VICE MAGAZINE VOLUME 12 NUMBER 5
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THE PROFILES ISSUE
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Untitled illustration from Alexander Heir’s upcoming monograph, Death Is Not the End, published by Sacred Bones
VOLUME 12 NUMBER 5 Cover by Nick Veasey
THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING TWITTER Mikki Kendall and Her Online Beefs with White Feminists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 THE MAYOR VS. THE OOZE How Toldi Tamás Saved His Town from Environmental Catastrophe . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 BODY OF AN AMERICAN The Russian Immigrant Who Conquered Porn and Became One of the Most Powerful Gay Men in New York City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
PRESIDENT CHILL Uruguay and Its Ex-Terrorist Head of State May Hold the Key to Ending the Global Drug War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 THE VICTIM How the Danish Legal System Gave Away Thomas Altheimer’s Identity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 A BUM WITHOUT A COUNTRY Mike Gogulski Builds a Life Outside the State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
14 Masthead 16 Employees 18 Front of the Book 40 DOs & DON’Ts 44 Fashion: Inside Out 74 People Reviews 80 Johnny Ryan’s Page
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EMPLOYEES OF THE MONTH
NICK VEASEY Nick Veasey is technically a photographer, we suppose, but he’s more of a quirky radiologist who has spent the past 20 years or so experimenting with X-ray machines, fusing art and science in the process and showing off the results. His work has been on the cover of Time magazine, and his photos are in a bunch of important museums. For this issue, we asked Nick to do his first-ever fashion shoot. The process involved loud warning sirens, flashing lights, lead doors, and a giant, humming machine. It was slightly frightening, but not any more than the plethora of makeup artists, stylists, and heavy-duty hair equipment you’d find at a normal fashion shoot. See THE COVER and INSIDE OUT, page 44
TIM SCOTT Tim Scott is a music writer, band booker, radio guy, and proud son of Doncaster Shoppingtown. He’s risen from intern at an “alt-country” magazine, through the ranks of community radio, to become the new editor of Noisey, our online appendage for all things music. As our in-house jam authority he’ll be across things like finding new artists, writing about old ones, organising exclusive streams and premiers, and applying his finely tuned cultural critiques to rappers’ Instagram accounts. Other than his set of suitable skills, he’s also a big NBA fan, an important quality for an office who shares his interest in the men who date reality TV stars. In a quiet moment he mentioned that his actual dream job is shooting guard in the NBA team, adorable. Welcome to the team Tim, we look forward to chasing all your dreams away.
SIMON WINKLER As our new editor of Thump, VICE’s channel for electronic music and culture, Simon’s list of responsibilities will range from telling us which eastern European country has the best superclubs, curating the best non-guitar-playing musicians for you to read about, and playing stuff that we’ve never heard before at work drinks. He’s a busy guy too, hosting the radio show Breaking and Entering on Melbourne’s home of soft-speaking music wonks, RRR. But he’s not all about the sick beats. This neat-haired, silken-voiced young man’s bag of eclectic interests include arctic weather patterns, ice-cream sandwiches, French-Japanese anime, and the Cookie Monster. And as we finish typing this paragraph, we realise we’ve hired a 9-yearold to run our electronic music site.
ATOSSA ARAXIA ABRAHAMIAN Atossa Araxia Abrahamian started to question the meaning of citizenship when her kindergarten teacher asked her what country’s costume she would wear for her international school’s Christmas show. She didn’t know how to answer the question then, and she definitely doesn’t know how to answer it now. This conundrum has inspired her many stories about citizenship, passports, and statelessness, including her profile, in this issue, of stateless ex-American Mike Gogulski, who renounced his citizenship in protest of his former country’s actions around the world. Atossa’s work has appeared in Dissent, the New York Times, Reuters, and other outlets. She is an editor at the New Inquiry and Al Jazeera America. See A BUM WITHOUT A COUNTRY, page 68
THEODORE ROSS Theodore Ross’s meditations on odd Jews (he counts himself among them), childhood pseudocelebrity, and illegal fishing have appeared in Harper’s, the New York Times, the Oxford American, Saveur, and lots of other prestigious publications that few people read. He is the author of the book Am I a Jew?: My Journey Among the Believers and Pretenders, the Lapsed and the Lost, in Search of Faith (Not Necessarily My Own), My Roots, and Who Knows, Even Myself. He was kindly asked to leave after being an editor at both Harper’s and Men’s Journal, and he takes pride in the fact that no security officers were involved in his departure from either publication. See THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING TWITTER, page 24
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,PDJH 6WLOO IURP $)756 VWXGHQW ÀOP The Twin. Photo by Jessica Craig Piper
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HUNDREDS OF ABORIGINAL WOMEN ARE BEING MURDERED IN CANADA, AND NO ONE KNOWS WHY In February, the body of 26-year-old Loretta Saunders, a pregnant Inuit woman from the Canadian province of Newfoundland, was found dumped off the side of the highway in New Brunswick. Saunders, a student at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, had been writing her thesis on missing and murdered aboriginal women in Canada—in a tragic twist, she became one of the subjects of her own research, the latest in what is estimated to be hundreds of murders and disappearances of indigenous Canadian women.
BY GRACE WYLER Photo by Nicky Young
The Canadian government doesn’t collect national data on missing persons, but a database compiled by Maryanne Pearce, an independent researcher, documents 4,035 cases of missing or murdered women and girls since the 1950s, 883— or nearly 25 percent—of which involve aboriginal women. That’s a shocking statistic, given that aboriginal women make up just 3 percent of the Canadian population. The reasons behind all these deaths and disappearances remain murky. According to David Langtry, head of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, the issue of violence against aboriginal women in Canada can be attributed, at least in part, to the country’s historical relationship with indigenous communities. Decades of systemic abuse and government-sanctioned racism have left Canada’s indigenous population—particularly women and girls—more vulnerable to violent crime, homelessness, substance abuse, and other social ills than the rest of the population. The numbers bear this out: In 2006, 35 percent of aboriginal women over age 25 had not completed high school, compared with 20 percent of other Canadian women; in 2005, 30 percent of indigenous women were considered lowincome, compared with 16 percent of non-aboriginal women. Despite the overwhelming evidence, the Canadian government has been slow to respond to the crisis, and it has so far resisted calls for a national inquiry. According to a Human Rights Watch study released last year, at least part of the problem also appears to stem from the broken relationship between indigenous women and girls and the Canadian justice system. The report found that many indigenous women have suffered mistreatment and abuse at the hands of law enforcement. The result, said lead researcher Meghan Rhoad, is an environment of mistrust and insecurity that is heightened by a lack of adequate police oversight. “I think it’s fair to say that the government is engaged in a cover-up of the truth of what is happening to indigenous women,” said Shawn Brant, a First Nations activist. “I believe that if the truth of what is happening to First Nations women were exposed, there would be an uprising in Indian country. I believe that First Nations people would be absolutely devastated.”
B O O K
Hey Gang, Let’s Explore the Ocean Floor with a Giant Submarine! BY JULIE LE BARON Photo courtesy of SeaOrbiter/Jacques Rougerie
Jacques Rougerie is a French oceanographic architect who has been designing underwater habitats and nautical museums for more than 30 years, but his latest project is also his most ambitious. He’s building a massive, 550-ton semisubmersible vessel called SeaOrbiter that, by late 2015, will be roaming the seas in search of undiscovered species and submerged relics of lost civilisations. The vessel will be manned by a crew of about 20, including Rougerie, who will live on the high seas for up to six months at a time. I recently went aboard Jacques’s boat in Paris, where he lives and works with his team of scientists, to discuss his project and the future of mankind. VICE: Do you know what sort of missions you’ll undertake once SeaOrbiter is built? Jacques Rougerie: We’ve planned years of expeditions. We will be based in Monaco, where we’ll launch our missions with Prince Albert II of Monaco; then we will sail on the Mediterranean for a year. After that, we’re scheduled to sail on the Atlantic Ocean for eight years—one will be dedicated to a mission in the Sargasso Sea alongside marine biologist Sylvia Earle. With this vessel, we will be able to explore abyssal plains [on the ocean floor], discover underwater mountains, and study unknown animal species—in the Gulf Stream, for example. This project is pretty similar to the Radeau des Cimes [a floating “Canopy Raft” held up by hot air balloons] project that was designed in 1986 to explore the rainforest canopy of the Amazon. That’s exactly what we’re planning to do: observe the canopy of underwater worlds. I had to imagine a next-generation machine that could allow us to live under the sea without danger. Why do you think underwater exploration gets less attention than space travel? The underwater world has fascinated men for centuries, but they are distressed by the sea, which has engulfed sailors, captains, and entire cities. During the space race, [Jacques] Cousteau was conceiving his first houses underwater, because current technology was finally allowing him to do so. At that time, we realised that the ocean wasn’t as gruesome and bleak as we thought it would be. It’s a place of wonder, made of coral galaxies and treasures that could benefit mankind—renewable energies, bacteria, and viruses that could be used to produce drug molecules or the food of the future.
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SOUTH KOREA’S NOT-SO-SUBTLE RACIST HIRING PRACTICES Every year, hundreds of young English speakers drift into East Asia, looking to while away a couple of aimless years between college and the inevitable round of grad-school applications that await them back home. South Korea is an especially popular destination: The Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education alone plans to hire 655 foreign teachers by the end of 2014, a fraction of the 22,000 expat educators working in the country today. But if you want to teach English there, it’s a lot easier if you’re white.
BY ALEXIS K. BARNES Illustration by Jonny Negron
Lasering Tats Is Big Business BY JUSTIN GLAWE Photo courtesy of Phil Marandola
Before
Straight-up racial discrimination is far from hidden in South Korea: A recent ad for English teachers posted on Craigslist by Talk and Learn, a Seoul language academy, simply stated, “Need: White” on its list of required qualifications. When black teachers do make it into the classroom, they’re often passed over in favor of their white counterparts. “I’ve had kids pulled from my class and placed in Caucasian teachers’ classes due to the request of parents wanting their child to learn from a white American and not a black one,” said Megan Stevenson, a Seoul-based American English teacher whose parents are black and Korean. Selin Jung, a Korean middle school student, laid out the logic for me. “Many Korean students like white teachers more than black teachers,” Jung said. “They think white teachers are more clean and have better pronunciation.”
Discrimination against foreigners has long been rampant in ethnically homogenous South Korea. The country’s relative isolation, coupled with sporadic subjugations by its more powerful neighbours, has infused South Korean nationalism with a sense of ethnic identity and racial purity, and those perceptions are only now starting to shift as Koreans adapt to globalisation. Whatever the reason for the racism encountered by English teachers, blatantly discriminatory hiring practices are a black eye for South Korea as the country struggles to adapt to its growing role in the global economy. A 2011 survey conducted by the Ministry of Justice found that, out of 931 foreign migrant workers, 78 percent said they had been verbally assaulted. To combat this and other abusive workplace practices, Korean
Across the United States, as you read this, people are getting ink needled onto their skin. More than a fifth of Americans have tattoos, and the tattoo industry brings in $2.3 billion in annual revenue. Many of the pieces of body art adorning American flesh are no doubt timeless works, but more are sloppily executed, embarrassing in the sober light of morning, or faded beyond recognition. So while the tattoo business continues to expand, some people, like Phil Marandola, are counting on another growth industry: tattoo removal. In late 2012, Marandola and his mother, Carmen Vanderheiden, founded a company called Tataway that, their website says, is there to help the “9 million people in the United States with tattoo regret.” Their main piece of equipment is a $340,000 laser called the PicoSure, which blasts tats with a trillion pulses of light a second. This displaces the ink from the crevices in your skin, which lets your immune system clear away the dislodged ink and wipe your human canvas clean. Tataway charges a few hundred dollars a treatment, though it can take multiple treatments to erase a tattoo (the average cost of removing one, Marandola said, is $1,500). Different ink types, your health, and the size of your tattoo all play a role in determining how many sessions it will take to make your ex-girlfriend’s name disappear. Sometimes, it can After take a year or more.
lawmakers drafted anti-discrimination legislation in 2013 that would have prohibited employers from discriminating against applicants based on ethnicity, skin colour, age, sexual orientation, and other factors. But the bill faced heavy opposition from corporations and conservative Christian groups, who attacked it as pro–North Korean and pro-gay, and is still pending review by Korea’s Legislation and Judiciary Committee. For now, those “Need: White” Craigslist ads are going to stay up.
Though that sounds like a long process, the PicoSure and other next-generation tattoo-removal technologies have made tats much easier to get rid of, and that has helped fuel the industry’s growth, said Lorenzo Kunze II, owner of the International Laser Academy, which certifies companies like Tataway to perform removals. “It’s safe to say that [removal] is definitely growing into a billiondollar industry,” Kunze said. “Thirteen years ago, we were charging $1,000 to $2,000 a treatment, and there was still scarring.” Besides the new technology, another reason the tattoo-removal business is expanding is that people want to swap their old, shitty tats out for better ones. “I think people have learned what better tattooing looks like, and now they want that old crap removed and new stuff put on,” said Chad Chase, a tattoo artist who works with Marandola. Erasing tattoos isn’t merely about aesthetics, of course. Marandola has offered free removals to gang members trying to disassociate themselves from their former lives and to breastcancer patients whose radiation treatments have left marks on their skin. “There are infinite reasons to have a tattoo removed,” said Cynthia Finch, a tattoo artist who recommends her clients to Marandola. One of the biggest ones, she told me, is the need to find a job. “I think that most people feel strongly enough about their tattoos that they acquire the mindset of, If they don’t like my tattoos, fuck ’em,” she said. “I don’t think people take job security into consideration when getting tattooed.”
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TRAINING BURMESE REFUGEES FOR WESTERN LIVING Thailand’s largest refugee camp, Mae La, is a dense, overcrowded city of more than 44,000 people on the country’s border with Burma. Bamboo huts sprawl over hills, their dirt-floor interiors containing few possessions beyond NGOissued goods like bags of rice and toothbrushes.
WORDS AND PHOTO BY MARC APOLLONIO
On one hill sits a hut that doesn’t quite fit in: Its roof, like the thousands around it, is made of thatched grasses and leaves, but its walls are grey-painted wood. Inside is what looks like a small but tidy bachelor pad: appliances, an oven, a window, a bathroom, a fridge full of fruits, vegetables, and eggs. But the food is all plastic, the toilet doesn’t work, and no one is supposed to live here—it’s a simulator apartment, designed to get Mae La refugees accustomed to the amenities of Western living before they finally immigrate to any of a dozen countries that take in people leaving Burma. My guide to the apartment was Saw Norman, a Karen refugee who’s a member of one of the many ethnic groups whose rebel fighters have spent decades at war with the Burmese government. Now 52, Norman (whose name has been changed at his request) has been fleeing the conflict since he was eight. In 2006, he and his family fled across the border into Thailand. He’s lived in Mae La ever since. “We call this a sink, to wash the plates, and then after we wash the plates, we dry the plates and arrange them on the plate shelf,” he told me. Despite his enthusiasm, Norman has never used many of the apartment’s devices in real life, and he likely won’t get a chance to. Despite his English skills and a strong desire to move his family to a country where his children can get a good education, Norman won’t be eligible for resettlement in the foreseeable future. The year before he arrived in Mae La, the Thai government stopped registering any new arrivals from Burma, and registration is a prerequisite for resettlement. “Any new arrival who came into the camps since 2005 is not even registered in a database with the Thai government,” said Sally Thompson, the head of the Border Consortium, an NGO that provides aid to Burmese refugees in Thailand. People like Norman have no legal status and, as nonpersons, are much more likely to be deported back to Burma. The only hope for Norman’s family to get out of Mae La safely would be the end of Burma’s civil war, which has been raging for more than 60 years. The government and the rebels are currently holding ceasefire talks, but there is still fighting in some parts of the country. Even if Norman had the choice, he wouldn’t return to Burma anyway. If he could, he’d move to the West so his three children could improve their lives. But for now, Mae La is home, and the simulated apartment is just a fantasy.
We Need to Get Better at Coding BY ALEX ELLEFSON Photo by alengo/iStockphoto
Modern-day humans rely on software engineering in nearly every aspect of our daily lives. Cars use between 15 and 50 microprocessors to get us from A to B. Banks rely on colossal databases and searching algorithms to store and retrieve our financial data. And one of the main features of America’s Affordable Care Act, which went into effect late last year, was a website that was supposed to allow people to sign up for health insurance— unfortunately, HealthCare.gov was a notorious disaster that gave users frequent error messages and had glaring security flaws. That wasn’t an aberration. According to 2013’s CHAOS Manifesto, a yearly report on the tech industry published by the Standish Group, only 39 percent of software projects were completed on time and within budget. “We don’t build [a product] to be high-quality, generally speaking,” said Dennis Frailey, a member of the board of governors at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. “The pressure is to get it out quickly. And this was one of the problems with the health-care system—they tried to get it out too quickly, and something that massive really needed more time.” Software failures can cost governments and businesses huge chunks of cash in a single stroke. In 2004, British food retailer Sainsbury’s had to hire an additional 3,000 clerks to stock its warehouses after the company’s $526 million automated supplychain management system failed to move products off the shelves. And in 2012, it was revealed that the city of Long Beach, California, failed to collect $17.6 million in parking ticket fines partly as a result of an antiquated software system. Frailey thinks that one way to cut down on mishaps like these is for software engineers to be required to demonstrate a certain level of expertise before offering their services to the public, just like professionals in disciplines such as medicine and law. Last year, 30 states included software engineering on a list of professions that require practitioners to pass state licensing exams in order to work on projects that could affect public safety, a requirement supported by a majority of 3,500 software engineers surveyed in a 2008 poll. Phillip Laplante, the chairman of the committee charged with developing the exam, explained the reasoning behind the requirement this way: “Don’t you want some level of confidence that the person who wrote that software that is controlling the nuclear plant is who they said they are?” As Laplante’s example suggests, while the HealthCare.gov snafu was bad, future software failures have the potential to cause large-scale disasters. “I do worry that this is going to be a sleeper topic until, one day, something very bad happens and it’s traced back to some failing in software,” he said.
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THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING TWITTER Mikki Kendall and Her Online Beefs with White Feminists BY THEODORE ROSS, PHOTO BY RYAN LOWRY
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ou don’t need to know anything about the history of racial tension among white and black feminists to understand Mikki Kendall. But it helps. In 1870, a good many white suffragists opposed the passage of the 15th Amendment—which allowed African American men to vote—on the grounds that black males ought not to be given voting rights before white women. Frances Willard, a leader of the suffragist movement, even supported the predilection for lynching beloved by her white sisters below the Mason-Dixon Line. In an 1890 interview with the New York Voice, Willard said that “the best white people” down South had told her that “great, dark-faced mobs,” multiplying “like the locusts of Egypt,” had threatened “the safety of woman, of childhood, [and] the home.” Such an onslaught necessitated a vigorous defense, she believed, often by men in white sheets. A pioneering black journalist and suffragist named Ida B. Wells had the temerity to confront Willard. But Willard and other white feminists were unapologetic and attacked Wells. She had transgressed a bedrock principle of the nascent women’s movement: Women don’t criticise other women. They stand in solidarity. One morning last August, Kendall, who is black, had Ida Wells in mind as she debated whether or not to violate this principle. An aspiring writer and full-time office worker for the Department of Veterans Affairs in Chicago, Kendall was curled up on a red love seat in the living room of her Hyde Park apartment, her computer perched on a small lap desk. She was thinking about “cuss[ing] out” Jill Filipovic, a white feminist writer and editor with whom Kendall had a Twitter beef. The origins of said beef are baroque and often confusing and always of the “(s)he tweeted, she tweeted variety.” To follow its thread requires one to know (and care) about the Twitter doings of a defrocked male feminist named Hugo Schwyzer, a young woman who goes by the Twitter handle @Blackamazon, and whether or not Filipovic had expressed support for the former at the expense of the latter. But the real import was Kendall’s belief that white feminists—not necessarily Filipovic, a reasonable sort who makes a poor target—behave in a Willardesque fashion and go unchallenged because of that same historical call to solidarity. Kendall chose not to curse at Filipovic and instead drafted a hashtag: #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen. The slogan meant to reference the long history of internecine feminist discord, one in which black women are obliged to suppress their needs in defense of white prerogatives. She began riffing on #Solidarity, again and again and again, in more than 40 tweets: “#SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen when you ignore the culpability of white women in lynching, Jim Crow, & in modern day racism”; “#SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen when you idolise Susan B. Anthony & claim her racism didn’t matter”; “#SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen when feminist discussions of misogyny in music ignore the lyrics of [the Rolling Stones song] Brown Sugar.” She knocked out scores of Tweets in an hour, tapping the rich vein of black female marginalisation until Twitter locked her out for over-tweeting. (This, apparently, is possible.) So she hopped off the couch and made herself a snack. By the time she returned to her computer she was famous.
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eople can quibble about the significance of “trending” on Twitter, what it means, how deep it runs, why and whether anyone should care. But it is a fact that from 1:20 PM on August 12, 2013, until 2:40 PM the following day, many individuals in this country and around the world suddenly gave some form of a shit about Mikki Kendall and her views on unity among feminists of the white-lady variety. An analysis
by iTrended.com found that #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen was for nearly four hours the most popular Twitter hashtag in the United States, and for 40 minutes it was the third most popular in the world. It trended in 61 US cities, rising to the top position in 21 of them. An estimated 7 million people participated in the hashtag, according to Ebony, whether by chiming in with their own take or by serving as an object of its ire.
Less than a year has passed since Kendall’s hashtag outburst, but much has changed. Gone is the “aspirational” caveat attached to her writing endeavors, as her articles have appeared in the Guardian, Ebony, Essence, and xoJane. Mother Jones named her one of its “13 Badass Women of 2013,” putting her under the same banner as Pussy Riot, a nine-year-old Pakistani girl who survived a US drone strike, and novelist and MacArthur “Genius” grant recipient Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. There have been multiple interviews on NPR, and stories on her in Bitch, Bustle, the Hairpin, and New York. She quit her job with the VA and began a master’s degree in writing, and she employed a literary agent with whom she is working on a book proposal for a memoir called Tales of a Hood Feminist. Other hashtags followed, including #FastTailedGirls, a play on sexual stereotypes in the black community; #FoodGentrification; and the tongue-in-cheek advice tag #HoodPSA (“When angry black girls start clapping, start running or start fighting”). Clever though these hashtags may be, they’re not that clever. Plenty of folks combine a razor-sharp facility with language and a finely tuned sense of the pop-cultural zeitgeist and still never make the papers. What distinguishes Kendall is a sense of personal stake, and a knack for discerning and communicating the nugget of virality hidden amid the clutter of things that bother her. “What Mikki has done that is so important,” said her friend Sydette Harry, a.k.a. @Blackamazon, “is say, ‘I am a person you need to pay attention to.’ There’s no one quite like her. She’s an emblem of what Twitter has become and is for.” VICE 25
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“I
t’s surreal,” Kendall told me one frigid day in January at the Medici, a restaurant near her apartment that used to be a hangout for 1960s radical antiwar activists. “I’m real for my family now. I was in Ebony and Essence. Nobody cares about the other stuff. Those are what matter for them. Now I’m real.” Unfortunately, Kendall’s Twitter fame hasn’t translated into popularity, exactly, particularly among the white feminists she has taken to task. A post on the blog Jezebel, which touted its “Favorite #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen Tweets,” neglected to include any of Kendall’s and failed to credit her as the hashtag’s originator. Jezebel updated the article with an apology. An invitation for her to write on the site has not been forthcoming. What’s more, deliberations on Kendall’s attitude and demeanor, and not her ability, have become ubiquitous. Michelle Goldberg’s “Feminism’s Toxic Twitter Wars,” a January article in the Nation, came one note shy of portraying Kendall as the poster child for online bitchery. This perception has become so pervasive as to spark a sarcastic rejoinder, of course involving a hashtag. From @suey_park, the Twitter wag who enjoyed her own recent burst of hashtag celebrity with the creation of #CancelColbert: “‘but mikki kendall is a bully and we are all too scared to say it’ #WhiteFeministRants.”
“Support Tattooed Military” written on it in white block letters, a reference to her own ink, which she wasn’t showing, and her stint in the army. She sports a tangle of short dreads, greying at the roots, and has a round and ample build. “What they call thick,” she said with a smile. “Pretty for a black girl. That’s something I’ve had said to me.” Kendall told me about her upbringing in pre-gentrification Hyde Park, how she grew up “where they were shooting. They still do occasionally.” She told me about her mother, who left her at the hospital at birth and wouldn’t give her a name; about being raised by her extended family, Chicagoans who’d come north from Mississippi and Louisiana during the Great Migration; about her grandmother, a South Side beauty— “shoulders back, head up”—who insisted that she go to school, and to whom Kendall gave her high school diploma on graduation day. She talked about poverty and rising out of it, about a bad first marriage and a good second one, and about her two children, one from each. She wouldn’t tell me everything—“I’m not laying out my entire life story for everyone”—but she said enough, and has written enough, to show that she is aware of who she is and how that person is perceived. In an article for xoJane, published after #Solidarity, she wrote: I’m one of those people. More specifically, I’m one of those black people. You know, the ones folks like to sneer about in discussions of life in the inner city, single mothers, welfare, you name it. I probably could fit at least part of a negative stereotype… So as I sit here at this metaphorical table, I see how cultural differences influence the tone of the conversation. I don’t think that women of any colour need to be respectable to be valuable.
Echoes of the Wells-Willard confrontation can be heard in Kendall’s strained entrance into the public conversation. The white feminist establishment has hastened to reckon with the criticisms expressed in #Solidarity. In the Nation article, Anna Holmes, the founder of Jezebel, who is also black, noted the “Olympian attempts on the part of white feminists to underscore and display their ally-ship” with black feminists. But those allegiances do not extend to Kendall, whom Goldberg described as “obsessed” with old slights and eager to batter her Twitter adversaries senseless with her 140-character club. “Sometimes she has very legitimate criticisms about society and media and speaks out against things that are real,” said one prominent feminist, who would not talk to me on the record. “But she’s not a victim. She’s incredibly self-aggrandising and often engages in very troubling, bullying behavior and targets individuals for no discernible reason other than that doing so seems to make her feel powerful. It’s sad.”
“I
have a little bit of a temper,” Kendall told me at the Medici. “I have a lot of a temper. I can be very nice. But I can be provoked, and then, for a minute, I might let you have it with both barrels.” Sitting in a graffiti-covered wooden booth and sipping a strawberry lemonade, Kendall didn’t appear mad, but only as she is: a 37-year-old hip-but-not-hipster mother of two, dressed in black corduroy pants, sensible shoes, and a black T-shirt with
Which circles back to bullying. Is Mikki Kendall a bully? Can she even be one? Answering such questions is never easy. It requires more than an analysis of the specific actions of individuals—she was nice, or she wasn’t. It takes an understanding of structural power and racism, cultural differences and how they play out, the value (and existence) of collective or historical guilt, and whether it makes any damn difference whether the language someone like Kendall uses is “constructive.” Because in truth I could read a Kendall tweet-rant assailing some “leading online feminist” whom I’ve never heard of but who is reliably white and conventionally pretty, and my first instinct might be to dismiss it as mean-spirited or overreacting. But if a ping-ponging of tweets in agreement with Kendall came from the masses of black and brown and Asian people, trans folk and those with preferred pronouns or identity gripes and aspirations, the angry disenfranchised and the outsider aspirants, I would have to step back and rethink. “I don’t expect them to be my friends,” Kendall said of her critics. “But I grew up in the hood. Here, ‘Don’t start none, won’t be none’ is a life lesson. If you pick a fight, then you’re in a fight. You don’t then get to say, when you lose that fight, that you were bullied. Because you picked the fight.” We left the Medici late in the afternoon for a walk in the failing winter sunlight. Kendall spoke of her future plans, her writing, a #FastTailedGirls documentary film she was hoping to put together. She was cheerful, wanted to talk, to be a good host, to show me the frozen banks of Lake Michigan, a great bookstore, to find me something warm to drink. “I’m not everyone’s cup of tea,” she said. “There are people who can’t stand me, and others who love me. But I’m willing to be disliked.”
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THE MAYOR VS. THE OOZE How Toldi Tamás Saved His Town from Environmental Catastrophe BY SEAN WILLIAMS
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n the top floor of a grand old building that used to house the Devecser post office, there’s a museum devoted to the worst environmental disaster in Hungarian history. Hardly anyone ever visits the place, the lights are usually off, and there’s no heat, but one cold December morning I strolled among its dusty glass cases with Toldi Tamás, Devecser’s mayor. Inside the cases are the sorts of things you’d find in someone’s house—a VCR, a Bible, teddy bears. All of the items are caked in the carmine residue of a weird wave of sludge that in 2010 killed ten people, injured 150, and left hundreds in the region homeless. Tamás paused to examine some blown-up press clippings on the wall from publications like Le Monde, the New York Times, and the Guardian. During the hectic days of the crisis, he told me, journalists would flank him as he walked up the steps of the hall while taking calls from his frightened constituents, some of whom had burn marks the size of dinner plates after coming into contact with the sludge. We went up to the roof and took in the view: On one side we could see the elegant town of about 5,000, where baroque halls daubed blue, yellow, and pink sat beside drab Soviet-era apartment blocks along winding cobbled streets. Beyond the old buildings were the 87 new eggshell-coloured houses that Tamás had ordered built from scratch in just eight months. Looking the other way, we could see a vast park where dozens of homes used to stand before the red sludge came. Some were wiped away by the flood; others were so badly damaged that they had to be bulldozed in the days following the disaster. The devastation, now consigned to memory save for the odd patch of rose-tinted soil, occurred in a single day. It also happened to be Tamás’s first official day on the job. He woke up that morning to find himself mayor of a city where people were drowning beneath two feet of polluted water that was rapidly flowing through the streets. Tamás doesn’t seem like the kind of man who saved an entire town. With his thin, grey hair, waxed jacket, billowing scarf, and Chevron mustache, the 62-year-old resembles a cross between a rural party apparatchik and a geography teacher. Hungarians of his generation lived through a Communist regime where stray words could have serious consequences, which may at least partially explain his taciturn nature. Even while touring the museum that serves as a monument to his greatest accomplishment, the idea of heroism is completely lost on him. “You just do your duty,” he said of that time as we walked down the stairs. “It was madness here. I wanted it to be happy again, calm.”
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evecser, located a two-hour drive from Hungary’s capital of Budapest, has long been an important strategic point, and it has been conquered over and over by a succession of empires. The Ottomans tried and failed to raze it seven times in the 16th century. It became a sleepy fiefdom under
the heel of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. During World War II, it was controlled by the Nazis before being overtaken by the Red Army. Tamás was born under Soviet rule, in 1952, to a farmer father and a mother who worked at a meat factory. Devecser was a “great, fun place to grow up,” he told me, even though it was in the midst of an industrial tumult. Ajka, a nearby city of 30,000, was booming: Trees were being torn down, and giant prefab apartment blocks “grew from the ground like mushrooms.” The city was soon home to power plants and an aluminum factory that produced so much filthy red waste, from the bauxite-toaluminum process, that in the 60s a giant reservoir had to be built just outside town to contain the toxic runoff (the stuff was so alkaline that it could cause skin burns on contact). Meanwhile, Devecser “was left to the old people,” Tamás told me. “Houses were dilapidated, and there were no real prospects.” For fun, the townspeople would sit around a wireless and listen to Radio Free Europe—a welcome alternative to the crude propaganda pumped out daily by Hungary’s Sovietbacked politburo. “We were isolated and had to listen to a lot of crap,” Tamás said. Tamás followed in his father’s footsteps and in the 60s, after attending college, joined a local state-owned agricultural firm. In the 80s, he was drafted into the Hungarian army for a stint in which 100 men were placed under his command. Rations were tight, and there was little to do; the men staved off “hard-worn boredom” by spending hours watching staterun television broadcasts. In the afternoons, when the officers left the barracks, they would climb to the top of the roof and reposition the TV antenna toward Austria. It was one of the few ways they could learn about life beyond the Iron Curtain. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and Hungary began to embrace capitalism. Tamás, by then an agricultural commissioner trading cattle with the West, bought a plot of land and established his own farm, which became wildly successful. In 1995, Ajka’s aluminum plant was privatised under Magyar Aluminium (MAL). It regularly inspected the reservoir, which was slowly filling up with red mud—after the disaster, a spokesman for the company would tell the media that the last appraisal of the facility showed “nothing untoward.” Eventually Tamás ran for mayor. To hear him tell it, he was persuaded to enter the race by friends who were upset that the last two Devecser mayors had been Communists from other towns. Tamás, a local kid who had managed to garner the respect of the community, was temperamentally and politically conservative—in other words, the ideal candidate. The race against incumbent László Holczinger was a close one: Voting ended at 6 PM on October 3, 2010, but Tamás didn’t find out he’d won until after midnight. Congratulatory toasts were made as the victory party carried over into daylight. Just hours later, the sludge came and washed the town away. VICE 29
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The aftermath of the flood of toxic red sludge that hit Devecser, Hungary, on October 5, 2010, after a reservoir owned by an aluminum plant burst. Photo by Tomas Benedikovic/ isifa/Getty Images
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ctober 4, 2010, was an uncommonly bright Monday for autumn. Having celebrated until the wee hours, Tamás slept in until 10 AM. His wife, Irma, had already left to teach her math class up the street, but he still had plenty of time to clean himself up before his 2 PM inauguration at town hall. He never made it. A little after midday, Tamás was overwhelmed by phone calls. His voicemail was full of messages from virtually everyone he knew, all of them frantic about some sort of flood. It was then that he first looked out the window: A tidal wave of rust-coloured slime was rushing down the street, taking cars, furniture, and people with it. As the slurry ripped through downtown, residents caught in the river were gasping for air. Cries rang out from people clinging to anything they could get their hands on. The dam keeping the red mud in MAL’s reservoir had burst, and a million cubic meters of hazardous waste was spilling out into the surrounding towns and villages. Devecser was among the hardest hit, and Tamás suddenly had a crisis of immense proportions on his hands. “It was a busy first day,” he told me. The townspeople had had no warning before the river of what looked like blood surged through Devecser. Homes were filled with foul ooze or wrecked by the force of the flood. People were forced to climb onto their roofs. Pets, vehicles, and even children were washed away by the red mud—Angyalka Juhász, a toddler from the nearby village of Kolontár, drowned when the sludge smashed through the walls of her house and ripped her away from her mother, Erzsebét. “Our family is cursed,” Erzsebét told Bulgarian journalist Dimiter Kenarov. She had already lost one young son when he
was hit by a train, and now her entire family was covered in huge alkali burns from exposure to the mud. Hundreds of her neighbours were suffering the same painful sores. The messages Tamás was receiving on his phone were getting grimmer by the minute. “There was a huge panic,” he told me. “People didn’t know what to do. They were running all around like poisoned mice. There was a chaos of communication.” Tamás quickly sprang into action: After calling Irma to advise her to stay at school, on higher ground, with the kids, he rang up old friends from the farming business who owned heavy machinery—tractors, diggers, dozers—that could be used to pull people from danger. “I asked them to go rescue people from their windows and rooftops,” he told me. His own house was being pummeled by the mud as he made his calls, but it survived, unlike the homes around it, thanks to its six-inch concrete foundation. Within hours the cameras from international news stations showed up and introduced the world to Devecser. At the same time, MAL was going on a PR offensive to claim that the red mud wasn’t dangerous. “It’s an innocuous material,” CEO Zoltán Bakonyi told one reporter. (He later apologised for the comment.) Even if that were true—which it wasn’t—it would have provided scant comfort for those who had lost their homes or worse. Anyone who had been affected by the flood knew that the substance that had flowed through the streets was anything but innocuous. People who had waded through the red mud started getting painful burns on their legs and arms, sores that took a long time to heal. Peter Pallinki, a butcher from Ajka, had climbed onto his roof when the mud slammed into his living room, and a year afterward he was still nursing the gaping
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wounds on his knee that had put him out of work. “Painkillers are my breakfast now,” he told Kenarov. For three nights after the flood Tamás barely slept; at one point he stayed up for 24 hours straight. He was kept busy coordinating with officials in neighbouring towns to provide refuge for the hundreds who were displaced. While he worked, he answered constant phone calls and dealt with reporters throwing microphones in his face wherever he went. The town, which had been under his leadership for less than a week, was caked in poisonous red mud, and the relatives of people who were dying in the hospital from God-knows-what wanted to know how, in the 21st century, no one could figure out that a concrete wall had been about to break. Tamás didn’t know what to tell them. He was tired, angry, and inundated with too many requests to handle. Irma worried about his health but made sure to keep calm around him. “Without her,” he told me, “I could not bear anything.” Tamás got a second phone for calls from the press, and it rang day and night. The Hungarian government sent in more than 500 policemen and soldiers to maintain control of the village, direct traffic, and prepare to evict people from damaged homes (in the end, all the townsfolk left their houses peacefully). A pontoon bridge was thrown across Kolontár’s Marcal River to replace a bridge that had collapsed in the slide. Plaster and other chemicals were poured into the river to stem the tide, extinguishing its ecosystem overnight. Devecser looked like a postapocalyptic version of Stepford. As the days passed and the mud dried, it blew into the air and enveloped Devecser in a scarlet sandstorm. People began to have trouble breathing. Tamás waded through the mud, coordinating every aspect of the cleanup and rebuilding process.
Sometimes he’d forget which phone was which—reporters were told about the post office, and locals got information about the blueprints that were being sketched for a new housing project across town. He soon slipped into a pattern of sleeping from 11 PM to 2 AM, which lasted a year. He had no choice—quitting wasn’t an option. “I never really seriously thought of giving up and turning my back on anyone,” Tamás said. Within weeks of the disaster, Tamás, working with famed architect Imre Makovecz, had drawn up plans for 87 new homes for those still without houses. They would be completed within eight months, using nothing but local materials. Some people who lived in damaged houses that had survived the initial flood weren’t sure the new homes would be constructed and chose to stay. Three years later, Tamás told me, they’re angry with him and bitter that they’re stuck in their red-mud-stained homes. “They didn’t believe I could do it,” Tamás said. “That’s tough luck. But I have to make tough decisions.” Today, when the mayor sees some of those people in the street, they won’t make eye contact with him. He had a lot of latitude to make those decisions—Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s populist prime minister, told Tamás to knock down anything that had been damaged and replace it. Budapest auctioned off 230 Communist-era relics, including more than a dozen portraits of Lenin, to help fund disaster relief, and the government eventually provided $190 million in aid. The region also received $9.6 million from private donors. Among the demolished buildings had been a crumbling old cinema that the locals had been complaining about for years. “People had been asking for that cinema to be knocked down for 20 years,” Tamás said, chuckling. “I guess it wasn’t all bad.”
A dog covered in toxic sludge. Photo by Tomas Benedikovic/ isifa/Getty Images
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The development built by Toldi Tamás in the wake of the flood. Photo by Sean Williams
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fter we left the town hall, Tamás took me to a small kindergarten. Toward the back of the building is a dim room with a sandbox on the floor and yellow-brown blocks of salt lining the wall. It’s a salt room, the type of which is common in high-end spa resorts and is said to relieve respiratory problems. (Many dismiss salt rooms as pseudoscience.) “We make the kids take lessons in this room at least once a week,” Jennervé Pál Szilvia, the school director, told me. Tamás had insisted the school install the salt room to help kids suffering from clogged lungs, and he persuaded two Austrian businessman who’d visited shortly after the flood to pony up $65,000 to pay for it. “We’re so fortunate our children weren’t affected more,” said Szilvia. “Of course we were scared. But it’s an unbelievably great achievement, what’s been done here… We were saved by this man.” Tamás smiled briefly before fixing his face to its default frown setting. “I was just doing my job,” he said quietly before heading slowly to the front door. Other improvements made as the town was rebuilt according to Tamás’s vision included a bus station heated by geothermal energy and a mulch-powered generator set up behind the town hall that heats the new homes. To run the generator, Tamás ordered a 75-acre poplar field to be planted on the damaged land. The poplars, which can grow up to eight feet a year, are chopped down every other summer and turned into mulch. Hungarian politics are notoriously corrupt, and many have questioned some of Tamás’s more ambitious projects like the salt room and the mulch-powered generator, but he showed me a series of documents detailing when each project had been completed and how much it had cost—a rare amount of transparency for a mayor.
After the school, he showed me the new development built in the wake of the flood. The 87 white, red-roofed houses are all slightly different, and at the center of the development is a small chapel with a spire girded by two bronze wings—though it looks a bit like a half-submerged trout, it’s supposed to evoke a phoenix-like triumph. At the bottom of the development are half a dozen homes whose walls are trimmed with ceramics and hanging baskets. They belong to Devecser’s small Roma population, who lived on the town’s lowest ground before the flood hit. As in other Eastern and Central European countries, the Roma have been increasingly persecuted in recent years. In August 2012, about a thousand black-shirted supporters of the far-right Jobbik (“Better Hungary”) Party marched through Devecser to protest against “Gypsy crime.” Tamás, sensing my train of thought as we looked at the Roma houses, said, “They keep to themselves, but they’re nice people.” There are some things Tamás would have done better if he’d had more time and sleep. Perhaps more homes could have been built. A quicker cleanup could have saved those still suffering from burns. And he struggles to hide his anger at Bakonyi and MAL—the company was fined $650 million and nationalised after the reservoir burst, but though some employees, including Bakonyi, face charges, the mayor claims they’ve all so far escaped jail time. “Why should the judgment take so long?” Tamás said. “No one can understand. I can’t.” But for someone who woke up to an environmental catastrophe on his first day and has had to rebuild his town from the ground up, it’s fair to say that Tamás has been pretty good for Devecser. Irma is proud of him, anyway, which is all that matters to him.
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BODY OF AN AMERICAN The Russian Immigrant Who Conquered Porn and Became One of the Most Powerful Gay Men in New York City BY MITCHELL SUNDERLAND, PHOTOS BY MATTHEW LEIFHEIT
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f you believe the conventional wisdom about the porn industry—that it’s falling apart, that there’s no money in it, that the studios that once made high-quality films are being supplanted by unwashed amateurs with webcams and stained mattresses—a visit to the immaculate offices of Lucas Entertainment will disabuse you of those notions. Located on the second floor of an office building in midtown Manhattan, the place is less a palace of sleaze and more a temple to 21st-century showbiz yuppie living. The waiting room, which has a plethora of adult-film-industry awards on the walls, features a plush white chair, an abstractly shaped wooden table, and a fridge stocked with green juice, almond milk, and water bottles. Lining the hall are cabinets containing rows and piles of costumes for porn actors, who do their business in a space that can be decorated as a hotel, bedroom, or pretty much anyplace else where men would plausibly have sex. A few doors down from the set, the company’s 15 employees sit in front of computer screens doing the behind-the-scenes work that results, eventually, in someone somewhere masturbating. For all this, Lucas Entertainment pays $16,500 a month, which it can afford thanks to its steady output of high-budget films that showcase the sexual talents of beefy muscle queens and often have cameos from D-list celebrities like Andy Dick. “We’re the only [gay] company that hasn’t gone belly-up or been owned by a distributor at this point,” Marc MacNamara, Lucas Entertainment’s then creative director, told me when I stopped by last June. “We’re the only company who still travels the world and makes big-budget movies.” (MacNamara has since left Lucas Entertainment to start his own porn studio.) I was there to see Michael Lucas, the founder and animating force of the company that bears his name. A former porn star who still dabbles in performing in films, he looks even today like a man who could sell his body for a living. The 42-year-old has the lean, sculpted body of a model, his skin is implausibly perfect, and his muscles show through his loose-fitting shirts (he told me he works out every day). His office is, unsurprisingly, a monument to all the success he’s had in his 16-plus years in the industry. Gay-porn-magazine covers featuring Lucas are stuck to the walls—X-Factor, Unzipped, Man, Mandate—and the decor also includes antique cameras, Lucas’s law degree from Moscow State University, and a set of artistic-looking photos of gay men: a family with two fathers, a naked guy standing behind an old TV, another naked guy balancing a TV on his butt. When I asked him where he had gotten one of the pictures, he replied, “Someone gave it to me as a gift… It’s interesting, but it’s not good enough for my apartment. I have very beautiful stuff from [Robert] Mapplethorpe there.” Everything about Lucas oozes wealth and power—a 2007 New York magazine profile called him “the Lion of Chelsea” and New York’s only “bona fide member of porn royalty.” But over the past several years, Lucas has also become notorious
for using his fortune and name to promote his pet political causes—mainly, his support for Israel and hatred of Russia, the country from which he emigrated when he was 23. His worldview is clearly present in 2009’s Men in Israel, one of Lucas Entertainment’s most popular videos. The two-hour porno (purportedly the first gay adult film to use an all-Israeli cast) is loaded with long, loving shots of muscular Jewish men fucking, sucking, and rimming on riverbanks and beaches—if not for all the hardcore gay sex, it could have been made by the Israel Ministry of Tourism. “I totally wanted to bring attention to Israel and bring tourists, and it was a success,” Lucas told me. “Gay men would rather watch porn than the geography channels—and I don’t think there are many films about gay Israel—so I not only showed men having sex. I showed them having sex in beautiful surroundings.” He’s praised Israel in the pages of the Advocate, a popular gay publication, and has started to make documentaries: Last year he released Undressing Israel, which praised Israel’s gay-friendly policies, and this April he put out a film about homophobia in Russia called Campaign of Hate. His outspoken Zionism has naturally brought him into conflict with those on the left. The New Republic has called him “gay porn’s neocon kingpin,” and the novelist Sarah Schulman, a Jewish lesbian, penned a New York Times op-ed that accused Lucas of “pinkwashing” Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians. In 2010, Lucas joined a chorus of right-wing voices when he objected to an Islamic cultural center being built near the site of the World Trade Center, writing in the Advocate that the center was an “Islamic colonisation project” and that “Muslims murdered 3,000 people and are building a mosque on the site of a crime.” Lucas is guarded about nearly everything, and talking to him about this stuff—the money, the controversies that surround him, any aspect of his personal life—can be a challenge. When I mentioned to Lucas that he is rich, he stopped me: “Who told you that I’m rich?”
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ucas was born Andrei Treivas in Moscow in 1972. Jewish, gay, and possessed of a natural distaste for authority, he constantly clashed with the confining power structures of the Soviet Union. “He was rebellious,” Marina Giliver, Treivas’s schoolmate and friend, told me. “He didn’t want to go by the Communist standards for how people should be, so he was different.” By age seven, Treivas had started questioning the Soviet Union’s government and politics. One day he asked his grandfather, a Communist Party member, “Why do we go to vote? It doesn’t matter if we vote or not, because there’s only one person on the ballot.” “Don’t you dare say no!” his grandfather shouted. “Don’t you dare tell anyone; don’t you dare talk about it.”
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TOP: Misha and Sasha, a Russian couple who have lived together for eight years and appear in Campaign of Hate BOTTOM: Activist Masha Gessen (left) and her wife, Svetlana Generalova, speak to Lucas about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s anti-gay policies in Campaign of Hate.
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When his parents sent him to a Young Pioneer camp, the Soviet Union’s equivalent of the Boy Scouts, Treivas refused to wear a red tie or wake up at 8 AM to salute the red flag. He told the camp leaders, “I don’t want to go.” They called Treivas a “fucking little Jewish brat,” and an hour later he climbed the camp wall and escaped. He took the train to his family’s country house; his father was infuriated when he saw him, and only the intervention of Treivas’s grandmother stopped his father from punishing him. “It was a Communist regime—there was no freedom of speech, and we didn’t know anything about sex, so I was struggling with understanding who I was,” Lucas told me. “I was abused by kids in school and by teachers, because I was very different, like gay people and others [marginalised in the Soviet Union].” By 1995, the Iron Curtain was gone for good, and Treivas was 23, with a brand-new law degree from Moscow State University. He went west in search of greater freedom, entering Germany on a tourist visa that didn’t allow him to work legally. He ran out of money in two days, but he did have a big dick and a willingness to do whatever it took. He made porn—both gay and straight—in Europe for a time and moved to New York in 1997, after Falcon, then America’s biggest gay-porn studio, saw a French film Treivas had made. They gave the 25-year-old a one-way plane ticket, a one-year contract, and a new, Americanised name. “Michael Lucas” was born. “It’s funny when people say, ‘I don’t have any regrets,’” Lucas told me. “I have regrets all the time… It’s a big regret that I didn’t fucking tell them that I wanted my real name. I like Andrei Treivas. I was 25, and I didn’t know anything about the industry. Falcon didn’t ask me. I saw my new name already in the movie. I was just some Russian boy to them.” For his first four months in New York, Lucas lived in a basement in Midtown with ten other people—each room had just enough space for a mattress, a tiny table, and hangers dangling
from nails in the wall. This didn’t bother him. “When you’re young, when you’re 25, it’s OK,” he said. “You can survive.” Lucas did better than survive—he won a green card through the lottery system and, with his newfound legal status, left Falcon to found Lucas Entertainment in 1998. (He refused to talk to me about his experience at Falcon.) By the time he started his own company, he had a one-bedroom apartment in the West Village (he paid half a year’s rent, plus a fee and the security deposit, in cash) and had achieved what he sees as the American dream. Not only was he hardworking—watch his early films if you don’t believe me—he had started his own business and, in true bootstrapping immigrant fashion, hadn’t even taken out a loan to help his empire grow. “When you take a loan out you waste it,” he said. “If it’s your hard-earned money, then you actually think about how to spend it. You start to be more calculating.” Somewhat surprisingly, Lucas is generally a pretty handsoff manager who trusts his staff to decide when and where to shoot and lets them hire celebrities to make cameos. “I don’t do it for business purposes,” Lucas said of the guest stars. “I do it because I don’t want my guys to burn out. I want to do something that excites them.” Lucas’s only guidelines are that he have approval over the actors (he goes by looks, naturally), that the actors be sober on set (Lucas has tried alcohol but doesn’t like it), and that the films feature intricate plots and big dicks. “A big dick is a major plus,” he said. “I believe in plot because plots make it more interesting. It’s sexy to know why people have sex rather than having people you know saying, ‘Here’s the pizza. Here’s the delivery.’ That’s not sexy. The reason people have sex is hot. Sometimes you’re watching a mainstream movie, and you don’t see the penetration, but it’s hot—and hotter than porn—because you know why they’re having sex.” J. C. Adams, a writer who covers the porn industry, believes these creative decisions are why Lucas Entertainment has flourished in the digital age as older companies have imploded.
LEFT: Porn stars Rod Daily and Vito Gallo with Andy Dick and Lady Bunny, who have gueststarred in Kings of New York, Lucas Entertainment’s cameo-heavy porn series RIGHT: The cover of the second season of Kings of New York
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Stills from Undressing Israel, Lucas’s documentary about Israel’s gay-friendly policies
“This is an industry full of artists and mavericks, but Michael Lucas has never lost sight of the bottom line,” he said. “Additionally, he tries different things, takes creative leaps, and goes against the grain. He released a fetish film called Farts! for Pete’s sake.”
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ast July, I went to MacNamara’s apartment to watch a shoot for an episode of Lucas Entertainment’s Kings of New York and was somewhat disappointed to find that, for all that talk about plots and high budgets, it was as cheap and narratively confused as a homemade YouTube music video. The story revolves around two gay theater owners who are converting an abandoned playhouse into a “gaiety.” As they arrive at the venue, former Village Voice gossip columnist Michael Musto, a fixture of New York’s gay scene, arrives. He’s just been fired from the Voice and has come to see his old childhood theater. After a flashback involving a young Musto at the theater and then a shot of the renovated theater’s opening night, we see the theater owners having anal sex in their apartment for reasons that remain obscure to me. After MacNamara cleared off the bed, he and Angelo and David, the two actors, figured out the scenes as Janet Jackson and Jennifer Lopez tracks played on a stereo. The script didn’t specify exactly how the actors should have sex, so, like choreographers working on a ballet, they had a lengthy discussion about how each position would flow into the next. MacNamara planned the cumshot. “Are you a shooter or a dribbler?” he asked Angelo. They were a little shorthanded on set, and I found myself being enlisted to hold a boom mic over David and Angelo’s heads as they fucked. While I was there, MacNamara wouldn’t let me watch the cameraman shoot stills of the actors, which was just one of the many times Lucas Entertainment employees refused to give me access to something or attempted to influence the writing of this story. Lucas’s assistant, Jeff, told me that Lucas would agree to be interviewed only if he could choose the photos that would appear in the story, and when I asked for photos Lucas emailed me glamour shots of himself in a Speedo. (He later approved the photos of him that accompany this article.) Lucas also played coy when I spoke with him about some of the controversies he’s been involved in. Schulman, the writer who attacked Lucas in the New York Times for his Zionist beliefs, later wrote a book, Israel/Palestine and the Queer International, that included a story of how, in February of 2011, New York’s LGBT Community Center banned Siege Busters,
a pro-Palestinian group, from holding events there. Lucas had threatened an “economic boycott” of the center if they didn’t ban the group, according to Schulman, and the center’s director, Glennda Testone, did as he asked within hours. (The center ignored my requests for comment.) Shortly afterward, Lucas sent out a mass email to brag about the decision. “We prevailed! Congratulations to everyone who stood with me in support of Israel,” he wrote. “With your help it only took eight hours to accomplish our mission.” When I asked Lucas about the story, he replied, “I have no financial influence on the center… If I would, I would use it immediately. They use that stereotype a lot—the rich Zionist pornographer-mogul is shaking his checkbook.” He failed to mention that his husband, the businessman Richard Winger, is the former president of the center. In fact, he didn’t even mention he had a husband until I prodded him about it. (Since I last spoke to Lucas, the couple has started divorce proceedings.) “Michael’s very much about censorship,” said Schulman.
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hough he clearly tries to keep a lid on certain aspects of his life, he never shies away from expressing his beliefs, even if they alienate people or create enemies. The comedian Yonah Ward Grossman, a friend of Lucas’s, said that even Winger disagrees with Lucas’s politics. “He does not share any of Michael’s more strident political or geopolitical views,” Grossman told me. Grossman also said that the porn mogul predicted Putin’s anti-gay laws before anyone else was talking about them. “Some people thought he was crazy,” Grossman said. “Occasionally, life and the world turns, and his craziness proves to be correct… Michael Lucas is probably one of the two or three most geopolitically informed people that I know, and I know a lot of people who are well informed.” Lucas retains the defiant streak that got him into trouble as a kid. Last August, at a tent Lucas sponsored at the annual Ascension charity party on Fire Island, he ordered his staff to kick Nick Gruber—the young, socially connected ex-boyfriend of Calvin Klein—out of the premises. Lucas told the New York Daily News that Gruber had said, “Keep your hands away from me!” to two men who had brushed against him by accident; Gruber then informed Lucas, “I’m straight, and I don’t want gay people touching me!” “You’re leaving,” Lucas told Gruber, according to Lucas’s Facebook. “Do you know who I am?” the 22-year-old said.
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“I don’t know,” Lucas said, “and I don’t even want to know.” Afterward, he was told who Gruber was but shrugged the incident off, even though it was likely to cause ripples in the insular world of New York City power gays, where he is well known. “I’m happy it went public,” Lucas said. “It was a no-brainer for me. I had to do it. Everyone should do it. It’s so easy to stand up to homophobes. Did these other older men just lose it because he’s cute?” He may be secretive about many aspects of his life, but his defining characteristic is right there on the surface: He doesn’t give a fuck and won’t back down when he thinks he’s fighting the good fight. “Michael sees the world in black-and-white,” Bradford Shellhammer, the founder of Queerty and Fab.com and another of Lucas’s friends, told me. “He and I mostly feel the same things about the world, but I subscribe to tact. He’s in your face and aggressive at times. He’s unwilling to accept compromise.” Shellhammer believes it’s even fair to say that Lucas is antiMuslim. “I think he does really object to many principles of the Muslim religion,” he said. “He has very strong opinions about the Muslim religion, especially when it comes to the treatment of women and gays, and you can’t argue with that to some extent.” Whether or not Lucas could fairly be classifi ed as an Islamophobe, he clearly sees the world in terms of good and
evil, famous and irrelevant, capitalist and communist, Zionist and anti-Semite. “I experienced a great deal of anti-Semitism when I was growing up in Russia. Part of my family was killed in the Holocaust,” Lucas told me. “That’s why I understand the need for Jews to have their own state where they can defend themselves and never be exterminated again. My great-grandfather was a rabbi and was killed in his own synagogue by Nazis. I never believed in God. I have nothing to do with Judaism. I believe in the state of Israel and the history of my people, which was very tragic. The contributions Jews have made to the world are great, and all the Jews were getting back was discrimination and extermination.” Grossman said that Lucas reminds him of his own father, who emigrated from war-torn Europe in the middle of the 20th century. Despite the way he’s made his fortune, Lucas holds a set of traditional, old-world values. In 2000, not long after Lucas started his own company, the porn actor’s grandparents visited him in New York, and he immediately took them to the giant menorah in Central Park. “He was just amazed when he got here that a Jewish symbol could be put in a public place and nobody vandalised it,” Grossman said. “That was one of the first things he took his grandparents to see, because he was so blown away by the freedoms we have here.”
Lucas in Moscow. For years, Lucas has warned friends about Putin’s homophobia.
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DOs
Fuck babies.
Behold, the world’s most efficient ensemble. The glasses emit a bookish vibe, the towel is because he gets sweaty when he parties, and the shorts can be easily pulled down by my teeth.
How things like the People’s Temple happen is, you find someone whose lifestyle you believe in more than anyone else’s on Earth, and then you forget the rest of the world ever existed and never look back.
It’s been a while since we last saw André 3000. Hey ya!
Every time you come there’s a bell that rings on the other side of the world, prompting an adolescent Russian boy to run into the street and shoot off a Roman candle, screaming your name at the top of his lungs into the night.
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DON’Ts
Don’t shatter my illusions about the gay experience. Don’t wear loud floral jeggings if you don’t mean it. Don’t make that haircut look like work. Don’t half-ass a “fuck me” pose. Don’t tell me what isn’t real, because I might not be ready to know.
You better lose yourself in the music, the moment / You own it / You better never let it go / You only get one shot / Do not miss your chance to blow / Yourself on thug-twink.com for $40 an hour / This opportunity comes once in a lifetime, yo.
French ravers are canaries in the trend coal mine. You laugh now, but in a couple years every brand manager in Williamsburg will be drinking fancy cans of horse milk and dressing like Tank Girl’s estranged older brother.
This conceptual artist is holding a mirror up to America. We think we’re Chuck Berry or 70s Hollywood, but we’re actually just a racist truck getting 12 miles to the gallon on a Florida highway. Two years from now this truck will be in the Whitney Biennial, and a year after that Sean Penn will buy it for $3.2 million.
You say sexual predator. I say sexy predator.
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DOs
Do what you love and be the best at it—that’s the secret to happiness. Just take a look at these guys. They may not be rich or famous, but collectively they’re the Carl Sagan of making passes at implausibly hot Eastern European street urchins.
Some people think Inland Empire is confusing, but for others it’s like watching a documentary about their childhood.
Now that the creator of Photoshop has made his billions, the only things left to do are attend tank-top conventions and try to remember how to blink.
The best thing about wearing layers is, you can put them on or remove them depending on how hot and matted the insane pubic mass that you just know comes along with that Guns N’ Roses mullet gets.
Together, trophy spouses Dan and Joanne live patient and contemplative lives, each comforted by the fact that whichever of them dies first will pass their riches on to the other.
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DON’Ts
The saddest app for Google Glass so far is the one that shows you the soul of the child the morning-after pill is going to extinguish following his not-quite-mom around to witness the night on which he almost gets made.
If you ever meet a girl at a boat party who asks you to have sex with her below deck, and she’s drinking piss and refusing to smile and dressed like a pirate, and no one else at the party looks like a pirate, just trust me—you should do it.
Even when Wes Anderson directs porn it has to feature exclusively white adults acting like they’ll be 14 forever.
Whoever can guess how many butt plugs are in this bag of butt plugs wins all the butt plugs.
You know how Frank Castle’s family was murdered by the mob and he turned into the Punisher to hunt down and kill all criminals? This guy’s origin story is basically like that, except when he found out he needed to repay his student loans he vowed to be part of every antigoverment protest in Continental Europe. VICE 43
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INSIDE OUT PHOTOS BY NICK VEASEY Stylist: Kylie Griffiths, Props: Marisha Green
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La Senza tights, vintage shoes, Ann Summers whip
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Topman top and pants, vintage briefcase
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Nordic Poetry jacket and top, vintage pants and jewelry
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Gap jacket, Motel top, Calvin Rokit Klein skirt and jeans, scarf, vintage vintage thong shoes andand earrings, cane, American Clone Zone Apparel gimp mask backpack, vintage sunglasses, Ann Summers dildo, Non-Stop Party Shop pen
Topman pants, Vans shoes, Creature skateboard
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Vintage sweater, Topman shirt, American Apparel pants, Claire’s suspenders, vintage glasses, Muji pencil case
Vintage jacket, Primark backpack, vintage glasses
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PRESIDENT CHILL Uruguay and Its Ex-Terrorist Head of State May Hold the Key to Ending the Global Drug War
Photo by Mariano Carranza
BY KRISHNA ANDAVOLU
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O
n the morning of October 8, 1969, José Mujica woke up and got dressed for a funeral. He and nine other young men—nephews of the deceased—piled into a Volkswagen van and waited on the side of a two-lane road that led from Uruguay’s capital, Montevideo, to the small city of Pando, about 14 miles east. Six other cars and a hearse—rented from the fanciest funeral home in the country—drove past, and the VW joined the cavalcade, rumbling through the flat green cattle pastures that hug the South American nation’s coastline. The journey was somber and quiet, until about three miles from Pando, when the mourners subdued the hired drivers of the cars and stuffed them into the back of the Volkswagen.
In reality, there was no funeral to attend, no corpse, and no mourners. The Pando-bound people were members of the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional—also known as the Tupamaros—a Marxist guerrilla group that wished to install a Cuban-style dictator in Uruguay and rid the country of its supposedly kleptocratic government. Mujica, who at 35 years old was one of the group’s earliest and most charismatic members, got into the backseat of one of the cars and clutched the wooden handle of his Spanish-made Z-45 submachine gun. When he arrived in Pando, a sleepy industrial city of 12,000, he and his small battalion robbed its banks and tried to take over the local government, killing a police officer and one civilian in a brazen, chaotic shoot-out in broad daylight. Four decades later, at 74, José Mujica donned Uruguay’s blue-and-white executive sash and became its president after his left-wing coalition party won the country’s 2009 election. Although his hair had greyed and his belly had expanded, Mujica looked over the crowds gathered at the capital’s central square for his inauguration with the same olive-pit eyes that had scanned the road to Pando back in 1969. The crowd looked back at him admiringly, as he delivered a fiery oration in front of a Jumbotron screen bearing his image. If a man’s character is his fate, as Heraclitus wrote, then Mujica’s has brought him on an exceptional ride, one that occasionally creeps into the headlines of newspapers and websites but rarely gets a treatment beyond his life’s major plot points. Mujica is a former revolutionary (some might call him a terrorist) who was shot six times, imprisoned for 14 years, tortured, and kept in solitary confinement for upward of three years, only to be released, renounce violence, enter politics, win election to the nation’s highest office, and lead Uruguay as it rose out of recession, all the while legalising gay marriage and abortion, which is noteworthy for a country that counts Catholicism as its dominant religion. He donates 90 percent of his income to charity, lives at his small farm rather than the country’s lavish presidential palace, drives a Volkswagen Beetle, almost never wears a suit, and rails against the excesses of consumerism and the West’s reliance on it as economic ballast. But Mujica’s most piquant achievement as a head of state, the one that has made him a cult hero to droves of young progressives around the world, is his government’s decision to fully legalise and regulate marijuana across the country, which became law on December 13, 2013, but won’t take effect until late 2014—making Uruguay the first nation to do so countrywide. Mujica himself is no stoner—he prefers whiskey and cigars and claims to have never smoked the stuff—but as he stated in an address to the United Nations General Assembly in 2012, “What we want is to take the
market from drug traffickers.” Rather than continue to fight the war on drugs and perpetuate its cycle of violence—which in South America alone has cost upward of a trillion dollars and taken the lives of tens of thousands of people, by some estimates—Mujica is presenting otro camino, another path. If Uruguay’s legalisation succeeds in wresting marijuana sales from cartels, Mujica’s model could reverberate around the world. Drug-policy-reform advocates hope that he will win the Nobel Peace Prize.
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osé Mujica Cordano was born in 1935 on the outskirts of Montevideo. As a child he would help his single mother sell flowers in their neighbourhood, riding a bike piled high with bundles of orange, white, and pink chrysanthemums to the farmer’s market. It was their main source of income. “We endured a dignified poverty,” he later recalled. Poverty was his gateway drug to political activism. According to The Robin Hood Guerrillas, Pablo Blum’s forthcoming biography, after dropping out of a prestigious high school, Mujica began to “link up with small time criminals in Montevideo’s shadier neighbourhoods,” where he met a socialist named Enrique Erro. Erro led a youth branch of a left-wing political party and offered Mujica a leadership role because of the teenager’s charisma. With financing from the party, Mujica—who went by the nickname Pepe—traveled the communist world, visiting, among other places, Moscow, Beijing, and Havana, where he met Che Guevara and Fidel Castro in 1959, just months after they took Havana. When Pepe returned to Montevideo, he abandoned Erro’s party and became a guerrilla. Very little is known about how exactly Pepe went from a young democratic socialist to full-on gun-toting guerrilla fighter. But according to Mujica: El Florista Presidente, a biography by Uruguayan journalist Sergio Israel, the Cuban Revolution pushed Mujica to imagine a similar South American upheaval. It was in this context of revolutionary longing that Pepe joined the Tupamaros. Founded in the 1960s by Raúl Sendic, a lawyer who had also met Guevara, the group started out doing what they called “armed propaganda”—taking over cinema houses, for example, and forcing the audience to watch slide shows decrying the injustice of liberal democracy. The Tupamaros would also rob banks and give back to people in the city, earning them a Robin Hood–like reputation. Women were well accounted for in the organisation, and the guerrillas became notorious in the Uruguayan press for their high-profile female members—like a beautiful blond Jane Fonda type named Yessie Macchi, whom Pepe dated. The group’s propaganda minister told the press that “at no point is a woman more equal to a man than when she is holding a .45 in her hand.”
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The Pando raid, in which Pepe dressed as a funeral attendee, was timed to honor the second anniversary of Che Guevara’s death and was meant to advertise the group’s presence—and goal of eventually taking over Uruguay—to the country. When the line of black cars and the Volkswagen entered the city just after noon, Tupamaros in disguise who had already arrived in town commenced a vaudevillian display of character acting in front of the city’s main police station. They harangued the officers at the front desk with their petty complaints until, in a coordinated assault reminiscent of a scene from The Town, they drew their guns and raided the precinct, locking the cops in the building’s jail cells and trading fire and grenades with one policeman who had held out and made a break for it. Pepe and his team were in charge of disabling the telephone exchange, and they dispatched their duties efficiently, without firing a single shot. The stunned telephone operators left their desks and lay on the ground. Then Pepe went into a tirade about the Che Guevara–inspired revolution the Tupamaros hoped to ignite in Uruguay. Besides the intricate planning, careful disguises, and hiding-in-plain-sight nature of Tupamaro attacks—of which there had been a handful before the Pando assault—pontification was a frequent and important feature. Their tactics of urban assault weren’t geared toward amassing a body count; they were calibrated to convert everyday citizens to the cause. In the end, three Tupamaros were killed and many more injured in a dramatic gunfight that started at the town’s main bank branch (which the Tupamaros were robbing) and spilled out into the streets. Meanwhile, Pepe had already fled Pando and returned to Montevideo, where he sat at a bar, listening to the action unfold on the radio, like the rest of the country. To Uruguayans alive then, that day is reminiscent of the chaos in Boston after the marathon bombing last year. On March 23, 1970, Pepe was arrested. A cop recognised him while Pepe was drinking grappa at La Via, a bar in the
center of Montevideo. The officer called for backup, and Pepe, seeing a police car pulling up to the bar’s entrance, took out his gun and opened fire. A gunfight ensued. Two policemen were shot, and Pepe was hit twice. While he was sprawled on the bar floor, another cop shot him four more times, in the gut. He likely would have died had it not been for a fortuitous Tupamaro twist: The doctor who ended up treating him turned out to be a Tupamaro too, hiding in plain sight. From a broad historical perspective, Mujica’s capture could be seen as the beginning of the end for the Tupamaros. Their merry days of masquerading had transformed into an increasingly brutal urban guerrilla war, during which the Tupamaros kidnapped and murdered an FBI agent. The military staged a coup in the summer of 1974, and the junta made a special cause of imprisoning, killing, and torturing hundreds of Tupamaros—including most of the leadership. Pepe spent most of the 1970s in and out of prison, escaping several times, only to be caught again. He and eight other leaders of the Tupamaros were singled out as special prisoners—the government called them hostages—and they were placed in solitary confinement and shuttled around in groups of three between military prisons. At one of the locations where he was held—a military base in the rural town Paso de los Toros, about 160 miles north of Montevideo—Pepe lived at the bottom of a well. Or not exactly a well, but an outdoor pool in a courtyard from which the military’s horses would drink water. They drained the pool and built three cells, placing sheet metal atop the pool to block the sunlight. Pepe went mad. He started hearing static, as if a radio had been left on, stuck between stations. He would scream for someone to turn it off. In 1984 the military rulers signed an agreement to hand power over to a democratically elected government, and the dictatorship officially ended the following year. During that transition, Pepe’s
Pepe’s three-legged Chihuahua, Manuela. Photo by Mariano Carranza
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Pepe addresses a crowd at the beginning of his legitimate political career, on September 29, 1985. Photo by Marcelo Isarrualde
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conditions of imprisonment improved. They let him garden. He grew vegetables and regained a degree of psychological stability. But one of the other Tupamaro “hostages” died in captivity, and another went insane. The surviving eight prisoners were released in 1985 and offered amnesty. Eleuterio Fernández Huidobro, another leader, and Pepe started the Movement of Popular Participation, a legal political party, with other former Tupamaros. Pepe’s charisma carried him to win election to the country’s parliament in 1994, then to its senate in 1999. In 2005 he was appointed the minister of livestock, agriculture, and fisheries. And then, in 2009, riding a crest of liberal sentiment in Uruguay, he won the country’s presidential election with 52.4 percent of the vote. Mujica has commented a few times over the years about his time in the Tupamaros and his subsequent rise to legitimate leadership, and the statement that makes it into his biographies speaks to the unlikelihood of his life’s arc. According to Mujica, “Not even the greatest novelist could have imagined what happened.”
“I’ve seen some springs that ended up being terrible winters,” Pepe said. “We human beings are gregarious. We can’t live alone.”
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n March I flew to Montevideo to interview President Mujica. The day we were scheduled to meet was bright and sunny. I stood in Independence Square, the same public plaza where he was inaugurated. In the center of the square stands a massive statue of Uruguay’s colonial liberator, José Gervasio Artigas, who fought against the Spanish to secure the country’s independence in 1830. He sits in full uniform astride a horse. Artigas died in exile in Paraguay, and legend has it that as he was approaching death he called for a horse so he could die in his saddle, like a true caballero. His remains are interred beneath the statue. On the southeastern side of the square is the Torre Ejecutiva, the offices of the president, and I escaped the morning sun under its blue-green glass awning while waiting to be driven to Pepe’s farm, a few miles from the city. A beige Hyundai minivan emblazoned with the seal of the president—a smiling sun with undulating rays reaching over a curved horizon—pulled up to the curb near where I was waiting. I got in, and we drove through the center of town and its Italian Gothic–style architecture, past the city’s maritime ports, and into the flat countryside. Pepe’s farm is bucolic and ramshackle. We sat in the sun-dappled courtyard of his one-story farmhouse, where his three-legged Chihuahua, named Manuela, and a few small kittens roamed. Songbirds chirped in the meadow surrounding his farm. I asked him why he chose such humble environs instead of the presidential palace. “As soon as politicians start climbing up the ladder,” he said, “they suddenly become kings. I don’t know how it works, but what I do know is that republics came to the world to make sure that no one is more than anyone else.” The pomp of office, he suggested, was like something left over from a feudal past: “You need a palace, red carpet, a lot of people behind you saying, ‘Yes, sir.’ I think all of that is awful.” As his wife, Lucía Topolansky, a former Tupamara who is now a senator, worked inside the house, I asked Mujica what the VICE 57
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implications of being the first nation to fully legalise marijuana meant for his country. “We’re going to start an experiment,” he said, in gravelly Spanish. “It’s almost certain that we’ll be under the international spotlight. We’re a petri dish, really, a social laboratory. But remember this: In Uruguay there are 9,000 prisoners. Three thousand of them are locked up for narcotrafficking crimes. What does that mean? That three out of nine incarcerations are drug-related. First and foremost we need to fix that.” While many of those prisoners are locked up for marijuanarelated offenses, Uruguay also consumes the third most cocaine per capita in South America. When I asked whether other drugs might become legal, he responded, “Paso a paso.” Step by step. Under the current law, tourists are not allowed to buy weed, but examples like Colorado—where hundreds of millions of dollars in increased economic activity is expected to produce a windfall of tax revenue for the government—are enticing. Is developing a weed economy a pragmatic economic decision?
Mujica rejected this as a goal of his law. “We want to find an effective way to fight narcotraffic,” he repeated. “After that we might encounter different chapters. But let’s take it easy and go slowly. Because we have to apply a thing and invent a road that we don’t know yet… we have to discover it along the way.” Even though Pepe is a humble man, his goals are ambitious. The international drug trade is “basically a monopoly for the ones who control it,” he said. “We want to introduce a huge competitor, which is the state, with all the power of the state.” The endgame is to force cartels out of business through economics: The government will sell weed at a shockingly low price of a dollar a gram. To Mujica, stamping out the violence associated with the drug trade comes down to slashing prices, not funneling billions of dollars to military and police and locking up his citizens. Perhaps surprisingly, while drug-policy analysts, news-hungry stoners, and other anti-prohibition observers love Uruguay’s move to legalisation, it’s actually unpopular within Uruguay. A poll conducted prior to the law’s passage determined that 64 percent of citizens oppose legalising the drug. And the United Nations’ International Narcotics Control Board has decried the nation, and Pepe in particular, for irresponsible policy decisions. I asked him what he thought about that. “It has always been like that with changes,” he said, wagging his head. “In 1913 we established divorce as a right for women in Uruguay. You know what they were saying back then? That families would dissolve. That it was the end of good manners and society. There has always been a conservative and traditional opinion out there that’s afraid of change. When I was young and would go dancing at balls, we’d have to wear suits and ties. Otherwise they wouldn’t let us in. I don’t think anyone dresses up for dancing parties nowadays.”
Photos by Mariano Carranza
While drug-policy advocates and news-hungry stoners around the world praise Uruguay’s weed legalisation, 64 percent of citizens oppose legalising the drug.
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Pablo Porciuncula/AFP/Getty Images
Pepe speaks during his inauguration in Montevideo’s Independence Square on March 1, 2010.
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Also unpopular is Pepe’s recent push to open his country up to mining. In 2013 his government approved what’s known as the Valentine’s Project, a $3 billion open-pit mine complex. Once the mine is up and running, Uruguay will become a global exporter of iron ore in the amount of roughly 4 to 5 billion tons, according to projections. To Pepe, it’s the most important foreign-policy decision of his administration, but farmers, ranchers, and environmentalists fear that the project, which includes hundreºds of miles of slurry pipelines and a deep-sea port, will be disastrous. When I asked him about it, he cut me off mid-question, leaned in closely, and squinted his eyes into two downward-facing crescent moons. “Let’s get things straight,” he said. “We want to diversify our economy. We don’t want to stop our cattle industries or agriculture or water. If we can add one more economic activity, that could be very interesting. But we have to do it the right way.” He went on: “What’s sad is that an 80-year-old grandpa has to be the open-minded one. Old people aren’t old because of their age, but because of what’s in their heads. They are horrified at this, but they aren’t horrified at what’s happening in the streets?” Pepe has no children and was referring to his grandpa-ness in a metaphoric sense, and he won’t turn 80 until after his term in office ends. But I was curious what he thought about the current state of revolt that has gripped young people and set streets on fire from Brazil to Greece, Taiwan to Turkey, and has brought down governments in Egypt and Tunisia. “I’ve seen some springs that ended up being terrible winters,” he said. “We human beings are gregarious. We can’t live alone. For our lives to be possible, we depend on society. It’s one thing to overturn a government or block the streets. But it’s a different matter altogether to create and build a better society, one that needs organisation, discipline, and long-term work. Let’s not confuse the two of them.”
Before I could ask my next question, Pepe interjected, hoping not to admonish the spirit of revolt that had guided most of his life. “I want to make it clear: I feel sympathetic with that youthful energy, but I think it’s not going anywhere if it doesn’t become more mature.”
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fter our interview, Pepe showed me around the rest of his property and then brought us back to the courtyard. He answered a call on an old Nokia brick phone—urgent state business. After he hung up, I asked Pepe whether he minded if I smoked a joint. I fully understood the implications of smoking weed in front of a head of state, but of all presidents, I thought, he’d be game. After my translator relayed my request, Pepe smiled broadly and exclaimed, “Por favor!” I sparked up a joint, and Pepe shrugged and smiled. “I have no prejudice,” he said, “but let me give you something juicier to smoke.” He got up, went back into his house, and emerged with a cigar. “This is a cigar given to me by Fidel Castro.” His wife, Lucía, followed behind and showed me a portable humidor, a large box shaped like a house filled with Castro-length Cohibas. For a moment, I thought she was giving all of them to me, and I worried how I’d get them through customs. Pepe chuckled, and I smoked the rest of my joint. To be clear, Uruguay’s legalisation is not aimed at allowing bozos like me to get high indiscriminately. It’s a serious legislative experiment designed to dismantle what pretty much everyone agrees is a horrid failure of public policy: the war on drugs. And while Pepe has an almost too-good-to-be-true avuncular charm, he’s a carefully calculating statesman with a keen sense of how to capture the limelight. A small country of 3.4 million legalising weed is, on the global scale, a tiny occurrence, but it might just be that crucial example, the hiding-in-plain-sight truth, that all it takes is bold decisions and bold leadership to turn ideas into action. Whether it actually will work is a question neither Pepe nor I can answer.
Photo by Agencia Camaratres/AFP/Getty Images
Pepe holding a cigar he received from Fidel Castro, one of his earliest revolutionary mentors. Photo by Mariano Carranza
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FESTIVAL STARTS IN 10 DAYS! Packed with talks, forums, special events, guests and red-carpet galas. FLEXIPASSES & SINGLE TICKETS SFF.ORG.AU 1300 733 733
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LAKE AUGUST
JIMI: ALL IS BY MY SIDE
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WED 11 JUN 8:30 PM DENDY OPERA QUAYS SAT 14 JUN 2:15 PM EVENT CINEMAS GEORGE ST A young drifter reeling from tragedy, despair and heartbreak escapes to a secluded riverside hotel in indie director Yang Heng’s beautifully composed portrait of contemporary backwater China.
THU 5 JUN 8.45PM HAYDEN ORPHEUM CREMORNE FRI 13 JUN 8.05PM EVENT CINEMAS GEORGE ST Directed by John Ridley (Oscar-winning writer of 12 Years a Slave ), this unconventional biopic of Jimi Hendrix (played by André 3000 of OutKast) looks at his transition from sideman to rock legend.
THU 12 JUN 8:05 PM DENDY OPERA QUAYS SUN 15 JUN 11:00 AM EVENT CINEMAS GEORGE ST This 2014 Cannes Directors’ Fortnight selection from Stéphane Lafleur (Continental ) is a delightful and absurd comedy about a twentysomething’s surprisingly eventful summer spent housesitting.
PULP: A FILM ABOUT LIFE, DEATH A & SUPERMARKETS
GOD HELP THE GIRL
SUPERMENSCH: THE LEGEND OF F SHEP GORDON
SAT 7 JUN 9:00 PM EVENT CINEMAS GEORGE ST MON 9 JUN 7:45 PM DENDY OPERA QUAYS This documentary about the Britpop icons at their last hometown concert is full of wit and warmth; when the charismatic Jarvis Cocker takes to the stage and the crowd sings ‘Common People’, you’ll want to join in!
THU 5 JUN 8:45 PM EVENT CINEMAS GEORGE ST SAT 14 JUN 8:45 PM EVENT CINEMAS GEORGE ST Directed by and featuring music from Belle and Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch, this poignant indie-pop musical is a coming-ofage story about a troubled girl (played by Emily Browning) who sings and dances her way through the streets of Glasgow.
SUN 8 JUN 11:15 AM EVENT CINEMAS GEORGE ST SUN 15 JUN 2:00 PM EVENT CINEMAS GEORGE ST The directorial debut of Mike Myers, aka Austin Powers, is a star-packed doco about a legendary showbiz figure, talent agent to the stars (starting out with Alice Cooper), Shep Gordon.
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SAT 7 JUN 6:00 PM DENDY OPERA QUAYS FRI 13 JUN 8:30 PM DENDY OPERA QUAYS This documentary charts the pleasurably perverse story of the only studio in the USSR that produced commercials, filled with reams of comical retro adverts – usually for products that didn’t exist.
SAT 7 JUN 8:00 PM EVENT CINEMAS GEORGE ST THU 12 JUN 9:30 PM EVENT CINEMAS GEORGE ST A Bigfoot believer takes his girlfriend camping in the California woods where the legendary creatures are said to roam in comedian-turned-director Bobcat Goldthwait’s scary foundfootage chiller.
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THE VICTIM How the Danish Legal System Gave Away Thomas Altheimer’s Identity
BY SAM McPHEETERS PHOTOS BY MICHAEL MARCELLE
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n September 2008, Danish artist Thomas Altheimer received a call from his eight-year-old daughter. She wanted to know why posters of his face were plastered all over Copenhagen. Altheimer was living in the Vienna suburbs at the time and didn’t have an answer for her. Only when he called a pal in Denmark did he learn the posters were promoting a book released by Denmark’s largest publisher, Gyldendal. The novel, titled Suverænen, or The Sovereign, was written by Altheimer’s former artistic partner, Claus Beck-Nielsen, who was now going by the name Das Beckwerk. Five days later, Altheimer found himself holding a copy of the book, peering down at his own face on the slick dust jacket. Although the The Sovereign—a roman à clef concerning a performance-art project on which the pair collaborated in 2004—presents Altheimer as a fictional character, he is referred to by his full legal name. The text includes his actual home address, the names of his children, and passages from his blog and private letters. The epilogue examines his tiny home village of Horne, where Beck-Nielsen had gone door to door, baffling Altheimer’s childhood neighbours with questions about his adolescence. Altheimer read the novel in one sitting and decided to sue. “It was the most surreal experience,” he later told me. “We all go around with our own story, and suddenly somebody knew how to narrate the story that’s in my head.”
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T
homas Altheimer stands 6'4" and carries himself with a vague air of lost European nobility. From certain angles, he resembles a mid-career Julian Sands. He holds a bachelor and master of arts in comparative literature, another bachelor’s degree in political science, a master of research in cultural studies, and a PhD in art practice. When he is in a good mood— and not overcome by one of his periodic waves of melancholy—he seems like the kind of man who would have diplomatic immunity. Altheimer first encountered his future artistic partner in 1999, as a voice on a Danish radio station. Claus Beck-Nielsen was being interviewed about his first book, Horne Land. As a child, Beck-Nielsen had summered in Altheimer’s home village, and he’d decided to write about the place through a filter of fond memories. The story produced a jealous disorientation in Altheimer, as if someone had decided to copyright his childhood. It was an odd provocation from a stranger. Three years later, the course of Altheimer’s life took a radical turn. He had grown disenchanted with his bureaucratic job in Denmark’s immigration ministry, and in 2000 he created Ticket to Denmark, a website inviting foreigners to meet and marry Danes for citizenship. The project was short-lived. Not long after it launched, Ticket to Denmark was reported to the authorities and Altheimer was fired from his job. But the event served as a sort of wake-up call, bringing Altheimer to the realisation that he’d made a sharp departure in his life, veering from a normal trajectory of education and employment to something dramatic and uncharted. Around this time, Altheimer learned that Beck-Nielsen, who was somewhat established in the Denmark art scene, had been
granted use of a Copenhagen theater, and he wrote the artist a letter referencing his own stunt and requesting an internship. “I did this because I wanted to open up everything. And it did. And in that situation, I sought out that person,” he said, referring to Beck-Nielsen. Altheimer’s letter stood out, partly because of his unusual academic background and partly because he struck Beck-Nielsen as “mad.” The two spoke by phone, and soon Altheimer was Beck-Nielsen’s assistant, a like-minded compatriot in a small art scene in a small European city. Both men had a fondness for trying on new names and personae. Born Thomas Skade-Rasmussen Strøbech, Altheimer (his “artist name”) has used a variety of surnames, including Cohen, Rasmussen, van Brunt, and van Woestenburg. Claus Beck-Nielsen has called himself Helge Bille Nielsen (after the deceased former tenant of his apartment) and Das Beckwerk (after his theater in Copenhagen, which, in turn, he’d named after himself). They’d started as simply Rasmussen and BeckNielsen, which Altheimer likened to the British art team Gilbert & George. At least in Altheimer’s mind, they were a “duo.” Beck-Nielsen viewed the relationship differently. When I asked by email whether he would call their collaboration a friendship, he replied with an unequivocal “No. Right from the very first day we met, we were, and have always been, on formal terms with each other.” He added, “I certainly do not actively dislike either Thomas Skade-Rasmussen Strøbech, Thomas Altheimer, Rasmussen, or any other of his chosen few. On the contrary: I love him, in a platonic way, indeed, and a very, very complicated way, most certainly, a very special but maybe lifelonglasting compassion [sic].” In a different email, he referred to Altheimer as his best “fiend.”
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After deciding to sue, it took several months for Altheimer to raise enough cash for a lawyer. He finally filed his suit in early 2009, accusing Beck-Nielsen of libel, breach of privacy, and commercial use of intellectual property. Over the course of the next two years, he went through four lawyers. The first “turned out to be a crook,” the second got cold feet, and the third refused to be filmed. This last point was crucial, because Altheimer voraciously filmed anything and everything—conversations, correspondences, meetings, attempted confrontations—that might link back to the convoluted strings of his and Beck-Nielsen’s former relationship. Danish director Max Kestner shaped the footage into the 2012 documentary I Am Fiction. The resulting film is often quite painful to watch—an intimate portrait of a man haunted by the betrayal of a close friend. At certain points, he refers to Beck-Nielsen as a “body snatcher” and “vampire,” and at others he longs for contact with his old comrade. The frank depiction of emotional conflict, coupled with the men’s history together, led some to question the veracity of the case, and to wonder whether or not the whole thing—The Sovereign included—was an elaborate bit of performance art. Altheimer bristled at not having final say on the edits, although this lack of control seems in keeping with the larger story. Director and subject struggled to find a distributor for the film. It was shown once at a film festival in Malmö, Sweden, to an unresponsive audience. A year later, according to Altheimer, the documentary aired on Danish TV to a meager 26,000 viewers.
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ltheimer had begun working as Beck-Nielsen’s assistant during the buildup to and beginning of the war in Iraq. In Copenhagen’s tiny art scene, the war posed a near-existential crisis. The theater responded to world events by converting a 40-foot freight container in the center of the city into a space for meetings and performances. They dubbed the box Democracy and tried to ship it to Iraq just after the invasion. But empty containers can’t be shipped, so there it sat. Conversations about attempting a more dramatic statement on the war provoked infighting among the theater community. Finding their artistic vision at odds with that of the rest of the group, Altheimer and Beck-Nielsen decided to strike out on their own. The two men arrived in Kuwait in late 2003. Their new plan was to hand-deliver a smaller, luggage-size version of Democracy to Iraq. Getting into the country at that time required permits, so they decided to wear business suits and present themselves as “the official ambassadors of Western civilisation.” When they arrived at Kuwait City’s Multi-National Command headquarters in their suits, the British commanders didn’t know what to do with them. Being honest about their artistic intentions didn’t help matters, since the only categories for entrants to Iraq were journalists, merchants, and soldiers. Finally one of the colonels—a former theater student from Oxford, it turned out—overheard their predicament and announced, “You are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.” He made both of them sign a copy of Hamlet, then ordered a Kuwaiti general to grant them permits. The general bellowed, “Throw them to the lions!” They caught a cab to the Iraqi border on New Year’s Day and crossed into Iraq on foot, jetlagged and woozy. The desolation of the nowhere zone reminded Altheimer of Escape from New York. The pair were in way over their heads. A prearranged contact picked them up and chauffeured them to a hotel in Basra.
When they arrived the men debated whether the ambassadors of democracy should be armed. In Basra and Baghdad, they staged several theatrical attempts to obtain guns from Coalition Provisional Authority consulates. In one such instance, Altheimer stuck a note that read “We would like guns” through the front gates. The men slept in cheap hotels and private houses and refugee gatherings, while a cacophony of donkeys, explosions, gunfire, helicopters, and muezzins blared outside. They left the box at a Baghdad art academy sponsored by the French embassy and vowed to return. Several months later, the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs awarded Altheimer a generous grant to go back to Iraq, but by that time the insurgents had started beheading foreigners, and the offer was placed on hold until October, when both men were able to return for a brief trip to retrieve Democracy before making a quick exit. The box continued on to Washington, DC, for “repairs,” and, in 2006, to Iran, where a far less eventful tour ended with both men leaving the box in the hills overlooking Tehran. Beck-Nielsen’s 2005 novel, The Suicide Mission, used their Iraq trip as its source material. In the book, Altheimer appears as the character “Rasmussen.” At the time, Altheimer viewed that as an acceptable remove from his true persona. I asked Beck-Nielsen about the book, and he replied: “The Suicide Mission is—or has become—the authorised version of the story (or this piece of history), which has of course upset my Rasmussen, who immediately felt that I had stolen and alone profited from our common adventure… Already in The Suicide Mission he was robbed of his story— the peak of his small life on Earth—and turned into a fiction called ‘Rasmussen.’ And then, with The Sovereign, he was finally ripped off it all: His name, his picture, his story, his life, his identity [sic].”
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n America an identity seizure like the one Altheimer suffered would almost certainly be seen as a serious civil or criminal breach, but in Scandinavia Beck-Nielsen’s approach to writing The Suicide Mission was largely considered his prerogative as an author. There is far more grey area in Scandinavia when it comes to such matters. Despite the nation’s active hate-speech law, the World Press Freedom Index ranks Denmark as the seventh-freest country for speech. Altheimer cited this cultural mentality as the main reason for the blasé reactions to his case. In his opinion, the difference between the legal systems of Scandinavia and the rest of the Western world is vast, a gap in which individuals in the former are liable to fall. Politiken, a leading Danish newspaper, praised Beck-Nielsen as a guardian of the “sanctuary” of fiction. Popular Danish critic and novelist Carsten Jensen (a Gyldendal-published author) dismissed Altheimer as “Nielsen’s hand puppet.” Altheimer didn’t read any press in his favor. In the eye of the public and the Danish literary establishment, Altheimer was the villain of the story and a whining nark. “I was just one guy against the biggest publishing house. They control everything in Denmark, that publishing house. And everyone sided with them! I don’t know why I am the one nobody trusts. That’s the thing that gets to me.” In 2007, Beck-Nielsen wrote and staged a play called The Return of the Democracy, based on their 2003 Iraq trip. Altheimer caught a performance at the Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center and found the actor playing Rasmussen to be a convincing mimic of his actual mental state in Iraq. Desperate to follow any leads that might help him put together the increasingly jumbled puzzle pieces of his life, VICE 65
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Altheimer tracked down the actor who’d played Beck-Nielsen and approached him outside a Copenhagen bar. During the short exchange, captured in—or possibly staged for—I Am Fiction, Altheimer tells him that he has trouble distinguishing the character from the actor, and that he felt provoked just from watching someone play Beck-Nielsen onstage. The actor, Thomas Mork, nods and tells him that it’s important to be able to separate the two, then quickly slips back inside. The meeting appears to have left Altheimer more depressed than he was before. Much to Altheimer’s chagrin, the buildup to the trial paralleled his rival’s ascent through the Danish art scene. In November 2010, four months before the ruling, the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts sponsored a reception in celebration of Beck-Nielsen’s writing and performance art. Altheimer decided to crash it. He’d been drinking vodka heavily and, by the time he arrived, had forgotten what he’d wanted to say. Standing, he announced to the audience, “The Sovereign is a crappy book,” and launched into a rambling attack on BeckNielsen’s hometown before losing his train of thought. The crowd smiled in polite silence. No one seemed to know what to make of the botched confrontation, especially Beck-Nielsen, who was sitting quietly in the front row. In January, Altheimer flew to Oslo to meet with the Norwegian publisher of The Democracy – Destination: Iraq, a collection of writings, by “Rasmussen and Nielsen,” that he was surprised to discover he’d coauthored without his knowledge. The publisher received him politely but offered no apologies for marketing his work without consent or compensation. Several Norwegian lawyers told him he didn’t have a case (Norway ranks third on the World Press Freedom Index). The following month, Altheimer tried to go on the offensive. Armed with a doctored copy of the dust jacket, he flew to New York with the aim of passing The Sovereign off as his own novel, thus achieving revenge while reducing Beck-Nielsen to the fictional character. He spoke with three publishers, all of whom rebuffed him, some with undisguised contempt. He wound up with just enough cash to get himself back to the airport. Speaking with a friend on his return to Europe, he referred to himself as “a jilted artist.” The role of Frustrated Performer was one that Altheimer had grown accustomed to. In 2005, he’d attempted to escape Beck-Nielsen’s shadow with a bold performance-art piece in the Caribbean. During the 1989 American siege in Panama City, the US military blasted Guns N’ Roses through huge speakers pointed at the Holy See Apostolic Nuncio, where Manuel Noriega was holed up, in an effort to persuade him to surrender. Altheimer decided he would turn the tables on America by playing classical music at high volumes outside the US naval base in Guantánamo Bay. His vision called for a cruise ship to sail from Miami. He’d be surrounded by intellectuals, displaying their righteous anger with stylish sarcasm and loud music. It would be like Billionaires for Bush, but on the sea, and more fun. He ended up renting a small boat in Jamaica, after a hurricane. Early in the trip, the boat lost one motor in bad weather. The day-long journey took three, and after the food ran out, he drank white rum. When they arrived at Guantánamo, Altheimer drunkenly held up a boombox he’d bought in Kingston, Jamaica. Waves drowned out the roar of Beethoven’s Third Symphony. In 2008, he spearheaded Europe for President, a mock political campaign intended to antagonise Obama supporters (one anti-Obama harangue got him ejected from the
Democratic National Convention). Although he’d learned from past actions to thoroughly document everything he did, Europe for President shared a common thread with the Guantánamo debacle in its lack of press. On a Swedish TV program covering both of Altheimer’s solo endeavors, he compared himself to Don Quixote. Altheimer was in Vienna, wrapping up an exhausting editing session on the Europe for President, documentary when he got the call from his daughter about The Sovereign.
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he trial got under way in early 2011, at the High Court of Denmark. The courtroom footage from I Am Fiction presents an oddly cerebral proceeding. Beck-Nielsen gives an artistic defense, framing his appropriations in a larger examination of the nature of reality. When asked why he hadn’t called Altheimer “Rasmussen,” as he had named him in The Suicide Mission, Beck-Nielsen replied, “The point I wanted to make was that this could be a real person.” For a viewer not steeped in the Copenhagen art community, this defense seems laughably esoteric. Altheimer felt assured of victory. When Denmark ruled in Beck-Nielsen’s favor, two months later, Altheimer sat in a shocked stupor. The possibility of losing had never crossed his mind. The state announced that it would, in accordance with Danish law, compensate Gyldendal Publishing $11,000 and Beck-Nielsen about $14,000. Outside the courtroom, the two men shook hands, and Altheimer bitterly congratulated the defendant on his windfall. After the ruling, two leading Danish newspapers, Dagbladet Information and Jyllands-Posten (the latter of which gained international attention for its liberal stance on freedom of speech in 2005 after publishing a number of controversial cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad), praised the ruling as a victory for the freedom of expression. Danske Bank sued Altheimer. He’d amassed tens of thousands of dollars in debt from the case, and from the Guantánamo footage editing sessions, during which much of his rented equipment had been stolen from an uninsured London gallery. In the March 2012 deposition hearing, he brought piles of transcripts, articles, and Beck-Nielsen’s novel. He told the judge, “The copyright to Thomas SkadeRasmussen Strøbech belongs to Gyldendal and Helge Bille Nielsen. This is not just my absurd claim but a legal reality established by the High Court last year. Therefore I cannot answer for Thomas Skade-Rasmussen Strøbech’s actions.” He concluded with a quote from Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” which impressed nobody. One month later, he received the ruling by phone, while sitting on a tombstone in a graveyard behind the prison where his grandfather had languished during World War II. He was already deep in debt for child support, back taxes, and student loans when the friendly clerk informed him that he had two weeks to pay about $35,000, including nearly $6,000 for additional court costs.
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ltheimer’s first words in I Am Fiction are “I hate Claus Beck-Nielsen,” and yet the film ends with a reconciliation. On a rainy afternoon one week after the court ruling, Beck-Nielsen arrives, sopping wet, at Altheimer’s doorstep. The two men share a pot of tea, sitting side by side on Altheimer’s sofa, chatting and laughing. The scene leaves an odd aftertaste. I asked Altheimer this ending made it easier for his critics to doubt his own authenticity and believe the whole thing is a hoax. He told me, “There’s only one person on this planet who
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“I just want to do fun stuff from now on,” Altheimer said. “I can’t do the self-important pompous thing anymore, which is what I probably am.”
knows what I’ve done, what we’ve done. So he will always be a factor in my life.” When pressed on whether or not that moment was documented as a wink to his audience, he seemed to agree. “It’s also taking it out of the victim narrative. For me, that wink also signals that I might have been in control.” We discussed the word victim. “I was a victim, but I was also playing a victim in the film, and between those two, I sometimes found it hard to distinguish. It’s a role I do very well. It’s like the only role I’m good at playing.” He had pursued the court case on dual tracks, as litigation and artistic spectacle, and gotten burned on both approaches. He’d lost by law and in public esteem, and even those siding with him weren’t fully assured the whole thing hadn’t been a stunt. In the wake of complete failure, why not be friendly with his own best “fiend”? Beck-Nielsen’s take on this reconciliation was more florid, and conflicted. “I wasn’t involved in the making of this film, and I didn’t see it until the premiere in the cinema,” he told me. “And on this opening night I left the cinema quite touched and very dizzy, with the feeling of having seen a love story. I am obviously portrayed as the antagonist, the evil, the enemy, in the movie… I left the cinema and wandered for hours in the cold and clear late autumn night of Copenhagen, feeling very sad and sentimental and touched: I had seen myself in a love story, and although I knew it was a piece of formalised reality, I felt that the story was true. The true story of Nielsen and Altheimer.” In I Am Fiction, the anonymous narrator recalls part of a letter Beck-Nielsen sent to Altheimer following the exchange: “You were the victim, the human who was robbed of his story. Who must fight to recapture it.”
It would have been interesting to see how this reconciliation might have played out a year later, in 2012, after the publication of Beck-Nielsen’s Store Satans Fald (Fall of the Great Satan). This final(?) installment of Beck-Nielsen’s fictional recreation of Thomas Altheimer examines the two men’s 2006 trip to Tehran to (artistically) foment democracy. At some point, the narrative switches to alternate history. The men are captured, convicted, and sentenced to death by starvation in the remote mountains. Banished, “Rasmussen” succumbs to hypothermia, and Beck-Nielsen cuts up the body for food. The cannibalism scene lasts ten pages and is stunning in its research, if not its audacity. (Who knew, for example, that the human liver crunches when bit?) Discussing the cannibalism scene with Altheimer, I asked whether he’d ever considered turning the tables on Beck-Nielsen and writing his own account of their association. “I’m not a very good writer,” he said. “It wouldn’t be particularly funny.” Besides, he pointed out, who would buy it? Beck-Nielsen himself had already saturated the Beck-Nielsen market. “I am, in a sense, radically free,” Altheimer said. While teasing out the inevitable implications of losing one’s primary identity, he announced his latest incarnation: Tom Dane, failed comedian. This identity had the advantage of being pre-tested. Popular Danish entertainer Thomas Eje had attempted to export his “Tom Dane” show to Vegas a decade earlier, but had seemingly returned to Denmark after he was unable to craft a successful act in the States. Thomas considered the stage persona “alive but without a host.” “I just want to do fun stuff from now on. I can’t do the selfimportant pompous thing anymore, which is what I probably am. But this is why I have to work against that. And so, trying to be a failed comedian… at least I might be able to do that.” VICE 67
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A BUM WITHOUT A COUNTRY Mike Gogulski Builds a Life Outside the State WORDS AND PHOTOS BY ATOSSA ARAXIA ABRAHAMIAN
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n 1863, Edward Everett Hale published a short story called “The Man Without a Country.” It’s a cautionary tale about one Philip Nolan, a US Army lieutenant who renounces America in a fit of rage. In response, a judge orders that he spend the rest of his days at sea, floating from ship to ship, without any news from his country. Nolan begins the journey unrepentantly, but as time passes, statelessness wears on him. He misses his homeland more than he longs for his family or the touch of dry land. Just before his burial at sea, he requests that a gravestone be placed in his honor: “In memory of Philip Nolan, Lieutenant in the Army of the United States. He loved his country as no other man has loved her; but no man deserved less at her hands.” The old “man without a country” yarn has been updated drastically since Hale’s day. Turning your back on your homeland, in real life or in fiction, is no longer an earth-shattering divorce with almost biblical consequences—it’s common (or at least not uncommon) for people to live abroad, hold dual or triple citizenships, or cut ties with their native country altogether. As markets and technologies around us become more global, it’s only natural for people to globalise too. What most people don’t do is formally sever their national ties and strike out on their own as a nation of one. Even in our so-called flat world, where free trade and lightning-quick communications make physical borders seem like a vestige of the pre-digital past, the fabric of our existence remains a patchwork of nations. Citizenship is fundamental, and those who are legally stateless are usually destitute and disenfranchised, with their right to nationality withheld by a repressive regime or through draconian bureaucratic error. Large intergovernmental organisations dedicate themselves to helping these ex-citizens reestablish their statehood. Statelessness is simply not a position anyone freely chooses to adopt. There is one notable exception to this rule: Mike Gogulski, a 41-year-old hacker, anarchist, and former US citizen. In late 2008, he walked into the US embassy in Bratislava, Slovakia, and renounced his citizenship; later he burned his passport in defiance. He is, in all likelihood, the only person alive today to have successfully made himself stateless of his own accord. Today, he’s an online activist who writes on anarchy-related topics like the ailing crypto-currency Bitcoin and the now defunct underground marketplace Silk Road through his blog, nostate.com. I first encountered Gogulski’s work in 2011, when I was researching citizenship renunciation. The number of US citizens giving up their passports was—and still is—on the rise: Government records show that renunciations jumped from a few hundred each year to more than 3,000 in the four-year stretch before 2013. This is mostly due to new tax laws that require US citizens to report their bank accounts and income on a yearly basis whether they live in the States or not. But Gogulski’s motives were different: The way he sees it, he wasn’t consulted about being an American in the first place. “Would I willingly enter into a relationship with the US government for any reason other than if someone pointed a gun at me? No way,” he told me over glasses of whiskey and cans of beer at Progressbar, a local hacker space in Bratislava where he hangs out. Gogulski—who grew up by an orange grove in the
suburb of Winter Park, Florida—sees no point in participating in democracy, period. “The sales pitch that goes with democracy is people can vote to choose the government they want, but that’s a lie,” he explained, pacing around the room. “We might get to tinker around the margins, but the central organism of states—which is murder, robbery, rape—continues on.” It’s hard to argue with this assessment, but going stateless presents more challenges than it really solves. The main problem is mobility: A stateless person can travel in Europe under the EU’s free-movement laws, but he can’t go outside the so-called Schengen Area without procuring a visa, a process that can take months of administrative hassle. The other problem is the paperwork: Without citizenship, everyday tasks like obtaining a driver’s license or opening a bank account are much more of an ordeal than they normally would be, and there’s rarely a “stateless” box in drop-down menus or government forms. What’s more, people without a country can’t claim any protection from a government if they get into trouble abroad (though what is “abroad” when you’re from nowhere? The semantics of statehood surround us). It isn’t a stretch to conceive of Gogulski’s conscientious statelessness as offensive, even inconsiderate: the moral mission of an intransigent white American manarchist acting from a position of relative privilege. If a female Bangladeshi garment worker did the same thing, would anyone notice? Gogulski acknowledges that his situation is nothing like that of other stateless people. He sees his move as an act of solidarity. “Citizenship is a tool of class division, a tool of hierarchy, an instrument of social control,” he told me. “There is no equality between citizens and non-citizens.” The truth is, you can only be so free of the state. To get around, Gogulski uses a stateless person’s document issued by the Slovak authorities and an EU residency card, which looks like a driver’s license. There’s a certain irony to his predicament. He wants, like so many citizens who are disgusted with their governments, to break free of the clutches of state power. In particular, he wants to extricate himself from the atrocities wrought by the United States, and his statelessness is an extreme form of conscientious objection. But by going stateless, he has put himself in the position of having neither king nor country nor means of leaving the EU. There are many ways of describing the predicament Gogulski’s gotten himself into, but there’s one that’s a bit clearer than the others: On paper, he has pretty much fucked himself.
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alking to him, you’d never notice that Gogulski’s spent a decade outside the United States. His accent is vaguely East Coastal, he picks up on the vast majority of mainstream American pop-cultural references, and he follows US news as much as the next guy. He’s about six feet tall and balding, with the physique of a formerly skinny computer nerd entering middle age after a lifetime of Funyuns and Jolt. On a good day, he’s warm, affable, and bursting with ideas that veer toward the conspiratorial. He’s also bipolar and prone to dizzying highs and plunging lows during which he barely communicates with anyone, let alone gets out of bed. For about three weeks before I was due to pay him a visit, my frantic emails, calls, and text messages went unanswered. That month, he later told me, was a low one. But over the first long weekend we spent together in Bratislava, Gogulski was in fine form. He chain-smoked Philip Morris cigarettes he gets for a little more than two euros, and he easily drained a bottle of whiskey over the course of our first evening. When the whiskey was close to done, he began rooting through
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a drawer for weed. When he finally found a nugget of pot buried in a large bag of condoms, he fashioned a pipe out of a beer can. Gogulski is something of a local celebrity on the hackeranarchist circuit. This is certainly due to his statelessness: He receives two or three inquiring emails from would-be renouncers every month, most of them Americans. He’s also known as a player in the Bitcoin community. To pay his bills, he operates a Bitcoin-laundering, or “mixing,” application that adds a layer of anonymity to the crypto-currency’s digital trail. Gogulski had a brush with the law shortly after dropping out of Orlando College, when he got busted for “phreaking,” or stealing, tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of long-distance calling minutes from local businesses to communicate with other hackers. His 1992 arrest seems lifted from a stoner comedy: He was set up by an undercover cop posing as a Domino’s deliverywoman and charged with a felony under the Florida Communications Fraud Act. “It was fucked. Crazy. It’s a terrible feeling, being on the front page of the paper along with news about the California race riots. I thought I was going to prison,” he recalls. His father sold his coin and stamp collections to pay for a lawyer, who got Gogulski a plea deal. As part of his 100 hours of community service, he lectured rooms full of cops about “hacker mentality.” It might seem that a stateless person is outside the jurisdiction of all countries, but Gogulski is not exempt from international law. Osama bin Laden, for instance, was rendered stateless after Saudi Arabia revoked his nationality in 1994; he still managed to be the most wanted man in the world (in fact, al Qaeda’s lack of affiliation with a nation-state is frequently cited as its most insidious quality). The Slovak authorities can treat Gogulski the same way they would any other resident. But it isn’t clear what kind of jurisdiction the US still has. He says he’s encouraged by the lack of extraditions from Slovakia to the United States, but he’s closely watching the
recent spate of Bitcoin-related arrests. “I’m aware that I may have to shut the Bitcoin laundry down any day now,” he said just weeks before the Mt. Gox Bitcoin exchange closed, causing millions of dollars’ worth of Bitcoins to disappear. In early March, Gogulski said his business was unaffected by the drama. “Nothing new to report,” he wrote in an email. “I’m scratching by.”
Bratislava, Slovakia, where former US citizen Mike Gogulski has been living as a stateless man
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ecoming stateless isn’t a common way for activists to make a statement, but it has been done before: Garry Davis, a World War II pilot and former Broadway actor, became a well-known antiwar activist when he decided to renounce all ties to the United States in 1948. He came to his decision after bombing the shit out of Germany and losing his brother in battle; when the conflict ended, Davis declared himself “World Citizen Number One” and remained without a country until he died last summer at the age of 91. Davis was a product of shellshock and the heady days of postwar internationalism, dedicating his life to promoting a “world government,” crashing the United Nations with the likes of Albert Camus to make speeches, camping out in embassies and consulates, and landing in jail more than a few times for crossing borders into countries illegally. Gogulski has nothing but respect for Davis, but he’s no proponent of the Esperanto-inflected One Worldism that Davis espoused. Gogulski identifies as an anarchist and an agorist—he’d like to see a world without centralised government, period. In his view, if left to their own devices, people would organise into smaller, more equitable, less oppressive communities that would enable humanity to flourish beyond our wildest dreams—a hopeful, if naive, perspective. “I’ve somehow kept believing that people actually do have the capacity to get ourselves out of the nasty corners we’ve painted ourselves into,” he said, referring, among other things, to violence, war, surveillance,
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Gogulski, who renounced his US citizenship in 2008 in protest of his former country’s actions around the world
and submission. “It’s the authoritarian mind-set. The notion that obedience is a virtue. It doesn’t take a particularly smart or thoughtful person to look at both history and the current times to realise that people are being obedient to awful things and stupid people, and that the potential in them will not be realised if they keep serving these evil constructs.” The roots of Gogulski’s version of this idealised vision of a stateless society can be traced to the utopian descriptions of a borderless future that emerged in the early days of the web. He is a product of these philosophies: He started logging on to murky BBS and Usenet bulletin boards in the 80s and early 90s, exploring politics, libertarianism, and drug legalisation. All this was catnip for a Ritalin-addled kid entranced by science fiction and stifled by muggy Floridian suburbia. At the time, it seemed to early adopters that the internet could render governments and nation-states obsolete, and that high-tech communications and crypto-currencies would soon lift humans from their terrestrial existence into a more elevated state of being. The sci-fi author Neal Stephenson wrote novels that prominently featured cryptocurrencies; his characters existed in a post-national world where large corporations stepped in and took control where individual states had failed. His was a dystopian vision that John Perry Barlow, who founded the civil libertarian Electronic Frontier Foundation, translated into something more positive in his 1996 “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind,” reads the opening sentence. “We have no elected government,
nor are we likely to have one… I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us.” Again, it’s a nice thought. But in retrospect, it’s insane to think that the existence of a decentralised information technology alone could dismantle centuries-old power structures in the real world. The same fallacious thinking afflicts proponents of crypto-currencies and those who believe that social media can liberate powerless, voiceless peoples. For a mind-set built on a deep mistrust of the state, it doesn’t seem to fully realise, or acknowledge, the enormousness of what it’s up against. This no-state philosophy, broadly writ, is experiencing something of a revival today. It’s what inspired the development and massive popularity of Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies; it’s the same motive that led Peter Thiel to fund the Seasteading Institute, a group that promotes the creation of new cities on floating platforms in international waters. Going back a bit further, it’s the idea behind the data company HavenCo moving onto Sealand—an abandoned World War II sea fort off the coast of Great Britain—in the early 2000s to defy state control of its servers. The problem with these philosophies isn’t that they seek to abolish, or challenge, the state; it’s that, in their current incarnation, they appeal mostly to individuals like Gogulski, who by accident of birth start off on top of the global pile. They aren’t solutions that management consultants would characterise as “scalable”; rather, they’re limited, solipsistic. That makes ideologies like Gogulski’s more symbolic than globally meaningful. “What is the provocation of Gogulski doing this now? I always fall back on the fact that no nation-state is really promising anyone a future,” said Eugene Holland, a professor at the Ohio State University and the author of Nomad Citizenship, a book about alternative, post-national forms of belonging. “It’s a stalling of the nation-state as a horizon for progressive change that’s bringing about these movements.” I asked Holland what he thought a personal renunciation of statehood could change. Holland laughed. “It’s a dramatic gesture and a personal sacrifice that makes a point, and underscores the degree to which we are unfree because of the way the nation-state monopolises citisenship and controls movement,” he said. “But it can’t change anything. Symbolically, that’s where I think Gogulski is successful. But materially, he’s only sacrificed his own freedom. Which is noble. But it’s not a positive contribution to anyone.”
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ogulski landed in Bratislava in 2004 when his girlfriend at the time, Stephanie Wilbur, found a job teaching English. It was around then that he began considering his politics more closely. “It was a brutal time in the history of America when we left, with Abu Ghraib on TV, these wars, the death and destruction, and all the tax money going there to pay for it,” Wilbur recalled. “We didn’t want to be part of it anymore. And when we moved, politics started to be a much bigger part of Mike’s life… probably because he had more time.” Stephanie ended up leaving Bratislava the following year—she wanted to see the world, travel more—but Gogulski, she said, had decided that he’d seen enough, so he stayed behind and worked a series of contract jobs doing systems administration for multinational companies. By mid 2008, Gogulski’s frustrations with the US had reached a boiling point—“when the soup starts spattering all over the stove” is his preferred analogy—so he decided the only way to stay true to his anarchist ideals was to become stateless and blog about it for the world to see.
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His friends all point to his unrelenting sense of justice when explaining what motivates his decisions. “His ethics are so visceral that he can’t be strategic,” said William Gillis, who volunteers with Gogulski at the Center for a Stateless Society, a think tank that promotes “market anarchism,” a political philosophy that attempts to reconcile kibbutz-style self-organising with Austrian-inflected free-market ideologies. “He went through an extraordinary process so the US would recognise him as no longer being a citizen. Plenty of people defy the state, but Mike was the only person to figure it out and do it all the way. And he’s made enormous sacrifices.” “It’s a more personal question that you don’t want to be party to the things done in your name, whether it’s blowing up wedding ceremonies or literally millions of other atrocities,” Arto Bendiken, a close friend of Gogulski’s who lives in Berlin, explained to me over Skype. “It’s not that it could affect anyone outside himself, but from his personal moral standpoint he had to opt out of the system.” When I asked Gogulski whether he had any regrets about his move, he looked baffled. “How can you regret the person that you have become?” he said. The only things he claims to miss about the United States are Mexican food and 24-hour breakfast. “There’s a special place in my heart for the likes of Denny’s and Waffle House,” he said. “It’s amazing. A place where you can get omelets and eggs and greasy hash-brown goodness at any time of day? In the middle of nowhere?”
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or all his symbolic gestures and rage, Gogulski’s life is pretty staid. “I’m more or less content to be here,” he said. “I live in my own head, pretty much.” Last summer, he married his partner, Eva, in a non-civil, non-religious ceremony at Progressbar (Gogulski was married once before in the US; he and his ex-wife split in 2000 and have a daughter, but he has no contact with either of them). As the bride and groom left the party, their friends and family threw hot dog buns instead of flowers—a symbol, in the parody religion of Discordianism, of all the foods that are forbidden at some point during the calendar year by the world’s major religions (by all accounts, Gogulski is nothing if not contrarian). Gogulski and Eva live together in his rented flat, which happens to be across the street from the International Organisation for Migration, the UN’s agency for displaced and stateless persons. It’s cramped and cluttered and dusty, and smells strongly of smoke and faintly of cat piss. Eva is Slovak through and through; she works at the Chinese embassy, processing visas and other paperwork. The breed and the provenance of the cat, Charlie, are unknown, but even he has an EU pet passport, which lists his name, sex, and date of birth. Gogulski spends most of his time in the combined bedroom/ living room, rarely getting out of bed until the late afternoon and tinkering away at one of the nine computers he has on at a given time. He may have said goodbye to the US years ago, but his circadian rhythm remains firmly pegged to East Coast time. Eva’s 16-year-old daughter, who lives nearby, occasionally joins them for dinner; her two Chihuahuas make frequent appearances, and they have a hairless kitten named Anubis on the way. “I’m going to call him Nube,” Gogulski declared gleefully. Gogulski existence is telling—not because it’s exciting (quite the contrary) but because it suggests a way of living outside, or at least on the fringes of, ordinary social and economic life while remaining in a technologically advanced urban environment. He doesn’t have a country, a job, or a boss; he earns an income mostly
from hosting ads on his website and the commissions he charges for the Bitcoin laundering. He doesn’t have a local bank account and pays for things entirely in cash or Bitcoin. His attempts to exist outside the confines of the traditional nation-state are, by some measures, successful: He’s living a sort of urban Into the Wild (a copy of the book lay on his table, but he said he hadn’t read it yet). But for now, it’s just that—a suggestion of a possibility of a way of existing, and a dystopian one at that. That’s not Gogulski’s fault: He’s stuck in a situation where his ideals are so radically incompatible with the status quo that there’s only so much he can do. His efforts in the face of utter futility are admirable—but practically speaking, the results are a little depressing. “[Gogulski] is one of many people who have thought about the modern state and rejected a lot of the assumptions on which it’s based,” said James Grimmelmann, a law professor at the University of Maryland who’s studied techno-utopian secession. “This idea that government is despotism goes way back. But it’s taken a very modern form through technology. You can draw a line between [renouncing citisenship] and Bitcoin, and the people who have data-haven dreams. All of these are efforts to make it possible to hide from the power of the state.”
Gogulski receives two or three inquiring emails from would-be renouncers every month, most of them Americans. Vinay Gupta, a friend of Gogulski’s who officiated at his wedding, sees him as a pioneer. “He’s showing that it’s possible to make a living entirely as a stateless individual operating in a non-state economic instrument,” he told me over Skype. “If he hadn’t gotten himself out of nation-state economies he’d be the equivalent of a champagne socialist—he’d still be supported by stuff he wanted to be free of.” This vision, on paper, is resolutely radical. It hints at a totally new way of existing in the world, and it’s certainly a novel way to tell the world to fuck off completely. But it has flaws: Bitcoin, for starters, has proved itself to be neither as secure nor as anonymous as its proponents believed. Before the great Bitcoin crash of 2014, Gogulski and his cohort were already speaking about the currency as somehow passé—they saw Bitcoin less as a practical achievement than as a theoretical shape of things to come. There’s no doubt that crypto-currencies will become more advanced and allow for a growing number of decentralised transactions between people all over the world. But the technical limitations of today’s options put a damper on just how removed from the state Gogulski can truly be. The stateless future may very well be on the horizon. But in real life, in 2014, there just isn’t that much to see. Gogulski is stateless and in Bratislava, but for all intents and purposes, he could be anywhere. He does not sail the seven seas, adrift and forced to face his actions like the fictional Lieutenant Philip Nolan. He does not embark on journeys around the world to make a point about the arbitrariness of borders, like Garry Davis. Gogulski can’t leave Europe and, by his own admission, doesn’t much want to. He doesn’t need the world. He has the internet, his community; an abiding hope that technology can set us all free; a cat who has a passport; and a wife who processes visas for a living. Is this the utopian future we’ve all been waiting for?
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PEOPLE REVIEWS BEST PERSON: JUDEE SILL
Rapper/Child Male
FEEBZZ Rapper Female
Seriously, have you ever seen a better rap name? This kid’s like ten, and he’s better at rap than at least all of Jurassic 5, times a bazillion. But it’s a major kick in the dick when you’re a fifth-grade rapper and your biological father gets investigated for child neglect. Turns out you can’t let your nine-year-old son join the Coke Boys and rap about drugs without the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families getting all up in that ass. BONES JUSTICE
RICK ROSS Rapper
This girl is extremely low-hanging fruit. Feebzz spends her life raking through Facebook and Tumblr in search of Ryan McGinley’s next hot and uncircumcised acolyte. We’re old pals with Ryan and everything, but journalistic integrity mandates that we call a turd a turd. Her videos are like a Lisa Frank K-hole, which I could get into if her songs didn’t make me vomit up my stomach lining. She also looks like my father’s ex-fiancée. I hated my father’s ex-fiancée. THOMAS NICHOLAS, ESQ.
Male
BARRY SOBEL
Rapper/Comedian Can we all just go ahead and admit that this dude sucks worse than finding out you got herpes and then having a piano fall on you Looney Tunes–style? Yeah, he’s got some jams, but he’s an ex-corrections officer who owns a chain of fried-chicken restaurants and lies through his teeth about selling crack in a yacht parked on the moon. On the other hand, bitching about Rick Ross isn’t that big a deal, because he’s so fat that it’s really a toss-up between who dies first—him or Terio, the fat kid from Vine. ERIC PUNDERMANN
YUNG TURD Rapper
Male
Hey, remember the 80s? It was cool back then to interpret casual racism as progressive realism. That was awesome! And while there may have been a bunch of bigger dicks than this asshat—you probably didn’t even notice him in Punchline—this is the guy who wrote Rodney Dangerfield’s “Rappin’ Rodney” and the rap song in Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise. If you were born after 1980, you probably have no idea what I’m talking about, so I’ll just say this guy’s a prick. BOOMBATZ
Male
BEYONCÉ Vocalist Yung Turd is a 19-year-old rapper from Pittsburgh who, as far as I can tell, lives with his grandma and smokes enough weed to keep an entire cartel in business. I’m sort of obsessed with him and his friends, who seem to sit around taking bong rips and flipping
Female
I’ll be real honest with you. I think Beyoncé’s music is pretty decent, and my opinion on her effect on
gender equality is [opinion not found—I am a man and don’t need to have opinions on that]. But my opinion of her thighs is HOLY MAMA I JUST GOT MY UNDERWEAR PREGGERS GURRRL. Man, I would literally pay $30k a year just to travel around with her and let me be the dude who greases those bad boys up before her shows and photo shoots and shit. I’d get ’em all nice and shiny. Mmm, that’s good gender politics right there. ROWAN PATRICK TABOR
PAUL OAKENFOLD DJ
Male
Paul Oakenfold grew up listening to the Beatles. Then he decided to popularise douchy Ibiza boat parties, spiky hair, and glow-in-the-dark fashion accessories. He’s Avicii 25 years older and looks like a shaved Geico caveman. Wonder why DJs stopped spinning vinyl? You can blame Serato, but it’s more fun to blame Oakenfold, because his music sounds like a Wachowski brother dry-humping a laser beam. FRANK OSHANSKY
OSCAR SLORACH-THORN Electronic Musician Male
When you really think about it, there’s all kinds of things you can do to be elusive in electronic music. For example, one way would be to change your surname to xx. You’re pretty much invisible now. Remove all the vowels from your moniker and see if anyone can figure out how to pronounce it. Bury your identity and call yourself Burial. Works for some. Or you could just glide into experimental beat pop as one half of Psuche, weave that into minimalist RnB as Oscar + Martin, hide behind the boards as the beatmaker of Brother’s Hand Mirror, ghost produce for Ghostpoet, secretly appear on a soulful
Ross: Johnny Nunez/WireImage, Sobel: Gregory Pace/FilmMagic, Beyoncé: Jim McIsaac/Getty Images, Slorach-Thorn: Phebe Schmidt
LIL POOPY
whatever happens to be pumping in their ears at the moment (Eiffel 65, Michael Jackson, Lil Wayne’s “Lollipop”) into songs so juvenile that they’ll make you prematurely ejaculate for the sake of nostalgia. UNDEAD TERIO
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PEOPLE REVIEWS WORST PERSON: IAN WATKINS
house throwback record with Andras and reemerge in the sky as all-powerful future-soul cloud-runner Oscar Key Sung. Who wants to be elusive anyway when you can be omnipresent? SIMON WINKLER
ARNAUD REBOTINI Electronic Musician
Ginn: Karl Walter/Getty Images for Coachella, Rebotini: Q. Caffier, Bermuda: Jack Mannix, Green: Dan Steinberg, Graves: Pooneh Ghana, Watkins: Elizabeth Cook/PA Wire, Lennon: Chris Walter/WireImage, DeMarco: Danny Cohen
Male
Is it me, or is it really creepy when straight dudes make rapey, ass-pounding electro meant for leather-clad gay bikers? Just look at that guy’s fucking face! DON RORITOR
last year’s trial, Watkins was given a 35-year prison sentence for conspiring to rape an infant. TO RAPE. A FUCKING. INFANT. Obviously you should never listen to a Lostprophets song ever again, which shouldn’t be hard, seeing as how the band is the musical equivalent of baby rape. But honestly, boycotting their music is not enough. If you see someone wearing a Lostprophets shirt, you should kick him as hard as you can straight in the dick. Kick him so hard that Watkins can feel it in prison, where he’ll probably die from being raped and shivved like the sack of shit he is. Fuck him. JONATHAN SAFFRON FOUR
ANGIE BERMUDA
Musician/Filmmaker Female
MEREDITH GRAVES Perfect Pussy Female
Meredith Graves is the short-haired girl in the dress who plays in Perfect Pussy, a band that finally got John Schaefer to say the drippy, sticky P-word. Speaking of drippy and sticky, she won us over recently by releasing a limited special edition of her recent LP, Say Yes to Love, which had her own menstrual blood mixed in with the vinyl. Remember, though, this smiley is for Meredith only, not for her band, which makes non-music for babies (no matter what Pitchfork says). KARA GARGA
IAN WATKINS Lostprophets Male
Earth is a sick fucking place where people do fucked-up shit all the time. But Ian Watkins of Lostprophets is, by far, the biggest piece of shit to ever drag his ass on it. In case you somehow missed
Angela Garrick is the kind of person that Rookie readers wish they were mates with and people who go to the Espy on a Friday night love to hate. Musician, artist, filmmaker, writer, and babe, she plays in thirty-eight bands including, Straight Arrows, Ruined Fortune, and Southern Comfort. She also has a new film coming out. I think she’s Jack Mannix’s muse. She was born to live in the Lower East Side circa 1981 but makes do just fine with Sydney 2014. TIM SCOTT
COLLEEN GREEN Singer-Songwriter Female
Once she’s completely lit on some OG Kush, Colleen Green gets to work, creating Ramones-inspired punk using a tiny drum machine, distorted guitar, and spiral notebook full of words about boys and doodles she’s flipped into profitable merchandise. She doesn’t have a day job. She’s too stoned for such pedestrian things. CG is a daydreaming slacker, which does nothing to explain how her cassette tape got the attention of Hardly Art, which issued her debut LP, Sock It to Me, last year. Now she’s a bit too cool and never seems to take off her sunglasses, especially while on stage or during a late-night doughnut run. NOISE JOURNO
GREG GINN Black Flag Male
You know how on every episode of Law & Order they’ll discover some clue that makes the whole case seem crystal-clear to them? (Probably. I don’t actually watch Law & Order. What am I, your 60-year-old Aunt Pat?) Recently, something suddenly dawned on me about this whole Black Flag reunion thing that made me see the train wreck in a new light: Greg Ginn is trolling us, bro. Every single thing about this reunion—the lawsuits, the half-assed songs on the album with the shitty artwork— he’s using to fuck with us. At least if I believe this, I can sleep at night. Makes me feel like Ice-T or whoever the fuck is on that show. EVIAN GONZALES
JOHN LENNON The Beatles Male
Anybody else have the sneaking suspicion that the secret weapon of the Beatles was always Paul? Between the insufferable platitudes about peace and the shitty record John made with Harry Nilsson, I think every single one of us can agree that the dude was overrated as fuck. DICK NIERL
MAC DEMARCO
Singer-Songwriter Male
Everyone’s got a story about Mac DeMarco, so here’s mine. One time, a few years ago, a buddy was interviewing Mac and his band for a local Canadian magazine. She’d heard stories that he was totally insane, VICE 75
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PEOPLE REVIEWS
but during the interview he stayed really calm and collected, answering her questions thoughtfully and coherently. She was disappointed. So for her last question, she asked him, “I hear you’re really weird from everyone I know, but you’ve been acting really normal in this interview. Can you do something crazy for us?” So Mac turned to his bandmate, pulled the dude’s pants down, and blew him in public. I am 95 percent confident that this story is true. BSHAP
MOHSEN NAMJOO Singer-Songwriter Male
Apparently, Islamic republics don’t dig sarcasm and LSD-inspired sitar solos. When Iran’s Bob Dylan mocked the Qur’an in 2009, all the squares there flipped their lids. But while Dylan got pooped on by Pete Seeger, Namjoo was sentenced to five years in jail, and he can’t go home. Now he sports a greyish-white afro and creates jazzy, psychedelic mullah-repellent. He often sounds like a drunk Jim Morrison spitting Persian poetry, a style best enjoyed stoned and naked on a Persian rug surrounded by weird plant-like things. ART TAVANA
BILLY RAY CYRUS Father of Miley Male
“The world ain’t ready for you, Bill. You’re about to make one hell of a comeback. Look at you—you got the looks, you got the skills, and you still have moderate name recognition in pockets of the Midwest. That soul patch makes you sexy as shit. Time to take back what’s yours.” This is the pep talk Billy Ray gave himself before going into the studio with Buck 22 to record his “Achy Breaky 2,” in which he rebranded his hit into barmitzvah-friendly rap trash. It’s probably not easy having your oversexualised daughter completely overshadow you, but whatever the fuck this midlife crisis is, it won’t solve poor Bill Ray’s problems. SPEWFAUX
JUDEE SILL
Singer-Songwriter Female
This stoned-out folkie Druidess grew up sticking up liquor stores and bouncing in and out of reform schools in Oakland in the 60s until she developed such a moral-numbing heroin addiction that she resorted to prostitution to stay high. After a few narcotics busts and check-fraud charges landed her in jail, she found Jesus, got out, got clean, and dropped two records of pitchperfect occult folk that Ben Gibbard is still ripping to this day. Her “career” never amounted to more than a wet queef, and she eventually got in some car wrecks and started using again. In the late 70s, she bit it in a monstrous cocaine and codeine OD, leaving behind a handful of perfect songs that will 100 percent get you laid, every time. DAVID VAN DRIESSEN
DONALD FAGEN Steely Dan Male
Look, I appreciate the sardonic lyrics, crisp production value, and subtle jazz-rock fusion of Steely Dan as much as the next guy. Not to mention, they named their band after a dildo, which is an A+ in our book. But have you dug into Fagen’s solo career? If you care whether or not your dad thinks you’re gay, stay the fuck away. GREEN JELLY
CONOR OBERST
Singer-Songwriter Male
Yo, Conor. You better not be macking on these teenage girls like they’re saying you are. Not that I’m a huge fan, but I do own this huge-ass Bright Eyes box set that would be a pain in the ass to unload on eBay if you go away to prison. Don’t pull this shit, bro. My
vinyl collection is my retirement plan. Oh, and the whole “It’s morally reprehensible” thing too. HALIGH HALIGH
JONATHAN TOUBIN
New York Night Train Male
We hate New York vinyl DJs because they exist in a closed culture where prowess is defined by how much of their trust fund they can drop on records. Jonathan is pretty much the only DJ we actually like. God must like him too, because he saved Jonathan’s ass after a car plowed into his hotel room while he was asleep. The accident crushed his chest, cracked his skull, and shattered his shoulder blades, which is the sort of sentence we hate writing about our friends. Make no mistake, this is the sort of thing you walk away from only if you’ve been chosen to deliver rough and raw Northern soul and rock ’n’ roll 45s to the masses forever and ever, amen. NEBBISH ORIPESH
HILDEGARD OF BINGEN Nun/Composer Female
Monophonic 12th-century plainsong was a major sausage fest, so it’s great that this hot Benedictine abbess was holding it down for the obligatorily single ladies while simultaneously tearing the Rhineland a new liturgical asshole. When Hildy was three, she started getting migraines so brutal that everyone thought she was FaceTiming with God. Since no one knew that God doesn’t exist (or that migraines most definitely do), she started translating her visions into soaring monodies that are basically impossible for dudes to sing. The lyrics are half about the Virgin Mary, and half about how many clit-boners she got living in an isolated German abbey with a bunch of nubile fuck-nuns. SALLY
Sill: Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns, Namjoo: Bahareh Ahmadi, Cyrus: Rodrigo Vaz/FilmMagic, Oberst: Butch Hogan, Toubin: Alexander Thompson, Fagen: C Flanigan/FilmMagic
BEST FACE: LIL POOPY
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PEOPLE REVIEWS WORST FACE: JOE PESCI
Father/Composer Male
My dad is a composer of chamber music. He’s done pretty well for himself—he’s written more than 60 pieces, he hung out with Stockhausen in the 60s, and he worked on the ARP 2500, ARP Instruments’ first analog modular synth. He retired this year, and now he lives on a boat in the middle of nowhere. But when I was six, my mom and sister planted a patch of watermelons in the backyard, and he pissed on them and killed them all. I don’t care how many grants you’ve been awarded, that’s just bad behavior. BENJAMIN SHAPIRO
DREW GOODEN
Pro Basketball Player
passenger plane half-submerged in the Potomac River. A rescue helicopter was already there, but one woman was too cold and weak in the water to grab the helicopter’s line. As a crowd of onlookers and emergency personnel watched from the shore, Lenny jumped from his car, tore off his coat, and dived into the icy water. He swam out and dragged the woman back, saving her life. Reagan invited Lenny to that year’s State of the Union, but then everyone basically forgot about him. My high school band wrote a song about Lenny when I was 15, and it was a heinously weak tribute to a forgotten hero. So here’s an equally puny paragraph, buried in the back of a magazine. Sorry, Len. In a perfect world, you would never go to sleep without a blowjob again. JDUB
LARKIN SAX
Singer-Songwriter Male
16-year-old novelty album that Pesci probably made to finance a single Saturday-night hooker-and-coke-binge, but I am. I don’t even know on what level it offends me most: as a person who likes non-shitty music, as a guy who likes his movies, or as an Italian. I’d rather Pesci stomp my own Billy Batts–style than listen to this again. MACAULAY COCK-IN
BRIAN
Old Roommate Male
Brian is probably one of the chillest dudes of all time. He plays bass in jam bands, smokes a shitton of weed, and has a killer collection of sick reggae jams. Also, one time he got me to DJ his friend’s birthday, and I threw up while playing a Kirko Bangz song. It was sweet. DREW MILLARD
Male
IASOS Veteran power forward Drew Gooden is shooting a sick 53 percent from the field since signing with the Washington Wizards, but really, no one gives a shit about what he does on the court. It’s his alleged piano-playing virtuosity that makes him legendary. Since there appears to be zero evidence of this musical talent anywhere on the internet or within the broader world of recorded music, we’re just going to have to take the big man’s word for it. He was kind enough to open a Wingstop franchise in Altamonte Springs, Florida, which you should probably be driving to right now in hopes of catching a rare live performance as you suck down that cheap chicken goodness. MATTHEW TAYLOR
LENNY SKUTNIK
Larkin is my 14-year-old little brother, and he used to send me SoundCloud links to his acoustic pop demos so I could give him feedback. Now he’s almost in high school, his songs are actually really good, and he’s stopped asking me for advice. He wears his hair long, like the Kings of Leon, and eighth-grade honeys are all up on his dick, and the little punkass just smirks when I try to rewrite his pre-chorus. Just because you have some curlies on your ball sack doesn’t make you king shit, little bro. I’ve got some hair down there, too. Or I did before I downed a man can and went all ’Nam with that Gillette Fusion I got free in the mail. ROCKDAWG5000
JOE PESCI
Male
Iasos is the super vital grandfather of new age music. He’s really into centering and meditating and the mind-body connection and swirly synths. What’s really awesome about him is that when he met my friend, he hit on her—a woman a third his age—and she kinda almost went with it. Now that’s a yogi. LANDSEY LINNERD
SHAUN WHITE
Olympic Gold Medalist Male
Musician/Actor Male
Real American Hero Male
This guy’s not even a musician, but who cares. In the winter of 1982, Lenny Skutnik was driving home from his shitty job in DC when he came across a
Guru
Joe Pesci made an album in 1998 called Vincent LaGuardia Gambino Sings Just for You (which includes a sexist rap song called “Wise Guy”), and I still have nightmares about the fucking thing. Honestly, I probably shouldn’t still be bummed about a
Shaun White is the greatest snowboarder of all time, if you care about that sort of thing. On the other hand, fuck him and his shitty band, Bad Things. They claim to be an “independent rock band,” but they’re on the same label as Cher and the Goo Goo Dolls, which basically makes them the Wes Anderson of indie rock. TARA LIPINSKI
Gooden: Rob Carr/Getty Images, Joe Pesci: J.Sciulli/WireImage, Skutnik: AP Photo, White: Jeffrey Mayer/WireImage
MY DAD, GERALD SHAPIRO
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MAY THURS 29 - The Twoks + Midnight Pool Party + Hudson Arc FRI 30 - Twin Beasts + Papa Pilko & The Binrats + Hank Haint & The Brothers Welsh
+ HANDS UP! Late-night dance party from 11:30pm every Saturday FREE!
JUNE THURS 5 - Luxembourg + Fingertips + Little Dash FRI 6 - Mr Clean + Sleeping Monk + Overproof + Monchichi + Lee Monro & Ello C SAT 7 - Audient + Twin Caverns + Jaws + Glass Transition + live art by MulgaTheArtist THURS 12 - THE FOLK INFORMAL: Enola Fall + Karl Christoph + Benjamin James Caldwell + Direwolf FRI 13 - Spookyland (launch) + Atlas B Salvesen + Tambourine Girls SAT 14 - Miners + Deep Space Supergroop + Dr Goddard THURS 19 - THE LAUGH STAND - top shelf comedy! FRI 20 - Tin Sparrow (launch) + Guests SAT 21 - Hitting Trees + Wish + Guests FRI 27 - Liam Gale & The Ponytails + The Double Shadows + Charlie Gradon SAT 28 - The Broken Needles + Guests JULY THU 3 - Gypsies & Gentlemen + Guests FRI 4 - Jagged Jayne + Guests SAT 5 - Vauxhall Outlaws + Guests
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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VICE MAGAZINE VOLUME 12 NUMBER 5
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THE PROFILES ISSUE
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