The Evolutionary Resilience Issue

VICE MAGAZINE VOLUME 12 NUMBER 3

FREE VOLUME 12 NUMBER 3

THE EVOLUTIONARY RESILIENCE ISSUE 2014

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PAT RUMNEY THE STACKS VULC

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THE CONVERSE CONS STAR PLAYER

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Paktika Province, Afghanistan. October 15, 2009. US Army soldiers in the 1/501st of the 25th Infantry Division shield their eyes from the rotor wash of a Chinook cargo helicopter as they are picked up from a mission. From Testament, with photos by Chris Hondros/Getty Images, to be published by powerHouse Books in April

VOLUME 12 NUMBER 3 Cover by Neil Winokur

UNDER THE VOLCANO Mining Conflicts in Guatemala Are Erupting in Violence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 THE WIDE WORLD OF BOOKIES Splitting the Odds of the American Dream . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

NEW YORK Photos by Neil Winokur . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 THE LOST BOYS OF CALIFORNIA Are (Literally) Dying to Pick Your Fruit . . . . . . 56 VICE READERS’ POLL RESULTS: 30 BEST TED TALKS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70

12 Masthead 14 Employees 18 Front of the Book 32 DOs & DON’Ts 36 Fashion: Iatronudia 68 Li’l Thinks: Loss 72 Reviews 80 Johnny Ryan’s Page

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Page 73

FOUNDERS Suroosh Alvi, Shane Smith CHIEF CREATIVE OFFICER

Eddy Moretti

PRESIDENT

Andrew Creighton

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Rocco Castoro

PUBLISHER

Michael Slonim (michael.slonim@vice.com)

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Royce Akers (royce.akers@vice.com)

HEAD OF CONTENT

Alex Light (alex.light@vice.com)

GLOBAL EDITOR

Andy Capper

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Jamie Brewer (jamie.brewer@vice.com)

MANAGING EDITORS

Ben Shapiro NSW SALES DIRECTOR

Adam Knight (adam.knight@vice.com)

SENIOR EDITOR

Aaron Lake Smith

VIC SALES DIRECTOR

Philip Normansell (philip.normansell@vice.com)

SENIOR ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Harry Cheadle

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Annette Lamothe-Ramos

LAYOUT

inkubator.ca

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Ben Thomson (ben.thomson@vice.com)

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ASSOCIATE NEWS EDITOR (AU)

Carly Learson (carly.learson@vice.com)

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Julian Morgans (julian.morgans@vice.com)

WORDS

Julie Le Baron, Kate Carraway, Giles Clarke, Rachael Ferguson, Brett Gelman, Débora Lopes, Lauren Markham, Mihai Popescu, Gideon Resnick, Johnny Ryan, Sean Tejaratchi, Michael Patrick Welch

PHOTOS

Matt Black, Giles Clarke, Gibson Fox, Chris Hondros, Christopher Ketcham, Martyn Stewart, Sean Tejaratchi, Rafael Tognini, Neil Winokur

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EMPLOYEES OF THE MONTH

NEIL WINOKUR Neil Winokur is a New York–based artist who became known in the 80s for life-size, sharp-focus portraits of his friends Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Cindy Sherman, among others. When his pals got older, they started to complain that they could see blemishes and pores in their portraits, so Neil switched to photographing only dogs and inanimate objects, because, as he told us, those subjects don’t complain. His deadpan, mug-shot style of photography could be considered a photographic equivalent to the pop-art movement. In this issue we’re featuring a never-before-published portfolio of photographs from his series New York. He also shot a giant cockroach for the cover; it was remarkably easy to find a bug that big in New York.

See THE COVER and NEW YORK, page 48

LAUREN MARKHAM Lauren’s first literary breakthrough came at the age of eight, when she was asked to recite her poem about a warrior bride to classmates in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. A seagull shat on her head mid-reading, and the poem was chosen for publication in a museum chapbook. Since that early victory, she has been writing unpublishable fiction and reporting stories related to migration, young people, and the environment. She has lived on an off-the-grid island in Maine, a Ugandan refugee camp, and in the backwoods of Vermont, and now she resides in a tree house in Oakland, California, with her cat, Bodi (named after both Patrick Swayze’s character in Point Break and the California ghost town), and works at a nearby high school for immigrant youth.

See THE LOST BOYS OF CALIFORNIA, page 56

JAMIE BREWER When our sales and marketing director Jamie Brewer told us that after seven years of bringing us daily ecstasy at VICE he’d never been Employee of the Month we immediately set upon flagellating ourselves for our grievous oversight. It goes without saying that Jamie is the employee of the month every month. In fact to call him an employee is as blasphemous as calling Jesus Christ a mid-budget carpenter. He his less a co-worker than a deity, sent from a glorious astral plane beyond our physical reach and mental comprehension to lead us from our grim reality to a new world of eternal peace and ultimate salvation. Thank you for being the light to mark our way through this cold cruel world Jamie, the sun is lucky to shine on your radiant face. Also fuck you, we know you’ve been employee of the month before.

SHARON RILEY Sharon Riley grew up on a goat farm outside a village called Hay Lakes, which is in Alberta, Canada. Last time she went home the first item on the community-events page in the local newspaper said, “Drop off dead gophers in bags of not more than eight gophers at our freezer,” which kind of sums it up. Now she splits her time between Montreal, New York, and a corner of the Rocky Mountains that might be her favorite place on Earth. She’s been our freelance fact-checker for about a year, during which time she’s transcribed tapes of Aldous Huxley on mushrooms, been given access to German porn websites in case she wants to do some “research,” investigated dubious information in a Joyce Carol Oates short story, and called the Chicago Police Department several times in a single day. It’s a pretty sweet gig, if we do say so ourselves.

SIMON KECK Every office has a “funny guy”. In fact that role is usually shifting in a primal comedic tug-ofwar between a shallow pool of highly strung individuals. VICE Melbourne used to be like that, we all drifted from day to day looking for the next laugh, shitting on anyone who faltered in their delivery of joke for even a fraction of a second. Then Keck started working here. Then Keck told us he was a comedian. Then Keck started winning comedy awards every weekend.

Now Keck’s the funny guy, and we’ve shelved our dreams of witty banter and, ultimately, self-acceptance. And by shelved we mean we shoved them up our ass. He’ll be playing the Melbourne Comedy Festival this month with his new show Let’s Write a Book. Check him out and feel terrible about yourself.

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HOW’S THE CONGOLESE SPACE PROGRAM DOING? Jean-Patrice Keka Ohemba Okese—also known as the “African Einstein”—is a scientist and the founder of DTA, a company based out of the Democratic Republic of the Congo that wants to build rockets that can reach outer space. That’s a pretty hefty ambition to have in a country where 70 percent of the people live in extreme poverty, but by 2008, JeanPatrice’s Troposphere program at DTA was on a roll.

BY JULIE LE BARON Photo courtesy of Jean-Patrice Keka Ohemba Okese

The initiative had been successful in launching a couple of small rockets into the atmosphere, the DRC government was publicly supporting the venture, and DTA’s next project, the Troposphere V, was a much larger, more ambitious rocket that was supposed to reach an altitude of over 22 miles.

Unfortunately, the launch of the Troposphere V was a disaster—a combustion chamber exploded, and the rocket swerved into the ground as soon as it left the earth. But Jean-Patrice is undaunted—DTA is hard at work on a new project that aims to put the first African satellites into orbit. I gave him a call to see how all of it was going.

VICE: How did you get involved in space research?

Jean-Patrice Keka Ohemba Okese: I’ve been really keen on science since childhood, although I was restricted to research for a long time. Of course, the scarce resources in Congo were discouraging. While I was pursuing commercial studies, I would fill my notebooks with ideas and build rockets in my spare time. At some point, I was contacted by the government—Mobutu [Sese Seko] was president at the time—and I was taken to the Ministry of Defense, where I met some great military engineers who were willing to help me. Later on, I was contacted by the ISTA [the DRC’s department of science], which hired me as a research associate. By then, I was able to build a rocket, so I founded my own company.

There was a rat on the Troposphere V that died when it crashed. Why the animal payload?

From now on, there will be a biological experiment with every rocket. I want to make African space tourism possible, and this is why I need to observe an animal’s behavior at higher altitudes. We put the rat in a cage along with several electronic devices in order to analyze its reactions, its cells, and its organ functions. Although this launch didn’t meet our expectations, this experiment was very valuable for our future tests.

When is your next rocket—the Troposphere VI—going to get shot into space?

If all goes according to plan, it should be launched this spring.

I’d like my rocket to reach an altitude of two kilometers. It will be launched on the same grounds I used before, a field I bought in Menkao, about 60 kilometers from Kinshasa. I just built a new control center there, and we took a lot of security measures to prevent any collateral incidents.

B O O K

The Exorcism Industry Joins the 21st Century

BY GIDEON RESNICK

Sure, you’d like to invite a priest into your home to battle the satanic forces occupying your body. But in today’s on-the-go culture, who has time? Can’t you have your demons cast out remotely via webcam or cell phone? Thanks to science, you can.

Carlos Oliveira, a Brazilian Christian exorcist who’s been plying his trade for almost 25 years, first in Brazil and now in Fresno, California, told me that he frequently banishes demons during phone calls with clients. His connection to Jesus Christ, which enables him to drive away evil, can manifest itself on a landline or even a wireless hub.

Carlos makes a living as a freelance exorcist, which sounds extremely difficult. He doesn’t charge for his services but will accept donations from clients—this is his full-time job, after all.

The issue of paying for exorcisms is a pretty thorny one.

Archbishop Isaac Kramer of the Anglo-Catholic Church, who has performed four exorcisms, refuses to accept payment for his services and abhors anyone who does, possibly because priests who charge for their services can come off like con men.

That’s not to say there aren’t demon fighters who regard their work as a career, not just a calling. For instance, Bob Larson, an infamous televalengelist, is now offering to conduct exorcisms on Skype for a suggested donation of $295.

“They’re doing more harm than anything,” Isaac said of people in the industry like Larson. “They’re completely fake. When you perform an exorcism, it involves several prayers. It involves commanding the demons. It involves holy water. It involves other things… that you just cannot do through a computer screen.”

Arguments among exorcists about procedure and payment may sound silly to a largely secular public that views their craft as the stuff of horror films—indeed, a priest in Indiana who performed a high-profile exorcism sold his story to a movie-production company earlier this year. People may question whether demons can be driven out via webcam, but mostly they’ll just question whether demons exist in the first place.

“I would say about 30 percent of the time [our profession is considered to be real],” David Biery, an Anglo-Catholic colleague of Isaac’s, told me. “Our society is becoming too secularised, and people are losing their morality.”

“This is a calling,” Carlos told me. “This is a gift from God. I don’t cast out demons because of my name. I don’t cast out demons because of my expertise. I don’t cast out demons because I’m powerful. I cast out demons because of the name of Jesus Christ.”

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FINDING DRUGS ON THE GROUND WITH MAD MIKE THE HIPPIE BUM I met Mad Mike the Hippie Bum at the turn of the millennium in New Orleans’s French Quarter, where he could often be found sitting on the ground playing folk songs featuring lyrics like “What would you do if little gnomes came and ate your poop at night?” (The goal was to get tourists to stop, listen, laugh, and ultimately donate.)

BY MICHAEL PATRICK WELCH Photo courtesy of Mad Mike

The Death of a Romanian Kangaroo

BY MIHAI POPESCU

Today, Mad Mike is 35 and still homeless but, thanks to a talent for scavenging, living in relative comfort in Austin, Texas, where he finds amazing amounts of drugs on the ground, which he considers to be his “career.” He also maintains a blog, called the Ground Score, about his life of homelessness (which he chose) and his habit of scooping up and sampling whatever powders or crystals he comes across. I talked to him recently to ask how business was.

VICE: How do Austin and New Orleans differ in terms of finding drugs on the ground?

Mad Mike the Hippie Bum: I used to find drugs occasionally in New Orleans, but it was nothing you could base a career on. I think the number of college kids in Austin, combined with the heavy drinking culture, creates sort of a perfect storm of drug-losing. There is just a lot of opportunities for kids to buy drugs and subsequently drop them on the ground.

smoke a couple of rocks; then I’m going to sell the rest to a crackhead I know.” It didn’t work out that way, of course. We ended up smoking the whole thing, and then we went to Jazz Fest the next day.

What is the most expensive drug, or stash of drugs, you’ve found on the ground?

I found $500 worth of crack in New Orleans. In Austin the most expensive thing I’ve found is a bottle of Dom Pérignon 2005. It was behind a dumpster in back of a restaurant—I think a waiter was trying to steal it and I beat him to the punch.

Did you smoke the $500 worth of crack you found on the ground?

Yes. I was with [New Orleans musician] Ray Bong when I found it—I told him, “We’re just going to

It sounds like the start of a heartstring-tugging kids’ film: On January 14, in the western Romanian city of Arad, the cops received a series of calls reporting that children were chasing a kangaroo down by the railroad tracks. At first they assumed it was a joke, but later they were called by the railroad police, who said, essentially, no, it was a real animal, and yes, they had it in custody. When the cops arrived to pick the kangaroo up, it had already died, of stress or suffocation, in the trunk of a railroad policeman’s car, which is where this story ceases to be anything resembling a movie for kids.

Nobody has assumed responsibility for the death of the kangaroo. The local police told me that the situation is the responsibility of the railroad police in Arad, because it was their trunk in which the kangaroo had died. But the railroad police in Arad told me that it was the job of the railroad officers at the Aradul Nou station, since they were the ones who had caught the animal. The Aradul Nou station cops said I should talk to the local police. After I told them that I already called the local police, they simply said, “Then we can’t help you. Have a nice day.”

But never mind whose jurisdiction the kangaroo expired in. The real question is, how the heck did it show up in Arad in the first place? Livia Cimpoeru, a spokeswoman for Vier Pfoten, an animal rights organisation that had complained to the local police about the

What separates you from those annoying kids who spend a summer on the streets pretending they don’t have trust funds?

The main difference between me and the people you are describing is that I have a strict rule against bothering anyone. I never panhandle, never ask for cigarettes, never pee or poo in your garden. I think everyone should have a sense of social responsibility and contribute to the community, homeless or not. Everything I do, from dumpster diving to finding drugs on the ground, is so I don’t have to rely on other people to get by. I think lots of old-school homeless people are that way, but some of these Johnnycome-latelies are making it look bad for the rest of us. You have to judge the homeless as individuals.

kangaroo, said that the bouncy marsupials had become a recent hot item for exotic-animal dealers and collectors. ”More and more kangaroos show up in Romania, like we’re turning into Australia,” she explained. “Last year, I personally followed a driver who was transporting a kangaroo. Another kangaroo was seen at the border with Hungary. Two other kangaroos were attacked and eaten by stray dogs.”

This past year has seen many cases of animal trafficking in Romania—in one memorable incident, an entire illegal zoo that included four lions and two bears was found in the backyard of a mafia boss. It’s illegal for ordinary people to sell kangaroos, or any other wild beasts, but the laws surrounding trafficking animals are vague—the penalty is likely to be, at most, a year in prison and a 400-euro [$550] fine for animal cruelty.

The issue, Livia told me, is that the Romanian authorities don’t seem to care about the illegal animal trade. “Romania is a transit country for an extraordinary animal-trafficking ring that goes through Hungary,” she said. “The border police aren’t doing their jobs, and the local police are just shrugging their shoulders. They know that they’d have to confiscate the animal, but they don’t know what to do with it—they’d have to call the mayor’s office, the local zoo, and veterinarians. So they just say, ‘Screw it; we have more important things to do.’”

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Cracking Crackland

BY DÉBORA LOPES Photo by Rafael Tognini

WHY WON’T THE AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT LET US HUNT UFOS WITH LASERS? I probably don’t need to tell you this, but when you’re trying to communicate with aliens, lasers are really helpful. According to UFO chasers like Australia’s Peter Slattery, the tiny beams of intense light cause UFOs to “power up,” meaning they flash their lights on and off, like a car blinking its headlights at a nearby hitchhiker.

Unfortunately for Peter and other Aussie UFO hunters, the government frowns on those who point lasers at the sky. Since lasers could blind airplane pilots coming in for a landing, flashing these devices near flight paths can lead to as much as four years in prison.

The conflict between the would-be first contactors and plain ol’ earthly pilots has been a topic in the Australian media as of late, so I called Peter up to see how he was getting on.

VICE: So why lasers?

Peter Slattery: There are UFO hunters who have been using lasers around the world for going on 15 years. We use them to point out the craft, to follow the beam up with the camera to capture the craft with the zoom [lens], and get a reaction from the craft.

BY WENDY SYFRET

Beyond staying away from the airport, do you have precautions that you take to make sure you don’t hit a low-flying plane?

You can just see it’s a plane by the green, red, and white navigation lights. I’m not interested in planes. You’d have to be dumb as dog shit to not know what’s a plane.

In that sense, are lasers vital to what you do?

I don’t always use them—I’ve basically stopped using them because of all this uproar. I don’t need all this crap from the media when they’re not even looking at what we’re doing. How we use the actual lasers, getting back to that, is we do group meditation, where we connect as one consciousness to these beings. Some of them do speak, but 99.99 percent of the time it’s telepathic. They’re from a higher plane, and they pick up on intent: good intent, good will. If your heart and mind are open, these things will happen. So I’ll take a few people out who’ve had experiences, and we’ll do group meditation with some energy work like yoga or tai chi.

Aren’t these lasers super-dangerous for planes?

You can tell the difference between a plane and what we’re filming. Now if you look at the videos of planes next to a craft, in situations where I did not use lasers, you can see the total difference between the unidentified flying object and the plane.

Since the 90s, downtown São Paulo, Brazil, has been home to a roving open-air drug market christened Cracolândia, or Crackland, and it’s easy to see where the name came from.

Addicts smoke drugs in the streets, beg passersby for spare change, and guard parked cars for money.

Over the years, the government has made several attempts to clean up the area, including a 2012 effort that involved the cops storming into the shantytown with rubber bullets and tear gas. Nothing has worked—the addicts would move and reassemble their shanties, and Crackland would rise again.

In January, the city government tried again, this time with what’s being called “Operation Open Arms.” Instead of being imprisoned or kicked out of the neighbourhood, a few hundred Crackland residents were given the chance to be resettled into modest hotel rooms, offered free food, and paid about $6.50 a day to clean the streets.

It’s unclear whether this will really help these hardcore addicts transition to stable jobs and lives, but it’s certainly more humane treatment than what they usually experience—though cynics see it as just another way the government is frantically cleaning up the city for the approaching 2014 World Cup, in June. Streets are being paved, long-abandoned green areas are being quickly fertilised, and airports are being renovated.

The police are also trying less gentle methods to drive out Crackland’s remaining population. A few days after the Open Arms program started, police cars surrounded the area and attempted to drive people away with tear gas.

I recently visited some of the 300 or so users who had taken up Open Arms on the offer of a job and a hotel room.

One of them, a man named Roberto Nascimento, told me the main difference between sleeping in the shacks and sleeping in the hotel was that it doesn’t rain in the latter.

Other than that, it was life as usual, and he wasn’t optimistic about Open Arms’s chances of reforming Crackland.

“Everything will stay the same. Nothing is going to change,” he said. “We have always slept in the streets, and we didn’t die. The hotel means nothing to us. Today is Friday, payday.

Today is party day in Crackland.”

Can you really be certain enough to risk the safety of planes?

The only time a laser will hit a plane is when it’s landing, because the lasers only go two kilometers [1.2 miles]. So there’s no way—unless I’m sitting at the airport waiting for the plane to come in—that I can even hit it. Now you’ve got little commercial planes that sometimes fly around 2,000 feet, but in my area that’s only during the day. At nighttime they’re either landing at the airport or are 30,000 feet in the air, where there is no way the laser can hit the plane.

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An anti-mining banner at the roadblock reads: “Defend our Mother Earth from the rats.�

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UNDER THE VOLCANO Mining Conflicts in Guatemala Are Erupting in Violence WORDS AND PHOTOS BY GILES CLARKE

I

n 2000, engineers from Radius Gold, a Vancouver-based mining company, discovered a belt of gold deep inside the Tambor mountains in southern Guatemala. The Guatemalan government promptly issued the company an exploratory license, and for more than a decade, Radius studied the region as a possible base of operations. The proposed mine lies just a few miles from the village of San José del Golfo and from San Pedro Ayampuc, a small city. Few locals, most of whom are of indigenous Mayan descent, were consulted before Radius moved in. Few of them knew anything was happening at all.

They certainly didn’t know they were living atop what would become a literal gold mine.

It wasn’t until early 2012 that townspeople began to grasp the scope of what was happening just down the road. They watched as truck after truck, loaded with heavy equipment, rumbled down the winding jungle roads that were normally used as routes for colectivo buses and small pickups carrying crates of chickens. In February 2012, Radius obtained final permission from the government to build its mine, which it hoped would pump out as many as 52,000 tons of gold a year.

Fearful of what might happen if a big foreign developer started digging into their soil, the community decided to intervene.

They formed a human roadblock, manned in rotating shifts by people sitting on plastic chairs. They held banners, and cooked on-site meals for protesters in a makeshift kitchen under a lush canopy of vegetation. The mine has yet to extract a single ounce of gold, and March 2 of this year marks the second anniversary of this roadblock, known as La Puya, which translates to the Point—as in the tip of a spear.

The human roadblock was the culmination of decades of frustration with the destructive and lucrative mining industry in Guatemala. The industry has benefited the national coffers since the country opened up to foreign mineral extraction in the mid 1990s. But that wealth rarely trickles down to those living in close proximity to the mines, who are the most affected by the damage to the local ecosystem. In San José del Golfo and San Pedro Ayampuc, where most residents earn a living as sweet-corn farmers or chicken ranchers, the fear was that the arrival of large-scale industrial mining would suck up and contaminate the local water supply, drying up natural springs, depleting the water table, and polluting it with arsenic.

I visited La Puya in July 2013, after hearing about the many attacks the roadblockers had withstood over the course of the previous year. Five months after La Puya was formed, Radius Gold sold its exploratory license to Kappes, Cassiday & Associates (KCA), a mining company based in Reno, Nevada.

The human roadblock drastically increased the risk of the investment, but the structure of the sale was such that Radius wouldn’t be paid in full until the mine started producing. This incentivised both companies to get rid of the activists and start digging up gold. In December 2012, the mining companies hired police and private security who arrived en masse at the roadblock and delivered an ultimatum to the protesters: Clear the

road, or be removed by force. Steadfast and resolute, the protesters didn’t budge—even when the security detail fired tear gas to disperse the crowd. Instead, the roadblockers lay flat on the dirt road, holding flowers up to the riot-gear-festooned police.

That official attempt to move the roadblock was somewhat chaotic but still respectful of the rule of law, oversimplified as a case of the state wielding its power as a cudgel against protesters illegally blocking a road. But months earlier, Yolanda “Yoli” Oquelí Veliz, one of the leaders of La Puya, had gotten a far more acrimonious visit.

On the night of June 13, 2012, as she was driving home from the roadblock, two masked gunmen followed Yoli on motorbikes and shot at her multiple times. “I still have the bullet in my back,” Yoli told me when I interviewed her at La Puya’s camp on a calm, sunny day in July. She craned her neck and pointed at a raised mound of flesh near her kidney.

ABOVE, TOP: A shooting victim shows a wound from the April 2013 attack near the Escobal silver mine.

ABOVE, BOTTOM: Members of La Puya meet with Guatemala’s president, center, and interior minister, right.

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Guatemala’s president, Otto Pérez Molina, right, and interior minister, Mauricio López Bonilla

Although many are undocumented, attacks like the one Yoli survived are all too common. Anti-mining encampments pepper the Guatemalan countryside, and attacks by private security organisations have been reported all over the country. One such case occurred in April 2013, at southeast Guatemala’s Escobal silver mine, which is owned by the Canadian-founded company Tahoe Resources. Tahoe’s head of security gave orders to open fire on protesters who had been blockading the road near the mine, according to an investigation by Guatemalan newspaper Siglo 21 a month later.

Six people were badly injured, and the head of security was recorded on tape giving the order to shoot, allegedly saying, “Kill those sons of bitches.”

Following the attacks, people from nearby villages began setting vehicles on fire. Riots broke out. Guatemala’s president, Otto Pérez Molina, imposed a “state of siege” for 30 days, a legal move that gave the military the right to impose martial law on the areas around the mine. The community’s blockade was dissolved, and Tahoe has been extracting silver on a commercial scale since January 2014, having begun operations in September last year. According to the company’s press materials, Escobal is now poised to become the largest silver mine in the world.

Guatemala sits atop a wealth of natural resources—nickel, gold, silver, and titanium—that lie beneath the country’s rich volcanic soil. In 1960, the Canadian-owned and -operated International Nickel Company (INCO) became the first transnational mining company to arrive in Guatemala. That year

also marked the beginning of a 36-year civil war between the government and a slew of leftist guerrilla groups fighting over land distribution, indigenous rights, and economic equality.

The conflict ended in 1996, after sweeping neoliberal economic changes were enacted and many regions of the country previously controlled by rebels were opened up to the mineralextraction industry.

Since then, the government has granted more than 400 licenses to multinational corporations, and the terms for these companies are exceptionally favorable. The government rarely receives more than 5 percent of a company’s earnings, and under the leadership of President Pérez Molina, corporations pay the government only 1 percent of the value of the minerals they extract. They also get to use local water at no cost. Mineral exploitation is a technical term for the process of mining, and in a very literal sense, communities like those near La Puya are being exploited for their gold, their water, and their wealth, with mining often leaving behind a thoroughly pillaged landscape that is utterly bereft and toxic.

On June 12, 2013, I was invited, along with ten representatives of La Puya, to the National Palace in Guatemala to speak with the country’s president and its interior minister.

The goal was to strike an agreement between activists and the government. The demonstrators at La Puya are the only community-based activists to have been invited to the National Palace for such a meeting. Unbeknownst to them, however, the president had also invited KCA in an attempt to open up dialogue between the two opposing sides. Yoli was furious and

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refused to speak with KCA executives. Which made perfect sense, considering her explicitly stated objective was the cancellation of all mining licenses within their territories.

“This decision can only be made by the government of Guatemala and therefore cannot be discussed with KCA,” she told Pérez Molina. He thought about this for a minute before asking members of KCA to leave the room, after which the president, the interior minister, and the representatives of La Puya spoke. One of the main issues discussed was an environmentalimpact study previously executed by KCA. The study found the environmental and ecological risks posed to areas surrounding the mines to be of relatively low impact—a conclusion that has since been discredited by several reputable geologists. La Puya successfully argued its case, and the meeting concluded with Pérez Molina’s promising that a second, fully independent study of the effects of mining on the area would be commissioned by the government. In the meantime, KCA was ordered to suspend its operations.

At the moment it felt like a small victory. But as of press time, the promised environmental-impact study has yet to be commissioned, and the scale of attacks against villagers near the mine has increased.

I returned to Guatemala in early December 2013 and visited San José de Nacahuil, a tiny village about 15 miles from La Puya. On September 7, 2013, 11 people were killed and 28 more were injured there when masked gunmen with automatic weapons stormed the village’s main street and opened fire on businesses. Authorities and local newspapers reported that the shootings were gang-related, but the community disputed this charge.

I drove up to San José de Nacahuil on a single-lane road and talked to local residents. They showed me the cafeteria where ten of the victims from the September 7 attacks had died.

Bullet holes riddled the wall. Later, an elderly woman led me to a spot where gunmen had allegedly chased a man and shot him before dragging his body back to the café and dumping him with the others.

According to many residents whom I interviewed, police invaded the small community hours before the massacre, to intimidate and harangue them. After the police had left, the gunmen arrived, tracing the same route as the officers and targeting the same businesses the police had visited.

Villagers believed that there had been an escalation of the mining corporations’ intimidation tactics, which now bore all the hallmarks of police collusion and a militia-style subjugation of locals fighting against the degradation of their environment.

Their strategy was now one of preemption; police and thugs had shifted their attention from disbanding already-established roadblocks to disrupting nearby communities that might rally to the cause.

It seems that the resistance to mining efforts in this area of rural Guatemala—and the associated violence—won’t be stopping anytime soon. La Puya might be celebrating its second anniversary, but some protesters are facing criminal charges and trials as their attackers go largely unpunished.

Yoli, the woman who was shot in the back near La Puya, went to court in February 2014, along with six of her fellow protesters from the roadblock. They were charged with kidnapping, coercion, and intimidation, allegations that their supporters claim are false. As of press time, a verdict has not been reached, but to the mining companies it’s something of a victory: It has kept Yoli in a courthouse, far away from the roadblocks.

A farm overlooking the Escobal silver mine

The day shift at La Puya’s encampment

The community of La Puya in peaceful resistance

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THE WIDE WORLD OF BOOKIES Splitting the Odds of the American Dream

BY RACHAEL FERGUSON, ILLUSTRATIONS BY SKIP STERLING

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etting on sports is only legal in four states: Delaware, Montana, Nevada, and Oregon. The rest of the country has to make its bets illegally, through bookies. As with any enterprise that holds the promise of easy money, there’s never a shortage of hungry gamblers looking to make a few dollars.

A few years ago, when I was working as a bartender in New York, I met a ton of bookies who’d ask me to “hold” envelopes stuffed with tickets and cash for shady customers who’d stop by later to pick them up. I quickly learned that those who operate in this world hail from all walks of life. Some were involved in organised crime, while others were independent operators who only took a few bets for friends and coworkers. Their clients were a varied lot who, for whatever reason, just liked to bet on sports: frat boys, athletes, waste-management guys, firefighters, cops, doctors, lawyers, and former felons. I spent a lot of time with a few bookies and customers in particular, through whom I became familiar with the less savory aspects of the business, starting with how the job actually works.

Illegal bookies base their lines (“money lines”) and spreads (“point spreads”) on calculations made by actuaries for Vegas casinos. These lines and spreads represent a handicapping that expresses which team bookies think is more likely to win. In the days and hours leading up to a game, bookies adjust their lines and spreads to account for the bets (“action”) in their books, fluctuations in the Vegas numbers, and any other unexpected events that could affect the outcome, such as player injuries.

There are many ways to use a bookie, but most customers stick to a few basic kinds of bets. To take this year’s Super Bowl as an example, when the Broncos were the obvious favorite leading into the game, the money line was set at Seattle +110, Denver -130. If you wagered $100 on Seattle and they won, you would get your $100 back, plus an additional $110 (minus the bookie’s “juice,” or commission, usually set at 5–10 percent). If you took the line on Denver instead, a $130 wager would net you only $100, but you would see the return of your $130 (less the bookie’s juice).

But you also have to consider the point spread, which was set at 2.5 for this year’s Super Bowl. If you bet on Denver, you would need them to beat Seattle by more than two and a half points for it to count as a win. On the other hand, if you backed Seattle on the spread, you’d need them to lose by fewer than two and a half for your wager to become a winning ticket. Finally, on a “total wager,” gamblers bet on the total points scored by both teams combined. In this year’s Super Bowl, the “over-under” was 47.5, meaning that a wager on the under would pay off if the total points scored by both teams were fewer than 47.5. (This year the over was the winning bet, since the total point score was 51.)

Successful bookies make it their business to learn the habits and tendencies of each of their bettors, basing their observations on an archetypal matrix of sorts: “Sharps,” also known as “wise guys,” tend to do their research, wager larger amounts than most bettors, and generally wait until the last minute to place their bets. They are knowledgeable and unlikely to let sentiment influence their decisions. On the other hand, “degenerates” are

often deeply sentimental bettors who place bets they can’t afford, struggle to pay on time, and compulsively wager themselves deeper into the hole. “Schnooks” are unsavvy bettors, more likely than others to get duped, and they rarely come out ahead of their bookies. Schnooks and degenerates are more inclined than other bettors to accept unappealing lines and spreads, and they’re more likely to put in an early wager than to wait for the lines and spreads to settle.

Sentimentality can be a very powerful guide for a gambler’s decision making, and when it comes to the Super Bowl, this sentimentality sometimes goes haywire. This year, New York and New Jersey bookies reported large and unexpected sentimental action on Denver from gamblers hoping to see Manning win another Super Bowl. When the lines first opened, Seattle was the favorite. But within 20 minutes the early action had been pushed out by emotional action, flipping the money line to favor Denver.

Nonetheless, bookies reported that unpredictable winter weather could be the deciding factor for the game and for their books, that Seattle would win in cold weather or snow, and that Denver would win if warmer weather prevailed in New Jersey.

As game day approached, and the likelihood of having a snowy Super Bowl increased, the action started to turn back toward Seattle. In the two weeks leading up to the game, the weather was all my bookies wanted to talk about, which was annoying but also made perfect sense. Misjudging the expected outcome of the biggest football game of the year could be a very costly mistake for anyone running a sports book.

Some of the bookies I met came to be involved in the business after running a book for friends, which led to friends of friends and, eventually, a de facto gig. Most were employed, or at least trained, in some sort of legitimate profession; their bookie business was something on the side. A handful had lost their jobs during the financial crisis, with sports books becoming their only source of income.

Dom was the first New Jersey bookie I got to know well, and he lived up to the stereotype—a 6'4" Italian American with prison-yard muscles and a hefty beer gut who could’ve easily walked into Central Casting and stepped out with a bit part in a Scorsese film. He even had the right nickname, “the Two-Ton Gorilla.” He has enormous hands, a square and heavily scarred face, a flattened broken nose, a very loud voice, and a very hot temper. Dom had grown up around bookies and loan sharks, and when he was younger he enjoyed getting into fights. This eventually led Dom to run his own wire room, which he started after a few years in prison for unrelated convictions under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organisations Act. He employed a team of clerks who handled customers and their bets. Clerking was seen as a very desirable gig. The hours were good, and it was possible for a talented clerk to be put in charge of a wire room or to open a book of his own one day. His right-hand man and unofficial head clerk was an old-timer called Sammy. While Dom set the lines and met with a few customers every week, Sammy and the other clerks would meet with customers daily.

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To make a bet, a customer would call one of the clerks, the wire-room number, or Dom’s cell. Most bets came in on game day, because, like the bookies, customers know they can lose money due to unanticipated events, like player injuries. After each game, clerks tallied their books—though they all knew exactly where they stood during every minute of the game—and Dom did the same for the entire wire room. Once the totals were logged for each clerk and customer, they held meetings to exchange money and start setting up the action for the next game.

Sitting in a dive bar in a recently gentrified neighbourhood in Brooklyn, I’d wait for Dom, watching as guys would wander in and order drinks, asking the bartender if Dom had been in yet.

They’d wait, excitedly talking about how they’d fared in the past week and how they planned to pick winners for upcoming games.

Dom would stride in and slam his gigantic hands on their backs.

His booming voice would drown out the jukebox as he’d shout to the bartender, “Coors Light and whatever these guys are having!

What’s good? How’s the family?” He once introduced me to a pair of customers, a local school-board official and a construction worker, by saying, “This is Rach, my nerd.”

Money would be exchanged, notes would be taken, and the conversation would flow from sports to the weather, politics, women, kids, work, employees, and then inevitably back to sports. Dom’s phone would vibrate incessantly, flashing with calls, texts, and emails.

He’d pick up without saying hello, just “Yeah, I’m on my way,” or “Ten minutes, all right, pal?” Calls from anyone he wasn’t due to meet that night were sent straight to voice mail to be handled the next morning.

Then we’d head to his next pickups, where Dom would repeat the same performance with other customers. As night fell, the locations would switch to strip clubs. This was the scene every Thursday night, from about 5 PM to sunrise, as Dom seduced his customers into another week of gambling.

Occasionally he’d binge on cocaine, which would sometimes cause him to freak out, and he often drank heavily. One summer afternoon a few years ago, as we took a leisurely stroll through midtown Manhattan, I asked Dom if he had enjoyed the Memorial Day weekend.

“It was horrible, Rach,” he said. “Had to go to Jersey, Brooklyn, and the Island after work Friday. Then back to Queens before I went home. Got into it with someone I’ve known for years, a good friend. He owed us $30,000. Dumbass shows up at this diner, hands me an envelope, and there’s only ten in it. Ten. Fucking. G’s. What am I supposed to do with that?”

I shrugged.

“I grabbed a fork and stabbed him in his fucking eye, is what I did. You have any idea how difficult it is to poke an eye out?”

I told him I had no idea.

“Neither did I, but it is.”

Before I started hanging out with Dom, I assumed the world of bookmaking would be violent. But it isn’t, on the whole. Physical violence is very rare, and for the most part, the day-to-day is all about proving whose dick has the most swing. Maintaining control over the clerks, making the most money, not letting degenerates and sharps bankrupt the office, and making rivals look impotent are the bulk of the job description. Sometimes, when Dom made mistakes in setting adjusted lines, his unofficial head clerk, Sammy, would take great pleasure in announcing losses the wire room was taking on a game in play: “You see that field goal? That just cost the house $50,000, and it’s only the first quarter!” Despite their

occasional quarrels, Sammy and Dom maintained a close friendship for many years until Sammy retired to Mexico. Even now, in retirement, Sammy occasionally returns to New York to help Dom out.

Every year around Super Bowl time, law-enforcement sting operations increase and bookies across the country get busted and thrown into jail, involuntarily forfeiting proceeds of the most lucrative week of their year. Considering that this year’s Super Bowl was held in New Jersey, local bookies were on high alert.

Governor Chris Christie has made it clear that he wishes to legalise sports gambling in his state’s casinos, and local bookies were worried that the governor was looking to take down large betting operations to demonstrate the need to regulate a widespread— and very profitable—black market. With this ammunition, the bookies told me, Christie and his cohorts could more easily challenge the leading sports leagues and make steps toward legalising and regulating sports gambling, in hopes that the collected taxes could rescue the state’s ailing economy.

Both sides in New Jersey’s fight over the legalisation and regulation of sports gambling sorely misconstrue the real nature of illegal sports gambling. As anyone who’s spent time with a bookie knows, the wager itself is only part of the appeal. Aside from the amounts won or lost, customers ascribe other values and meanings to these transactions. The juice, or “vigorish,” is little more than a fee charged by bookies for the social experience they provide. The social rituals involved in betting with your local bookie could never be replicated by a state-regulated transaction at a casino or a racetrack, where tickets are processed by bored, nametag-wearing employees sitting behind bulletproof glass in an alcove conveniently located between the bathrooms and the ATMs. What is being proposed in New Jersey would be sterile, impersonal, and joyless: the DMV of the gambling world, which would resemble similarly boring legal gambling facilities in other parts of the country. But of course, the erosion of bookie culture is not a sound legal argument. More importantly, whichever side wins the legal fight, whether it goes to the New Jersey governor or to the sports leagues (which fiercely oppose state involvement in sports gambling), bookies and their customers probably won’t even notice.

This time things worked out for Dom. He didn’t have his most lucrative Super Bowl ever, but considering the difficulty bookies had in calling this game, he was happy to come out on top. The odds on the first score coming from a Seattle safety were +4,000 (or 40/1), meaning that the payout on a $100 bet would be $4,000. As unlikely as this outcome was, those were tempting odds, and some of Dom’s customers made the wager. A few seconds after kickoff, as Denver’s first offensive snap resulted in a Seattle safety and a 2–0 Seahawks lead, the Two-Ton Gorilla sent me a text message: “That killed us.”

But this was the Super Bowl, after all, and in the end Dom was spraying champagne around the bar as if he’d just won a ring of his own. Two days later, having avoided busts and losses, he jetted to Costa Rica, where he runs two online gambling businesses, leaving the wire room in Sammy’s safe hands until Dom returns for March Madness. He makes this trip down south every year, ostensibly to check in with his online sports-book operations at a time in the year when there’s less face-to-face action. Privately, however, he admits that these long trips are more about escaping the NYC winter.

“If I don’t have to be up in the cold, why the fuck would I be?” he said. And the answer is simple: If you’re a bookie who didn’t go bust or get busted during Super Bowl week, you can pretty much do whatever the fuck you want.

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CALL FOR PHOTOGRAPHS TOO HARD TO KEEP Since 2010, Chicago-based artist Jason Lazarus has maintained a growing archive of images deemed “too hard to keep� by their owners. Submissions have included photos of friends, family members, pets, high school graduations, objects, and places that are too difficult to view again.

Lazarus returns these shadow images to the light in the form of books and exhibitions culled from his archive, but their dark pathos remains attached.

We invite VICE readers to contribute images to Too Hard to Keep, and VICE will publish a selection of the results. Please indicate whether the photographs you submit to the archive may be exhibited in the future, or are private photographs that are only to be displayed face down. Send photos, photo albums, photo objects, or any other large submissions to the repository: Jason Lazarus THTK 1516 N Kedzie Ave, #3 Chicago, IL 60651

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DOs

Crippled prostitutes typically charge less, but a lot of them can be overeager when it comes to attracting new customers.

Some people celebrate Easter by hiding chocolate eggs from their kids and saying a rabbit did it. In Alana’s family, you get drunk on Malört and eat a roll of toilet paper, then fashion the cardboard into Jesus’s crown of thorns. Toe-may-toe, toe-mah-toe.

Usually when I think about the last living human on Earth, I imagine a beautiful woman walking alone on a beach, eating fruit, and enjoying the silence, but odds are it’ll be this guy, helping himself to unlimited McCafé frappés and posing for Christian Mingle profile photos no one will ever see.

Unsurprisingly, the first photographic proof of God reveals that God wears jorts.

I ordered a “We Trippy Mane” T-shirt on the internet, and two minutes later this girl showed up at my house and stood there with her mouth open for 60 seconds and then turned around and left. The next morning I woke up covered in pig’s blood.

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DON’Ts

Bestiality mogul Mittens was finally arrested Friday, facing charges on more than 1,400 counts of obscenity, cruelty, and distribution. Here, Mr. Sniffles, a victim and the author of the best-selling tell-all Rough, confronts his abuser.

Sucks when you think you’re finally getting to the good part in your Braille edition of Mein Kampf but really you’re just fingering the warts on your seeing-eye dog’s throat again.

Honestly can’t tell which of these two would give better head.

It’s nothing but nausea and jitters backstage for the bassist of Van Der Beek Division—South Dakota’s only Dawson’s Creek–themed Cure cover band—as they prepare to take the Jody’s Coffee performance nook by storm.

This is literally what every person who’s ever gotten an MFA in creative writing sees when they look in the mirror.

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DOs

Trust me—if this German for Dummies book is even half right, I’m well on my way to posting pretty much the best dick joke of all time up here.

The trolley lifestyle isn’t about what stop I got on at, what stop I get off at, how long I’ve been riding, or even the fact that if anyone saw what’s in this bag he would let out the most blood-curdling scream you are likely to hear in this lifetime. The point is, I’m showing up 365 days a year, sometimes even more. And if I happen to squeeze in a change of pants somewhere along the way, well, that’s just gravy.

Usually by the time you go stonewashed, you’re already in your despondent early 50s, when your ex-wives are less than a memory and you’ve given up on interpreting the things your penis does when you’re drunk-cuddling your only remaining friend.

After suing the Red Hot Chili Peppers for stealing the melody of “Under the Bridge” from the self-titled track on his 1989 self-released EP, I’m Bony, Jonas Wingwater spent the rest of his life on the streets, gloatingly performing an open-ended, free-form rendition of “Give It Away.”

Comic-Con models with tits bursting out of their Emilyfrom-BioShock costumes are jerks who will never touch you unless they’re paid to. This is what a real gamer girl looks like, nerds. Learn to love her.

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DON’Ts

You could fill a library with what I don’t understand about restraining orders. All I know is that I fucking love you, Karen.

It’s like the two shittiest X-Men ever, whose shared mutant powers are ferocious pubic-hair growth and blinding leg meat.

Yeah, yeah, I don’t like the flowers either, but once they cut your testicles off there’s very little you aren’t willing to accept as just another part of the deal before they eventually put you to sleep.

No, my dad who didn’t love me enough is THIS tall.

A liberal arts education is more than just seven years of working in the campus mailroom and forcing everyone to call you “Ho-Dog.” It’s about making memories.

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IATRONUDIA PHOTOS BY: GIBSON FOX AT FEELTHEFUTURE STYLIST: RENEE WARNE AT FEELTHEFUTURE

Hair: Kyye Reed Makeup: Miriam Nichterlein Models: Astrid Holler and Kathleen McGonigle at IMG, Ebony Gallant at the Wolves, Eilika Meckbach at EMG, Newsha Syeh Special thanks to Sun Studios

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Katerina Nis briefs

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Soot dress, POMS earrings

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P.A.M. dress, Triangl briefs

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Yuliy Gershinsky top; Lonely Hearts pants

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FEELTHEFUTURE top and gown, American Apparel tights, vintage shoes, Prada bag

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Pelvis top

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Verner dress, FEELTHEFUTURE top

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Pageant dress; Soot dress

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Louis Vuitton top, Rolex watch; Prada bag

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IDENTIFYING MEXICO’S UNIDENTIFIED WITH DIY FORENSICS

WATCH NOW ON

MOTHERBOARD.VICE.COM

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NEW YORK PHOTOS BY NEIL WINOKUR

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Images courtesy of Janet Borden, Inc.

obody I talk to under the age of 40 knows the work of Neil Winokur. This seems odd in light of the 68-year-old photographer’s achievements: His work has been collected by the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, to name a few. MoMA included him in its important 1991 exhibition Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort. In 1994 the Smithsonian published a monograph of his pictures, titled Everyday Things. By objective standards, he is an important artist. So why does a Google image search of his name retrieve only a narrow selection of the hundreds of photographs Neil has exhibited over the course of his career?

I will admit that, until a photography-critic friend mentioned Neil to me a couple of months ago, I had not heard of him either. Why was his work not covered in my college photo-history classes? Most artists with his credentials go on to found cult-like educational institutes or build extravagant palazzos. They do attention-getting things like performing with Lady Gaga or Jay-Z. When I went to visit Neil at the quiet Manhattan apartment where he lives with his wife, their twins, and their two cats, the reasons I hadn’t seen him in recent headlines became clear to me.

He’s not that kind of artist. This is a grounded man who is incredibly dedicated to his family. He has worked as a used-book buyer at New York’s Strand bookstore for the past four decades, and so of course his house is filled with books.

Neil’s work proposes that it is possible to depict a culture through its most ordinary objects. A native New Yorker, he applied this logic to his hometown for the 1999 series New York. He lured the viewer into these starkly graphic tableaux with a colour wheel of luminously atmospheric backgrounds, giving each object a great deal of importance. “Andy Warhol said that everybody has 15 minutes of fame,” Neil told me. “I do still lifes because I think these objects should get theirs.” These objects are products of our society, so they can be held up as mirrors to it. As Neil puts it, “I try to photograph objects that are archetypal, objects that have a meaning to society beyond themselves. An American flag, a glass of water.

I did a toilet, and it sold out almost immediately.”

—MATTHEW LEIFHEIT

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Unif shorts

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S Y O B T S O L E H T

M RKHA K A M AC UREN TT BL A

BY LA M OS BY PHOT

Ernesto, 16, works 65 hours a week harvesting crops.

Here, he performs “cleanup” work at an almond grove in Madera, California.

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Reporting for this story was generously supported by the 11th Hour Food and Farming Journalism Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley.

A I N R O F I L A C OF uit

) Dy y l l a r e it

Are (L

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ing

r Fr u o Y to Pick

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Amilcar and Junior outside their home, in Mendota

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A

t the age when most American teenagers are trying to decide whom to ask to prom, Ernesto Valenzuela was instead weighing whether it was worse to die of thirst in the desert or have his throat slit by gangsters.

That’s the choice the 16-year-old faced in his hometown of Mapulaca, Honduras, a drowsy village where MS-13 and Barrio 18 gangsters are known for recruiting youth—sometimes as young as kindergartners—into their cartels. If the kids refuse, they are often killed.

Now Ernesto was being recruited, and he didn’t want to end up one of the 6,000 people murdered each year in Honduras. With a total population just shy of 8 million, that means nearly one of every 1,000 Hondurans is a victim of homicide, making it the most dangerous place—after the war zones of Iraq, Somalia, and Syria—in the world.1 After mulling it over for months—and trying to dodge the tattooed gang members who wanted to sign him up—Ernesto decided his potential fate at home presented far more danger than what he might face at any distant desert crossing. So, early one morning in June 2013, after his mother sobbed and begged him to stay safe, he set out for a place he’d only seen in movies, a place where he’d heard a kid like himself—with just a fifth-grade education—could earn $60 a day working in the fields: America.

To make the journey, Ernesto borrowed money from older cousins who’d migrated to California several years prior. They lent him $7,000, the amount he’d need to cover bus fare from Honduras to Guatemala and up through Mexico, where he would then need to hire a coyote—a smuggler of human beings—to sneak him over the border and into Texas. The way Ernesto saw things, the mere fact that his cousins were able to loan him so much cash at once was evidence of the riches to be found on arrival at his final destination.

At first Ernesto wasn’t fazed by his lonesome journey on an endless succession of buses. It didn’t bother him that between rides he sometimes had to sleep in the streets, or, if he was lucky, a fleabag frontier hotel. He even brushed off his fellow passengers’ cautionary tales of narco violence and the countless murdered migrants who wound up in the cross fire of the cartels. But on the fifth day of his trip, he got nervous. He had arrived in the border town of Reynosa, Mexico, with 14 other travelers. Only a black ribbon of water—the Rio Grande—separated Ernesto from McAllen, Texas, and a new life. But first the group had to avoid drowning to get across.

Led by their smuggler, Ernesto’s group boated across the river in a leaky sloop. They made it without capsizing, but shortly after climbing to shore, leaving a trail of soggy footprints behind them, they were spotted by US Border Patrol agents just as they were about to load into another coyote’s waiting pickup truck.

The group scattered, and Ernesto sprinted into some scrub brush. He managed to evade the authorities, but in the process he’d gotten himself completely lost. For three days he and four others—three adults and another parentless boy, all from El Salvador—wandered the desert without food or water, scorched from the inside out. Lost and dying in the 90-degree heat, he no longer found the gangsters in Mapulaca so scary.

After circling through the ceaseless South Texas nowhere, all of them on the brink of collapse, the group eventually stumbled on a midsize cattle ranch. On the outskirts of the building, they found a cache of water jugs, presumably left out in the sand for

hopeless migrants just like them. They guzzled all the water they could drink, left the bottles behind, and took a road leading north.

As they followed the path, Border Patrol once again spotted the bedraggled crew. This time, they were too exhausted to run.

Ernesto was arrested and taken to a detention center 50-odd miles away in Harlingen, Texas, a sort of high-security youth shelter—replete with locked doors and guards—for “unaccompanied alien children” (undocumented kids who are found in the US without their parents or papers). He was placed in one of several dorm rooms alongside 200 boys who had stories much like his.

1

2

Because of sensitive legal situations, the names of some people in this story have been changed at their request.

This year, because of rising crime and economic depression in Central America, the Department of Homeland Security is expecting approximately 60,000 unaccompanied minors to be captured while attempting to illegally enter the US, according to a report issued by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which tracks human-rights issues. That’s more than double the number that were apprehended in 2013, and more than four times the number that entered the year before. Conversely, for the past nine years, the number of adults captured while illegally entering the US from Mexico has steadily decreased—from 1.1 million in 2005 to 367,000 in 2013.2 Apparently, increased risks and ramped-up security on the US-Mexico border have deterred adults but not children. According to Jennifer Podkul of the Women’s Refugee Commission, an NGO that works with displaced women and children, a spike in violence throughout impoverished Central America is the primary force behind the rise in youth migration. As a result, the average age of the illegal migrant labor force in America is declining each year. Parentless, penniless, and homeless—what will happen to them? And what effect will they have on the US economy?

Ernesto’s route from Mapulaca, Honduras, to Mendota, California

All dates refer to federal fiscal years, which run from October 1 to September 30.

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T

his September, three months after Ernesto was apprehended, I met him in the dusty California town of Mendota. “I’m not supposed to work,” he said. We were at a bustling swap meet where gloves, boots, and bold-coloured bandannas are sold to the laborers who live in this town of 11,000 people, 97 percent of whom are Latino. But Ernesto—who has almond eyes and the thin shadow of an adolescent mustache—admitted that, even though it was illegal, he had been picking melons to survive.

He was already sending money to his mother back home, and he still owed the coyotes $3,500 (because he was caught, he was able to negotiate his debt). “The judge told me I couldn’t work,” he said. “But I need to work.”

After spending more than two months incarcerated in Texas, Ernesto was released to await an official removal hearing, expected to be set in March or April of 2014. Youth detention centers along the US-Mexico border were filling up and needed, more than ever, to cycle him out (as is customary in these shelters) and into the care of a trusted adult. While he awaited trial, he would be free, as long as he met two conditions: First, he was to be placed in the care of an older uncle and California resident named Orlando; second, he had to attend school in the interim.

If he fulfilled these requirements, and could sufficiently convince a judge at his removal hearing that he’d left Honduras under the threat of violence, he might be granted Special Immigrant Juvenile Status and eventually become a resident. This would be a huge victory in that it would allow him to legally stay and work in America, and ultimately offer him a path to citizenship.

In 2012, California farm barons collectively grossed $311.2 million on melons and $4.35 billion on almonds.

For this to happen, however, he faced enormous challenges, not least of which was that the Sixth Amendment, which guarantees the right to a lawyer, only applies to criminal cases, and immigration cases are classified as civil. So Ernesto—all of 16 years old, with little command of the English language beyond hello and thank you—would very likely have to argue his own case before an American judge. And if he failed to be sufficiently persuasive, Ernesto would be immediately deported back to Honduras.

For now, neither condition of his release was being met.

The uncle who was supposed to take care of him had vanished shortly after his nephew’s arrival in Mendota, so Ernesto was living with four of his young cousins, who’d illegally sneaked into the US without being caught. They were living in a house nearby, surviving on sheer wit, hard labor, and little else.

Ernesto also wasn’t attending school. That’s why he’d come to the swap meet, where a group called the Fresno County Migrant Education program had set up a dusty stall between a taco truck and a work-boot stand, signing up youth for English classes.

“We can only help people who are working in the fields,” an ebullient woman named Rosa Hernandez told Ernesto when he approached her table. The Migrant Education Program is funded by the US Department of Education, which aims to provide additional support to children of migrant farmworkers—or, in Ernesto’s case, child farmworkers themselves. If

Ernesto refrained from working in the fields, as his judge had mandated, he would be ineligible for the temporary health services, English classes, and dental care offered by the program.

Such is the contradictory and confusing existence of the young illegal migrant in the US. Ernesto shifted back and forth as Rosa took down his information on a clipboard, nervous that immigration court would learn he’d been working and not going to school—or that he was not, in fact, living with his uncle, who’d all but abandoned him (which violated the agreement he signed with the federal government).

After we left the stall and chatted by the refrescos stand, Ernesto told me that because he’d dropped out of school in Honduras when he was 12 to help support his family, he was actually excited about the prospect of learning English. Now was his chance to “get ahead,” he said. It might also help him argue his case successfully.

L

ater, I visited Ernesto’s home in Mendota, where he lived with four young cousins. It was something like a Peter Pan’s fort for disenchanted migrant youth. None of the young men living with Ernesto had papers, and all of them crossed the border to work the California fields well before their 18th birthdays.

Their house, near downtown, was a small, sweet little ranch, plunked between a larger home on one side and an empty dustfilled lot on the other. Its wrought-iron fence, painted black and white, was slightly askew at the hinge, and on the concrete front porch stood five pairs of sturdy, dirt-caked work boots lined up neatly beside the door.

When I arrived, Ernesto led me to a tattered couch where we sat and he told me about the work he’d been doing. His shoulder muscles swelled, belying his age. Hanging on the living room wall behind him was a collection of frames, variously sized, displaying a depiction of the Virgin Mary and colourful family portraits, several of which appeared to be of the same older woman. I asked about her, assuming she was a relative.

“Oh, those aren’t ours,” Ernesto said. The photos belonged to the owner of the house—a Mexican woman who lived nearby and rented it to them. Those were her family members, he said, and the boys just kept them up for decoration. He seemed somewhat comforted by them, in any case, much more than he would have been by a blank wall.

Since his release from the Texas detention center, Ernesto and his cousins had been working the melon harvest, but now that the summer had passed and winter was approaching, they’d moved on to trimming almond trees. It paid minimum wage—not piecework, meaning that he earned $8 per hour and was not paid by the bushel (as is the case with crops like grapes and strawberries).

Ernesto worked 65 hours per week, he said, which earned him about $1,400 a month. He paid around $100 for rent, plus utilities. Even after paying an installment of his coyote debt, settling his phone and electric bills, buying food, and helping his family as much as he could—plus putting money away in savings for the winter months, when there would be less work—the take-home pay wasn’t so bad for a 16-year-old.

Local produce companies—like Stamoules and Westside Produce, whose fruits and vegetables reach nearly every major grocery chain in the US—rely on cheap migrant labor to reap enormous profits. In 2012, California farm barons collectively grossed $311.2 million on melons alone. The state’s almond

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industry, for which Ernesto was working (albeit illegally), grossed $4.35 billion that year. Approximately 75 percent of the manual labor required to put cans of almonds on supermarket shelves is performed by immigrants, according to Philip Martin, a professor of agriculture and resource economics at UC Davis. Logic dictates that this is the reason politicians from across the spectrum, from Nancy Pelosi to George W. Bush, have always tacitly supported lax migrant labor laws, even while occasionally spewing anti-immigrant rhetoric from the podium; California, along with many other western states, relies on this work force.

According to a 2012 report by Human Rights Watch, at least 50 percent of US farm laborers are working in the US illegally; estimates in California are closer to 60 percent. Increasingly, undocumented children and teenagers are an accepted part of this labor pool. There are currently more than 3,500 unaccompanied minors working in Monterey County, according to Ernesto Vela of the Monterey County Office of Migrant Education. Statewide, that figure is likely well over 10,000.

In the US, individuals under 14 years of age are prohibited from legal employment, and individuals under 16 can work only on nights and weekends and school vacations, unless they have a special permit from their school district stating that they’ve completed the necessary education or that they have explicit permission to work instead of attending school. Yet Ernesto told me he’s never needed any age documents or work permits—none of the foremen for the labor-contracting companies that employed him for have even attempted to determine whether he is legally permitted to work. He didn’t buy a counterfeit Social Security card, either—which most kids purchase from an underground network in the neighbouring town of Huron—because he was worried that obtaining one illegally might mess up his court case. Instead, he rented one “from someone who’s not working right now and doesn’t need it.”

I asked Ernesto whether his job was difficult. Not really, he said. In the fields in Honduras, where he began working at age 12, he made only 100 lempiras—or $5—a day. The labor there was just as hard, if not harder, and it wasn’t nearly as consistent.

That kind of life wasn’t good for him, he said. He could never help his family on such insecure pay, either.

“So that’s why you left?” I asked.

“A person wants to make a better life for himself,” he said a little abstractly, universalising his experience, making it seem not so unique, not so bad. “A person always wants something more.”

Just then, the door to Ernesto’s house opened. In walked three boys carrying groceries. Ernesto’s cousin, Amilcar, whom I had met briefly at the swap meet, looked like a gangly ninth grader, only with larger biceps and a more hardened gaze. He was 16 and came from the same region in Honduras as Ernesto—they’d gone to grade school together and dropped out around the same time to work in the fields. Amilcar had been in the US for just three months, crossing the border without hassle. He was carrying two 30-packs of Pepsi, while the others were lugging grocery bags full of the week’s other provisions: I counted at least five cartons of eggs and three tall stacks of tortillas, as well as several gallons of juice and freezer-wrapped bags of chicken.

It took each of them three trips to get all the food through the door. When work started tomorrow, they said, there wouldn’t be time to shop again until next Sunday.

There were five of them living here, jammed into three small bedrooms. There were Ernesto and Amilcar, both 16; Juan

Pablo, 22; Juan Pablo’s younger brother, José, 19; and Junior, short, muscly, and with his hair slicked back with thick gel, also 19. Juan Pablo and Junior had been living in the Mendota area for more than three years and had successfully paid off their coyote debts, making them the de facto patriarchs. There was a strong sense of family among the group; they told me that they all looked out for one another, the older boys offering advice and guidance to the younger ones as needed. “You know,” Ernesto said, “telling us what’s good, what’s bad, and what we should do.”

I asked whether it was hard to be so far away from their families.

“Of course I miss them,” Ernesto said.

Amilcar, the quiet tough guy of the pair, just shrugged—no big deal.

“But it makes you feel good to talk with them on the phone every now and again,” continued Ernesto. “That makes a person feel better.”

“They’re becoming good workers,” Junior said of the two boys. “They’re learning.”

A

few weeks later, I accompanied Amilcar and Ernesto to their first English class, in Mendota. They have a vague, inherited sense that knowing English might open up doors for their futures, and after I’d visited their house, Amilcar had called me and asked for help finding English classes in town.

After reminding him that I’m a journalist and not his social worker, I agreed to help. I explained where the classes were: not far from his home and where, I knew, he went to the swap meet each week. “I don’t know where that is,” he told me on the phone. This is a child who, like Ernesto, had made it from rural Honduras through Mexico and across the US border all alone—but he was too intimidated to seek out the English classes ten blocks from his house.

When I drove to their house to pick them up, they’d just returned from work. Ernesto was in the shower, getting ready to go. But Amilcar, who had been more eager than anyone, seemed hesitant.

“I don’t think I can go tonight.”

Mendota is home to 11,000 people, nearly all of whom hail from Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, or El Salvador.

Most work as laborers in the surrounding fields of Fresno and Monterey counties.

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After a long day at work, Amilcar is greeted by one of the random portraits that decorate the boys’ living room.

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Ernesto and Amilcar’s home in Mendota is something like a Peter Pan’s fort for disenchanted migrant youth. None of the four young men living there have papers.

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“Why not?”

“Well,” he explained, “I have to cook my lunch for tomorrow.” In a pan, four knuckly chicken breasts were faintly sizzling.

He poured in more oil out of a yellow gallon jug, poked at the pieces of meat, and turned up the heat. “I just got back from work,” he said. “I would have to shower.”

Ernesto emerged from the hallway smelling of cologne, having spiked his hair and put on a plaid, collared shirt. “I’m going to bring this notebook and pen,” he said, with a flourish. “What do you think?”

Amilcar was shifty as he cooked. He was still undecided about tonight’s class. And who wouldn’t think twice about attending a three-hour class after a 12-hour day spent trimming almond trees in the sun? His older cousins, seated at the kitchen table, urged him to go.

“It’s important for them to learn,” said Junior—his spiky hair gelled, as always—as he sipped a full cup of juice.

“OK,” Amilcar finally said. “I’ll go,” and he left the kitchen to take a quick shower.

For all its bounty, there’s something about the landscape of California’s Central Valley that feels diseased.

While I waited, I asked Junior whether he was interested in the English class. “Oh, that’s good for the young ones,” he said, “but not for me. They need it—but, you know, I’m older.” He was all of 19. I asked how much schooling he’d had in Honduras.

He’d completed most of the third grade, he said, and could read and write only a little in Spanish. He’d given up on his ability to learn anything other than fieldwork, but he was hopeful for his younger cousins.

When we arrived at the school, a group of elementary and middle school students—a mix of immigrants and Californiaborn—was playing basketball in the gym. Amilcar and Ernesto adjusted their shirts nervously, clutched their notebooks, and walked toward the library, where the English class was being held—but the room was dark and locked. It had been canceled today. Amilcar and Ernesto were clearly disappointed, but also a little relieved.

As much as they knew education is important for their distant futures, life—without school—was pretty good right now. But did they want to do farmwork forever?

“Oh, no,” Ernesto said.

Amilcar shook his head.

It struck me that a factor of their youth was their expansive sense of possibility: In their minds, they wouldn’t be stuck in the fields forever, despite the fact that, statistically speaking, they probably would be. According to Human Rights Watch, a third of youth farmworkers in the US have dropped out of high school, which leaves them “with few options besides a lifetime of farmwork and the poverty that accompanies it.” And Ernesto dropped out of the sixth grade in Honduras—he didn’t even make it to high school.

“Working in a restaurant someday,” Ernesto said, from my backseat as we drove home, when I asked him what he dreamed of doing with his life. He looked out the window at the deadening Mendota night. “That would be really good.”

F

or all its bounty, there’s something about the landscape of California’s Central Valley that feels diseased. Just a few miles from Ernesto’s house in Mendota, the air is a heavy brown-grey, polluted by the trucks that pass through on Highway 99, carrying produce to be packed and shipped and stocked onto shelves at Safeways and Hannafords across the country.

The pollution clouds the rays of light that shine on the fields, smudging the horizon lines and the silhouettes of crops. The fields, too, in towns like Mendota and Huron and Raisin City, feel exquisitely toxic. As productive as they are, and as heavy with bloom and fruit, the plants are subtly listless in their rows and rows, lacking vibrancy. It’s a battered landscape, excavated and plucked and pumped for every last bit it can give.

Early one winter morning, six months after Ernesto and I had first met, I struck out into this landscape—now dried and brown—to try to find him hard at work. I wanted to see firsthand what the conditions were like, especially given that laboring in these fields is illegal but also arguably essential to the average American’s way of life. I was curious how he fared each day, and how the companies—their foremen, their coworkers—justified employing kids like Ernesto who were posing as adults eligible to work. But, indicative of the various contradictions of the issue at hand, the last thing I wanted was to get Ernesto fired, so he and I came up with a plan to prevent this: Once he arrived at the fields, he’d tell me where he was working (he was assigned a different location each day), and I’d show up and ask his crew general questions about the harvest. I would identify myself as a journalist, but not as an acquaintance of Ernesto’s.

Just in case that plan didn’t work out, I staged a meek stakeout of his house, where I watched, in the still-black, 32-degree chill of the morning, as a white-paneled van pulled up and honked. Ernesto ran out, lunch bag in tow, like a high schooler late for his bus. I trailed the vehicle but lost sight of it after a few U-turns. There were dozens of white vans roving the 6 AM Mendota streets.

Still, I made my way to Madera, the town where Ernesto had told me he’d be working the almond trees that day, and waited for the text that he had said he would send if we were separated. An hour later my phone buzzed: “12th Street where there are some oranges on the north side.”

I was way off base, soon realising that Madera is both a county and a town. The town alone—consisting of some 16 square miles of farmland—is home to an Avenue 12, a Road 12, and a 12th Street. I quickly ruled out 12th Street, which runs for only a few short blocks in Madera’s small downtown. “Road or Avenue?”

I texted. “Road” was his response. So I drove the ten-odd miles to the start of Madera County’s Road 12 and scoured it for any sign of oranges, my silver Volkswagen a pitiful chariot lurching over roads maimed with potholes, roads slick with frost, roads of dust that dipped into culverts and out again and then dead-ended altogether (despite my iPhone’s insistence that I was going the right way), roads rimmed with tree after tree after tree but no oranges, my car seeming punier and my quest more and more futile with each mile I bumped away.

Having covered every inch of Road 12 to no avail, I headed for Avenue 12, a wide, infinite east-west strip on which trucks roared past vast fields of brown: empty dirt furrows, the leafless silhouettes of fruitless trees. Unlike the summer, when vans and buses full of workers pack the fields and roadways, there was not a work crew in sight.

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Just as I was about to give up and turn around, however, I spotted a stripe of orange along the road ahead—a patch of tangerine trees, or mandarinas, the landmark I’d been searching for.

As I inched along Avenue 12 with the bright thicket of mandarina trees on one side, hoping to come upon Ernesto’s almond grove on the other, I thought of a 17-year-old boy profiled in a Human Rights Watch report I’d been reading who, on his first day on the job in a Florida orange grove, was crushed to death by a truck. But devoid of humans and human folly, these groves were magnificent (save for the carpet of rotting fruit beneath the trees), the vivid colours a welcome break from the tawny winterscape I’d been traversing. Then, sure enough, across from the mandarinas, just as I’d been hoping and as Ernesto had said, I came to an almond grove where a crew of men spread throughout the rows and shook sticks into the highest branches.

Though I couldn’t see their faces from the road, I knew Ernesto was among them.

So I pulled over and waited. A Migrant Education worker I had previously interviewed had explained to me the dynamics of ownership and cash flow in the groves to me. There’s typically a rancher who owns the land and leases it to a separate company—in this case, Cottonwood Creek Farms, according to the Madera County Department of Agriculture—that owns the trees and, therefore, the almond yield. A separate company, the labor contractor, hires the people. With all of these layers of ownership—land, plants, people—it’s easy to see how the agricultural industry can throw up its hands when it comes to labor-law violations, like hiring undocumented workers and teens, not to mention the moral violations of paying so little for a product from which so much profit is made. Nearly every work crew throughout the valley includes paperless workers, according to the Migrant Education staff, and of the 15 or so fields I visited over the course of the five months I reported this story, I met underage workers at nearly every single one. The multiple companies act as a compartmentalised buffer, defraying responsibility for these violations, legal and moral.

Whether intentionally or not, the agriculture companies profit from the vulnerability and fear of illegal workers. For undocumented laborers, especially children, reporting abuses like lack of water, lack of shade or bathrooms, abuse by their foremen, wage theft, or low pay—all of which are rampant in the Central Valley, according to California Rural Legal Assistance, which litigates many of these issues—could cost them their jobs.

Meanwhile, small legal outfits like the Migrant Education program or California Rural Legal Assistance lack the ability and resources to enforce existing labor laws, except to litigate on a case-by-case basis. But such cases ending up in court are rare and mere thorns in the sides of the mega-companies reaping large profits. According to a report from Human Rights Watch, between 2005 and 2008, 43 children died while working in US fields or packinghouses—a number that doesn’t include young workers masquerading as adults, a metric that is almost impossible to quantify.

While these young workers provide cheap labor and big profits to agribusiness, the skyrocketing number of unaccompanied minors puts a strain on the federal government: The Office of Refugee Resettlement is obliged to house unaccompanied minors who are apprehended, feed them, keep them safe, and ensure that they are transferred to the custody of responsible adults—all of

which takes a lot of manpower and money. Before the spike in arrivals in 2012, the budget for unaccompanied alien children had been hovering around $150 million; in 2014, the federal government upped that to nearly $495 million. When you factor in those who are caught, the young, cheap labor force that agriculture companies profit from turns out not to be nearly as cheap as the fresh produce readily available in supermarkets across the country.

E

rnesto had told me his crew would break for lunch at noon, so at midday I left my car on the side of the road and tiptoed through the grove, ducking under rows of trees. I finally came upon a white van. Workers rested, stretched out in the dappled shade of the vehicle, with others leaning against nearby trees, silently sipping sodas. I introduced myself, asking where I could find the foreman. Among the crew of reclining men I spotted Junior first—the 19-year-old who had told me he was too old to learn anything but farmwork—his hair perfectly coiffed, his chin leaning on his knee. He was surprised to see me and quickly averted his gaze.

Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ernesto. Wearing a tattered baseball cap and a clean, white Henley, he reclined easily against an almond trunk, his work boots and the cuffs of his jeans covered in dust, his feet ringed by overturned mango skins stripped clean.

I exchanged pleasantries with the foreman, a friendly man in his 50s from El Salvador, of whom Ernesto had already told me, “He’s a really good boss. He never mistreats us.” As the foreman and I spoke, Ernesto fidgeted a bit, then stood up and walked farther into the grove and out of sight. I didn’t ask the foreman about Ernesto, or whether he knew that Ernesto was underage. But he must have been able to see that this member of his crew was just a kid, and he also must have known that it was illegal for Ernesto to be here, because it was the middle of the afternoon on a school day.

I didn’t ask, in part, because I didn’t want to get Ernesto in trouble, but also because it didn’t seem like the right place to

A bus in Huron waits to take workers to the nearby melon and almond fields.

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get lost in the moral thickets of the question. After all, Ernesto wanted this work and needed it to survive. The foreman, himself a promoted farmworker, and his adult crew had their own things to worry about—their own lack of papers, their own need for a paycheck, their own debts, their own families here and back home. So they, just like the industry at large, turn their heads. This is the willful ignorance on which the whole system of planting, picking, and packing our food—and by extension, eating it—seems to rely.

Instead, I asked the foreman about the specifics of the work he and his crew were doing. During peak harvest, he explained, machines drove through these wide rows of trees and shook the almonds loose. But the machines didn’t get everything. Ernesto and his companions were the cleanup crew.

“Look,” he said, pointing at the ground. It was blanketed with almond pods, which resembled bulbous, mossed-over acorns. He grabbed one off the ground and cracked it open to reveal, much to my surprise, a perfect, golden-brown almond.

“But so many almonds are wasted!” I said.

“That’s how it is,” he shrugged. “In every harvest, you lose something.”

Amilcar in his backyard

A

fter my time in the almond fields, I didn’t see Ernesto or Amilcar for a few months. I was busy at my day job—I teach immigrant children in Oakland, California, more and more of whom are unaccompanied minors. For their part, Ernesto and Amilcar continued to trim almond trees while Ernesto awaited his day in court.

Their work dwindled during the December holidays, the cold spells, the rain. Days off were boring, Amilcar said. Ernesto found them nerve-racking—he was worried about the possibility of being deported, and in the meantime no work meant no money. Other boys they knew moved on throughout California or out of state, as far as Washington or Texas or Arizona, in pursuit of the winter crop. But Ernesto and Amilcar were scared to move with the harvest because they lacked papers. Mendota was a place they knew, where they had work connections and felt safe enough from Immigration and Customs Enforcement

(ICE). On top of all this uncertainty, the State of California declared a drought. As a result, some farmers weren’t even prepping their fields for planting in the summer, because the state was raising water prices and climatologists predicted there wouldn’t be rain. So Ernesto and Amilcar waited, at the mercy of the weather.

In early January, Ernesto walked out to the front yard of his house to get the mail. Inside he found a letter from the immigration office in San Francisco, which had taken over his case: Please take notice that [your] case has been scheduled for a master hearing before the Immigration Court in July 2015… Failure to appear at your hearing… may result in… [your being] taken into custody by the Department of Homeland Security.

It took him a moment to understand the letter, but when he did, he was shocked: His court date—the one that would determine his fate—had been pushed back to July 2015. The ICE court was overloaded. Instead of knowing if he would be deported in March or April 2014, as expected, he would have to wait another year and a half. He wouldn’t stand in court until more than two years after he crossed over the Rio Grande in that leaky boat.

In a way, it was a fitting turn to his story. Like so many lost kids before him, Ernesto would remain in limbo, at the mercy of the vicissitudes of the courts, the gangsters, the markets, the crops, the California rain and sun. He would likely spend the rest of his teenage years laboring under that uncertainty.

When I met Ernesto one last time, at his home in Mendota, he told me—with an optimism that was both impressive and a little inscrutable—that he saw waiting for court as a good thing. He would be in the US, working, and not in Honduras, and for now that was good enough for him. “It’ll find me time to get a lawyer,” he said. His uncle, who was now “somewhere up north,” promised to help him with this—although when I pressed him it was unclear how, and when, and with what money.

Even with a decent lawyer, Ernesto’s odds of actually winning an asylum claim, and thus a visa, would be something like winning the lottery. Being the victim of gang violence is not a sure bet, and he didn’t have concrete evidence that he was specifically targeted. According to the Women’s Refugee Commission, very few asylum cases are awarded based on claims of gang persecution—because it’s very difficult to argue, in a case like Ernesto’s, that the gang activity he experienced was personal, or anything more than generalised violence in a certain region. In other words, Ernesto might not have had it bad enough to win.

I asked him what he will say to the judge when he finally gets his day in court.

“Well, my lawyer will help me with that,” he said. “When I find one.”

And if he doesn’t find one?

“I guess I’ll ask the judge if I can stay.”

I asked him how he felt about the very real possibility of deportation, of being sent back to all his former problems.

“If they send me home, I won’t go back to my town. It’s too dangerous there.” He said the gang members who first threatened him would recognise him. “So I guess I’d just go somewhere else.”

“Where?” I asked.

“Well… One never knows.”

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LI’L THINKS: LOSS

BY KATE CARRAWAY, ILLUSTRATION BY PENELOPE GAZIN

More of Kate’s Li’l Thinks can be found at Twitter.com/ KateCarraway.

Everyone knows the moment or month or era when life happened, all at once, and established some set point of desire or values or best-ever happiness. Flash-flooded with detail, and then flash-frozen in time, it’s usually a quick, early thing: an especially rad summer, maybe, or a singular, sparkler-in-the-dark love. For me, it was my first three months of work. (I’m the worst?) Everything that comes before doesn’t matter; everything that comes after is not so much compared with it (because nothing can compare) as informed by it, forever and always.

There are biological and age-related reasons for these fast-and-hot epochs, and that they usually happen so early, before anything else gets figured out, feels like a gnarly trick. A particularly cruel and punishing strand of nostalgia is assigned and attached to these mega-specific moments, which means that other eras, even the amazingly idyllic ones, never feel as… much. If you were deep into Facebook or some other searchable record at the time of your personal flash flood, then it’s probably extra brutal for you, and guh, I’m sorry. The inevitability of remembering parts of youth as flares in a cold, black sky really means that, by the time participatory and for-real life starts, there has already been some profound but invisible loss.

I rewatch The Hills to work through, and maybe get over somehow, the effects of this kind of loss. For me, it’s a perfect, if elevated, proxy of my own era of sunlit rosebud gathering. I barely ever watched the show during its original run because, at that time, a posse of kids who took clubbing really seriously wasn’t interesting to me (which is cute, because during this time of my life I took going to shows in garbagey bars really seriously; if you were 23 then, all it really came down to was whether your sequins were ironic or not).

The Hills was a hothouse of future nostalgia for its total nonspecificity: Aside from the LA-ness of it all (luxury SUVs direct from the car wash, etc.), the show was so broadly about everyday origin stories of friendship and love and jobs that its themes drew a wide circle around MTV’s entire demographic. The Hills revolves around its women, who move between shabby-chic shared apartments, barely-there jobs and formal-shorts internships, dates with their trainers, and clubs, with Cabo and Costa Rica interspersed. The show became especially mythical (and, yeah, this statement will probably be controversial for LC-heads) when the darkblond, tall-poppy centerpiece of the show, Lauren Conrad, left. Remaining were girls who were exclusively and explicitly about “the best time of their lives,” with sunset-BBQ cheering, deeply fraught breakups, and friendship fights.

What other show, or what other entity, has been so available for the projection of anyone’s pre-adult nostalgia? The Hills did not make its drama out of plot twists or calculated misunderstandings, the stuff of most TV programming that is about the same parts of life. Instead it distilled—and then amplified—the existing, ready-made drama of being alive and 20-ish or whatever, hanging out with your friends every single day and night, as if they’re oxygen, until, slowly or suddenly but always agonisingly, you just don’t anymore. I don’t know whether The Hills was hyperrealism as TV, but it wasn’t “reality television” as we knew or now know it.

Watching the show is like a salve, a Crayola-bright and comfy therapy that makes me feel closer to, and less reliant on, my own individual but hardly unique halcyonathon of riding bikes and driving cars and playing games and talking eeeeendlessly with and at my friends. I know that all of it is totally unremarkable, elevated only because it’s mine, just as The Hills feels unremarkable and elevated only because it’s theirs (and also because of its soundtrack, which offers a second, separate punch of nostalgia). Watching identical emotions played out by blonder, glossier similars recasts the experience itself—and the subsequent loss of it—as something else, as something so common and, yeah, mythical, that the attendant alone-feelings just wear themselves out. They seem, I don’t know, cute now, and not so tragic, because I’ve seen them through a prism of high ponytails and beach houses and sidewalk confrontations.

That loss—still sticky and gnawing on a bad day—is most often just information on what I loved, what I once had, and what it is I should find and make for myself again, in a real and adult way.

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Underneath the Rainbow LP / CD / Digital out now

facebook.com/theblacklips twitter.com/theblackLips theblacklips.tumblr.com

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Readers’ Poll Results

30

Best TED Talks

With more than 1,600 online videos that collectively have over a billion views, the world of TED Talks can be overwhelming to the uninitiated. To help, we asked our readers to submit their picks for the 30 most informative, provocative, and inspiring TED Talks in the fields of technology, entertainment, and design. We received more than 12,000 ballots, and now we’re pleased to share the results.

1 The Future of Sex Zoos: Balancing Fetish, Innovation, and Conservation Bill Gates

2 How to Fight a Cow Col. Frank Tuplin

3 Community-Based Arson Initiatives: Ideas at Work Taureen Helms

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4

5

What a Courageous Georgia Cat Breeder Can Teach Us About Eugenics

Wireless Headset Mics: What We’ve Learned, What’s Still to Come

Dr. Barbara Mershepp, PhD

Klefton Marbell

6

7

How to Fight a Chimp Col. Frank Tuplin

9 Shitting Underwater Pavel Gibbons

13 What Life with a Slightly Larger Head Has Taught Me About Diversity

8

Love Will Turn You Around: Ten Days to Mind-Blowing Anal Sex Kenny Rogers

10

How to Dispose of a Chimp’s Body Col. Frank Tuplin

11

12

The Secret Language of Scarfs

Rethinking the Idea of “Rethinking”

Why Parasites Target Hollywood Royalty

Dr. Beautrice Garmin, MD

Sween Griggs

Dr. Vikram Parmalat, MD

14

15

15 16

Raising a Drug-Free Child—the Hamas Way Emerging Markets in Suburban Bush Meat Milk Trends Brayff Johnson Uffrica Lofgren

Prius Ramsey-Shilling

Anacin Shroeper

17 The Wordless Art of Claw Gestures Nuncy Thamber

18 WomenTalk: Women Talking to Women About Being Women Umoja Holmo

19 This World Exists for My Pleasure: The Power of Quantum Affirmations

20 Rabbits: Nature’s Furry Pieces of Shit Dr. Björn Karensdottir, PhD

Dr. Dodd Olper, PhD

21 How I Disguised Shitty Stand-Up as a Life-Changing Talk Todd McCrystal

26 The Corporate Art of Business Massage Dalton Chispers

22 Chimp vs. Cow: Who Would Win? Answer: Probably the Cow Col. Frank Tuplin

27 The Road to Equality: The Story of America’s First Gay Highway Tandolyn Kindles

23 How Fact-Learning Improves Your Knowledge Schwinn Cubscutt

28 No More Hitlers: The Case for Subsidising Failed Artists Purina Tomatillo

24 Eldergangs: How an Iowa Nursing Home Changed Our View of Inner-City Violence Kelp McCann

29 Never, Ever, Ever, EVER Give Up: Daring to Keep Dreams Alive Pepper Scoville

25 It’s Me, Gail Henlorn: Pay Attention to Me for 16 Minutes and 32 Seconds Gail Henlorn

30 Give Up, Idiot: Why Walking Away Is Often the Best Move Malvea Harlapp VICE 71

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REVIEWS BEST ALBUM OF THE MONTH: NOTHING

YG

head off. Please note that this review is biased because the last time I hung out with Freddie he got me so faded off lean and haze I was huffing laps around the editorial office trying not to have a panic attack.

DREW MILLWAD

My Krazy Life Def Jam

How many of you think hip-hop’s best days are behind us? How many of you think we’re in a new golden age for rap? OK—how many of you don’t give a shit? According to our market research, you already dress like you don’t give a shit. So let’s get some fucking action around here! Go ahead: Put down the magazine, pull down your pants, and piss all over the guy in front of you.

RAPPIN’ RODNEY

IGGY AZALEA

The New Classic Def Jam

We usually don’t like to rate women’s records based solely on how steely they make our Dan, but this bombshell Aussie high-school dropout has made her wild pineapple ass such a huge part of her marketing campaign that it would be misogynist not to grade her on it. Have you seen that thing lately? It looks like two baby belugas slow dancing.

NEBBISH ORIPESH

FREDDIE GIBBS & MADLIB Piñata

Madlib Invazion

Freddie Gibbs is one of the best MCs ever to take his ski mask off long enough to spit a 16, and Madlib makes better beats than Jesus would if Jesus made beats. On this record, like Spade and Farley before them, they bring out the best in each other: Freddie becomes a psychedelic drug-thug cowboy, ready to save the day by completely trashing it, and Madlib sounds like he’s been sharpening his rare 45s so he could throw one and cut your

TRUST

Joyland Arts & Crafts

Dear Robert, Since your last record, you’ve ditched that four-eyed Austra chick and are now a solo act. That must have been a hard decision, but I want you to know that I think you’re brave and made the right choice. Your alien voice, arpeggiated waves, floppy hair, and thumping beats slide out of your body and deep into mine, but I would like to take our relationship further and make sex with your actual penis. All your songs are about me.

Yours, FREDDIE JERKURY

KYLIE MINOGUE Kiss Me Once Warner Bros

Kylie Minogue is polished child-sized woman whose voice has been so artificially fuelled for so long I really struggle to say anything thoughtful about her abilities. For a decade her major claim to fame was her ass.

Before that it was being corrupted by Michael Hutchence.

She makes music for the people you get in fights with on the internet to dance to in shit clubs you would rather die than go to. Despite this, she is still pretty much the coolest lady to ever live. She also doesn’t age. These two facts can lead to only one conclusion, she’s a vampire. So just in case you ever see this Ms Minogue, keep up the great work and I eat way too much canned food to have delicious blood.

SHEILA LAROUX

MAJOR LAZER

Apocalypse Soon Mad Decent

The last time I thwarted loins to Major Lazer, I was getting violently dry-humped in a club in Belize by a local diving instructor wearing FuBu. In a cathartic attempt to somehow reverse all recollection, I enrolled in a Dancehall class last month to get thighs like Ri-Ri and confirm if “daggering” was ever a real thing. But seriously though, when you get past the 80s commando shit, you realise Diplo is just another whiteboy reappropriating Caribbean “culture” in return for ceviche and ass. Sounds like a wet brain fart in a Malibu bottle. JAH NO PARTIAL. MEL TAN

SHIT ROBOT

We Got A Love DFA Records

I listened to this album at the gym and it was awesome. “The Secret”, the opening track, made me imagine I was in a video game as I jogged alongside a room full of other weight-obsessed freaks towards the finish line where a svelte body would be waiting for me.

The persistent bass kept me focused on the win and the pew pew laser noises were the sounds of my competitors being eliminated.

EDNA K

NOTHING

Guilty of Everything Relapse

Look, sometimes you’re just fucking scared, OK? If you’re too hetero to admit that, then maybe we shouldn’t be friends. Like, I can see 30 so clearly, and if I

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Photo Credit: Kris Alan Carter / Walter Delgado of Rotting Out

YOUR SHOW FOR PUNK HARDCORE AND EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN Noisey-1203.indd 1

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REVIEWS WORST ALBUM OF THE MONTH: LYLA FOY

just keep running long enough, keep my job, and stay with my fiancé, maybe things will work out for me. But I’m consumed with this crushing fear that if I look down, all I’ll see is 30,000 feet between me and the jagged wreckage of my life—all the people I’ve let down, all the opportunities I’ve blown, all these mindless obligations that are the foundation of my pointless, stupid existence. It’s times like these when only two things work for me: exceptionally conceived, downer shoe gaze like this, and Seinfeld.

DUKUS P. TEKUM

TAKING BACK SUNDAY Happiness Is Hopeless

Whoo, boy. Sounds like somebody’s going through a shitty divorce. That must be extra aggravating when you’ve got more nautical-star tattoos than toes. You know what’s cool? Dedication. You know what’s not cool?

Sad-ass humping in a loveless marriage, which is exactly what I imagine Taking Back Sunday band practice looks like. Maybe these guys should consider hocking their pyramid belts to fund a tropical Vipassana retreat or something.

BECA GRIMM

BLACK LIPS

Underneath the Rainbow VICE

Here at VICE Media, we fire people all the time.

Even if you’re super hot and popular, we’ll shitcan your ass and laugh about it the next day. Hell, we’d bring the company mascot out to the middle of the football field and put a bullet in its brains if it recommended an incompatible brand partner for content creation or something. Over the years, it’s become a team-building sort of thing, and whenever we give some new guy the boot the Black Lips have been there in the lobby to play him out with a cover of the Benny Hill theme and one of those giant novelty candy canes. (Fun fact: That’s the origin of the timeless saying, “Don’t let the Black Lips kick you in the ass on the way out!”)

PRICELINE NEGOTIATOR

PERFECT PUSSY Say Yes to Love Captured Tracks

The first time I met Meredith Graves I was a fat, drunk college kid with rosacea scars, slamming tall boys at a locals-only punk bar in Syracuse. Everyone was rocking salt-stained Vans and skinny jeans from the mall when she rolled up with a pixie cut, mink coat, and a fat little baby friend named Cupid, who promptly fired off 300 heart arrows into my vagina. After that we had some cool times but never hung out because she had too much social anxiety. Whatever. I see now we never became friends because she was saving up all her piss and vinegar and poetry to front the best band ever and save the world with love and music.

LINDSAY LEONARD

LIARS

Warrior, Medusa, and Gorgon Medusa, and ever since I nabbed a promo copy I’ve been silently awaiting the return of the goatish lich king so that I may plunge my dwarven foe hammer into his urchin-snouted meat cleaver. (I get to be the dwarf, though. I’m always the dwarf.)

FIRE OF WRATH

UME

Monuments Dangerbird

One time Ume opened up for Blonde Redhead on a bill in my consciousness, and then they never played there ever again.

MATURING ADULT

FUTURE ISLANDS Singles 4AD

Mess Mute

Wait, what happened to all the guitars and drums and monotone yelling and talk-singing?

Gone is the kinda Fugazi, kinda Gang of Four, mostly weirdo vibe, and in its place is some sort of chintzy industrial goth? No offense, guys, but pretty much everyone does this better than you.

FREDDY CURRENT

VARIOUS ARTISTS

Wayfaring Strangers: Darkscorch Canticles Numero Group

Future Islands is a band that’s built its career on creating a bunch of songs about being heartbroken and feeling really, really sad. That’s cool. We’re into it. It sucks when relationships end, whatever. But what makes these dudes rule is that, while crying your eyes out, it’s perfectly acceptable to take a swig of that molly water and dance your Chuck Taylors off and do everything you can to forget that dumb ex who did that dumb stuff to you while you do dumb stuff with a dumb new person on the dance floor.

NEW YORK TIMES MOLLY TRENDPIECE

DZ DEATHRAYS Black Rat I Oh You

Playing role-playing games is a commitment that brands you for a life as swirlie bait. If you want to pretend to be a dwarf in your living room without living the lifestyle, we suggest HeroQuest, a board game that won’t scar you the way D&D or Magic: The Gathering will.

I used to play frequently with my older cousins, and I turned into a fairly normal human who isn’t into fantasy.

But the bands on this comp have names like Triton

This album is thrashy and frantic by virtue of youth, inherently erratic, agitated, mismatched, yet underpinned by very serious feelings about yourself and the world and how important you are. The album as a whole is disjointed, there is far too much going on for me on both a macro and micro level. Nothing sounds superfluous

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H I F I T H E N O R T H E R N R O U N D H O U S E

T H E G O V

H I F I C A P I T O L & A M P S

t 5*$,&54 0/4"-& /08 5)36 888 )*54"/%1*54'&45 #*($"35&- $0. t "-- 4)084 + t '03 .03& */'0 7*4*5 '"$&#00, $0. )*54"/%1*54 t

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REVIEWS BEST COVER OF THE MONTH: WAYFARING STRANGERS: DARKSCORCH CANTICLES

however, more like a couple of hectic bros trying to have it all before they can narrow it down. The backbone of Black Rat is located, if you could believe, in the middle. “Keep Myself On Edge”, “Northern Lights”, and “Night Walking” are not only the bangers, but make sense as songs next to each other. I would advocate more songs of this frequency but I am also hyper aware of how popular they may be in a Hottest 100 situation so maybe I’ll just shut my big mouth.

Also according to Wikipedia DZDs won an Aria a few years back, whatever that means. I absolutely thought this type of music died in the early 2000s but I guess there are always hot shots crinkling regardless of space and time. Hot shots to whom I would like to recommend some new influences. I probably would have liked this 15 years ago and that is nothing to discount. I loved both Savage Garden and Limp Bizkit as a child though so who the crimp knows.

SALLY BEAVER

ETERNAL SUMMERS The Drop Beneath Kanine

I like this band, and I like this album, mostly because the singer and bassist sound like they’re lamping out on beanbag chairs while the drummer wrestles with a bout of chronic hypertension. This would play well with people who wish all that nerdy 80s Glasgow indie pop would sprout a pube or three.

MUSCHA TRIMPOP

THE NIGHT PARTY Get To You MGM

I once saw a shaggy dog out on the street doing his or her thing. It was hard to tell if shaggy dog was a him or a her—its lipstick dog-dick or weird tiny bitch-teats were hidden under that much sodden fur. It was wet, it’d been places. Down to the pond at the park

where it filled its hide with scum and lived, I think, for the first time without ownership. A daring jailbreak from its nuclear family’s yard meant shaggy dog was now tasting freedom like a wild animal tastes the blood of man. There would be no going back. An altered beast had been created. “Look Out!” was the song I’d landed on when shaggy dog revealed himself as a dude by humping at a car.

TOBY MCCASKER

CERES

I Don’t Want To Be Anywhere But Here Hobbledehoy Record Co

Ceres have almost named themselves after the operatic battle Betty in Final Fantasy VI, and that is pretty much how we tell if a band is legit in modern times. “Have you played Super Nintendo or at least a ZSNES emulator on the internet?” If the answer is no, you shit into your own hands and throw it at them and leave the venue in ironic disgust. Ceres are too busy answering a less important question: “What does working class poppy rock sound like?” Singing and riffing nicely about what’s there instead of what you want/don’t want to be there. The intro to “Three Times” sort of sounds like that Fuel song.

TOBY MCCASKER

LINDA PERHACS

The Soul of All Natural Things Asthmatic Kitty

This is the second album by California singer Linda Perhacs, ending a 44-year absence since her cult 1970 record, Parallelograms. Like Vashti Bunyan and Sibylle Baier, Perhacs cut one album of moody, psychedelic folk and fell into obscurity, only to be rediscovered during the great New Weird America gold rush of 2003, except she was working as a dental hygienist. Speaking of 2003, Devendra Banhart has now skip-farted out eight records of banal tropicália poseury and banged Natalie Portman on a filthy Anthropologie rug. I’m turning 30 this year, and I still have trouble finding matching socks in the morning.

RODNEY MCCRAY

THE HOLD STEADY Teeth Dreams

Washington Square

Not really sure why the Hold Steady exists in 2014, honestly, but this record is pretty sick, mainly because if the Hold Steady aren’t making Hold Steady records, nobody else will. Craig Finn, a.k.a. the Dream Dad of every doofus with a drinking problem and a John Berryman tattoo, is doing this weird reverby thing with his voice that makes him sound like he’s singing into the Large Hadron Collider, but it works well enough, I guess. This is one of those records that gets a “Hesitant Smiley,” in that I like it but don’t really give a shit if you actually listen to it.

DREW MILLARD

ANNE

Pulling Chain Run for Cover

It’s a long-standing urban legend that dropping a rat in a bucket of Mountain Dew will cause it to dissolve on contact. Picture that in your mind’s eye—a squealing, bug-eyed piece of vermin, its flesh sizzling from the harsh bite of calcium dissodium EDTA, brominated vegetable oil, and Yellow 5 as it is reduced to nothing, leaving only a neon brownish-yellow plasma in its place. It’s also, coincidentally enough, how I would describe this record.

LESTER BANDS

LYLA FOY

Mirrors in the Sky Sub Pop

This lady is the perfect embodiment of my least favorite trend in girl music today—when indie popster chicks are so self-conscious and scared of failure that they produce harmless music that’s impossible to criticise by dint of its lack of vision. Come on, Lyla! Don’t you know we can all smell fear? Whatever. This

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REVIEWS WORST COVER OF THE MONTH: ANNE

is an open Lykke Li rip, right down to the number of syllables in their names (only when I listen to “Little Bit” I get the feeling that, unlike Lyla, li’l Lykke has actually had a cock-induced orgasm in her life).

SALLY

REAL ESTATE Atlas

right person in their US division, then claimed they had no email contacts for them. As I sat taking a dump and reading the chain, I pondered the complete and utter uselessness of writing a review of George Michael’s new CD. But then I remembered that this was the most shits anyone had or would ever give about George Michael’s new CD, and I realised I’d done my good deed for the day.

BILL CARTWRIGHT

Domino

KOEN HOLTKAMP Motion Five young men ride in a slightly distressed van, leaving miles and miles of asphalt behind them.

Most wear interesting sweaters, save one—he wears interesting glasses instead. They have been driving through the arid plains for what seems like days. The man in interesting glasses breaks his focus from the cacti dotting the highway shoulder. He looks at another shoulder, one in an interesting sweater. Dreamy guitar noodles, turning 30, waking and baking. The sun melts into the Arizona border. They make out. I join. Eventually we pull over to split some edamame hummus.

GRECIAN BRIM

Symphonica

Virgin EMI/Universal

In a heroic act of determination, VICE’s reviews editor has been trying to get a copy of this record from George Michael’s publicity team for a week now. I’ve been on CC the whole time and marveled at his perseverance, firing off emails as he lies in bed with his girlfriend so he can catch the UK publicity company before they leave for the day, all so that I can make fun of George Michael’s new symphonic smegma. Usually when we ask for albums to review, they immediately forward along a download link or whatever, but this company (who have AOL email addresses, mind you) first wanted to have a “call” about it, then promised they’d connect us to the

311

Stereolithic 311

Thrill Jockey

Koen Holtkamp was one half of Mountains, a band that made a career out of feeding acoustic instruments through oscillators and modular synths. Now he’s gone solo and started pounding out more virtuosicelectronic esoterica. It would be a lie if I said this stuff doesn’t get boring, but for stony space doodles, you could do much worse.

DESSERT STORM

Remember that dude from your freshman year of high school who sat in the back of the bus and wore a bright-coloured undershirt to match the American Eagle insignia on his American Eagle polo while spending his Friday nights playing backup linebacker to some other turd log dressed exactly the same but better because he managed to match his T-shirt colour to his eyes? 311 is still that dude’s favorite band.

AMERICAN SMEAGOL

OWLS

BURNT ONES

Polyvinyl

Castle Face

Two

GEORGE MICHAEL

pioneering work John Cage made more than half a century ago. I know you want me to think I’m listening to genius without precedent, but what I really think is that I’m listening to an ignorant IT guy who spilled kale chips on his girlfriend’s baby grand and forgot to clean them up before returning to Ableton.

DO YR HOMEWORK

Owls was always the least embarrassing of the Tim Kinsella projects, and now that it’s finally put out another record of mathy avant rock after 13 years I can pick up where I left off—smoking cigarettes behind a West Hartford teen center, wishing I were somewhere else.

DREXEL SUPERGLUE

HAUSCHKA

Abandoned City City Slang

City Slang really shouldn’t eagerly advertise in their press release that the 40ish-looking experimental musician—who has “brought an exciting new perspective to the prepared piano”—had honestly, seriously, actually, 100-percent really never heard of the

Gift

The last time I ate weed candy I got some bodega sushi and wrote a meditative story about my lunch on my cell phone. You can imagine how that turned out—here’s the deus ex crapina: “I fail to secure the lid of the soy container, and the winds blow it off the ledge of the bench, splattering soy on my shoes—the good pair I use for everyday walking. Very little soy remains in the container now. I don’t like to use too much soy, so it’s not like I considered dipping the rolls into the soy puddle on the ground. Sure, I just mentioned doing that just now, so I wasn’t blind to the possibility of someone else in my situation doing that, but I was never seriously considering it.” The moral is that smoking pot tricks your brain into thinking you’re the next Tracey Emin when in actuality you’re 100 percent pure uncut dickcheese, so don’t go releasing records unless you’ve got something to say.

WATCH WEEDIQUETTE ON VICE.COM

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MARCH

APRIL

THURS 27 - Little Earthquake + We The Brave + The Retreat

THU 3 - Bradley Cork & The Folklore Mantra + guests

+ Karly Christoph

FRI 4 - The Ninjas + Birds With Thumbs + Hockey Dad + Noire

FRI 28 - Sydney Pony Club Quarterly - Kato + Junglesnake

SAT 5 - Glass Ocean + Residual + Little Napier + Jordan RIddle

+ Antoine Vice + Mattrad + Maximus Nice Guy + Blowout DJs

THU 10 - THE FOLK INFORMAL - the best in local & interstate folk

+ Serfo

FRI 11 - TORA + Tim Fitz + Yon Yonson

SAT 29 - The Good Ship (QLD) + Lacey Cole & The Lazy Colts

SAT 12 - KING GIZZARD & THE LIZARD WIZARD + guests

+ The Harry Heat Chrysalis

THU 17 - THE LAUGH STAND - side-splitting stand up comedy SAT 19 - Deadbeat & Hazy + guests THU 24 - Archer & Light + Train Robbers + Missing Children FRI 25 - Empat Lima + Jugular Cuts + Okin Osan SAT 26 - Ben Hauptmann + Danaides + Luke Escombe

+ HANDS UP! Late-night dance party from 11:30pm every Saturday - FREE! + LUNCH BREAK: A live broadcasted set from your favourite local and interstate acts! Bring your lunch to FBi Social or tune-into FBi Radio from 1pm each Wednesday!

FBi Social • L2 Kings Cross Hotel • www.fbiradio.com • www.fbisocial.com Gigs are correct at time of printing - check fbisocial.com for any changes and updates!

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JOHNNY RYAN’S PAGE

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PAT RUMNEY THE STACKS VULC

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