-sensitive than some of the other things that you see.

I heard the page got taken down for a bit. What happened?
We [initially] offered these rewards, expecting it would only be our friends that would see this. One of these rewards for $25 was Lücifer would make a custom edit of a photo. He’s really good at editing photographs, so for $25 [he would] make a custom edit of a photo of your choice. And then for $50 we’ll do your grocery shopping and give you a hug. Then for $100, we’d clean your house and as much clothing as you wanted. Which was a joke, an absolute joke, that we expected no one to take us up on.

But it did get a lot of attention and it also got a lot of like negative attention. Then people also objected to the language. So it was reported, and it got flagged for adult content. We emailed the people at GoFundMe and said, "That was a joke! We didn’t expect this kind of a response!" So GoFundMe took that off, and the page was able to go back up. I guess they thought we were serious and we weren’t.

There’ve been a lot of negative responses. How have you been taking them?
I expected to get negative responses. There are people who are really vocal. I was prepared, to a certain extent, to receive a lot of hate, or venom or even threats, but I have definitely been surprised. There have been moments when I almost had a panic attack or just was really, really taken aback at what kind of responses we’ve gotten: how many assumptions, how many projections, I guess how angry it makes people that this is something that we’re trying to do. 

I’m sure you can see on the actual fundraiser, there’ve also been things I’ve seen on Facebook you wouldn’t see otherwise. Threads of 200 or 400 comments that are really hateful, or violent, or threatening. I’ve had a few people threaten to dox me, log my IP address, and find out where I live [so they can] come hurt me in some way, or come hurt Lüci. There have definitely been moments where we’ve been like, Holy fuck. Really? Really?

Are you nervous about the procedure?
Yeah, I’m nervous. It’s scary. It’s a surgery. In Illinois it’s a two-day surgery. And it’s painful, like any surgery is going to be. It’s just an absolutely necessary thing, so I’m more nervous about running out of time than any pain.

According to the page, you’ve been having pregnancy complications, correct?
Yes.

Do you want to elaborate at all?
It’s just been really, really painful. Like I said, I just got the ultrasound done and haven’t really been to the doctor very much, so I can’t say there’s a specific condition, but I know that it’s worse than any menstrual cramps I’ve ever had. Sometimes the pain is so bad that I can’t get out of bed, and I can’t go to the bathroom. When I cough, it feels like my organs being shredded inside of me. For a second, I was afraid it was ectopic, because that’s supposed to be incredibly painful, but it’s not. I don’t know if there’s any medical terms for what it is, but it’s difficult.

I also saw on Facebook—again, sorry for stalking you—that you’re getting a kitten?
[Laughs] Yeah, actually. One of my friends just moved into a house, and they’re talking about getting a kitten. So it’s not actually gonna be my kitten, but it’s going to live in the same house that I stay at, so I’m going to pretend it’s my kitten.

Alright, Bailey. Thanks for talking with me.

Follow Troy Farah on Twitter.

A Florida Chef Is Inciting a Class War Over Ketchup

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A Florida Chef Is Inciting a Class War Over Ketchup

It’s a Secret: My Time with Charles Sobhraj, the Bikini Killer

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Collage by Matthew Leifheit

One night in the winter of 1983, shortly before I left for Bangkok to work on a movie, a friend told me about a serial murderer known as the “Bikini Killer,” a handsome, charismatic occasional gem thief named Charles Sobhraj who had operated out of Thailand in the early 1970s. My friend had known a Formentera couple, smuggling heroin in relays from South Asia, who had been separately lured to their deaths. They were two of many Western tourists Sobhraj had snuffed out on the so-called Hippie Trail. This path stretched from Europe through southern Asia, trekked by Western dropouts as they smoked grass and connected with the locals. Sobhraj would fleece these spiritually thirsty wanderers of any money they had, contemptuous of what he considered their loose morals.

Production delays in Bangkok left me to my own devices for several weeks. It was a disorienting, smelly, traffic-crazy, scary city full of begging monks, teenage gangs, motorcycles, temples, murderous pimps, terrifying prostitutes, sleaze bars, strip joints, street vendors, colonies of homeless people, and mind-boggling poverty. After discovering that Captagon, a powerful amphetamine, was sold over the counter, I sat at my rented manual typewriter for 12 or 14 hours at a stretch, churning out poems, journal entries, stories, and letters to friends. The drug helped the writing along. After a speed binge I knocked myself out with Mekhong, a virulent whiskey said to contain 10 percent formaldehyde and rumored to cause brain damage.

At dinner parties with British and French expats who’d lived in Thailand since the Tet Offensive, I picked up more rumors about Sobhraj. He spoke seven languages. He’d escaped from prisons in five countries. He had passed himself off as an Israeli scholar, a Lebanese textile merchant, and a thousand other things while trawling southern Asia for tourist victims as a drug-and-rob man. People he befriended over drinks woke up hours later in hotel rooms or moving trains, minus their passports, cash, cameras, and other valuables.

In Bangkok, things had taken a grim turn. Sobhraj had made himself an object of passion to a Canadian medical secretary he met in Rhodes, Greece—a woman named Marie-Andrée Leclerc, who was vacationing with her fiancé. Leclerc quit her job, dumped her fiancé, and flew to Bangkok to join Sobhraj. Upon her arrival, he ordered her to pose as his secretary or his wife, as occasion demanded. Sobhraj rarely fucked her, much to her chagrin, and only when her common sense threatened to overpower her florid romantic fantasies.

They traveled up and down the countryside, drugging tourists, taking them in a semi-comatose condition to a spare apartment Sobhraj rented. He convinced them that the local doctors were dangerous quacks and that his wife, a registered nurse, would soon have them in the pink of health. Sometimes he kept them sick for weeks, Leclerc administering a “medicinal drink” consisting of laxatives, ipecac, and Quaaludes, rendering them incontinent, nauseated, lethargic, and confused, while Sobhraj doctored their passports and used them to cross borders, spend their cash, and fence their valuables.

In 1975, he met an Indian boy named Ajay Chowdhury in a park. Chowdhury moved in with Leclerc and Sobhraj, and the two men commenced murdering certain “guests.” The “Bikini Killings” were especially gruesome, unlike any of Sobhraj’s previous crimes. Victims were drugged, driven to remote areas, then clubbed with boards, doused with gasoline and burned alive, stabbed repeatedly before their throats were slit, or half-strangled and dragged, still breathing, into the sea.

Sobhraj had killed people before, with accidental overdoses. But the Bikini Killings were different. They were carefully planned and uncharacteristically inelegant. They occurred over a strangely compressed period between 1975 and 1976, like a fit of rage that lasted several months and then mysteriously stopped. Sobhraj and Chowdhury slaughtered people in Thailand, India, Nepal, and Malaysia. It isn’t known how many: at least eight, including two incineration homicides in Kathmandu and a forcible bathtub drowning in Kolkata.

Sobhraj was finally arrested in 1976 in New Delhi, after drugging a group of French engineering students at a banquet in the Hotel Vikram. He tricked them into taking “anti-dysentery capsules,” which many swallowed on the spot, becoming violently sick minutes later. The hotel desk clerk, alarmed by 20 or more people vomiting all over the dining room, called the police. Entirely by chance, the officer who showed up at the Vikram was the only policeman in India who could reliably identify Sobhraj, from the scar of an appendectomy performed years earlier in a prison hospital.

Tried in New Delhi for a long menu of crimes, including murder, Sobhraj was convicted only on smaller charges—enough, it was assumed, to ensure his removal from society for many years. In Bangkok, sleepless from speed, I began to suspect that Sobhraj wasn’t really incarcerated in an Indian prison as the papers reported. I was paranoid enough to think that since I was thinking of him, he was likewise thinking of me. I dreamed of him in the rare hours that I slept, picturing his lithe, lethal figure in a black body stockings, crawling inside air ducts and ventilation shafts in my building, like Irma Vep.

Charles Sobhraj and Marie-Andrée Leclerc in 1986. Photo by REX USA

In 1986, after ten years in prison, Sobhraj broke out of New Delhi’s Tihar Jail, helped by fellow inmates and a gang he’d assembled on the outside. He escaped by drugging an entire guardhouse with a festive gift of doped fruit, pastries, and a birthday cake. India, which had no extradition treaty with Thailand when Sobhraj was arrested in 1976, had agreed to honor a special extradition order after he’d served his time in India—a non-renewable order valid for 20 years.

Thailand had evidence of six first-degree murders. The Bikini Killings had ruined the tourist industry for several seasons, and Sobhraj had made fools of the Bangkok police. It was widely believed that if he were extradited he’d be shot getting off the plane.

He fled from Delhi to Goa. He buzzed around Goa on a pink motorcycle, in a series of absurd disguises. Eventually, he was seized in O’Coqueiro restaurant, while using the telephone. The whole purpose of the escape had been to get arrested and be given more prison time for escaping—just enough to exceed the Thai extradition order’s expiration date.

After years of sporadic interest in Sobhraj, I wanted to meet him. So in 1996 I proposed an article about him to Spin. I didn’t particularly want to write an article, especially not for a glorified version of Tiger Beat, but they were willing to pay, so I went.

I first contacted Richard Neville, who had spent a lot of time with Sobhraj when he was on trial in New Delhi. Neville had written a book, The Life and Crimes of Charles Sobhraj, and now lived in a remote part of Australia. He still had nightmares about Sobhraj. “You should go and satisfy your obscene curiosity,” he told me, “and then get as far away from that person as possible—and never, ever have anything to do with him again.”

When I arrived in New Delhi, Sobhraj’s ten-year sentence for the jailbreak was about to expire, along with the extradition order. I moved into a cheap hotel owned by a friend of a friend. I often hung out at the Press Club of India in Connaught Place, a favorite dive of journalists from all over the country. The club resembled the lobby of a Bowery flophouse circa 1960. Plates of Spanish peanuts fried in chilies, the only edible item on the menu, came free with the drinks. Lining the walls were shrine-like portraits of journalists who, after leaving the Press Club dead drunk, had been run over in traffic.

My new colleagues were full of lurid Sobhraj anecdotes—tales of his friendships with jailed politicians and industrialists, of fabulous sums he’d been offered for movie rights to his story. A Hindustan Times correspondent assured me I’d never get in to see him. Sobhraj had been quarantined from the press, and the lavish privileges he’d once enjoyed in Tihar Jail had been cut off when the new warden took over.

The new warden was Kiran Bedi, a legend of Indian law enforcement. A former tennis champion, she became the first Indian policewoman. She was an outspoken feminist and, paradoxically, an avid supporter of the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party. Fanatically incorruptible in a richly corrupt police force, she had been given numerous “punishment postings” to discourage her, but she applied such literal-minded zeal to her jobs—ordering state ministers’ illegally parked cars towed away, for example—that she became a national hero her bosses couldn’t get rid of. Before Bedi’s arrival, Tihar had been known as the worst prison in India, which is saying something. Bedi flipped her penalty assignment into another PR triumph, transforming Tihar into a rehabilitative ashram, introducing an inflexible regimen of morning meditation, vocational training, and yoga classes.

I sat for hours one morning in the prison administration hall, near a vitrine of confiscated weapons. Listless soldiers passed through, yawning and scratching their balls. An excited group of ladies arrived, some in pantsuits, some in saris, surrounding a short figure in blinding-white plus fours, with a butch haircut and a bunched fist of a face. This was Bedi. On advice from friends at the Press Club, I told her I wanted to write a profile of her for a New York magazine. It took only moments in her presence to sense the immensity of both her ego and her shrewdness.

I was welcome to spend time at the prison, she said. But if I planned on speaking to Sobhraj, I could forget about it. She would endanger her job if she let the press talk to him. Whether or not that was true, I felt certain she intended to be the only celebrity on the premises. I asked how Sobhraj was.

“Charles has changed!” she declared in the birdlike, pattering accent of Indian English. “Through meditation! He will work with Mother Teresa when he is released! No one can see him now—he is rehabilitated!” In the next breath, she suggested I remain in India for several months. I could live very nicely there, she said, if I agreed to ghostwrite her autobiography. This seemed bizarre.

Before I could breathe, I was hustled outside and packed into a bulbous automobile that sped along the inside perimeter wall enclosing the four separate jails of Tihar, an enormous complex with many open spaces, resembling a little city. We arrived at a reviewing stand, where I was ushered to the end of a row of dignitaries in formal dress. Below us, 2,000 prisoners sat in the lotus position, many festooned with smeary colored powder. I had no idea what I was doing there, in torn jeans and a Marc Bolan T-shirt. Bedi’s speech was a celebration of Holi, a Hindu religious festival encouraging love, forgiveness, and laughter. And smeary colored powder.

After the ceremony we returned to the office. Bedi announced she was leaving for a conference in Europe the next day for several weeks. Eager for me, her new biographer, to get the full effect of the Tihar ashram, she scribbled a laissez-passer to all four jails on some scrap paper. I was in. Sort of.

Every morning for three weeks, I inched toward Tihar Jail in a cab edging through unexcitable crowds and confused traffic, skirting elephants and ashen, starving cows. Everything shimmered in the appalling heat. We passed the Red Fort, the air greasy with yellow smog and the black smoke of gasoline fires. Beggars squatted in the marshes beside the road, candidly shitting as they watched the traffic.

My laissez-passer was inspected every morning—with the same doubtful scrutiny—in a cavernous security buffer between two immense iron gates. Each day, the ranking officer assigned me a minder for the day, and I tried to bend things in favor of the youngest guards, who were the most relaxed and permissive, often abandoning me while they ambled off to smoke and chat with friends.

They showed me anything in Tihar I cared to see—vegetable gardens; yoga classes; computer classes; shrines to Shiva and Vishnu covered in daffodils and hibiscus; dormitory cells carpeted in prayer mats; loose circles of chattering women bent over looms; a bakery full of barefoot men of all ages, in diaper-like shorts, shoveling dough into industrial ovens. I met Nigerians accused of drug trafficking; Kashmiris accused of terror bombings; Australians accused of manslaughter; accused people who had languished in prison for years, still waiting for a trial date—Indian “undertrials” often serve a full term for the crimes they’re charged with before they’re even tried, and if they’re acquitted they get no compensation for false imprisonment.

I saw everything but Sobhraj. Nobody could tell me where he was. But one afternoon, after three weeks of daylong visits, I got lucky: I had a toothache. My minder took me to the prison dentist, in a little wooden house with 30 or so men lined up outside, waiting for typhoid vaccinations.

My minder distracted himself talking to a nurse on the veranda while she stabbed the same needle into one arm after another. I asked the men in the queue whether anyone could take a message to Sobhraj, and a Nigerian wearing a glowing beaded necklace took my notebook and sprinted off, returning after my dentist’s appointment. My face was numb with Novocain as he slipped a folded paper into the pocket of my orange kurti.

I opened it hours later, as the young warden of Prison 3 brought me back to my hotel on his motorcycle. Sobhraj had written the name and phone number of his lawyer with instructions to call him that evening. On the phone, I was told to meet the lawyer at exactly nine the next morning, at his office in the Tis Hazari courthouse.

The Tis Harazi courthouse was a thing of wonder, sprung from the brow of William S. Burroughs. A Leviathan in maroon stucco, with an ocean of litigants, beggars, water sellers, and various weird forms of humanity surging outside. At one end of the building an overturned bus, charred inside and out, housed a large family of vicious monkeys, excitedly ripping excelsior out of the split seats, shrieking and lunging and hurling feces at passersby. A shallow ravine separated the courthouse grounds from a labyrinthine mesa of squat cement bunkers that served as lawyers’ offices.

The lawyer was a boneless-looking man of unguessable age, with dusky skin and Aryan features. He told me to leave my camera behind. We walked over to the court, through the crowds, and up some stairs to a dim, boxy courtroom.

I recognized Sobhraj in a queue of plaintiffs, one by one approaching the bench of a bilious Sikh judge in a bright yellow turban who thoughtfully swigged from a bottle of Coca-Cola. The lawyer introduced us.

Sobhraj being led to Tihar Jail in New Delhi in April 1977. Photo by REX USA

Sobhraj was shorter than I expected. He had a sporty beret tilted on his salt-and-pepper hair. A white shirt with blue pinstripes, dark blue trousers, Nike sneakers. Slight, though whatever weight he put on obviously went straight to his ass. He wore rimless glasses that made his eyes enormous and damp-looking, the eyes of some blubbery undersea mammal. His face suggested a somewhat crumbling boulevard actor formerly noted for his beauty. It passed through a morphology of “friendly” expressions.

I avoided his eyes and stared into his mouth. Behind his fleshy lips, he had wildly irregular, jagged bottom teeth, vaguely suggesting the maw of a predatory amphibian. I decided I was reading too much into his mouth and focused on his nose, which was more pleasantly formed.

He was waiting to plead his side of some trivial litigation of a type he was always initiating, mainly to get out of jail for a day and make a splash in the local papers. “You need to wait outside” were the first words he said to me. “The lawyer will show you.” He walked me to a spot under a high rectangular window in the courthouse facade.

Half an hour later, Sobhraj’s face appeared in the window, framed against an unlighted holding cell. Before I could say anything, he peppered me with questions about myself: who was I, where did I come from, where did I go to university, what sort of books did I write, where did I live, how long would I be in India, a virtual Niagara of ferreting questions about my political attitudes, my religion if any, my favorite music, my sexual practices. I lied about everything.

“Where are you staying in New Delhi?” he asked me. I mumbled something about the Oberoi Hotel. “A-ha,” Sobhraj snapped. “The lawyer told me you called him from a hotel in Channa Market.”

“That’s true, but I’m moving to the Oberoi. Maybe tonight!” I said emphatically. I was suddenly striken with the thought of one of Sobhraj’s minions, of which there were always many on the outside, paying me a surprise visit and involving me in some innocent-sounding scheme that would land me in jail without any laissez-passer.

Out of nowhere: “Maybe you could work with me writing my life story for the movies.” Something that felt the size of a peach pit suddenly clogged my throat as I told him I’d only be in India for a few weeks. “I mean later. After I am out. You can come back.”

I felt relieved when an irritating, gawky journalist cantered up to the window and interrupted, even though I was bribing Sobhraj’s guards every 15 minutes for the privilege of talking to him.

A bit later, Sobhraj emerged from the lockup, manacled by his wrists and ankles and chained to a soldier lurching behind him. He had some other business at the distant end of the courthouse. I was permitted to walk beside him, or rather, he told me to, without meeting any objection from his guards. We walked inside a ring of army personnel, with submachine guns pointed at both of us. Other prisoners with court business simply walked hand in hand with their unarmed escorts, but Sobhraj was special. He was a serial killer, and a major celebrity. People rushed through the cordon sanitaire to beg for his autograph.

“Now,” I asked him as we walked, “before Kiran Bedi took over the prison, people said you were really in charge of the place.”

“Did she tell you I’m writing a book?” he snapped. “About her?”

“She mentioned something. I don’t remember exactly.”

“I am a writer. Like you. In jail there is not much to do. Reading, writing. I like very much Friedrich Nietzsche.”

“Oh, yes. The Superman. Zarathustra.”

“Yes, exactly. I have the philosophy of the Superman. He is like me, with no use for bourgeois morality.” Sobhraj bent down, clanking his chains, to pull up a pant leg. “This is how I ran the prison. Do you know about those little micro-recorders? I would tape them to myself here, you see. And under my sleeves. I got the guards talking about taking bribes, bringing prostitutes into the jail.”

He showed me some papers scrunched in a plasticine wallet he’d been carrying in his shirt pocket.

“These are papers for a Mercedes I will turn in here,” he said, pointing at the open door of the office. “It applies against my bail. When I leave Tihar, I have to give them some money.”

“By leave, you mean—”

“When I leave to work with Mother Teresa.” Yikes.

“I need to ask you something, Charles,” I repeated, as firmly as I could. In the course of our conversation (of which this is only the gist) I noted that Sobhraj had made a sort of mental collage of everything I’d told him earlier about myself, and was feeding parts of it back to me, with various plausible modifications, as revelations about himself. It’s a standard technique of sociopaths.

“Would you like my autograph as well?”

“No, I’d like to know why you murdered all those people in Thailand.”

Far from the shattering effect I had hoped for, Sobhraj smiled at some private joke and began cleaning his glasses with his shirt.

“I never murdered anybody.”

“What about Stephanie Parry? Vitali Hakim? Those kids in Nepal?” On a Christmas holiday vacation, Sobhraj and Chowdhury, Leclerc in tow, had found time to incinerate two backpackers in Kathmandu.

“Now you are speaking about drug addicts.”

“You didn’t kill them?”

“They may have been…” He searched for the proper word. “Uh, liquidated by a syndicate, for dealing heroin.”

“Are you the syndicate?”

“I am one person. A syndicate has many people.”

“But you already told Richard Neville that you killed those people. I don’t want to offend you, but I want to know why you killed them.”

“I just told you.” I felt time slipping away. I didn’t consider it prudent to see this person again, and as soon as he concluded this murky business with the Mercedes they would take him back to Tihar.

“Well, I can tell you about one,” he said after a thoughtful silence. He leaned into me confidentially. One of the guards coughed, reminding us of his presence. “The girl from California. She was drunk, and Ajay brought her to Kanit House.” We knew about her, you see. We knew she was involved with heroin. He proceeded to recount how he killed Teresa Knowlton, a young woman who had definitely not been involved with heroin and planned to become a Buddhist nun, more or less exactly the way he’d told the story to Richard Neville a quarter century earlier. Her corpse was the first to be found, in a bikini, floating off Pattaya Beach. Hence the Bikini Killer.

When he got to the end of a long, ugly story I said: “I’m not really interested in how you killed her. What I’d like to know is why. Even if you were working for some Hong Kong syndicate there must be some reason why you and not someone else would do this.”

A guard indicated that Sobhraj could enter the office. He stood up with a great clanking of chains. He shuffled a few steps and peered over his shoulder.

“It’s a secret,” he said, his face suddenly dead serious. Then he disappeared, waving the title for the Mercedes, Iago to the very end.

Sobhraj reading about himself in a French newspaper upon his arrival in Paris in April 1997. Photo by REX USA

I thought Sobhraj and Chowdhury must have taken a lot of speed. I often speculated that the Bikini Killings were a twisted, homoerotic death ritual triggered by amphetamine psychosis. I wanted to suggest this to the Bombay police, but since I was on speed myself, I had the paranoid thought that if I brought it up they might give me a drug test, right there in their office.

I went to meet Madhukar Zende, an impressively solid, strangely feline police commissioner, who presented me with bales of handwritten depositions by Sobhraj’s cohorts, scrawled in ballpoint or pencil, confessing to multiple larcenies in Peshawar and Karachi and Kashmir, carried out in a frenzy of bewilderingly rapid transit. Zende had arrested Sobhraj twice: once in 1971 on Zende’s 42nd birthday, after a jewel heist at the Ashoka Hotel in New Delhi, and once in 1986, after the Tihar prison break.

He spoke about Sobhraj with ironic affection, thumbing his D’Artagnan mustache as he recalled the early 1970s, when Sobhraj kept a flat on Malabar Hill and made himself popular in Bollywood by offering stolen Pontiacs and Alfa Romeos at a thrilling discount. For dicier scams, he recruited stooges in juice bars and fleapit hostels on Ormiston Road, doing his drug-and-rob thing to wealthy tourists at the Taj or the Oberoi near the India Gate to keep in practice.

“He was interested in women and money,” Zende sighed. “He left a trail of broken hearts wherever he went.” In 1971, Sobhraj had been waiting for an international call at the O’Coqueiro restaurant in Goa when Zende, disguised as a tourist, busted him.

I sat near the spot where Sobhraj had been seized, as tiny, iridescent lizards scrambled up and down the sage-green walls of the O’Coqueiro. It was off-season in Goa. Waiters stood around aimlessly in the dining room like gigolos in an empty dance hall.

On the shadowy veranda, Gines Viegas, the proprietor, plied me with rum and cokes while he drawled out tales of his years as a travel agent in Africa and South America. He was an irritable tortoise, but now and then he inserted fresh details of the weeks when Sobhraj showed up every night to use the phone at the restaurant.

“He was calling his mother in France,” Viegas told me. “He looked different every time, wearing wigs, his face all made up. He made his nose bigger with putty. When Zende was here on his famous stakeout, he wore Bermuda shorts and tourist shirts. I knew he was a cop right away.”

Madhukar Zende is dead now. So is Gines Viegas. Charles Sobhraj is still alive.

The new owners of O’Coqueiro have installed a statue of Sobhraj at the table where he ate dinner the night of his arrest. As for Kiran Bedi, she lost her job—a victim of hubris and, not unpredictably, of Sobhraj. This tough woman softened under a tsunami of the Serpent’s flattery. She so fervently believed in his rehabilitation that she allowed a French film crew into Tihar to document it, giving her superiors an excuse to fire her.

Contrary to what Zende said, I didn’t believe Sobhraj was ever interested in women or money. Despite all the bling he displayed to impress his marks, his pleasure in life was putting one over on them. He never got more than a few hundred dollars from the backpackers who turned up at Kanit House and later turned up dead. Whenever he reaped a windfall from his trade, he instantly flew off to Corfu or Hong Kong and blew it all in a casino. The women in his life have always been props for a criminal enterprise, or publicity. If Charles was ever a fabulous stud, nobody’s ever said so. And they would have.

Sobhraj being escorted by Nepalese police after a hearing at a district court in Bhaktapur on June 12, 2014. Photo by AFP/Prakash Mathema/Getty Images

I don’t know why the Bikini Killings happened. But in that part of the world, such events used to be called “amok”—a “triggered rampage,” first observed by anthropologists in Malaya in the late 1800s. More often, now, they happen here in the United States. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold ran amok at Columbine. Adam Lanza ran amok in Newtown, Connecticut. The trigger event in Bangkok—I feel fairly certain of this—was Ajay Chowdhury. The murders composed a very brief chapter in Sobhraj’s stupendously variegated lifetime of crime: a prolonged explosion of “overkill” by a svelte, unruffable con artist who prided himself on self-control. The killings started when Chowdhury came into the picture and stopped when he left it.

To the dismay of many people who tried to prevent it, Sobhraj was released from prison a year after I met him. As a French national with a criminal record, he was hastily booted out of India. He settled in Paris, where he was allegedly paid $5 million for his life story and began giving interviews for $6,000 a pop, at his favorite café on the Champs-Élysées.

But that isn’t quite the end. In 2003, he turned up in Nepal—the only country in the world where he was still a wanted man. (Thailand has a statute of limitations on all crimes, including murder.) He believed—or so it’s said—that the evidence against him had long crumbled to dust. I’m not so sure he believed that. He roared around Kathmandu on a motorcycle, as he had in Goa, making himself conspicuous. The Nepalese had carefully preserved dated receipts for a rental car and blood evidence found in the trunk and proceeded to arrest him, fittingly enough, in a casino.

As I write this, I just watched a YouTube video that shows Sobhraj losing his final appeal on a murder conviction in Kathmandu. So much time separates the Bikini Killings from the present that the way he will finish up no longer illustrates the tendency of certain individuals to flog their pathology to the point of self-immolation. What it illustrates is the ultimate futility of everything in the face of the aging process. Sobhraj has grown old. If he hasn’t grown tired of himself by now, he’s certainly grown stupid. If you look at his story for as long as I have—the endless trail of mischief and mayhem that only led back where it started, a prison cell; the money robbed and instantly gambled away; the pointless perpetual motion across countries and continents—you will see that Sobhraj was always ridiculous. The first impression I had of him face to face was one of aggressive, implacable ridiculousness.

His victims had been people then my own age, no doubt wandering the earth in the same mental fog I carried around in my 20s, in exactly the same years. The story called to me long ago, no doubt, because I wondered whether, in their place, I could have been conned to death by Sobhraj too: In photographs from that time, he looked like a person I would’ve slept with in the 70s—like several different people, in fact, whom I did sleep with in the 70s. There was no way to answer the question by meeting him. He no longer looked like anyone I would ever sleep with, and I knew in advance what he’d done. A criminal quite like Sobhraj would be impossible now: Interpol is computerized; a person can’t hop on and off airplanes and cross frontiers with nothing but fast talk, sexy smiles, and crappily forged passports; every jewelry store in the world has surveillance cameras, and soon every street in the world will have them too.

But I may have had the whole thing wrong from the start, anyway. For years I imagined Sobhraj enticing credulous, not-very-bright stoners into his web of death through sexual charm and superior cunning. But what if the people he killed didn’t buy his act any more than I did, regardless of how attractive he was at the time, and even without knowing anything about him? What if, instead of an image of perfection, they saw an obviously Asian, hilariously sleazy loser, like a ponce in a business suit shilling in front of a strip joint, absurdly pretending to be French, or Dutch, or vaguely European, “like them.” What if they considered him amusingly pathetic but possibly useful? Most had been “lured” not by his sex appeal, or his oily patter, but by the prospect of getting expensive gemstones on the cheap. It’s just possible that his victims imagined they were conning him and found him as ridiculous as I did. And maybe they believed—patronizingly, with liberal, enlightened indulgence—that a ridiculous person is also a harmless one.


This Stab-Proof Clothing Aims to Keep Medellin Safe

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El Duke, the Colombian rapper whose death inspired Miguel Romano

In 2012, Elider Varela—a rapper known as “El Duke”—was gunned down in his home of District 13 in Medellín, Colombia's second-largest city. It was a murder that shook the district more than the many that regularly occur in the area, as El Duke was a rising community leader who created youth programs that promoted expression through music and dance rather than through violence. His belief was that art could make the district’s children realize they had options other than joining the highly militarized gangs that control the area.

Now, a new clothing line seeking funding on Kickstarter aims to honor El Duke’s memory and protect its wearers all at the same time. The “El Duke Collection” by fashion label Miguel Romano is producing a line of blade and ballistic-resistant hoodies, polos and T-shirts bearing the artist’s face and the slogan “paz y respeto”—“peace and respect”—emblazoned over it.

I spoke with Miguel Romano’s co-founder Michael Puscar to learn about his inspiration, what it feels like to be stabbed in a blade-resistant shirt and to find out if the best way to honor a peacemaker’s memory is to put his face on bulletproof clothing.

(L - R) Míguelo Romano's director of creative design Neil Gallagher; Carol López, El Duke’s widow; and Michael Puscar, co-founder of the Míguelo Romano fashion line

VICE: El Duke inspired your clothing line. Why are you so into him?
Michael Puscar: While most hip-hop and rap music in the world today is sort of violent and advocates violence against women, Duke was different. Within District 13 Duke was a community leader. He helped children. He gave them other options. A child who grows up and is 15 years old and living in District 13... their options are to join one of these gangs, so he was giving them a different choice.  A choice to put down the weapon, pick up the microphone and express their anger and frustration through art.

Are things really that bad in Medellin that there’s a need to constantly wear body amour clothing?
I'd hope that we live in a world where this kind of clothing isn’t necessary, but unfortunately I do feel like there is a need for it. The amount of crime that has been happening in Latin America and in Colombia in particular is on the decline. However, the murder rate is still high, and our goal is to make people safe, and also look stylish, and have a great line of clothing that is stylish and beautiful. And believe me, as much as I think that this is an innovative great idea, I really do hope for the day when it's really not necessary.

Body amour clothing sounds uncomfortable. What does it actually feel like when you have it on?
So there’s two different lines of armored clothing. One is our blade resistant line, which is available now. The anti-ballistic line is in production and will be ready by October. What makes this clothing innovative is that it’s using state of the art material that's lightweight and comfortable. So it’s not too heavy. It’s very flexible. It feels nice. It’s made up of 80 percent ultra-lightweight polyurethane fibers. What that means in layman’s terms is it's 80 percent plastic. But the other 20 percent is a type of polyester. So the way the materials weave together, it has a very lightweight feel. It breathes easily. It’s flexible. This kind of material is innovative and hasn’t been involved in the marketplace until now.

So someone could literally come up to me in one of these shirts, stab me and I'd be totally OK?
It’s been tested against the highest standards in the industry right now. It’s been rated at ISO 13997:1999, which is Blade Cut Resistance Level 5—the highest level. If you were walking on the street and you were slashed it would be very unlikely that it would penetrate. [But] we can never say never, because there’s all kinds of innovative weapons out there. I mean, since medieval times someone comes up with a type of armor, another person comes up with a weapon and the means to overcome it, right? So there is this sort of evolving cycle, which continues to exist. But we're very confident against slash attacks. Stab attacks are a little more difficult, but also we're confident that it leaves you in a better position than if you had cotton clothing, for example.

So what would I feel if someone slashed me in one of your shirts?
If you’re being slashed you feel pressure, but it won’t penetrate. So it might hurt a bit, but it won’t bruise. And obviously it won’t leave a cut. Now, a stab attack is different. If you get stabbed it may stop the stab, but you will have one point of pressure focused on one area. So that would be a considerable bruise. It would hurt. But it would save your life.

But let me make some distinctions here, because the materials we use in the blade resistant [material] are very different to the anti ballistic. When a bullet strikes the anti ballistic clothing it distributes the force. So the idea is to absorb the kinetic energy and distribute it. So striking one location distributes it to different parts of the body—to a larger portion of the body. Leaving a big bruise, but again the bullet will not penetrate.

And, just for kicks, let’s say I got blood on one of these shirts. Are they washable?
The blade resistant clothing is entirely washable. No problem at all. The anti-ballistic material is different. It cannot be wet. So what we do is we take the cotton that’s on the outside and weave the anti ballistic material inside with a thin layer of plastic over the top of it. So in that way, the material itself—the part that’s anti ballistic—is protected from any kind of water or water damage. So it too can be washed. But if it’s penetrated with a bullet it’s not going to be usable any more for it’s anti ballistic qualities, but by that time it will have saved your life.

Rapper Alberto Stylee wears the Peace and Respect District 13 T-shirt

You're starting with a men’s clothing line first, with a women’s line following in 2015. Why guys first? Do they get stabbed more?
Well, not necessarily. Actually, on a personal level, I believe that women need more protection, and there’s a strong demand for products that can protect women. However, we wanted a smaller market to begin with, so we started with something very targeted. We did a market study. In addition to needing this protection, men tend to be more open to buying it. They are more interested in buying the product. 

How much does your stuff cost?
An anti ballistic hoodie is the most expensive line. You can imagine, these materials are not cheap, and they are woven carefully. So an anti ballistic hoodie that can stop a .38 caliber 9mm, 45 caliber cold will run you about $1,100. A blade resistant hoodie is $400.

Given that in Colombia the monthly average salary is less then $700, do you think these clothes will reach the people that need them most?
Very fair question. There is a strong market for security products in Colombia. Executives and people who do make money tend to be targets for kidnappings, for murders and for being held ransom. So our market is there. We're also obviously attracting people on the street, but the product costs are the costs. The blade resistant hoodie's material is difficult to acquire, and of course if it’s anti ballistic it can’t be cut. So we use lasers to manufacture, and of course the customer incurs some of the costs of the manufacturing process.

El Duke was a pacifist. Isn't it a bit off the mark to make body armor clothing to commemorate a rapper who promoted a message of peace? Wouldn’t a better way to honor El Duke’s memory be to fight the socioeconomic conditions in Colombia that lead to poverty and gang warfare, instead of selling body armor? It seems a bit defeatist.
Our message is "You can kill the messenger but you can’t kill the message." And we want to be able to protect that messenger as much as we can, be they El Duke or any common citizen on the street. So for us, what you're saying makes a lot of sense, but we also support local artists in the community. We are sponsoring the music of MC Radio, a very successful hip-hop artist who rapped with El Duke and who was driven out through forced displacement in District 13 shortly after El Duke’s death. We're sponsoring local hip-hop schools across Medellin and in Brooklyn as well, with the mentality that we want them to be part of that local community and we want to support those local artists. So that’s really important for us. It’s important for the brand image. The brand isn’t just armored clothing. It’s really representative of those communities and their struggle with the cycle of violence and drugs.

Thank you very much, Michael.

The “El Duke Collection” is currently raising funds on Kickstarter. Carol López, El Duke's widow, and his two children will receive a percentage of all profits from the collection.

Follow Michael Grothaus on Twitter.

Lebanon Is the Middle East's Next Ticking Time Bomb

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Lebanon Is the Middle East's Next Ticking Time Bomb

Lindy West Is Leaving Jezebel, but She Still Hates Rape

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Screencap via Totally Biased on YouTube

You know feminist writer Lindy West from her humorous but substantive takes on topics like pop culture, social justice, rape culture, and body image. This week she announced on twitter that this would be her last week at Jezebel where she’s been a staff writer for the past two years, and that she’ll be going freelance and working more on personal projects. One of those projects is “I Believe You It’s Not Your Fault: Notes From Your Big Sibling” (IBYINYF).

The idea for the project came earlier this summer when a member of a private online writing group she is a part of posed the following question:

My daughter’s friend was sexually harassed by some boys at school and feels like it’s her fault. She’s 12. Her parents are conservative evangelicals, and there’s really no adult in her life who’s even remotely versed in concepts like victim-blaming and slut-shaming and boundaries and consent. She doesn’t want to talk about it and I won’t violate that request, but I wish I could slip some resources her way. Is there anything out there like a Girl’s Guide to Rape Culture? That explains it in an accessible, empowering way? I just want her (and all the other kids, of all genders, who are in similar situations) to know: This isn’t your fault. I believe you.

Members of the group had a collective and immediate desire to harness their own similar experiences to support young people going through the same thing. Someone asked if writing something in the form of a letter to this girl -as well as others in similar circumstances—would be a good way to do that. But “without coming across like dorky, hand-wringing moms.” Hence the name for the project.

IBYINYF is led by Lindy, who at 32 will soon become a stepmother to two girls aged 10 and 12. Contributor Mary Adkins (one of over 30 volunteers) described it as “a blog aimed at teenagers who have been victimized by sexual assault.” Younger readers who are currently struggling with abuse submit questions which are responded to by several contributors. Older readers submit letters narrating and reflecting on their past experiences. The result is a very raw collection of very traumatic experiences. 

The blog launched on July 15, and within two weeks and had gotten 3,000 followers and 2,300 notes and gathered enough submissions to cover two months. Only two stories a day will be published. I reached out to Lindy to find out more about its progress.

VICE: How would you characterize the feedback you’ve gotten? Both positive and negative.
Lindy West:
I'm thrilled to say that the feedback we've gotten has been nearly 100 percent positive. We've received a very, very small amount of kneejerk anti-feminist pushback—people presenting these ludicrously tortured scenarios like, "I went to a party wearing a sandwich board that said "PLEASE RAPE ME"—are you sure it isn't my fault?" as though that somehow undermines our mission statement; or people asking, clearly in bad faith, "What about male victims? Why don't you care about them?" which is spurious, because we've been publishing questions and letters from male victims since the blog's inception. Oh, and we've gotten some criticism from anti-BDSM radical feminists for being sex-positive. 

But I could pretty much count those messages and comments on one hand, while the positive response has been infinitely more plentiful and more meaningful. As cliche as it sounds, one person writing in to say, "I felt bad about this, and now I feel better about it, now I feel less alone," makes this project worth it to me. And we're getting notes like that all day, every day. Even when I set up the blog, I didn't yet understand how powerful and healing it could be just to be able to tell someone what happened to you. We get so much of that. "I just wanted to tell someone." "No one has ever believed me." "I thought I was the only one." 

In the BBC piece, when discussing the possibility that her assaulter might read the blog with her story, Jessica Probus—one of the contributors—says she didn’t tell her story for him, but for other girls that might be in the same situation as her. Notwithstanding the fact that survivors are the primary audience, have you gotten any feedback from the other side? Namely, people who recognized certain predatory behavior from their own past or that of their friends/family and maybe it gave them pause? 
I haven't gotten that feedback specifically, but I've heard from a lot of men saying, "This was so important for me to read. I had no idea." A lot of people know this stuff is happening, intellectually, but it's a really visceral, eye-opening experience to read all of these first-hand experiences in a row. 

A screenshot of one post at IBYINYF

What’s surprised you about the project since you launched?

Probably the most significant thing I've learned is that these stories are devastatingly common--more common than you think--and many, many people have been keeping them inside for years. Our society gives victims infinite reasons to keep their traumas to themselves (you're going to break your grandmother's heart, you'll destroy the family, your sexual past will be dredged up, it was probably your fault anyway) and very few incentives and support systems for speaking out about them. When you read this many stories in a row, from people all over the world, it really becomes clear how intense the cultural messaging is that keeps people quiet. The patterns are undeniable.

Is there something more or different that you and your contributors do for self care now that you’re working closely with so many very personal stories of sexual assault?
Well, it's still new. So, at this point, I feel far more energized than burdened by the project. But I definitely feel the sheer volume of these stories weighing me down—the number of submissions, the number of questions, the number of people who feel trapped and lonely and ashamed and confused. We definitely take shifts in answering the ask box questions. People take breaks when they're feeling ragged and come back when they're feeling fortified. And as for general self care, it's like anything else. Everyone's different. Personally, I turn off the computer and hang out with my family as much as possible. And I find TV binge—watching very therapeutic. Also, wine. 

In the FAQ you state that you’re accepting submissions from people of all genders and ages. Are there plans to add male contributors that can give advice?
We actually have two cis men and one trans man on our advice panel right now, and I've gotten several queries from men about submitting their stories. I would absolutely love to hear from more men and post their submissions. One of the most heartbreaking letters we've gotten in the ask box was from a young man who'd been raped by his soccer coach, and he was convinced he couldn't tell anyone because men aren't supposed to be vulnerable, men aren't supposed to cry or ask for help.

That's one of the most pernicious aspects of patriarchy—the idea that weakness and victimization are inherently feminine. That's a horrible paradigm for women, obviously, but it's also massively damaging for men. Hearing from these teenage boys who don't have anywhere to turn—it's just fucking sickening to me. I really do want everyone to know that if you feel like you don't have anyone to talk to, you can talk to us. Please, please, please talk to us.

Thanks. Good luck in the next phase of your career, Lindy.

Follow Simon Davis on Twitter.

The NFL Player Fighting Against the Stigma of Mental Illness

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The NFL Player Fighting Against the Stigma of Mental Illness

Inside the Secret World of a British Undercover Drugs Cop

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Former undercover drugs cop Neil Woods at his home in Herefordshire, wearing a T-shirt that reads: "Nice people take drugs." Photo by Ian Lloyd.

During the summer of 1994, amphetamine virgin Neil Woods found himself at a bar in a sleepy village in the UK faced with the choice of swallowing 40 percent pure speed or having the shit kicked out of him by a notorious local gangster with a $1600-a-week cocaine and crack habit.

Unbeknownst to this gangster—who ran a racket stealing lockable gas caps from cars and then having the keys replicated and boosting the cars—Neil was an undercover cop. He'd been attempting to buy one of the stolen cars from the gangster and had built up something of a relationship with him through chatting at this bar. However, one mistake he'd made was to make himself out as “some sort of connoisseur of amphetamines.”

“After about four weeks of knowing him he produced this bag for me,” Neil tells me from his home in Herefordshire. “He said, ‘Here’s a present for you. I bet you’ve never had speed like this!’ Well, I certainly hadn’t, because I’d never actually had any speed in my life. But just before he produced his bag, I’d literally seen someone have the shit kicked out of them in the pub on his orders for only a $15 debt. So I thought, I’ve got to take some.”

Neil put a tiny splodge of speed on the tip of his tongue, but that wasn’t enough to satisfy the gangster. “I was a little too tentative, so he said, ‘You want to have more than that!’ He expected me to have a tolerance, so he gave me another big dollop. I could feel it burning as it hit my mouth. He charged me some money for it and I went home, but I didn’t sleep for the next three nights. It was absolutely horrific. We got the stuff tested later and it was over 40 percent pure. Normal street stuff is about 5 percent.”

This kind of thing wasn't out of the ordinary for Neil, who served as an undercover drugs officer for 14 years between 1993 and 2007. During his tenure he estimates that his work put drug criminals behind bars for a combined total of 1,000 years, though he's certain all that prison time did absolutely nothing to stem the flow of drugs like heroin onto Britain's streets.

“Everything I did while undercover was a waste of time,” he says. “All I did was make the lives of the vulnerable more unbearable.”

While it was domestic stress with his ex-wife that ultimately led to his resignation from the force in November of 2012, for years he'd been growing slowly disillusioned with the policing of drug laws and the undercover tactics he had both witnessed and used himself.

Growing up in Derbyshire, Neil dropped out of a business studies course at Salford University at the age of 19 to join Derbyshire Constabulary, wanting to do something “more adventurous” with his life. “I was going to go backpacking around Europe, but I saw an ad in the local newspaper for police recruits, so I flipped a coin,” he says. “It landed heads, so I joined the police.”

He worked for four years in general policing, before settling with the Drug Squad (DS).

Back in the early 1990s, undercover drug policing was a pretty loosely regulated affair, and when some colleagues suggested he try it out, Neil decided to give it a go. “I was quickly found to be particularly good at it,” he says. “I think it’s an adrenaline thing. People react differently to adrenaline, but however nervous I was before I did something, as soon as I went into it my head went clear.”

Regional drug squads share information, so very soon Neil was getting offers of work around the country, being assigned to jobs that lasted months. Because of the lack of regulation, these first jobs were often risky. He would pose as a drug user—usually a crack or heroin addict—and work his way toward infiltrating the drug scene in whichever area he was assigned to.

He recalls a scene from one of his first assignments in a housing estate in Normanton, an inner suburb of Derby: “I was sent in to just knock on the door and speak to some people who were dealing crack,” he says. “I got chatting to people and I ended up in a bookies, which was funny because I don’t think I’d been in a bookies before in my life. All the crack dealers were hanging around there and I got to know them and managed to buy off them.

“I was actually being observed at the time by the drugs squad, and I completely walked off the plot where they thought I was, and when I went back to meet them they looked seriously quite stressed—dripping in sweat and worried. It turned out the person who was selling to me had two convictions for GBH [grievous bodily harm] for stabbing people.”

In 1996, the police introduced formal training for undercover drug work, but by this time Neil already had three years of experience, so found himself teaching part of the course as well as studying the training. “They do say in undercover training that you’re not acting,” he says. “You’re just being a different version of yourself.”

But despite the extensive training, his life was still constantly under threat from the erratic behavior of the dealers he encountered.

In 1997, he met a dealer in Fenton, Staffordshire, and bought “half a T” (0.8g) of heroin from him, then went back to buy more. “I knocked on the door again and said, ‘Hey mate, have you got another half T?’ He said, ‘I haven’t got anything near that weight.’ He then pulled a samurai sword out, put it against my throat and said, ‘You must be fucking DS!’”

Neil buying crack undercover in Normanton in 1995 from a local dealer. Photo courtesy of Neil Woods.

The dealer’s girlfriend then poked her head out the door and said, “Fucking hell—I thought he was going to say he was, then!” The guy pulled the sword away from Neil’s throat and he and his girlfriend burst out laughing. He then asked Neil what he wanted and he asked for four bags.

“He took his time, gave me the four bags, and I started to wander off and put the small silver foil wraps in a cigarette packet. But then I look up and there’s a blade pointing at my face. Some bastard is trying to rob me for the heroin I’ve bought. I thought, This is just not my day at all!" Neil laughs. “He said, ‘Mate, just give it to me and it’ll be alright.’ I said, ‘Nah, not with the day I’m having,’ and jogged away. You might look and sound like a heroin addict, but you can always run faster than them.”

Neil moved from town to town throughout his career, mixing undercover assignments with regular police work. He would often spend his day playing the part of a crack or heroin addict, before turning in at a luxurious hotel or apartment in the evening, a contrast he found weird and uncomfortable. 

“You spend all day being comfortable however anybody sees you, and relaxing into that role of being humbled almost to the point of humiliation,” he says. “You then go to something of privilege and it doesn’t feel quite right at all, and you can feel eyes upon you. In the city center, no one pays you any attention at all when you’re posing as a crack addict. That’s why people don’t realize so many crack addicts struggle living in inner cities.”

"This guy needed help—something else rather than being exploited by all the dealers around him, or exploited by me for that matter."

These experiences spurred Neil into obsessively teaching himself everything he could about drugs. He visited the first European conference of Narcotics Anonymous (NA) in September of 1999. There, he listened to a debate about whether people should be sent to NA rather than prison. During the Q&A he posed the question—which, in hindsight, seems naïve to him—of what the point of sending someone to NA would be if they didn’t want to get help in the first place.

“The whole room—and it was a big, big room—went completely quiet,” he says. “I could almost see the tumbleweed. One of the people on the panel said, ‘Do you think we had some magical epiphany to come here? We’ve all been dragged kicking and screaming.’”

This was a turning point for Neil, one that made him realize the addicts whose social circles he'd been infiltrating weren't really criminals, but vulnerable people in need of real help. “After that, every time I went out and mixed with heroin addicts and crack addicts on the street I realized that previously I’d been seeing them as less than human and thinking they had got themselves into their problem through their own mistakes,” he says. “But actually, they were just people who needed help and were too ill to get it themselves.”

Neil now believes that police tactics put these already vulnerable people at even greater risk.

“Organized crime gangs’ biggest weapon really is fear,” he says. “The more they’re put under pressure by policing the more they will exercise that power of fear that makes people vulnerable.”

In Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, he met a beggar who'd introduce him to people so he could feed his own habit by taking a small cut out of Neil's transactions. About a year later, Neil heard he'd been sentenced to five years in prison for heroin dealing. “This just horrified me, because all he would do was sit in the same spot in Mansfield town center, begging.

“He told me that the height of his month was when a vein in between his toes on the top of his foot had opened up that he hadn’t been able to inject into for three years. That was the summation of his entire life. This guy needed help—something else rather than being exploited by all the dealers around him, or exploited by me for that matter.”

Neil explains that heroin addicts who are imprisoned have often accumulated debts, or “tabs,” with their dealers. For those who can’t afford to pay the tabs, the family and friends can be subject to exploitation to pay off the debt, including coerced prostitution and being forced to sell drugs. When the addicts get out, they often immediately re-offend as they still have the debt to pay off.

According to Neil, out of the country’s estimated 300,000 heroin addicts, a high proportion of them seem to gravitate toward large seaside towns. “I wonder if people just want to run away and that’s as far as they get because they run out of places to run,” he says.

Neil was sent to Brighton at the end of 2005, which at the time had the highest per capita overdose rate of any city in the country. When he arrived, he discovered that the undercover tactics being used there had been in place for so long that the gangsters had caught on to them. “The gangsters had designated homeless people to be their point of contact,” says Neil. “Everyone was absolutely terrified. The feeling of fear throughout the homeless community was absolutely terrible.”

He got to know two homeless people who told him that other rough sleepers who were found to have unwittingly introduced undercover policemen to the gangsters had been murdered. “Anyone can get rid of a smackhead,” Neil explains. “You just give them an overdose.”

By this point there had been 58 overdoses that year. “That’s substantially more than any town of its type, but my team just laughed about it,” says Neil. “The other addicts were completely convinced that some of them were murders. Without a proper investigation I wouldn’t want to speculate, but the fact that they were completely convinced should be a concern of any police officer.”

That the people he was going after, and often imprisoning, were in desperate need of help was further reinforced to Neil by one particular homeless person in Brighton, a British former businessman who spoke five languages fluently but, after losing himself in the 1990s stimulant drug scene and using heroin to come down from speed, had become an addict.

“He had this sense of doom about him,” says Neil. “He just knew he was going to die, that he wouldn’t survive the winter. He had an offer of some housing in Worthing. It would have cost him about $9 to get the train to go for the interview for this bedsit, but at the time he couldn’t spare it because he needed it to get a $30 bag of heroin. Even though he knew he was either going to overdose or freeze to death, he still couldn’t get that money together to get the housing.”

After just six weeks of what was supposed to be a six-month assignment, Neil grew tired of going after petty dealers rather than the top dogs. He left Brighton and refused to do that kind of work again.

Neil stopped doing undercover work in 2007 but remained with the police until 2012. Now, he's focusing on using his experiences to improve the drug control system. He's a proponent of the full regulation of all drugs to “take the control away from the criminals.”

“It’s not good for you to be doing something which you feel is unethical—it takes its toll,” he says.

“What I did wasn’t completely my fault. You’re a foot soldier; you take orders and you trust the system. It’s a disciplined organization and you trust other people’s judgements. You trust the laws, but when it comes to drugs the laws are wrong.”

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We Chatted About Horses and Viagra with Toronto Mayoral Candidate Sarah Thomson

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Sarah Thomson, smiling in front of a food truck. Photo via her campaign.

September's finally rolled around, which means that there's just over a month and a half to go before Toronto hits the polls and either re-elects or boots out Rob Ford from the mayor's office.

There's been no shortage of interesting candidates who want to take over Toronto's top job, like the guy who played saxophone on “Spadina Bus,” or the candidate whose main platform is to increase taxes. I talked to the white supremacist candidate earlier this year, so I figured I'd swing to the other side of the spectrum and talk to Liberal candidate Sarah Thomson.

Sarah Thomson, who also ran in the 2010 election that brought Rob Ford into office, can hold her own in the race when it comes to personality and antics. She's the only mayoral candidate in recent memory to wear her hair in dreadlocks, and she's made the news over the past two weeks for pledging free Viagra for low-income senior citizens. She also made a ridiculous, parody music video about public transit (a trend that started in 2008 with Toronto rappers Randal Paul and Syruslife who released a parody of Young Jeezy’s “I Put On” called “I Get on the TTC”).

Anyway, I met with Sarah Thomson in a downtown Toronto coffee shop to talk about her policies, riding horses, and what she thinks of people who don't approve of her look.

VICE: Since the beginning of your campaign, you said you want to “keep it real.” How are you “keeping it real?”
Sarah Thomson: I ran for mayor in 2010, and I had a team that said, “Oh, make your hair this way, wear these dresses,” you know? And they changed who I was. I was lacking that authenticity of who I really am. And so I spent four years since 2010 working as an activist, working as an advocate for transit. I've been, you know, on committees, and doing all sorts of things to try and figure out a way to fix the city. And what I discovered was there's a thousand different little tweaks in process that need to be done. As a transit activist, I've met with transit experts from all over the world. And they've all said, “Look, you need that downtown relief subway line.” So how do you keep it real around that, right? It's a $10 billion plan. Where are we going to get the funds for that? So keeping it real is all about addressing the real issues, which are a shortfall of money, and coming up with real solutions.

What do you think sets you apart from the other candidates running for mayor?
Personality? I just find they're really beige, don't you? I mean, have they come out and stood for anything? See, I've had to do that. Like, I came out for that Viagra thing…

Yeah, about that—how do you plan on paying for it, and of all things, why Viagra? Because in Mexico City, where the idea came from, only about 100 seniors went and took advantage of it.
I have five policies. I'm out there having to figure out a way: “How do I talk about martial arts for police? How do I get that policy out?” Off-peak transit for seniors. Having a car-free ride day that winds through every community and shows off their best street. Play streets where we put the pedestrian first. As a mother, that's really important to me, My kids are 9 and 10, and I'm worried every day when they're out there on their bikes. I wanted to get those four ideas out, yet I wasn't getting any coverage in the press, because in this election, the press aren’t trying to push anyone who isn't one of the top three. It's all about stopping Rob Ford, and not about saying, “Well, have we picked the right candidate here?”

So the Viagra was a way to get attention on them but also a way to make people think, “What makes you happy?” What makes us happy as a society? We've got to, as a city, start making that a priority, and that's what that whole launch was about, making happiness a priority, you know? I wanted to get the four issues out, and the Viagra was a way to get the press to go off of Ford for a day and cover a policy.



Who doesn't want free Viagra, right? via Flickr user loauc.

So would you actually implement the Viagra or is it just a weird stunt?
You know what, if people wanted it, then yes. And how do we pay for it? Simple, we enact the congestion charge [which would charge cars from outside of Toronto $5 for entering the city]. But why did I mention the Viagra? Because I wanted people to think about how to make the city a happier city. So you think, “Okay, oh my gosh, we mentioned Viagra and the sex issue.” And we are such a, I almost want to say, a Protestant-based town-mentality. We've got to start thinking like an international city, where people are like, “Yeah, you know what, people do have sex. What's wrong with talking about it?” It's not a scary issue. It's a real issue. “Keeping it real” again. And Viagra is a beacon to talk about what makes us happy as individuals, and how can we make our city a happier city.

Happy is good. There's a press release on your website that said you're polling roughly 15 to 18 percent. But, the Toronto Star reported that you're polling closer to two percent and Metro quoted a politics professor saying your poll was not at all credible. What do you have to say to that?
It was an internal poll, first of all. So it wasn't made to be a poll that was to be publicized. Campaigns do polling to get the message out. So if a lot of people don't know your name, they don't know what you stand for, you do a poll and you say, “Look, Sarah Thomson stands for building the downtown relief line. Sarah Thomson stands for free transit for seniors and students, and this is how Sarah Thomson is going to pay for it. Do you agree with this or not agree with this?” So it showed us that when people know about my platform, they like it and they want to support it. When Metro News talked to me, I said, “Look, I can give you an internal poll we've got, but we're doing another poll, we're looking for one of the major companies to do a poll for us. So I'd rather you use that because it's going to be more of a legitimate poll, right?” 

The poll we were going to do got held back a day, so they decided to publish it. So it was one of those things where it was like, “Urgh why would you publish a poll when I've told you, look, it's a push poll, it's all about my platform. It's not an authentic poll.” But they took this and sold it as if it were an authentic poll. 

Ah I see. So, there's been a lot of talk this election cycle about addiciton. Do you think Rob Ford can beat his demons?
Treatment takes a year to two years, not a month. It's a joke, everyone knows it's a joke, right? I think he could get to the point where he understands his sickness and knows how to cope with it. He's not there, right? I know this sounds bizarre, I don't hate Rob at all. I look at Rob and I think, “He's got a sickness.” I feel for him. I was on the campaign trail with him. I saw him every day, and you get to know someone. He's surprisingly stubborn. He can stay on message like nobody else, right?

He really, really, really does want to help people, but he honestly in his heart knows he doesn't know how to lead. So when he gets to that position, the fact that he knows he can't lead eats away at him. And that then causes him to think: “Ah, have a drink, I'll feel better.” I think our city could drive the poor man to go back to alcohol and drugs. And if he doesn't have that support around him, who knows? Will we find him in a ditch somewhere, you know? That worries me, and I think our city wants to use him and that bothers me.

Yes. Now on to the horses, I guess. When you registered to run for mayor this time around, you showed up in a horse-drawn carriage. You also showed up at Ford Fest on a horse. Why horses?
I'm a transit activist. If you look at the history of Toronto, how did our transportation start out? Horse-drawn carriages and wagons. So the issue I was launching on was, “Look. Transit. We either invest in transit, or we might as well go by horse because it's going to be faster to go by horse than it will be to drive a car.” I was trying to shine a spotlight on the issue of transit and why it's so important we invest in transit. And that's what the horse is all about.

 

Sarah Thomson on her famous horse.

Do you have any plans to appear or horses in the future?
Maybe.

You say the other candidates are kind of "beige." On the flip side, people say that sometimes you're a bit too enthusiastic. Robyn Doolittle has described you as “a bit loopy.” How do you feel about that?
I think Robyn Doolittle tends to be a conservative at heart, and she would like everyone to have perfect hair and dress perfectly and hasn't learned enough to know that people have their own personalities. Some people are more energetic, and I get that a lot. But true leaders don't really care so much about Keeping Up With the Joneses. I don't worry about what people think of me, I look and I worry about, “How can I help that person to make this city better?” 'Cause I have a debt to pay. I did very, very well in business, I am very happy, I have a fantastic husband. I feel like I've got to give something back. So if Robyn Doolittle wants to make fun of the way I look or the way I am, I let her, and I see a weakness in her, and I understand it. And I hope she'll get over it and she'll do something significant with her life so that, you know, so that she can experience what it's like to actually give back.

To actually help people is so much more rewarding than just sniping and gossiping about people. You know? So that's kind of how I feel about people like that. I feel a little bit sorry for them, 'cause I think, “You've got to snipe and gossip and do that?” Really, that shows an insecurity within yourself, right? So I always try to say, “Okay.” Every time I see her, I give her a hug, and you know, it's like, “Hi, whatever, you can say the meanest words about me and I'll still hug ya,” because to me, that's silliness, it's just immaturity.

Have you seen the other VICE article about you where the author says you make her uncomfortable?
 [nods] I saw people come to my defence and I went, “Yes!”

One of the article's main points is about your dreads and how dreads are very important in the Rasta culture...
They actually come before Rasta culture. There's an older heritage than that. You know what I found beautiful? Is that somebody mentioned that article to me when I was at Gay Pride. Gay Pride, you can dress any way you want and you have a right to be whatever you want to dress like, whatever you want to look like. And that's what I want my city to be, right? So when you have these prissy people saying, “Oh, you can't wear your hair like that,” or “You can't dress like that,” or “You can't act like that,” I say, “Shut up girl, really?” You know? 'Cause this is Toronto. We can be whoever we want to be, and I hope to defend that right forever. I just think if we have people trying to take away that right to dress and look the way you want to dress and look, that's scary to me.

If somebody came up to you and asked: “Why should I vote for you?” What would you say?
I've got energy, tenacity, and I'm the only candidate who's donated my life for the last four years towards pushing transit through. I got the downtown relief line on the plans for TTC, I still have more work to do. So please elect me because I will roll up my sleeves and get to work. I'm not somebody who has committee after committee and doesn't know how to get down to work. I'm a real person, and I'm committed to making Toronto a better place for my children, and for your children. And it's not about a career in politics, it's about getting the work done. Right now Toronto needs somebody. A fixer. And I'm a fixer.


Follow Jackie on Twitter.

Why Should We Care What Mitt Romney Has to Say About Foreign Policy?

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Mitt Romney at the 2013 Conservative Political Action Conference. Photo via Flickr user Gage Skidmore

A man who tried and failed to be president—twice—and last held political office in 2007, when he was finishing up his one and only term as governor of a tiny little state called Massachusetts has opinions about things. Do we care about those opinions? No, we don't. We don't care at all.

Alas, none of us own a newspaper called the Washington Post. This week, what is now essentially the Amazon.com newsletter run by a former aide to Ronald Reagan published an op-ed from the two-time loser with a title borrowed from a dull fifth grader's book report, "The World Needs a Mighty US Military,” which is predicated on the idea that Barack Hussein Obama is unilaterally disarming America by cutting military spending to about what it was when George W. Bush left office.

This premise is, of course, what the French would call “bullshit." The current President of the United States has spent more on the military in a single year than any of his predecessors, nearly tripled the number of US troops in Afghanistan soon after taking office, and ordered drone strikes in from Somalia, Yemen, and Pakistan. The guy has a “kill list,” to which he adds names based on a PowerPoint presentation he watches every Tuesday while sipping his Intelligentsia coffee. As Obama reportedly told his aides, he's “really good at killing people."

However, just as it doesn’t matter how many people he deports, it doesn’t matter how many people Obama kills: He will always be a Democrat and Mitt Romney is a Republican and that means Mitt Romney must pretend that Obama is surrendering to the terrorists. It’s a fictional narrative, to which the facts must be fit, but there aren’t many facts to support it, so what we are left with is some steaming hot rhetoric. Here are some selections:

It is said that the first rule of wing-walking is to not let go with one hand until the other hand has a firm grip. So, too, before we jettison our reliance on US strength, there must be something effective in its place—if such a thing is even possible.

Is the world the plane in this metaphor? If so, why is the US walking on the wings? That’s reckless and dumb and will get someone killed, just like US foreign policy. But let’s go with it: Without US strength, how would a million Vietnamese have been slaughtered? How would 500,000 Iraqi children under the age of five have died from an embargo that denied them access to medicine and filtered water? Who would have armed Indonesia's military dictator, enabling him and his allies to wipe out hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians?

There are those who claim that a multipolar world is preferable to one led by a strong United States. Were these other poles nations such as Australia, Canada, France and Britain, I might concur.

If other white people ran the world, Romney might be down with it. Alas:

. . . with emerging poles being China, Russia and Iran, the world would not see peace; it would see bullying, invasion and regional wars. And ultimately, one would seek to conquer the others, unleashing world war.

It's worth noting that, historically, China isn’t the most militaristic power in Asia: That honor would have to go to Japan, a close US ally that, with the encouragement of the Obama administration, is rapidly remilitarizing. Russia is run by an asshole, but for all Vladimir Putin's bluster, it's not so powerful it can freely annex Eastern Ukraine. And the last time Iran was at war it was because the US encouraged its then ally, Saddam Hussein, to invade it. A world war between all three of them? Maybe in Call of Duty. Romney apocalyptic vision is even wider than that, however:

Some argue that the United States should simply withdraw its military strength from the world—get out of the Middle East, accept nuclear weapons in Iran and elsewhere, let China and Russia have their way with their neighbors and watch from the sidelines as jihadists storm on two or three continents.

There were no jihadists in Iraq until the US invaded the country in 2003, after which it became a training ground for the very people who would go on to form the Islamic State. After a decade of military action, the US hasn’t been able to defeat Islamic militants in Afghanistan, which is to say: US military action creates the very threat it is incapable of defeating.

Also, it should be noted, people—stupid people and simple liars— have been claiming for years that Iran is on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons, though Iran’s leaders say such weapons violate the fundamental tenets of Islam. In early 1992, as noted by Iran analyst Nima Shirazi, House Republicans issued a report that claimed with “98 percent certainty that Iran already had all [or virtually all] of the components required for two to three operational nuclear weapons.” Those weapons were supposed to be assembled by April of that year.

No, that didn’t happen.

Meanwhile, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which inspects all of Iran’s nuclear facilities—something Israel, the only nuclear power in the Middle East, refuses to allow—“continues to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material” in the Islamic Republic. If Iran were building nuclear weapons, it presumably wouldn’t be able to hide all the highly enriched uranium those weapons require from IAEA inspectors. But these are facts, and this is an op-ed by Mitt Romney.

The history of the 20th century teaches that power-hungry tyrants ultimately feast on the appeasers—to use former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour’s phrase, we would be paying the cannibals to eat us last.

History shows that most power-hungry tyrants were given arms by alleged appeasers in the West. The US government famously gave Saddam Hussein everything from anthrax to the bubonic plague. The US was likewise giving weapons to Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi up until the West decided he was too difficult to deal with to bother keeping around. Time and time again, the US government creates monsters—or at the very least heavily arms them—then cites their monstrous behavior to justify further military interventions.

Haley Barbour, by the way, is a man who has publicly praised the White Citizens’ Council, which is, yup, what it sounds like: a white supremacist group. The curious thing here, though, is that his quote was actually referring to dealings with Congress, not foreign governments; it’s Mitt Romney who is using the phrase in a way apparently meant to conjure up images of our enemies as spear-chucking savages.

And in the meantime, our economy would be devastated by the disruption of trade routes, the turmoil in global markets and the tumult of conflict across the world.

Military spending is a net drain on the economy because it’s spending on things that serve no damn purpose. Instead of missiles and tanks, factories that produce weapons of war could be repurposed to improve the world we live in. Money spent on bombs could be spent on bullet trains—on the building of infrastructure, not the destruction of it. With just $30 billion a year, or about the cost of 100 F-35 fighter jets that don’t even work, the US could make a serious dent in global hunger, which in addition to being a really good thing would also be a hell of a propaganda victory that would genuinely make us all safer. Or we could take Romney's advice and build more aircraft carriers that will never see combat.

The arguments for shrinking our military fall aside to reveal the real reason for the cuts: Politicians, and many of the people who elect them, want to keep up spending here at home. Entitlements and programs are putting pressure on the federal budget: We either cut defense, or we cut spending on ourselves.

"Every gun that is made," said former president Dwight D. Eisenhower, "every warship launched, every rocket fired, represents, in the final analysis, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, who are cold and are not clothed."

Eisenhower said that after overseeing the creation of what he called the "military-industrial complex," but at least he felt some shame about it.

Some insist that our military is already so much stronger than that of any other nation that we can safely cut it back, again and again. Their evidence: the relative size of our defense budget.

That evidence is pretty good, guy: No country in the world spends anywhere near as much money on its military as the United States. With a Pentagon budget of over $600 billion, the US government accounts for at least 38 percent of global military spending; add in members of NATO, and the US and its closest allies comfortably spend more than the rest of the world does combined. The next biggest spender is China, which devotes a mere $112 billion to its armed forces.

More relevant is the fact that Russia’s nuclear arsenal is significantly greater than our own and that, within six years, China will have more ships in its navy than we do.

Here’s a fun fact: Once you possess enough nuclear weapons to destroy all life as we know it, there’s really no point in possessing more of them. In fact, there’s no real point at all to possessing weapons capable of destroying all life unless one plans on using them, which no one but the war criminal Harry Truman has had the nerve to do.

Meanwhile, China just built its second aircraft carrier. The United States has 19, soon to be 23. China may someday have more boats, but those boats are nowhere near as deadly capable as those America has deployed just off China's coast.

The most ludicrous excuse for shrinking our military derives from the president’s thinking: “Things are much less dangerous now than they were 20 years ago, 25 years ago or 30 years ago.” The “safer world” trial balloon has been punctured by recent events in Ukraine, Afghanistan, Libya, Egypt, Gaza, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria and Iraq. “Failures of imagination” led to tragedy 13 years ago; today, no imagination is required to picture what would descend on the United States if we let down our guard.

The fun thing about this list of “recent events” undermining the idea that we live in a safer world is that the US government has had a direct role in creating most of these dangerous situations.

Afghanistan: The US has been at war there for over a decade.

Libya: The US armed the former dictator and then armed the jihadists who helped overthrow him. Now Libya is undeniably in worse shape than ever, with warring militias breaking the nation up into competing fiefdoms.

Egypt: Next to Israel, no country receives as much military aid from the US government, which provided the weapons and tear gas used against protesters.

Gaza: Hundreds of civilians were just murdered there by a colonial-settler client state that is the top recipient of US military aid.

Nigeria: The Nigerian military, backed and funded by the US, has committed war crimes on a scale far greater than Boko Haram. And despite deploying US troops there, we still haven’t brought back those girls.

Somalia: The last time Somalia enjoyed any semblance of stability was when a relatively moderate group, the Islamic Courts, took over Mogadishu. They were promptly bombed out of existence by the US and its ally Ethiopia, unleashing a wave of terrorism from which the country has yet to recover.

Syria: Bashar Assad, Syria's dictator, used to torture people on behalf of George W. Bush, but after it looked like he was about to lose power, the US government—and close allies like Saudi Arabia—joined the effort to overthrow him and flooded Syria with weapons that have since gone to jihadists who received their training on the battlefields of Libya and Iraq; these jihadists have in turn helped kill off more moderate elements of the Syrian opposition, strengthening Assad's grip on power. Good work, everyone.

Iraq: Oh, shut up, Mitt. They may not have your hair, but there are plenty of personality-free Republicans out there willing to spout this vapid garbage, like the aide who presumably wrote this piece for you. Please, sir, go away and fade into obscurity already.

Follow Charles Davis on Twitter.


Animal Rights Activists Protested a Fashion Show Starring a ‘Breaking Amish’ Star

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All photos by Amy Lombard

Everyone knows most activists are poor and ugly, so I am shocked to see dozens of animal activists at Victor D’souza’s spring fashion show.

I come to Central Park to watch one specific model: Breaking Amish’s Kate Stoltz. Like Lauren Conrad and other reality stars before her, the "bishop’s daughter" sees television as a side job and wants America to recognize her as a clothing designer and model. Stoltz is walking in D’souza’s two shows this week: a standard runway show and a pre-show where models wore his looks in horse carriages in Central Park to the ire of the animal rights groups NYCLASS and members of PETA.

Throughout the day, Stoltz spends hours at a ballroom applying makeup and trying on clothes and her wig, but when I arrive at Central Park, I only see dozens of activists screaming at middle-age men driving horse carriages. “VICTOR D’SOUZA! ANIMAL ABUSER!” they scream as street performers dance to Papa Roach-like music.

Spotting my photographer, Amy, shooting photos, a hot blonde guy in a suit approaches me. He asks if we’re press. I nod, shocked to see a sexually attractive animal activist.

“Are you with… the animal activists?” I ask him.

“No,” he says.

He introduces himself as Alex Moore, the communications director for the Teamsters Joint Council 16, which represents the horse-carriage drivers. He tells us that 64 percent of New Yorkers support the carriage drivers and hands us a packet including statistics and some of the horses’ worker benefits: a minimum of five weeks of vacation, two to four veterinary exams, and a stall that’s a minimum of 60 square feet.

Before I can finish my conversation with the sexy Teamster, animal activists start running to a new area. Like stalkers or poachers hunting elephants, they chase after the carriages as they turn the corner and then stop where the models will board their rides.

Stoltz tells me the activists lack proper knowledge about animals. As an Amish girl, she spent years taking care of her family’s horses and knows her shit about ponies. “I support [animal rights], but they were uneducated about what they’re shouting out,” she says. “There’s a difference between having a horse work and abusing a horse.”

Although I typically wouldn’t trust a model’s opinion about humanitarian issues, Stoltz makes great points. Throughout the evening, the activists repeatedly contradict their statements. One elderly activist with very bad botox criticizes the street performers for blasting metal music because they could scare the horses, although the activists’ screams are much louder than the music.

Another activist brought her daughter to the event and then flips out when a middle-aged redhead starts recording the daughter. The mother places a sign over her daughter’s face. I tell the mother she brought her daughter to a public rally and anyone can photograph her daughter. The redhead then puts her camcorder in my face and starts asking me who I’m with.

“VICE,” I tell her. “I’m here to write about the event. Who are you with?”

She admits she doesn’t belong to the media—she’s the family member of a carriage driver who has come to counter-protest the activists.

Allie Feldman—the executive director of NYCLASS, the organization that organized the animal rights activists’ protest—finds these family member's actions inappropriate. She complains to me about how the family members “harass” the activists, although she makes a living encouraging people to scream at the carriage drivers.

“It doesn’t give them the right to get in our faces,” she says.

I admit to Feldman my bias: My parents own pet stores, and during high school, animal activists tried to shut down my parents’ pet stores. I can understand why the redhead is angry, since Feldman and her cohorts are trying to rob the carriage drivers of their livelihood, but she insists she’s not robbing anyone of their income because her organization has proposed an alternative: a “three-year phase-out of horse carriages, replacing them with the 21st Century "Horseless eCarriage" for current drivers.”

During our conversation, Feldman claims the protesters lack affiliations with crazier animal rights groups as a blonde woman in heels hold a PETA sign behind her.

When three models arrive at the carriages, the activists lose it. They surround the models, prompting photographers to start flashing their cameras.  “The fashion world needs to show some compassion!” an activist screams as the models hold signs that say “SAVE OUR HORSES.”

Since she’s as attention hungry as the activists, the redhead relative of a carriage driver jumps in front of the camera men and then screams, “EMPOWERMENT!”

A few minutes into this chaos, a man in a suit grabs one model by the arm and they begin walking around the park. The activists storm after them as they circle around the park.

“It’s like a parade,” I say at one point.

“Unfortunately a parade that’s not a celebration,” an activist says to me.

Exhausted, I stop to speak to three elderly activists from Queens. One tells me she’s mostly concerned the horses will “spook” and start a stampeding and stomping on people. After I finish speaking to her, her elderly friends ask who I am.

“The man from VICE,” she says.

“What’s that?” one old lady asks.

“It’s a popular youth magazine!”

“I’m too old for [VICE],” one old lady says.

A few minutes later, Stoltz and the other models finally arrive. They wear matching blonde wigs, and unless you Stoltz is here, you can’t tell she’s a reality star. She’s the fiercest model of the group and looks stoic as she pets a horse. When the activists scream at her, she looks through them, unimpressed.

As the shouts continue, two models step into each carriage and then the carts start driving into the park, cop cars cruising behind them.

“Trash. Trash. Trash,” one activists whispers as the models pass her.

When Stoltz’s carriage drives by the activists, she just smiles.

Some activists struggle to keep up with the horses’ speed, but when a cameraman walks by, one activist stops her march and jumps in front of the camera for her closeup.

“ANIMAL ABUSE!” she shouts.

The cameraman laughs at her.

Another activist turns to homophobia to prove his points about the horses. As an androgynous model passes him, he yells, “Hey, man in the dress!” because, you know, nothing makes your point better than screaming homophobic thoughts in the middle of Central Park.

After the models finish riding in their carriages, they head to a janky ballroom in midtown for the runway show. Backstage in a room that smells like a motel, the models rush to prepare. As publicists and cameramen rush in and out of the room, Stoltz remains calm, like an Amish girl playing dressup on a farm. Although she broke her Amish roots years ago, she still seems innocent and unlike Americans who grew up in the model world.

The same can’t be same for the other fashion people attending the show. An Asian woman in an elaborate dress stops when she sees Amy’s camera. “That is heavy duty equipment,” she says before she starts posing for photos.

During the runway show, other attendees keep their chins raised high as the models wear blonde wigs and affordable-looking clothes that remind me of Nickelodeon characters if Nickelodeon characters were chic. Stoltz looks forward with a smize Tyra Banks would love.

After the show, she walks backstage smiling. Amy sits on a couch with her camera, but Stoltz doesn’t pounce toward Amy the way the activists did.

For once, a reality starlet wants the least attention.

Follow Mitchell and Amy on Twitter

Artist Jason Polan is Trying/Failing to Draw Every Person in NY

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Photos by Matthew Leifheit
 
Artist Jason Polan is trying to draw every person in New York City, and he’s failing.
 
Over six years ago, the idea formed in his head, and when it existed in the laboratory that sits between his ears, the concept was so simple, so clean, so utterly perfect in the way a circle drawn by some theoretical supercomputer is perfect. A) There is New York. B) There are people in New York. So, C) There could exist a total, whole and complete document of Every Person in New York.
 
But then, just after conception, the idea left his head and entered the world—as any art that ends up actually existing does—and became subject to the brutal elements of this sloppy place where drawing a perfect circle is, it turns out, inherently impossible. Suddenly, “Every Person in New York” was flawed, messy, ugly even.
 
Drawing by Jason Polan
 
Jason wouldn’t know if he was drawing residents, tourists or those just passing through. He could go door-to-door with piles of census data, but there’d still be plenty of people who existed off the grid, or people who moved here since the last data collection, or babies being born, or people dying, or some other factor that made New York a subject that just wouldn’t sit still. Any way he approached it, there would be countless tiny gaps in a portrait of the city, holes that would render the thing fatally incomplete. And even if Polan somehow disentangled this logistical puzzle, there was still the most glaring problem of all: He would have to draw something like 14 people an hour for 70 years to include “every person.”
 
In short, an idea was born in Jason Polan’s head perfect, and when exposed to the cruel inadequacies of existence, it turned unrecognizably imperfect, leaving Polan with just one way to restore the thing to its original state of immaculate beauty: Finish it.
 
And so, Polan walks the streets of New York City everyday with his pen and notepad, “failing.” He draws portrait after portrait after portrait, works on side projects (often at MOMA), and every so often, he organizes meetings of the Taco Bell Drawing Club (exactly what it sounds like) so that he can share his experience with others. He does it all with a smile on his face, never frustrated or defeated, totally comfortable playing a game that he full well knows is rigged. In fact, he seems happy just to be playing at all, proud to be playing as hard as he is.
 
 
It’s almost as if Polan has come to terms with what lies at the core of one of art’s great intrinsic dilemmas: The whole thing is, by its very nature, a sisyphean task. That is, in the context of all our constructions surrounding stuff like truth and representation, art is always an attempt at something impossible. It always fails. It’s never perfect because in order to exist, it must exist in the imperfect place we call “here.”
 
See, Polan could have created a portrait of New York the way most sane artists/documentarians probably would, selecting a diverse range of characters that are meant to “represent” the entire city. He could have drawn a handful of people from every borough, a handful of people of every race, a handful of people of every economic standing, and so on, stopping when he felt like the story was told. But while employing that tactic might have yielded a successful finished product, that product would always contain a misleading simplicity, a false neatness. It would have been an artistic document presenting itself as the real deal when, in some sense, it’s the consolation prize. It would have been the ever-practical seven colored rainbow posing as the entire color continuum.
 
Drawing by Jason Polan
 
Instead, Jason Polan indulges failure. He meanders around the super well-traveled intersection of art and mortality by meandering around NYC all day, reaching for the proverbial stars in earnest. He doesn’t gloss over or circumvent the impossibilities inherent in art. He makes them his subject. 
 
Earlier in his career, Polan drew every kernel of popcorn in a microwave popcorn bag and called the project “An Entire Bag of Popcorn.” It’s the counterpoint to his city-sized magnum opus, in that the scope is so small, the task so goddamn doable. But even then, in what might be the most ridiculous of his many projects, Polan was making ambitious art about art. When he sat in his living room, meticulously organizing each kernel so as not to draw the same one twice or drop one on the floor, he was, consciously or not, conducting some strange artsy experiment by doing what any scientist worth his salt does: Examine the small to understand the big.
 
 
It’s no suprise that Polan always says MOMA is his favorite place in the whole wide world—at his core, he’s a fan. He’s the kind of guy capable of being in awe of art. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the sort of thing that gets hung on prestigious white walls or just some friend’s basement creation. If it’s something that has the gumption to fail and fail spectacularly, it’s good, and maybe, a little miraculous. 
 
Gideon Jacobs is the creative director of Magnum Photos, New York. He was an actor and now is a writer, soon to publish a book called Letters to My Imaginary Friends. Follow him on Twitter.

 

This Guy Spent Twenty Years Searching for a Dwarf James Bond

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Image courtesy Firefly Entertainment

It’s a source of both wonder and awkwardness that the Philippines' most internationally recognized film star is an 32-inch-tall primordial dwarf. According to legend, Ernesto de la Cruz was so small that he lived in a shoebox for the first six months of his life. In the 1970s, he entered the Philippines' then booming and goon-obsessed film industry, got christened "Weng Weng," and morphed into the Filipino answer to James Bond.

Over the next decade, Weng Weng’s films became the country's most successful film exports. Sadly, that success didn't always translate into star treatment, and Weng Weng eventually disappeared from the public eye, living on as a cult icon in the deep recesses of 90s film subculture. That's when Australian film director and video shop owner Andrew Leavold discovered Weng Weng’s 1981 film For Y’ur Height Only. He was instantly obsessed and needed to know the star’s backstory.

Unfortunately, Weng Weng’s story ended up being a tough nut to crack. Andrew spent 20 years hunting down retired stuntmen, shonky producers, and gravestones in the Philippines. I recently spoke to him about the result of that chase: a feature-length documentary called The Search for Weng Weng.


Image courtesy of Firefly Entertainment

VICE: How did you react when you first saw For Y’ur Height Only in the early 90s?
Andrew Leavold:
Well, in the opening seconds, you see a two-foot nine version of Sean Connery with a gun, and you immediately think, What the hell am I watching? You’re plunged into an alternate universe where the rules of what’s good and decent are completely turned on their head. And then you start picking up on the weird dubbing—and I’m a fan of shitty dubbing.

What’s so good about the dubbing?
This one had these Peter Lorre voices and Humphrey Bogart impressions, and it seemed to be self-aware of its inherent absurdity. Obviously the dubbers were on another plane than the filmmakers. I’ve never been able to solve the mystery of the dubbing team, but I suspect it was done by Dick Randall’s team in Rome, as there are no Asian inflections in the voices. It was a bunch of Americans sitting around in Rome, getting drunk and stoned, and making things up as they went along. That’s how Dick Randle dubbed all of his films.

It’s interesting that you say For Y’ur Height Only is aware of its absurdity—or at least the dubbers were—because some people aren’t sure if it’s a spoof or not.
Well, I remember speaking to Tony Ferrer’s son, who’s this weird little creature called Falcon. He kept insisting that his father’s films were not comedies. They were serious action films. And I said, "You don’t find the image of Weng Weng running around and punching somebody in the nuts a bit absurd?" And he said, "No! It’s a serious action film!" On one level, they’re really goon films: dumb, stunt-centric films from the Philippines, made by the thousands from the 60s to the 90s. But on another level, you have Weng Weng kind of spoofing the Filipino answer to James Bond: Agent X44.

And you can’t really escape the fact that it’s a dwarf doing James Bond stunts.
Oh, yeah! You can’t get away from that one. It’s insane and idiotic. But there is something that kind of shines between the cracks in those films, and that’s the weird, inexplicable character of Weng Weng. I think it takes a special eye to recognize that quality that shines out of him. When you do connect, you connect in a profound way. Either by going on a ridiculous lifelong odyssey to find out who he is, or you start dreaming about him. I’ve been collecting people’s dreams about Weng Weng for years.


Image courtesy Firefly Entertainment

When I first started watching your documentary, I thought, Oh god, it’s just a weird sideshow, but then you uncover his intense training and how did his own stunts. Is the magnetic quality more than that?
There’s his undeniable talent at karate and stunts, but there’s something else. There’s this weird mutant charisma that beams off him. At first you see something weird and odd, and then eventually you connect to him on a much deeper level. You end up falling in love with him, and then feeling his tragic and bittersweet story.

Your documentary definitely starts on the note of, "Osn’t this fun and cool that a dwarf became a movie star?" and then it turns into basically a story of exploitation. Was there a moment when you realized that was the core narrative?
Yeah. It’s that moment in the film when I’m sitting in a coffee shop with For Y’ur Height Only’s director Eddie Nicard and a bunch of the old stunt guys. And they said, "What happened to the money?" And Nicard said, "There was no money. We never got paid. Weng Weng never got paid." And one of the actors, Rusty Santos, turned around and said, "What? Weng Weng didn’t get to enjoy his own money? That’s bad." And he looked straight at the camera. That was the moment when I realized that Weng Weng was betrayed by his producers. He was exploitation film star who was also exploited.

How did you feel when you realized Weng Weng was ripped off?
I was heartbroken on his behalf. Up until that moment, like everybody else, I’d heard the film editor’s comments about him being “pampered” and treated like a prince. I had no idea that the real story was so much darker. As the investigation progressed, I just felt even more devastated with each blow. So I really wanted to convey that sense of ever-increasing awareness of Weng Weng’s fragility and the betrayal by his producers, the Caballes, who sadly weren’t forthcoming for the film.


Weng Weng at Cannes. Image via Death Rides a Red Horse

What happened to Peter and Cora Caballes?
Peter died about six months after I started looking for him. Cora challenged me over the TV to come and interview her in California, so I did that with my collaborator Daniel Haig. We sat in Hollywood for three weeks and rang her answering machine every day, and she wouldn’t pick up the phone. There’s a big gaping hole in the middle of The Search For Weng Weng, and that is the absence of Cora.

So, you’ve got this story of Weng Weng’s exploitation, and then you’ve got this academic in your film who also talks about his films being “pre-modern” and not politically correct in today’s world. Should we still enjoy Weng Weng films?
Absolutely. Weng Weng may have been exploited, but not every little person who goes into the entertainment industry is exploited. We can’t condemn all midgets to a life of anonymity, just in case they might get ripped off. On my first trip to the Philippines, I went to a dwarf restaurant called Hobbit House. And I started interviewing some of the dwarf waiters. I said, "Do you ever feel that you are being exploited?" and they said, "Absolutely not. People look at us not as freaks, but as something special." I think Weng Weng’s films occupy that space to a certain extent—probably not in terms of money—but if you look at his face in the movies, he’s having an absolute blast, and so will the audience, if they approach them from a position of fun and entertainment.

Why are people so fascinated by dwarf film stars?
From a Western perspective, I guess it’s a case of "the other." We’re entering almost taboo territory these days by thinking somebody can be celebrated for their special qualities, but we’re still fascinated by deformities or extremes in height, weight, and age. I think there’s always a childlike part of us that wants to revel in the different, which is ironed out by society out as we grow up into becoming homogenous beige automatons. From a Filipino point of view, they seem to regard small people as almost otherworldly. They resemble imps or what the Filipinos call duwende. They think dwarves, midgets, and primordial dwarves like Weng Weng, which are the most special of them all, have a foot in another world.


Weng Weng with his family. Image via Death Rides a Red Horse

When he was alive, Weng Weng’s community called him "Sainto Nino"—the little saint—due to his “miracle birth” and living in a shoebox for his first six months of life. Was that saint like status just an urban legend?
I always thought that it was. Then when we screened The Search For Weng Weng outside his old house about two weeks ago, I got talking to somebody who lived two doors down from him. I asked him what he thought about the Sainto Nino thing. And he said, "Well, he healed me". And I said, "Excuse me?" And he said that he’d once broken his arm, and Weng Weng prayed over a bottle of oil and rubbed it into him, and within a couple of days it was healed. And I said, "You were healed by Weng Weng?" And he said, "We all believed there was something special about him."

'The Search For Weng Weng' is playing at Sydney Underground Film Festival this weekend.

Follow Emilia on Twitter.

Cry-Baby of the Week

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

Cry-Baby #1: Tang Chu

An apartment building in Guizhou, China. Photo by Flickr user Quentin Scouflaire.

The incident: A kid couldn't hear the cartoon he was trying to watch because of construction work. 

The appropriate response: Deal with it.

The actual response: He tried to kill the construction worker. 

Earlier this week, a construction worker named Liu Mai was using a drill on the side of an apartment building in Guizhou, China. He was doing this while suspended 80 feet in the air from a safety harness. 

Inside the building, a ten-year-old boy named Tang Chu was reportedly trying to watch cartoons, but couldn't hear them over the sound of Liu's drilling. 

"I felt my safety rope shaking. I looked up to see what was wrong," Liu told Xinhau News according to a translation by Shanghaiist.

"Then I saw the boy cutting the rope with a knife. I shouted at him to stop, but he didn't listen, and soon after, the rope was broke," he added.

He was left hanging on to a second rope for 40 minutes until firemen and police were able to pull him to safety. 

"I was petrified," said Liu 

The boy's father, Tang Peng, said the boy received a telling off and "has promised he will not do something similar again." 

The family is also reported to have bought Liu a new rope, which was nice of them. 

Pictures of the incident can be viewed here

Cry-Baby #2: Oakleaf High School

The incident: A girl violated her school's dress policy.

The appropriate response: Giving her a detention or sending her home to change or something. 

The actual response: She was forced to wear an outfit with "DRESS CODE VIOLATION" written across it in giant letters.

Last week, on what was her third day at Oakleaf High School in Orange Park, Florida, 15-year-old Miranda Larkin was told by a teacher that her skirt was too short. 

The school's dress code states that students' skirts must be knee length. As you can see from the above photo, Miranda's was not. She says that, because she was new at the school, she wasn't familiar with the skirt-length rule. 

Miranda was sent to the school nurse's office, where she was told she would have to put on a different outfit. "They told me I was going to have to change and put on the dress-code violation outfit," she told ABC News. 

The "dress-code violation outfit" turned out to be a bright yellow shirt with "DRESS CODE VIOLATION" written across the front, and red sweatpants with the same words written on the leg. 

According to Miranda, she was told that the idea behind the outfit is to shame students into not violating the dress code again. "The school has said this is to embarrass you," she said. "It's supposed to embarrass you so you don't do it again."

"She put on the outfit in the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror and just broke down. She started sobbing and broke out in hives," Dianna Larkin, the girl's mother, told FCN. Which may have been a bit much. 

Also speaking to FCN, a spokesperson for the school said that students who violate the dress code are given the choice of staying in their clothes and going to in-school suspension, having a parent bring them a change of clothes, or wearing the dress-code violation outfit.

Miranda denies that she was given those choices. “Those options aren’t presented to you,” she said. “People who have asked if they can call home for a change of clothes have been told no.”

Miranda's mother plans to file a complaint with the Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act, as she says the punishment violated her daughter's right to privacy. 

Which of this lot is the bigger cry-baby? Let us know in this poll down here, pleaaaaase:

Previously: A woman who allegedly set fire to a house because she didn't like the children that lived there vs. some people who sent a guy to prison for pirating a Vin Diesel movie

Winner: It's a draw!!!

Follow Jamie Lee Curtis Taete on Twitter

'Queers for the Climate' Want Environmental Protests to Look Like Pride Parades

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'Queers for the Climate' Want Environmental Protests to Look Like Pride Parades
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