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THE OFF THE DEEP END ISSUE

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TABLE OF CONTENTS | Volume 13 Number 1

Amanda Charchian, Ginger Entanglement, 2013 (detail).

Pheromone Hotbox, a group show featuring five young female photographers, will be on view at Steven Kasher Gallery in New York City through February 28.

32

THE BOYS ARE BAKKEN TOWN

46

Gay Men Search for Community in North Dakota’s Oil Boomtowns

34 36

THE ENFORCER

38

54

THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN

62 68

76

FRÄULEINS DIG THEM

SLAY QUEEN

84

Perfume Genius Sings Scary Songs for Homosexuals

44

KNOWN ZONES The Noisey Guide to ATL’s Trap Map

SHOOTING THE EDGES

30

THE INTERIOR FRONTIER

48 90

HALFWAY TO NOWHERE

MERCI BEAUCOUP, ‘CHARLIE HEBDO’

By George Lois

EMPLOYEES OF THE MONTH FRONT OF THE BOOK

DYING TO TELL THE TRUTH A Breakdown of Recent Attacks Against the Press

The Town Where the Confederacy and Slavery Live On

Out of Prison, Not Yet Home

99

28

WELCOME TO AMERICANA, BRAZIL

Rudy Wurlitzer’s Underappreciated Masterpieces

MASTHEAD

New York’s Trash-Eating Ants, Vaginal Rejuvenation in Brazil, Algeria’s First LGBT Mag, Tequila Diamonds in Mexico, and High-Tech Crime-Fighting Software in Zurich

MOMMY

A Photographic Survey of Russia’s Borders

Fighting for Facial Scars in Germany’s Secret Fencing Frats

42

12 14 22

Photos by Robert Melee

ANOTHER BULLSHIT NIGHT IN CRACK CITY Getting by in São Paulo’s Skid Row

40

Peter Stichbury Paints Alien Abductees for a Living

Afghanistan’s Only Female Police Chief Takes On the Taliban

How an Inventor Lost Almost Everything in His Hunt for the Perfect Weapon

THE PARANORMAL PORTRAITIST

Cover by Robert Melee

THE WORLD OF VICE A Guide to Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Going

DOs & DON’Ts CROOKED MEN: The Beauty Queens and BattleAxes of Organised Crime

92

RECORD REVIEWS Some Make Us Smile, Some Make Us Puke

98

FULL BLEED: JOSEPH WOLFGANG OHLERT

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EMPLOYEES OF THE MONTH

See SHOOTING THE EDGES, page 65

JONATHAN DIXON See THE INTERIOR FRONTIER, page 76

ROBERT MELEE See the cover and MOMMY, page 54

In middle school, Mimi Dwyer briefly worked as a reenactor at a colonial tenant farm in Virginia. Visitors routinely attacked her character’s historical accuracy, mostly by pointing out the anachronism of her braces. One grown man called this her lack of “colonial viability.” Mimi no longer has braces, but she still felt out of place eating fried chicken and other Southern treats with Civil War reenactors in Brazil, where we sent her to report on a community of Confederate descendants living there.

In New York, Mimi works as a wage slave for Reuters, writes for the New Republic, and should never, ever, be trusted to drive your car.

Jonathan’s writing has appeared in the Milan Review, Sleeping Fish, Post Road, the Boston Phoenix, and the New York Times, among others. He is the author of Beaten, Seared, and Sauced (Random House 2011), which he wishes were described more often as the “Jesus’ Son of cooking-school memoirs.” He spent seven demoralising years as a staff writer at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, where his pieces on getting yellow stains out of the armpits of white T-shirts and how to make homemade decongestants were deemed too controversial for publication. Jonathan’s profile of the screenwriter and novelist Rudy Wurlitzer is his first article for us.

Cole Stangler is a Washington, DC–based writer, covering labor, trade, and environmental issues. His work has been published in the Nation, In These Times, the New Republic, and the American Prospect and cited in the New York Times. For this month’s issue, Cole traveled to the oil fields of western North Dakota on a Grindr-fueled search for the gay men of the Bakken. While cruising for rustabouts and roughnecks, he discovered just how small the gay community up there is. The trip proved fatal for his once vegetarian diet. A native of suburban Connecticut—The Stepford Wives was filmed in his hometown—Cole likes coffee, baseball, and maps.

Robert Melee is a multidisciplinary artist creating installations that include sculpture, painting, photography, and video.

He’s currently working on a solo exhibition for David Castillo Gallery in Miami (to debut in September) and will show his new gilded-bottle-cap paintings in the Andrew Kreps booth at the upcoming New York Armory Show. We’re pleased to publish a selection of photographs he took of his dear mother. He’s put together a book proposal that includes many of the hundreds of portraits he’s made of her over the years, and he’s looking for a brave publisher to help him foist it on the world. To see more of his work, visit RobertMelee.com.

Ellis started at VICE as an intern and worked her way up to managing editor.

After five years with the magazine, she left last year to work for a stringent UK-based media company, but the job wasn’t a great fit because Ellis likes to take leisurely lunches. She made a triumphant return to VICE in August and now serves as our global editor in chief, which means she can approve or kill any pitch with a one-word email, like YES or NO. The higher up you are, the shorter the emails you have to write. Ellis is a battleship. She’ll bite your head off if you fuck up, and then she’ll help you find a new head because she’s also nice.

MIMI DWYER See WELCOME TO AMERICANA, BRAZIL, page 68

COLE STANGLER See THE BOYS ARE BAKKEN TOWN, page 32

ELLIS JONES

Illustrations by Geffen Refaeli

MARIA GRUZDEVA

In spite of the post–Cold War thaw and increased news coverage of the recent re-freezing-over of East-West relations, it’s still all too easy to see Russia as one big, snowy country made up of bearskin hats and Gazprom pipelines. Thankfully, Maria Gruzdeva has been documenting the country’s borders for the last four years. From the islands off North Korea to balmy, palm-scattered Abkhazia in the south, she covers the inhabitants of the largest country on Earth. The earlier stages of her project, The Borders of Russia, won Maria the IdeasTap & Magnum Photos Photographic Award and made her a finalist for the LensCulture Exposure Award.

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D I S C O V E R H I S T O RY ’ S DARKEST SECRET

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FRONT OF THE BOOK

Minority Report, Zurich

BRAZIL IS THE WORLD’S VAGINOPLASTY LEADER

where, when, and how a burglary took place. However, as examples from the US and the UK have shown, one cannot rule out the possibility that privacy laws will be bent in favor of the police once the software has proven to work effectively. Gabe Mythen, a professor at the University of Liverpool who examines the issues that come along with pre-crime measurements, noted on Swiss radio that “although the software works with algorithms, it depends upon human judgments at the end of the day. And those human judgments cannot be insulated against social prejudice and bias.”

So if the citizens of Zurich don’t want to end up defending themselves for crimes they haven’t even done yet, they should closely watch the development of precrime technology in their city. |PHILIPPE STALDER|

NYC’s Six-Legged Trash Compactors

A feisty, armor-plated breed of ant is waging war on New York City’s litter problem, a recent report has found. Over a sixday period, scientists at North Carolina State University left out processed foods in 59 carefully assigned nooks around Manhattan. On the first day, 59 percent of the food vanished from the sites, with removal being three times more likely in the presence of these alleywaydwelling arthropods.

Despite the feast, the pavement ants— Tetramorium caespitum, when they’re feeling sophisticated—favored the team’s cookies and chips over chopped-up hot dogs. “They have pretty flexible diets and eat a lot of different things, but not all ants are quite as willing to capitalise on human garbage or processed foods,” said Elsa Youngsteadt, one of the scientists at NCSU’s Department of Entomology.

Among the United States’ most commonly seen ants, the insect is equipped with two spines stretching to the end of its thorax and stiff hairs covering its exterior. The report, published in the science periodical Global Change Biology, suggests that had food been left out for a whole year, pavement ants would have consumed up to 2,150 pounds of food waste across the sites’ 150-block stretch. |JACK MILLS|

Illustration by Ole Tillmann, vaginoplasty photo by BSIP/UIG via Getty Images, Zurich photo by VICE staff

“Precobs” software is able to detect burglaries before they take place.

It may sound like a scene from Minority Report, but it has become a reality for the Zurich city police. The city is allocating patrols based on pre-crime technology, or “precobs,” a software that was developed at the Institute for Pattern-Based Prognosis Technology in Oberhausen, Germany. The algorithm analyzes all previous burglary cases and defines danger zones where upcoming burglaries are likely to occur. “We intend to prevent these burglaries by patrolling the danger zones and intimidating the burglars,” Dominik Balogh, of the Zurich city police, noted in a lecture. Indeed, the amount of burglaries in targeted areas decreased by as much as 30 percent since the program was introduced, achieving a ten-year low.

So far, the policemen are only allowed to work with anonymised data about

The “country of soccer” was humiliated 7–1 by Germany during the 2014 World Cup. But at least it’s still the champion of something: plastic surgery on the vagina. After conquering salons all over the world with the Brazilian wax, Brazil is taking home the trophy as the international leader in vaginoplasty procedures.

A 2014 survey published by the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery shows that Brazil was responsible for a total of 1.49 million surgical procedures last year, holding a global share of 12.9 percent, trumping the US (12.5) and Mexico (4.2).

According to the same survey, 13,683 vaginal procedures were carried out in the country, including ninfoplasty, or vaginal “rejuvenation,” a procedure to make the labia smaller. Luiz Henrique Ishida, board member of the Brazilian Society of Plastic Surgery, said that “in Brazil, patients usually prefer a vagina with small labia minora, as they are considered aesthetically more appealing, more pleasant.” |MARIE DECLERCQ|

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Sweden’s Hopeless Homeless

FRONT OF THE BOOK

In Malmö, Sweden’s thirdlargest city, homelessness increased by 42 percent last year among households with children. One reason for this critical situation could be the 1991 liquidation of the Ministry of Housing, which allowed many national affordable-housing programs to be rolled back. Housing production has been a low priority over the past 24 years even as urban populations have skyrocketed, and subsidies for the housing market have decreased substantially.

Furthermore, tenancy agreements that don’t allow government benefits as payment have become commonplace.

Sweden’s national homelessness coordinator, member of parliament Michael Anefur, told VICE that “with this housing debt, we may have to build sixty to seventy thousand flats a year over five to ten years. Sweden may have a deficit of between two and three hundred thousand flats. It will take many years before we catch up—even if we give grants and other things that can help.”

More than 700 people have been infected and over a dozen killed in the latest outbreak of dengue fever in Mumbai.

This is not unusual—dengue is the world’s fastest-growing mosquito-borne disease. What is strange is that Bollywood stars are being blamed.

Officials from the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, Mumbai’s governing body, have denounced the wealthy residents of the city for not allowing mosquito exterminators entry to their estates, providing luxurious incubators for dengue.

In recent months the BMC has stated that as many as 80 percent of mosquito-breeding sites are found in middle- and upper-class houses, and has identified wealthy areas such as Bandra and Pali Hill as hot spots.

Rishi Kapoor, who has appeared in more than 140 Bollywood films, was recently hospitalised with dengue fever. When the BMC’s pesticide department inspected his Pali Hill residence, they found that the standing water in his feng-shui-friendly plants had become a tranquil haven for mosquitoes. Several other stars have also been named in reports for restricting access to their compounds.

Dengue fever can cause severe aches, fevers, permanent liver damage, and, in the worst

cases, bleeding all over the body. There is no cure, but the amount of damage the virus can do is closely linked to economic status.

Thomas Walker, lecturer at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said, “Dengue is essentially treated with a drip, and the more money you have the more likely you are to have access to hospital treatment. Plus, it has a big impact on people’s ability to work, which can be devastating if you need money for your family’s food.”

Failing to deal with mosquito breeding carries a maximum fine of 10,000 rupees, which equates to just $160. Vivek Adhish, who coauthored a recent paper on the underreporting of dengue cases, said, “If breeding is found in the premises of a house, the person concerned can be fined but not much, especially if we take into consideration the potential impact this can have.”

Walker added, “In most countries it’s down to the good will of the people to let exterminators onto their property to remove mosquito larvae. In a place like India, where the population is so huge and you have temporary slums and the rich with inaccessible houses, it is practically impossible to eradicate breeding sites.” |ALEX HORNE|

Sweden also lacks comprehensive stats on the total number of homeless, meaning the official number of 34,000 people without a fixed address is probably a low estimate. Large groups of EU immigrants without residence permits and people without legal documents are not included in the statistics. “Much of the increase consists of people who have not had a foothold in the housing market before—young people, people who do not have any contacts, people without living references, such as new immigrants, and people who haven’t had work and don’t have a real income,” Anefur said. |HUGO ANDERHOLM|

Illustration by Ole Tillmann, New Delhi fumigation photo by Prakash Singh/AFP/Getty Images

Celebrity Dengue Fever

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SY D N E Y O P E R A H O U S E P R I N C I PA L PA RT N E R

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FRONT OF THE BOOK

Homosexual relationships are still illegal in Algeria. The law states that “any person guilty of a homosexual act shall be punished with a term of imprisonment of between two months and two years and a fine of between 500 and 2,000 Algerian dinars.”

There is still no law prohibiting or banning discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Mexican scientists have managed to synthesise diamonds from tequila. Because of its carbon-, hydrogen-, and oxygen-rich chemical makeup, the traditional Mexican liquor can be transformed into thin layers of diamond using a process called chemical vapor deposition, which mainly consists of putting tequila through fluctuations of temperature, pressure, and volume to rearrange its structure into that of a diamond.

Even though the resulting diamond is absolutely pure, the thin layer produced can be measured

only in micrometers. “We would need hundreds of liters of tequila to make a one carat diamond,” said Victor Castano, one of the scientists involved in this research and winner of an Ig Nobel Prize in chemistry.

“There are cheaper and better ways to produce diamonds,” he added. “This was done, partly, to prove that diamonds can be made practically from anything that has carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen.”

December 1, 2014, started off rough for Sharmin Aktar, a seventh-grade student at Gazirchar High School in the Barisal District of Bangladesh.

In the early hours of the morning, her mother screamed at her for not attending her final exams at school. Sharmin then locked the door of her room and hanged herself from the ceiling fan.

The incident has plunged the family into despair, a feeling they share with more than a hundred other Bangladeshi families whose children committed suicide last year.

According to the Bangladesh Shishu Adhikar Forum, a Dhaka-based NGO that promotes the rights of children in the country, at least 116 suicides by children were reported in 2014. The organisation’s director, Abdus Shahid Mahmood, said that reportedly 49 and 76 suicides were committed by children in 2012 and 2013, respectively.

“The trend shows that the rate of suicides is increasing with each year,” he said.

Shamim F. Karim, a professor in the psychology department at the University of Dhaka, said that Bangladeshi children are growing increasingly frustrated about life for a number of reasons. “Among the rural classes, the underlying reasons for depression among children include poverty, unemployment, and child marriages for girls,” she said. For children hailing from middle-class and higher-income families, the reasons are different. “Such families living in urban areas are becoming increasingly nuclear,” she said. “With few people to interact with in the family, these children become more self-centered and demanding. When their demands are not met by their parents, they sometimes become depressed and decide to commit suicide.”

Such is the tragic case of Shela Khatun, a 15-year-old girl from the Chuadanga District, who demanded a special dress from her father for the Muslim festival of Eid al-Fitr on July 21, 2014.

After her father chose to buy her a different dress, Khatun committed suicide in the same manner as Sharmin Aktar.

|JOSÉ LUIS MARTÍNEZ LIMÓN|

|SYED TASHFIN CHOWDHURY|

TRANSFORMING TEQUILA INTO DIAMONDS

A Troubling Rise in Child Suicide in Bangladesh

Illustrations by Ole Tillmann, magazine cover courtesy of El Shad’

Algeria’s First LGBT Magazine Comes Out

In order to raise awareness about LGBT rights in Algeria, three anonymous activists (who are nicknamed O. Harim, Sappho, and S.P.) created the Alouen Association in 2011. When they realised that Algeria was one of the only North African countries without an LGBT magazine—except the lesbian-centric Lexo Fanzin, which, according to O. Harim, fails to address the whole queer community—they decided to create one. The result is El Shad’, a quarterly magazine whose first issue was published last year on November 20, the Transgender Day of Remembrance. In an interview with the news outlet France 24, O. Harim said he chose the name El Shad’ because “it means ‘abnormal’ in Arabic and it’s a name that heterosexuals use to describe us. We decided to reappropriate it. We are abnormal—but so is everyone else in this world. There are people of all different colours, and there are also people of different sexual preferences.”

The magazine is exclusively written by Algerian contributors, who also pay the cost of printing. For their safety, all employees work online from their homes. The first issue, which dealt with being transsexual in the country, featured a retrospective about trans culture and interviews with Algerian students and journalists who gave their opinions on transsexuals. According to the El Shad’ Facebook page, the next issue will deal with love—a subject the editors chose in order to prove that “LGBT love is just like any other form of love.” |JULIE LE BARON|

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beachburritocompany.com

#feedingculture

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beach_burrito_co

lagoon_collective

#LagoonTakeover

2014-11-26 8:15 PM

Dying to Tell the Truth A Breakdown of Recent Attacks Against the Press

BY HAISAM HUSSEIN As the attack on the staff of Charlie Hebdo made clear, journalists everywhere face targeted threats intended to silence them. Religious extremists certainly play a role, but more often than not government and anti-government forces are the perpetrators of violence against the men and women who report the truth as they see it. Since 2000, many journalists have been killed while working in dangerous situations. Here we focus on those who were intentionally targeted and murdered for doing their job.

Yuri Shchekochikhin Novaya Gazeta RUSSIA

Believed to have been poisoned for his coverage of corruption and organized crime

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

16

27

14

24

36

REL POL GOV MIL CRI LOC ???

2007

2008

50

28

REL POL GOV MIL

Ali Iman Sharmarke HornAfrik

CRI

Chauncey Bailey Oakland Post

LOC ???

SOMALIA

Killed by a land mine after attending the funeral of a fellow journalist

UNITED STATES

Shot by a lone gunman while walking to work

2011

22 1

WHERE THE ATTACKS TOOK PLACE

1

2

1

8

1 1 1

2

GOV 1

2

2 3 1 4

10

2 2

7

1

1 2

19

1 1

2

1

13

69 5

2

3

5 1 1

1

1

31 5

20

4

???

1 12

CRI LOC

30

102

1 1

1 1

1

2

1

2 2

MIL

1

10

2 1 21

POL

1

2

1

1

REL

23 3

1

1 1 5 1 1

Top Ten Most Dangerous Countries,

by Number of Journalists Murdered Since 2000 Iraq Philippines Somalia Pakistan Russia

102 69 31 30 23

Mexico Brazil Colombia Bangladesh India

21 20 19 12 12

Rafiq Taği Freelance AZERBAIJAN

Stabbed to death while under a fatwa issued by Iranian clerics

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Assailants:

KEY

REL Religious extremists

(al Qaeda, ISIS, etc.)

Number of

16 journalists murdered

POL Political groups

(anti-government forces) Commentator/columnist Reporter Camera operator Editor Producer/publisher

(including police) MIL Military officials (including paramilitary) Criminal groups LOC Locals (including mob attack) ??? Unknown attackers CRI

2005

2006

38

47

Aswan Ahmed Lutfallah AP Television News

Ogulsapar Muradova Radio Free Europe

GOV Government officials

TURKMENISTAN

IRAQ

Imprisoned after a secret, hasty trial; attacked and killed while in custody

Approached and gunned down while filming insurgent activity

REL POL GOV MIL CRI LOC ???

2009

53 REL

32 journalists Various media outlets

Lasantha Wickrematunge The Sunday Leader

PHILIPPINES

SRI LANKA

A group of journalists were ambushed and killed by gunmen

Pulled out of his car and beaten to death with iron bars

2010

27

POL GOV MIL CRI

Uma Singh Janakpur Today

LOC ???

NEPAL

Stabbed to death in her home by 15 attackers

2012

2013

2014

2015

35

30

27

8

REL POL GOV MIL CRI LOC ???

TOTAL NUMBER OF JOURNALISTS MURDERED Ampuatan massacre in the Philippines 50

Eight journalists Charlie Hebdo

40

FRANCE

30

26 journalists murdered in Iraq

20

12 journalists murdered in Somalia

10 2000

2001

2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

Two gunmen with links to al Qaeda stormed the Charlie Hebdo offices and shot 12 people to death Source: Committee to Protect Journalists

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THE WORLD OF VICE |

A Guide to Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Going

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CANADA The Politics of Food: Seal Meat in the debate. Gollner traveled to Newfoundland to speak to Canadian chefs who believe seal meat is a crucial part of their country’s culinary identity. He met with activists who consider killing seals to be a cruel, antiquated tradition. Gollner also spoke to locals who claim that animal rights groups have ulterior motives for interfering with seal hunting.

Watch The Politics of Food: Seal Meat, coming soon to Munchies.VICE.com.

Photo by Lucian Read

Seal hunting in Canada has been a controversial issue for decades.

Animal rights groups want it outlawed, while native populations fight to preserve the tradition. In 2010, the European Union banned seal products, but in recent years the culinary world has taken an interest in the sustainable harvest of wild seal meat. To learn more, we sent writer Adam Leith Gollner on a journey to seek out the key players involved

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BANGLADESH Steel Salvaging in the Bay of Bengal

When large international cargo carriers retire, they’re sent to the Bay of Bengal to be salvaged in the Bangladeshi city of Chittagong. The industry is a vital part of Bangladesh’s urbanisation, employing 200,000 workers and supplying the country with 80 percent of its steel. Shipbreakers dismantle the massive vessels wearing flip-flops and T-shirts, exposing themselves to lead and asbestos on a daily basis. In 2013, 20 deaths were reported, though the numbers are actually much higher.

International criticism has escalated, and the powerful families who run the industry do everything they can to keep it from scrutiny.

Muhammed Ali Shahin, from the NGO Shipbreaking Platform, said the practice will never stop. “It’s a good place for people who don’t care about the environment, who don’t care if a human dies.”

Watch the documentary, part of our VICE Reports series, this month on VICE.com.

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IRAQ Robot vs. IED

The Hurt Locker got it only partly right. Just ask Brian Castner, a former bomb technician with the US military. He served three tours in the Middle East, two of which were spent leading an Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit, and deployed small remotecontrolled robots to battle a blitz of insurgent-rigged car bombs and improvised explosive devices in and around Kirkuk, Iraq, in 2006. “In the Iraq War, each side sent its champion into battle,” Castner said. “Their champion was the IED. Our champion was the robot.” Castner and his crew grew so reliant on these machines, which can disarm explosives from afar, that they considered them part of the team. Years later, does he still feel an attachment to the machines? We met Castner to find out.

Watch Inhuman Kind, now playing on Motherboard.VICE.com.

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CALIFORNIA California Soul

California has a long history of drought, and 2014 marked the thirddriest year since the state began keeping records, in 1877. With the total economic cost of the 2014 drought at $2.2 billion, and hundreds of thousands of acres going fallow, the future for California’s farming industry, its workers, and the surrounding communities is looking bleak. A report released in July 2014 stated that the drought could lead to a total loss of 17,100 seasonal, part-time, and full-time jobs in 2014 and 2015. One of the cities most affected by the drought is Mendota, with more than 80 percent of its population relying on agricultural jobs. Up to half of the nation’s fruit, nuts, and vegetables are grown in this area. We traveled to Mendota to see firsthand how the drought is impacting the city’s farmers.

Watch the documentary, part of our new California Soul series, now on VICE.com.

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NEW YORK The Monumental Comeback of Judge

In 1991, at the height of its popularity, the New York hardcore band Judge broke up, leaving a long and storied career of incredible music and hyper-violent gigs for the history books. The band’s caustic mix of straight-edge hardcore and metal connected with fans on a profound level. In the decades that followed, Judge’s meager output became hardcore punk 101 for much of the growing scene, which built upon their metal-tinged riffs and attitude. While the legend grew, lead singer Mike Ferraro virtually disappeared, only to reemerge in 2013 at Webster Hall to headline one of the most respected hardcore punk festivals in the country, Black N’ Blue Bowl. Where did the revered front man go and why did he vanish from the public eye? We found Ferraro and talked to him about his monumental comeback.

Watch the documentary this month on Noisey.VICE.com.

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The Boys Are Bakken Town Gay Men Search for Community in North Dakota’s Oil Boomtowns

BY COLE STANGLER PHOTOS BY MATTHEW LEIFHEIT

y one and only liaison in the oil fields of western North Dakota was with a 23-year-old truck driver. Like most such encounters in the oil patch, ours originated on Grindr, the mobile hookup app for gay, bisexual, and curious men.

He sent me a photo, and we traded some biographical details. A few hours later, he was in my room at the Williston Super 8.

After our rendezvous, as the November night air dipped below ten degrees, we took shelter in his car to smoke cigarettes. I was only going to be in the state for 48 more hours, but we made tentative plans to go shooting the next day. I was less interested in exercising my Second Amendment rights for the first time than in extending our easy fling. He just needed to see whether he could get off work that day—no small task for someone accustomed to 16-hour shifts, six days a week.

I’ll never really know whether he was able to get time off or not, but when he told me he had to work, it seemed plausible enough. This is a sacrifice made by nearly all

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Most gay encounters in the Bakken oil patch originate on Grindr, the mobile hookup app for gay, bisexual, and curious men.

those who have flocked to find jobs in North Dakota’s booming Bakken shale formation.

When you’re working in the fast-paced, physically exhausting oil economy, there’s little time for romance.

“You make money up here and you leave,” another gay worker, a 23-year-old who works for a company that rents and sells motors to drill wells, told me. “That kind of puts a damper on relationships.”

And it leaves little time for gay men to build a community. Attitudes are shifting, but the state’s socially conservative heritage still looms large. Same-sex relationships are often intensely private—if not wholly covert—affairs, and LGBT-friendly spaces remain exasperatingly limited. Online platforms like Grindr provide a means for some gay workers in the area to connect with one another. But the sorts of fleeting and—for the most part—one-on-one interactions they enable don’t do much to break the overall sense of solitude.

Homophobia never lingers far from the surface. “I was at a bar the other night,

when this guy started calling me a ‘fucking queer,’” Jon Kelly, a burly 29-year-old real estate developer who moved to Williston four years ago, told me. “I’ve been out for ten years, and nobody’s ever said that to me.”

Kelly tried to defuse the situation. But when the drunken taunting wouldn’t stop, he was left with no other option: “I punched him in the face, knocked him down to the ground,” Kelly said. “And I told him, ‘You just got your ass beat by a fucking queer.’” t Outlaws’ Bar & Grill, a steakhouse in Williston, I met Jim, a 52-year-old twice-divorced Wisconsin native with two sons. Jim used to run his own advertising business, but it fell apart in the 2008 recession. After struggling to pay off his debt, he decided to move to North Dakota to take a job in what’s euphemistically called saltwater disposal, the process of pumping water-like fracking waste deep underground.

“I’m pretty much in the closet,” Jim told me. “I just don’t want to have to deal with all that comes with it—you know, with all the questions. I think, for me, it’s all about meeting Mr. Right. If I met Mr. Right, then I’d be more open.”

The closet is still a major institution in the Bakken. Over the course of a week in North Dakota, I spoke to more than a dozen workers in a similar situation. Some are in the closet for fear of losing their jobs. Others figure the risk of creating friction at the workplace isn’t worth their peace of mind.

Like the vast majority of employers in the state, most companies in the oil patch do not provide discrimination protections for gay and trans workers. That means, if you’re a roughneck who’s out on the job—or a truck driver, or a welder, or a pipe fitter—your boss can probably fire you for being gay, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. Protections exist at some of the bigger international companies that have set up shop—Halliburton and the Norwegian oil giant Statoil, for instance. But this often means little in practical terms, since the industry relies so heavily on subcontracted labor. “You might be working for Statoil, but you’re actually an employee of another company, so those protections may not be there through your employer,” said Joshua

A

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Jason Marshall, a 36-yearold oil-rig handyman, left, recently accepted a job that will offer health insurance to his partner, Cody, a rare benefit for LGBT couples in North Dakota.

Boschee, a state legislator who’s working to pass a ban on employment and housing discrimination against LGBT people.

During the day, Jim often cruises Grindr, looking for other “masculine” types. There’s no shortage of them: the guys who sport beards and tattoos—some heavy-set, some more fit—and self-identify with the app’s “rugged” tribe or insist on “masc only.”

Other than scouring social apps—and if you can’t bear the small talk, there’s always Craigslist—there aren’t a whole lot of ways for Jim to meet Mr. Right.

There are no gay bars in North Dakota.

From the oil fields, the nearest one is seven hours away, in Winnipeg. The state’s three biggest cities, Bismarck, Grand Forks, and Fargo, offer the occasional drag show, but they, too, are hours away from the Bakken. inot, a growing city of 46,000 on the eastern edge of the patch, is the closest there is to a gay mecca in these parts. A few years ago, James Lowe, a 36-year-old Minot native, and his friend James Falcon helped organise a series of quarterly LGBT dances and weekly meet-ups,

M

but internal disagreements brought them to a halt. Last year, the group Pride Minot held weekly viewing parties for the TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race, and it plans to do the same for the show’s upcoming season. Today, there are a couple of Minot bars that are known for attracting a sizable gay male clientele—a mix of locals, airmen, and oil hands willing to make the trek.

Compared with Williston, the Magic City—as Minot is known—has a cosmopolitan feel. At the Starlite Club, a karaoke bar in a strip mall next to the local airport, I hung out with several gay men, a bi woman, and a self-described “fag hag.” An otherwise straight crowd, decked out in the state’s familiar modern cowboy aesthetic, grooved to country-rock anthems from Kellie Pickler, Alabama, and the Zac Brown Band. When the bar closed, at one, I was introduced to Essy Parizek, an owner of Starlite who doubles as its karaoke emcee.

“We don’t care,” Parizek told me when I asked what made her spot one of the few LGBT beacons of the Dakotas. “We just want everyone to have fun—that’s what it’s all about.”

There is something of a growing community in Williston at the center of the oil industry as well. Jon Kelly throws occasional house parties for his queer friends.

The gatherings are small, but Kelly sees them as evidence of broader progress.

“There are the beginnings of a scene here,” Kelly said. “Over the last few years, more and more people are willing to be open about it.”

Jason Marshall, a 36-year-old roustabout, or oil-rig handyman, recently accepted an offer to operate a natural-gas-processing plant in Lignite, a sleepy town of 150 near the Canadian border. In a rare move for the area, his new employer offers benefits to him and his partner, Cody, who is considering adopting a more androgynous gender identity. Cody said he’s not too worried about the reception in his new town. “It’s just better not to mention that stuff,” he said.

Countless others—poor, alone, and horny—struggle to find comfort in the Bakken. “I just really don’t know what to think of these people,” said a gay 22-year-old who recently moved to Williston from Las Vegas. “It’s a weird city, man. If there was no money here, I wouldn’t live here.”

MINOT, ND A growing city of 46,000 on the eastern edge of the oil patch is the closest there is to a gay mecca in these parts, attracting a sizable gay male clientele—a mix of locals, airmen, and oil hands willing to make the trek.

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The Enforcer Afghanistan’s Only Female Police Chief Takes On the Taliban

BY BILAL SARWARY

Firoza, a police commander in the Helmand Province of Afghanistan, at home. All photos by the author

t was five in the morning. A cluster of mud houses stood in silhouette against the moonlit sky, breaking the monotony of Helmand’s desert topography. They were surrounded by farms that seemed to have produced little over the years. The icy, earlymorning silence was interrupted by hushed chatter and hurried footsteps, which stopped at the door of a small, dark home.

Knocks in the dark are usually not welcome in this war-torn country, where they can be from Taliban insurgents seeking food and shelter or from Afghan soldiers in hot pursuit of them. But this knock on a frigid December morning was greeted with warm smiles and hot cups of green tea.

I

The visitor was Firoza, a 53-year-old grandmother and a police commander in Sistani, a village in the remote Marjah district of Helmand. Like many Afghans, she goes only by her first name.

She was here to settle a domestic dispute. Fida Noorzai, a local, had complained about her husband Fazal’s violent outbursts, which had, of late, become frequent. Firoza ordered five of her heavily armed soldiers to quickly gather Noorzai’s extended family in the courtyard. “I have to get this dispute out of the way before I get on to my routine duties,” she bluntly told the soldiers.

Firoza’s routine duty is to command the Afghan Local Police in the area. The ALP, a 30,000-strong organisation that stands separate from the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police—two huge forces with a checkered history—was built up with the help of coalition brass in the waning years of the NATO mission and was trained by US Special Operations Forces. In recent years it has moved to the front lines of the fight against the Taliban, bringing local expertise and connections to bear,

and its members have had many successes and suffered heavy casualties. Covered from head to toe in a traditional black cloak and donning an automatic assault rifle on her broad shoulders, Firoza has been defending the people of Sistani for the past three years. Affectionately called Ajani, meaning “the one who overcomes,” Firoza was earlier under the command of her husband, 60-year-old Ewaz Mohammad Khan. But three years ago, the authorities in the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah relieved Mohammad of his charge, citing lack of confidence in his leadership skills, and handed over the command to Firoza.

Mohammad, who now reports to her along with 13 other soldiers, told me that Firoza quickly established herself as the leader of the unit. She is now the only female ALP commander in the country.

At the Noorzai compound, about a dozen people assembled in the small open space.

In her steely voice, Firoza asked Noorzai to explain his irrational behavior. He gave an incoherent reply, which was summarily dismissed with the wave of a hand.

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“Islam prohibits beating women,” Firoza said as Noorzai nodded in agreement. “I expect you to be kind and compassionate to your wife.” She then signaled one of her soldiers to hand over his thick leather belt. “If you defy me, you will have this printed all over you,” she said, holding the belt high over her head for everyone to see.

In Sistani, no one defies Firoza. “Earlier, there were frequent complaints of soldiers extorting money and food from villagers,” said Mohammad. “When such a complaint was brought to me, I would scold the guilty soldier. But Firoza took a different route.

When she got the first such complaint, she called the guilty soldier, took his belt, and thrashed him with it in full public view.

The message immediately got across, to the unit and to the people, that Firoza would not tolerate any transgression.” He said she does not spare anyone. “I was once badly beaten by her. She hit me with a belt. I had to see a doctor,” he said, deflecting questions about what he did to draw Firoza’s ire. “In Sistani, there is no doubt over who is in command.”

Three years ago, Sistani was overrun by Taliban, who imposed and collected taxes and dispensed their version of justice. The authority of the Afghan government was confined to the district headquarters and the provincial capital. There was only a limited presence of US and NATO forces, and the strength and morale of the Afghan forces were low.

This changed after Firoza took charge.

She initiated several bold and unconventional measures to instill confidence among the people and her soldiers, one of which was her decision to arm her family. When the Afghan authorities ignored Firoza’s repeated requests to give her more soldiers, she handed over weapons to 40 of her family members, including a 12-year-old grandson. This raised the strength of her forces in Sistani to 55 from 15. “In one stroke, we outnumbered the Taliban,” Firoza said. “They got scared.

They knew that Ajani was armed, her daughters were armed, her daughters-inlaw were armed.”

The Taliban then changed its local leadership and asked Mullah Habash, a key commander in the area, to take charge of the fight against Firoza in Sistani. Firoza said the three police posts under her control soon came under heavy fire from the Taliban. At half a dozen other places, her soldiers were ambushed. One of Firoza’s sons was killed.

“The Taliban thought that the death of her son would crush Firoza’s spirit. They did not know the stuff she was made of,” said Hazrat Bedal Khan, the police chief in Marjah. Khan, who has known Firoza for more than ten years, told me that the killing of her son strengthened Firoza’s resolve to drive the Taliban out of Sistani.

“From being largely a defensive force, the ALP unit under her command took on a more offensive role,” Khan said. “Firoza and her men began to preempt Taliban attacks. Mullah Habash was injured, several Taliban fighters were killed, and many others were taken prisoners.”

Khan said that to ensure her soldiers would not buckle under attack, Firoza would often stand behind them with her gun, telling them that she would not hesitate to shoot them if they turned and ran.

The clashes took an unexpected toll on Firoza and her family, however. Months after she took charge, two of Firoza’s sons were arrested by Afghan soldiers following a clash not far from Sistani. Details are murky, but the authorities say the two were involved in a dispute with their brother-inlaw and killed him in front of their sister at her home, a charge Firoza strongly denies.

“My sons were accused of killing civilians,” Firoza told me, disputing the claims.

“It’s been nearly three years, but they have not been sentenced because the prosecutor’s office has no evidence against them.

I don’t have the money or the connections to fight for them.”

But Mohammad Anwar, the military prosecutor for Helmand, said his office has all the evidence to secure conviction of Firoza’s sons. “They claim they only shot Taliban, but the reality is that Ajani’s sons killed their sister’s husband, who was a civilian,” Anwar told me. “Ajani’s daughter herself filed the complaint against her brothers. She said that her brothers would have also killed her son had she

not protected him.” According to Anwar, the case against Ajani’s sons is now final.

“A death sentence has been issued against one son, while the other will be sentenced soon,” he said.

Meanwhile, back in Sistani, Firoza’s soldiers had intercepted a Taliban radio message. “They are plotting another attack on me,” she said. “This time it’s going to be a car bomb.”

If it’s true that all politics is local, then in the fractured geographic and security landscape of Afghanistan all politics is hyperlocal. The ALP has seen successes in areas where the national army and police have struggled, in part because the ALP is made up of fighters like Firoza, who, beyond being a trailblazer for female commanders, has proven to be exactly the sort of leader who can really bring the fight to the Taliban: She is connected, respected, often feared, and fights as much for her village, her family, and her personal honor as she does to defend her country. This is the complicated reality of how the war in Afghanistan must be carried out today.

In the past three years, Firoza has survived nearly a dozen assassination attempts. The last one was only a week before my visit, when a Taliban insurgent planted a roadside bomb on the route her car was supposed to take. “Just like the Taliban, we too have informers. We have our people in their ranks. They tell us what the Taliban is up to,” Firoza said, adding that “the Taliban has done all within its power to kill me. But I am not afraid of death. Even if I die, the battle will go on.”

As an unfazed Firoza began to give instructions to her soldiers for the night patrol, Marjah’s police chief, Khan, interjected. He asked Firoza’s husband to double her security cover. Turning to Firoza, Khan said, “We want you alive—because when we look at you, we fight better.”

Firoza in the remote Afghan village of Sistani with her grandchildren, who are trained fighters and don’t attend school.

FIROZA’S MANAGEMENT STYLE When Firoza received a complaint about one of her soldiers, she took his belt and thrashed him with it in public.

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The Man with the Golden Gun How an Inventor Lost Almost Everything in His Hunt for the Perfect Weapon

BY JULIAN MORGANS

t the turn of the millennium, an amateur gunsmith living in Australia claimed to have achieved the impossible. To the quiet amusement of weapons engineers around the world, Richard Giza, the Polish co-founder of Recoilless Technologies International, announced that he’d built a mechanism that eliminated recoil from firearms.

Recoil is the kickback felt when firing a gun. The stronger the gun, the bigger the pulse and the greater the chance of hitting something other than your target. To those in the weapons industry, eliminating it would be a Holy Grail scenario, leading to better accuracy and larger payloads. In terms of achievability, it’s up there with nailing cold fusion and inventing time travel.

This didn’t bother RTI. By 2001, the company was briefing Australian defense scientists and working alongside gun

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Gunmaker Richard Giza with a schematic of his recoil-free rifle. Photo by the author

manufacturers like Glock and Beretta. In January 2006 Peter Dunn, an Australian retired major general, told the Age newspaper that RTI had “the potential to fundamentally transform the way ballistic weapons are deployed.” The firm was sitting on millions in investment dollars, its success all but assured.

Fast-forward to December 2013, and Giza was starving himself on the steps of Melbourne’s Parliament House. This was a hunger strike, and it wasn’t his first. Giza’s company was being liquidated and every vestige of his illustrious future had come undone. He and his colleagues had, in a sense, shot themselves in the foot.

Giza was born in western Poland in March 1955. His earliest memories are of his father conspiring with Poland’s underground anti-communist resistance, the .

Zołnierze Wykleci, or Doomed Soldiers. ‘

“I would stay awake and listen,” he says of his dad’s secret meetings. “The idea of revolution was normal for me, and that’s just how I grew up.”

In 1967 his father’s branch of the Doomed Soldiers came unstuck, forcing the family to settle in Australia, where Giza had an uncle. And while late-60s Melbourne was livelier than Soviet-era Poland, the future inventor kept to himself.

“The other boys would go to discotheques while I’d stay home to read text books,” he recalls. “Military magazines, physics, and technology—that’s all I cared about.” At the age of 13 he read about Leonardo da Vinci’s design for a recoilless cannon, and it stuck in his imagination.

The next 25 years passed without incident. Giza married, had children, and worked a series of shitty jobs in both Poland and Australia. He continued to read about

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ballistics technology and play around with numbers, equations, and designs, but it never went further than theory.

Then, in 1992, when Giza was working at a Melbourne metals foundry, he fell out with the union and management sacked him. Unemployment is a hard knock for any father, but Giza met it by staging a hunger strike against the government, which he blamed for his situation. “I was thinking of my favorite hero, Mahatma Gandhi, and he’d done things like that,” he explains, grinning. “Actually we’d done things like that in Poland too, but much shorter.”

The strike worked and City Council found him a job, but he and his wife divorced. “My wife and kids always suffered because of my revolutionary activities. We were together and separated, then together again, then finally separated, but people can’t stop you from fighting for your rights.”

The next hunger strike came in 1996.

That year a mentally handicapped loner named Martin Bryant shot 35 people in Tasmania, and the Australian government banned a wide range of weapons.

“Disarmament! The government wanted to leave people unable to defend themselves,” Giza recalls, still incredulous. He commenced another hunger strike on the steps of Parliament, and made a decision to pursue his oldest passion: firearms. Since 13 he’d dreamed of small weapons with immense payloads—handguns that fire 20mm rounds and aircraft that pack the wallop of tanks. Since he was jobless and single, he had more time than ever.

Giza sold his house and rented a workshop. The problem of recoil lies in the fact that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. A bullet explodes forward and something has to go backward. Giza’s thinking was that if a gun’s backward recoil were split into two opposing directions, backward and forward, the weapon could remain stable in the middle. This would happen if an equal amount of exploding gas were forced forward as back, causing two spring-loaded components of the gun to separate from the center. In his own words, “the gun is effectively being blown apart and the bullet leaves as a side effect.” By 1998, after two years of refurbishing a .22 magnum, he had a working prototype.

Joseph Vella is a stocky Maltese mechanic who owned the garage next door.

By some twist of fate, he was a shooting enthusiast who, as Giza recalls, “would

always say hello and have lots of questions.” When asked to remember the first time he saw the gun, Vella’s eyes light up.

“I couldn’t believe it,” he says. “I knew right away.”

The pair went into business and incorporated RTI on March 23, 2000. By Giza’s estimate, they received $9 million in investments over the decade, but Singapore’s interest was the kicker. Several members of the country’s defense ministry visited RTI’s workshop in 1999, which is a moment captured on YouTube. You can see the officials watching a modified Mauser 98 bolt-action rifle suspended by four free-hanging steel cables. A shot is fired and the rifle sways gently in the wires. There’s no jolt.

Noting Singapore’s interest, the Australian military signed a non-disclosure agreement with RTI, asking the firm to brief its scientists. A similar deal with Poland followed. This inspired discussions with the German manufacturer Glock, after which Vella used his shooting contacts to hash out a collaborative deal with Beretta. Vella also claims that an executive from United Defense (which became part of BAE Systems) visited them in the mid 2000s and later admitted that he was there to steal RTI’s designs.

Despite the innovative technology, Giza and Vella’s business decisions were unwaveringly abysmal. In 2004 the Australian Securities and Investments Commission discovered that RTI had raised their initial capital from Vella’s friends and family without legislated disclosures on risk. They deemed this “misleading or deceptive” and forced the company to return $600,000 in funds or shares.

After this debacle, Giza and Vella sought to get RTI some business acumen with a

smooth-talking director by the name of Andrew Flanagan. But exactly five months later Flanagan initiated legal proceedings to have the company shut down. An investigation by the Australian later found Flanagan was a repeat con artist wanted by several governments around the world.

RTI somehow survived, only to report an operational loss of $2.7 million in 2006, trailed by a $4.8 million loss the following year. According to Giza, the company’s R&D simply cost more than they raised, but Valla is far more forthcoming: “It was our board treating themselves, flying everywhere first class.” This all came to a head in 2007 when most of the company’s investors walked, leaving the founders to go down with the ship. The end came in 2009, when Giza was diagnosed with colon cancer. By the time he’d beaten it, RTI had lost everything.

In December 2013, Giza and Vella applied for government welfare. “We had no money for food,” Giza explains. “And Joseph can’t write, so I had to fill in his forms.” This led to a heated argument with the welfare officer, and the two men were escorted from the building. A few days later, Giza was back on Parliament’s steps for his third hunger strike. For three months he lived on nothing but salt, sugar, and water, losing 92 pounds in the process.

Finally the government relented and has paid for his hostel lodging ever since.

“What was it all about?” Giza repeats my last question with a certain smugness, like he anticipated my asking it. “Forget about money,” he says. “It’s about solving problems created by motion.” I think he means motion in a physics sense, but it’s an ambiguous statement. Maybe Richard Giza just likes a fight.

GIZA’S RECOIL THEORY

Recoil is the backward momentum of a gun when it is discharged.

When a bullet explodes forward, something has to go backward.

If a gun’s backward recoil were split into two opposing directions, backward and forward, the weapon could remain stable in the middle.

Giza (right) with a protester at an antigovernment hunger strike. Photo

by Jonathan Sheehan

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Another Bullshit Night in Crack City Getting By in São Paulo’s Skid Row

BY SARIKA BANSAL PHOTOS BY ALMUDENA TORAL

Priscila Carolino, 29, is a resident of Cracolândia.

riscila Carolino was nearly due with her fifth child when she sauntered into the public hospital for her weekly checkup. Fidgety and talkative, she quickly made her presence known in the waiting room, asking to touch other patients’ pregnant bellies and inquiring about their love lives. After her visit, unhappy with her doctor’s recommendations, Carolino yelled across the room, calling herself a fat cow.

Like many women in the waiting area, 29-year-old Carolino carried a paper deeming her pregnancy alto risco, or high risk.

She lives in a densely populated area in São Paulo known as Cracolândia—or Crackland. She claims to have stopped using

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crack cocaine during this pregnancy, but she frequently smokes cigarettes and marijuana.

There are an estimated 1 million crack users in Brazil, the largest number in the world, and for many politicians and voters, Cracolândia is symbolic of the country’s drug epidemic. It is composed of several blocks in the center of South America’s largest city, and at points in its history, it has drawn upward of 2,000 people looking to buy or sell crack cocaine.

Since the area is so visible and politically important, Cracolândia has drawn sizable government resources. For much of the last two decades, Brazil’s politicians and police forces took a strongman approach, arresting drug users and shutting down streets. After watching operations fail time and again, Brazil has now adopted a different method.

As opposed to the tactics used in the US in the 1980s, Brazil is offering resources to rehabilitate drug users rather than criminalise them. Lieutenant William Thomaz, who patrols Cracolândia, said his unit considers crack users to be “sick people who need social services” rather than criminals. (The selling of drugs, though, remains strictly illegal.) He has also talked to his force about the particular challenges that women face in Cracolândia.

Thomaz and his colleagues can now refer crack users to a city program called De Braços Abertos, or With Open Arms, which began in January 2014. Drawing from harm-reduction philosophy, it works with more than 400 Cracolândia residents, including Carolino.

The Open Arms program, which is unique in South America, is designed to reduce dependence on crack—though it may not result in total abstinence.

Participants receive food, housing in nearby hotels, and basic medical services in exchange for work. Fernando Haddad, São Paulo’s mayor, says that these basic services help remove stressors that can cause people to seek drugs.

More controversially, the Open Arms program offers participants jobs to sweep the neighbourhood streets. Haddad says the custodial jobs are part of a “therapeutic process and the recovery of citizenship.”

Participants are paid every Friday, and can do what they please with their earnings— including buying crack. Critics worry that this approach will keep users trapped in a vicious circle of addiction and poverty.

Harm-reduction advocates, meanwhile, say that the jobs help crack users set and maintain daily schedules, which can alter their relationship with drugs.

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Cracolândia was born in the late 1980s.

The story goes that a bus station in the city center fell out of use, and people began congregating there to sell, buy, and use crack cocaine. As businesses started disappearing from the city center, crack became more pervasive. Traffickers began to control much of the activity, including doling out punishment.

“Some streets were no longer under the surveillance of police,” said Francisco Inácio Bastos, who conducts crack-cocaine research with the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation. “So these places were occupied by [drug] trafficking and attracted users from many different neighbourhoods of the city.”

Brazil has an immense, sometimes lawless border with Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia, all of which mass-produce coca leaves. In rural Brazilian towns, small factories—and sometimes home kitchens—turn coca paste into low-quality crack rocks. The drug then reaches São Paulo with the help of micro-traffickers, who carry small quantities of crack cocaine around the city. This supply chain is virtually untraceable. As a result, crack is plentiful and cheap enough in Cracolândia—a hit costs as little as five Brazilian reals, or two US dollars—to satisfy demands of low-income drug users.

Police told me that today the population has dropped to about 500—partially because of government programs like Open Arms.

The program’s representatives claim, based on anecdotal evidence, that drug consumption has decreased in Cracolândia since the inception of the program. Even so, drug traffickers still control much of everyday life.

For instance, Carolino’s hotel is known to be rife with illegal activity, but police are not allowed to enter without a search warrant.

An estimated 30 percent of Cracolândia’s residents are women, who are particularly marginalised. “Women crack users are in an even more vulnerable situation because they usually have sex in exchange for crack,” said Bruno Gomes, who leads a nonprofit in Cracolândia called É de Lei. “A lot of men like to go [to Cracolândia] because the women are easy and cheap, and you can do whatever you want with them. So they suffer a lot of violence.”

Isabelly Santana, a transgender woman who has lived in Cracolândia for two years, has seen this firsthand. “No one treats women well here,” she said. “We have to stay chill. We shouldn’t say anything to the police [if we experience violence], because people who do that are snitches.”

Open Arms representatives say that the income women earn in their program could decrease the need for sex work. But Santana

told me that she earns significantly more from sex work than from sweeping. She only occasionally shows up to her custodial job, though she acknowledged that the routine has made her days more stable and her drug cravings less severe.

Both she and Carolino were particularly thankful to have the hotel rooms. For Cracolândia’s women, accustomed to the injustices of the streets, privacy is paramount.

At first glance, Carolino looks and sounds nothing like the stereotypical image of a marginalised woman. Though she is petite, she is unafraid to dole out her brand of justice. The first time I met her, she was chasing a man with a stick, her shirt rolled up to reveal a very pregnant belly. He had broken a promise, she said, and she needed to teach him a lesson.

Underneath her self-assurance, though, Carolino has a dark past, which is quite common among women in Cracolândia.

Her brothers were killed when she was younger. She was in two physically abusive relationships, which caused her to eventually flee her hometown of Rio de Janeiro.

She does not have legal protection against her abusers, so she ran to a place that felt faraway and anonymous.

Cracolândia is home to a sizable number of pregnant bellies—possibly because of genderbased violence and limited access to birth control. However, there are startlingly few children in the district. Cracolândia’s hotels are not considered homes, and children in the area are not permitted to remain with homeless mothers. Instead, most babies born to Cracolândia residents are either given up for adoption or shipped off to family members.

In compliance with the law, Carolino was told that she would have to give up her child, despite new efforts to help pregnant women.

“People think that [women in Cracolândia] would be bad mothers,” said

Dartiu Xavier da Silveira, a drug-addiction researcher at the Federal University of São Paulo. “That’s not true. Alcohol is much more aggressive to the brain of the child than crack is. It’s unbelievable, but it’s true.

I think that most of them can keep their babies, if they are helped.”

Of course, if women keep their children in Cracolândia, that means they will grow up in one of the most challenging environments imaginable. Adults have an unwritten rule to never smoke in front of children, whom they affectionately call anjos, or angels. But some residents told me about children who became addicted to crack from the age of eight.

In spite of the Open Arms program, most people familiar with Cracolândia believe the area will continue to exist—but it could change dramatically in coming years.

There are rumors of future plans for real estate development, which may push drug use underground. And the recent social programs in Cracolândia have had some incremental benefits in the neighbourhood.

Still, challenges remain: Drug traffickers have enormous clout in the area, and some local politicians seem more interested in revitalising downtown than they do in healing addiction.

Cautiously optimistic about Cracolândia’s future, a local pastor successfully advocated for Carolino to be allowed to keep her baby.

Only time will tell whether she will be able to calm her temper and become as good a mother as he believes she can be—and whether the baby has a chance of living a drug-free life.

“I want to keep this son with me,” Carolino said, while still pregnant. She was rocking her new stroller back and forth.

“I stopped smoking crack for him.”

Cracolândia is composed of several blocks in the center of São Paulo.

Sarika Bansal and Almudena Toral traveled to Brazil with a grant from the International Reporting Project.

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Fräuleins Dig Them Fighting for Facial Scars in Germany’s Secret Fencing Frats

BY ROC MORIN

irst, they cover the pictures, because the blood can go all over,” Hans began.

“I saw a lot of duels, and fuck, there’s a lot of blood.” Fearing reprisals, Hans, a student, insisted on using a fake name. He also asked us not to mention the fencing fraternity he defected from in Heidelberg, Germany. “It’s not a public thing,” he said.

“You don’t go around telling people, and there are no videos of a real duel.”

The secret duels, conducted by a small number of university fraternities in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, are all that remain of a once widespread practice called Mensur. In a Mensur bout, fencers display their valor through stoic endurance of an opponent’s blows. From the 19th century on, the practice flourished across Europe, before quickly declining after World War II. “In the past,” Hans noted, “only high-borns were allowed to carry weapons, but since students were in danger of getting robbed on their travels, the king decided to let them wear weapons too. Of course, they were like, ‘Oh, cool. Let’s duel each other.’”

There were many fatalities—typically caused by sword thrusts to the lungs or heart. The loss of eyes, ears, and noses was also common. In 1566, famed astronomer Tycho Brahe lost his nose to a fellow student’s sword. For the rest of his life, the Dane wore a brass prosthetic.

Heavy casualties led to the adoption of chain-mail suits, eye coverings, and nose sheaths. “Still,” Hans said, “if a sword gets trapped under the nose guard, it’ll cut your nose to pieces. That’s not so nice. You can also lose a piece of your [scalp] with your hair on it. I saw guys faint.

“When the face is [lacerated],” he explained, “they pause to stitch it without anesthetic. A doctor is always there.

They don’t use too many stitches, because in a duel for honor, the man with the most stitches loses. Sometimes there are these

“F

A Mensur fencer in an undated photo

MENSUR Academic duels in which fencers display their valor through stoic endurance of an opponent’s blows

huge cuts with only two or three stitches.

It makes the scar a lot bigger. Back in the day, they ripped the wound apart, or put horsehair in it, so it would infect and be bigger. It was a big deal for men from the upper society to have a scar.”

In addition to being badges of courage, the marks, known as Schmisse, are often seen as aphrodisiacs. “There’s a famous quote,” Hans said, “that if you have a scar on your face, it’s a sure thing to get a girl. And the worse it looks, the better it is for the girl.” A 2009 study in the journal Personality and Individual Differences supports that conclusion, finding that women favor men with facial scars for short-term relationships.

Duels of honor are customarily initiated when one fencer tears his business card and hands it to an opponent. As Hans noted, there are always plenty of opportunities to make enemies. “Fraternities are constantly having drinking competitions against each other. You have to puke. They actually have buckets for you to puke in, because your stomach only has a certain amount of space. People always talk bad to each other when they drink.”

After a year as a pledge, Hans earned the right to participate in his first duel.

“Several times,” he said, “our swords got stuck, and the other guy hit me on the head with the flat side of the blade. You’re not allowed to move, but I got a little bit scared and flinched. Everyone said, ‘That’s very dishonorable.’ Even if you see it coming, you have to take it like a man. There are always five hits, and then it’s the next round.

You have 25 or 30 rounds, depending on the duel. We got stuck again on the next round, and I moved again, and they took me out of the duel. They said, ‘You have to clean your honor in another duel.’ I was like, ‘Peace out.’

“They say it’s not about winning; it’s about standing up for your fraternity. They say that honor is important, but no one really cares about it. I have no fencing honor anymore. I can live with that.”

Georg, a member of the prestigious Corps Marchia Berlin fraternity, offered a different perspective. The law student sees Mensur as a means of self-mastery. “Of course, you are nervous,” he acknowledged. “There are people who are really afraid. But they chose to do it. You learn to deal with extreme situations—to stand there and just do it because you know you can. That’s the most important thing about it.”

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Slay Queen Perfume Genius Sings Scary Songs for Homosexuals

BY MITCHELL SUNDERLAND, PHOTOS BY MATTHEW LEIFHEIT

f Cat Power and Liza Minnelli’s gay dad gave birth to an emotional, pale sex god, he would probably look and sound like Perfume Genius, a.k.a. Mike Hadreas. The Seattle-born singer plays sad piano ballads and stars in music videos with drag queens and dudes wearing tacky jumpsuits. Unlike gay performers such as Sam Smith, who will sing melancholy songs about monogamous relationships and then criticise his peers for finding anonymous sex on Grindr, Hadreas is unafraid to wear glitter and then tell reporters that he hopes his drag-queen-filled video for “Queen” scares heterosexuals. Most important, when he covers Sade’s “By Your Side” without the chorus, he can make you come and cry at the same time.

I made plans to hang out with Hadreas before his concert at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, but he had to cancel last minute. He gave me a rain check, promising to eat greasy food with me next time he was in town (gay men love bad food as much as they love bad pop music).

Since the Cheesecake Factory has yet to open in Brooklyn, I met Hadreas at a diner a few weeks later to discuss Madonna and why he loves scaring boring breeders.

should be able to get a blanket, cigarettes, dinner, and a gun all at the same place.

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VICE: How did you start playing sad songs for boys?

Mike Hadreas: I took piano lessons, and I would always make things up. They weren’t really songs—more fragments. I didn’t start writing words or official songs until five years ago. I’m untrained. I always wanted to sing, but I didn’t like the way it sounded. I didn’t think I was a good singer until recently. I feel like good singing and sex should be easy, but for me it’s, like, ugh.

How did you come up with the idea for the song “Queen”?

I was mad—walking around guarded and selfconscious, internalising things people said to me. I felt bad and embarrassed at myself for still

What’s your favorite chain restaurant?

I’m really into the Cheesecake Factory. The menu’s like a book. People ask me, “Where should I eat in Seattle?” And I usually recommend the Olive Garden.

Why do you love what straight people would call “bad food?”

It tastes good, man. I don’t know. I like fancy food too; I like richness in food. I don’t like little flavors.

You cover artists like Madonna and Sade. Why do you cut the refrains when you sing their songs?

That’s what I do. I cover the Madonna song “Oh Father” from Like a Prayer and just take all the saddest, quietest, and weirdest lyrics.

carrying around stuff from when I was a kid.

There are times on tour when I’m in a gas station and I have my nails done and I’m in a dress or whatever, and people are kind of backing up out of fear. Now, I’m like, “Fuck you—back up! I want some Nerds [candies]. Let me through.”

If you’re gonna be scared, do that, ’cause if anything I’m gonna be even more gay later and even worse and more disgusting and scary than you ever thought.

Where did you work before you sang professionally?

I worked at a department store that was like Walmart but nicer. I made keys and mixed paint.

Do you like America?

I like America because there are malls and chain restaurants open 24 hours. It’s frustrating in Europe because you can only buy cigarettes at the cigarette store, and it closes at seven. You

Does being labeled a “gay singer” bother you?

Yeah, and I am a gay singer, so I can’t get too mad at it. And I’m pretty explicit in my lyrics and I mean it. I feel very purposeful about it, but I think sometimes people talk about that more than the music. Still, that’s what I signed up for.

But I don’t know—there’s a duty to it. I don’t mind that responsibility, no matter how small it is.

What’s the biggest misconception about you?

I guess that people always think of me as wounded and frazzled because there’s a lot of vulnerability in my music. But talking about those things, to me, is very strong and brave. I don’t mind saying that about myself. Someone wrote, “He makes music with the flair of the head of a drama camp.” Like, shoot me. If Jack White gets emotional, people aren’t like, “He seems so dramatic.” Fuck you! Of course there’s drama to it, but anybody who makes music needs a certain amount of drama to think [they’re] good enough.

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Known Zones The Noisey Guide to ATL’s Trap Map

BY THOMAS MORTON PHOTOS BY CAM KIRK AND JERRY RICCIOTTI PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY JOE BURGER ap music is hood music. In the sense that its lyrics and rhythms evoke the grim realities and fleeting triumphs of quotidian life in the contemporary urban milieu, and also because at least half of all rap songs are about neighbourhoods. Be it the hood the rapper is

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from, the one he sells drugs in, the one he used to sell drugs in, or just one he thinks is particularly rough or particularly fancy, you can’t swing a cat in a rap track without scratching a shout-out to some spot or another.

While this is a straightforward affair in cities with distinct internal entities like Compton and the South Side, trying to rep your neighbourhood in Atlanta isn’t so simple. After Sherman burned the place to the ground, Atlanta was rebuilt by a 100-year succession of carpetbaggers, developers, and politicians on the take, leaving the city’s map a baffling, decentralised spidermess that conforms to no known human system of logic. Neighbourhoods here are amorphous blobs nobody agrees on the boundaries of, and whose names are only used by realtors

to convince buyers they’re moving to a nicer part of town than they actually are. Good hoods and bad hoods not only touch each other but sometimes are each other. Only in a city this geographically schizophrenic could you have a lifelong East Atlantan like Gucci Mane say “I’m a East Atlanta nigga” and then IMMEDIATELY follow it with “You an East Atlanta bitch.”

Thankfully for the city’s rappers and trappers, the Atlanta police divided up this maddening tangle into six patrollable zones. Not only does this provide a concrete place to tell people where you hail from, calling your hood “Zone X” makes Atlanta sound like a Logan’s Run– esque dystopia in the not-so-distant future.

Which, in terms of what’s happening in hiphop, it actually kinda is.

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ZONE 1

ZONE 3

Zone 1 is home to Bankhead and the Bluff, the titular drug market of the film Snow on tha Bluff. Apart from inspiring Freaknik-era shoulder-dance craze the “Bankhead Bounce,” Bankhead is also T.I.’s old stomping ground and the setting for his 2003 genre-christening album Trap Muzik, which may make it the original trap in trap music. Incidentally, Zone 1 is where FDR built the country’s first public housing project, Techwood Homes, arguably the first trap in history.

Back when Atlanta was one of America’s most dangerous cities, this is where most of that danger was happening. A gang called the Miami Boys brought the crack war up from Florida, funneling coke from the Caribbean straight up I-75 to the Connector and into Zone 1. The city used the 1996 Olympics as a chance to tear down Techwood and drive the Miami Boys out of town, and those who remained were pushed out when the Black Mafia Family moved down from Detroit and started running West Coast coke in exotic rental cars.

Notable Zone 1ers: T.I., Dem Franchise Boyz, Shawty Lo, Curtis Snow, Maynard Jackson, Gladys Knight and two of the Pips, D-Roc of the Ying Yang Twins (and “Bankhead Bounce” fame)

When we were filming Noisey Atlanta, Trouble from Duct Tape took us to a Zone 3 trap house that was the only building on its block with a roof. It was seriously the set from one of those “after humans” shows.

But once we crossed the porch, and waited for a person inside to open the door’s bankvault lock system, some ten guys were sitting in a sumptuously air-conditioned living room playing Xbox and doing bench presses with their guns in their laps. It took me a second to figure out what was going on, but the deal is: That’s their job. They were all “at work.” And from the finish of their firearms and jewelry, seems like work’s going good.

The fact that a single drug spot can maintain a staff the size of a reputable steakhouse is a testament to the entrepreneurial spirit that drives the Atlanta trap scene. Basically, when BMF collapsed it forced everybody back to the trap house to do it themselves.

And not just drug dealing. People DIY everything in their trap houses: They record tracks, shoot videos, and found indie record labels like Gucci Mane’s 1017 Brick Squad and Future’s Freebandz. Zone 3 is like the Silicon Valley of trap-made rap music.

Of the four trap houses rising trap star Peewee Longway keeps in the various zones (“like Monopoly”), his Zone 3 spot, the Lobby, is the one he always mentions.

2 Chainz’s studio probably doesn’t count as a trap house considering he has $500 worth of candles on the console, but it’s here too.

Even iLoveMakonnen and his weird little clique of home recorders are Zone 3 kids.

It’s the zone where shit gets done.

Notable Zone 3ers: 2 Chainz, Ludacris, Yung Joc, Trinidad James (ancestrally), Monica, Jeff Foxworthy, T.I.’s character in ATL, Rich the Kid

ZONE 2 North Atlanta, including Buckhead and Lenox, comprises Zone 2 and is essentially an amusement park for ballplayers’ wives and rich lawyers. This is the part of town that earned Atlanta its “Black Hollywood” nickname and was an obvious choice for a drug lord cum aspiring rap mogul like Demetrius “Big Meech” Flenory, founder of the Black Mafia Family, to make his hub.

After BMF set up shop and consolidated the city’s drug industry, it was not uncommon to see 15-car convoys of Day-Glo Lamborghinis commuting (loudly) between Buckhead’s myriad bottle-service bars and strip clubs. Nor for those Lambos to cause an hours-long traffic jam as they all tried to stonedly park and unpark in the same lot.

Due to a number of high-profile parkinglot shootings, the City of Atlanta imposed a drinking curfew on Buckhead, and the cops began looking suspiciously at all the guys with quarter-million-dollar cars and chains with the same three letters. Meech didn’t help matters by erecting a billboard proclaiming “The World Is BMF’s,” based on the one from Scarface. Eventually the DEA took down the whole operation and turned off the money faucet that had kept Atlanta hip-hop in diamonds.

Notable Zone 2ers: The Black Lips, Migos (kinda), the current governor

ZONE 4 Zone 4 is the SWATS, which stands for “Southwest Atlanta something something.”

This is the zone Goodie Mob, Outkast, and all the other Dirty South folks from the late 90s came out of. Although some of them are technically from East Point, which has its own police force sandwiched between Zone 3 and Zone 4. And is, of course, on the west side of town. Fucking Atlanta.

Notable Zone 4ers: Killer Mike, Outkast, CeeLo

ZONE 5 Downtown and midtown Atlanta used to look like The Walking Dead after dark.

When Buckhead shut down, the frat crowd headed for East Atlanta while the hip-hop set helped revitalise the intown.

Nightmarishly huge clubs like Opera and Harlem Nights opened up featuring flaming

champagne bottles, multitiered VIP sections catering to 20-person entourages, and uniformed Atlanta police officers they hire to—I don’t know what. Certainly not to stop anyone from doing drugs. It’s entirely possible they’re hired just so clubgoers can do drugs in front of a cop.

Right across the highway, a colony of recording studios like Patchwerk and Coach K’s Quality Sound run all night, and then down next to the Greyhound station you have institutional titty bar Magic City, where producers take their new tracks directly from the booth to DJ Esco to premiere, bypassing the entire record and radio industry in the process. It’s probably the only farm-to-table hip-hop distro operation on earth.

Nobody is really from Zone 5 (though Trinidad James does keep a pied-à-terre overlooking the 75/85 connector), but it’s such a studio haven that producers here like Mike Will Made-It, Metro Boomin, Sonny Digital, and TM88 are as famous as the rappers they make beats for. They’re like the Wrecking Crew or something.

Notable Zone 5ers: Trinidad James, Supreeme, the ATL Twins, the dancers of Magic City

ZONE 6 The zone du jour. The trappest of all possible zones. If you’re looking for Gucci Mane, this is the zone he’ll be in. Provided he’s not in jail (which, presently, he is). Zone 6 is where Young Scooter jugs out them Section 8 houses, where Future drinks like it’s Cinco de Mayo, and where all the hoes stare at Rich Homie Quan when he walks through.

It’s essentially the capital of the “New Atlanta” that magazines like Complex keep going on about. I wanna say it’s where Peewee Longway lives, but I have a hard time understanding him through that grill.

The East Side is also a perfect microcosm of Atlanta’s development chaos, with ritzy brunch lofts built directly overlooking some of the most dangerous projects in the city and multiple apartment complexes that claim the title “Little Mexico.” (Shootings have thankfully come down enough to obviate the old sobriquet of “Little Vietnam.”)

It’s an area in such churning flux the Zone 6 cops are still on the lookout for gangs that disbanded years ago and think new gangs whose members we met in person are just urban legends. Basically, it’s the most confusing, fucked-up, interesting trap in America. No wonder God lives here.

Notable Zone 6ers: Gucci, Young Scooter, OJ da Juiceman, Rich Homie Quan (ancestrally), Childish Gambino Watch Noisey Atlanta on Noisey.VICE.com to learn more about Atlanta’s Zones and the trap musicians who call them home.

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“The sightings occurred over a period of months in 1977 on the Brazilian island of Colares,” Stichbury told us. “Beams of light shot down from the sky, burning villagers and leaving small puncture marks on their bodies. For me, the most interesting thing about this case is that the Brazilian Air Force eventually formed Operation Saucer to investigate and document the ongoing incidents, and interviewed thousands of witnesses from the region. There are almost no other cases like this that leave a trail of meticulously collected hard evidence, and most of the formerly classified government documentation connected with this case has been released to the public, including photographs of the aerial phenomena and military drawings. It’s plausible that this was a military exercise, some sort of psychological warfare, or a new weapon being tested on the hapless villagers, but I personally believe this is a legitimate case. The UFO photographs are some of the best ever recorded.”

The Paranormal Portraitist Peter Stichbury Paints Alien Abductees for a Living

BY ZACH SOKOL, PAINTINGS BY PETER STICHBURY

hen New Zealand artist Peter Stichbury was seven, he thought he saw something shoot across the sky in broad daylight.

Though he no longer believes that the object was anything out of the ordinary, the moment was a creative sucker punch for the portraitist: At 46, Stichbury is as enraptured by UFOs as ever and devotes his work to them. His recent show at Tracy Williams, Ltd., in New York, titled Anatomy of a Phenomenon, featured paintings of people who claim to have had a UFO-related encounter, extraterrestrial-related or not.

A painting of a young blond girl with downcast eyes was inspired by the time John E. Mack, a psychiatrist and Harvard professor, traveled to Zimbabwe after 62 children reported seeing a flying saucer and “strange beings” during recess.

Rather than depicting the girl in utter terror, Stichbury chose a vacant facial expression to prevent the work from being one-dimensional.

He thought about how such an event “would have changed the psychology of a witness over time,” and how “experiencers” (as Dr. Mack called UFO witnesses) tend to talk about these phenomena with a multitude of emotions other than fear.

Aside from the strange happenings themselves, the artist has found the lore of ufology

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fascinating because of its “cast of complex characters, intrigue, and infighting,” as well as the inherent factual contradictions of paranormal occurrences. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his earlier work revolved around the empty, glossy expressions of models and actresses.

“The UFO phenomenon is utterly confounding and, on the surface, ridiculous,” Stichbury said. “The easiest thing to do is ridicule and marginalise people when they challenge consensus reality. But after two years of research, I think some of the phenomena are inexplicable in terms of our current and conventional understanding of physics and the universe.

“The underdog is such a rich archetype and interesting position to explore,” he said. “It has a kind of objectivity that is completely autonomous from the groupthink or broader social collective.”

Tellingly, one of his favorite quotations is from Roswell researcher Stanton Friedman: “Don’t bother me with the facts, my mind is made up.”

Stichbury’s subjects come from a variety of sources, including UFO documentaries, paranormal-themed podcasts, and research compiled by scientists and journalists. He shared with us two of the strangest UFO-encounter stories he’s come across—tales that have inspired his idiosyncratic portraits.

JAPAN AIRLINES FLIGHT 1628 “This is, in my view, one of the best pilot sightings ever,” Stichbury said. “In November 1986, Japan Airlines flight 1628, a cargo plane flown

by Captain Kenju Terauchi, encountered a giant, walnut-shaped UFO in the skies above Alaska.

Two smaller objects were also seen flanking the plane. Terauchi said in an interview, ‘The thing was flying as if there was no such thing as gravity.

It sped up, then stopped, then flew at our speed, in our direction, so that to us it [appeared to be] standing still. The next instant it changed course. In other words, the flying object had overcome gravity.’

“The UFOs were tracked by ground radar, and a target was picked up by nearby Elmendorf Air Force Base. A whistle-blower at the FAA released the radar data to the public. The FAA dismissed the case as an ‘equipment malfunction.’ Captain Terauchi was grounded by Japan Airlines for several years before being allowed to fly again.”

Painting on the left: Experiencer, Ariel School, 1994 (2014). On the right: Japan Air Lines, Alaska, 1987 (2014). Peter Stichbury is represented by Tracy Williams, Ltd., New York, and Michael Lett, Auckland.

THE SIGHTINGS IN COLARES, BRAZIL

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FREE /fri /

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DOs It’s not a party until you’ve thrown so many friendships on the bonfire that you have to hold your own hair while purging yourself of booze, drugs, and glacier-melting rage.

They don’t teach you this in health class, but between toodrunk-to-drive drunk and pissyour-bed drunk, there’s a state known as look-my-beer-is-asilly-little-hat drunk.

Walking the streets with a look that says “Commit all the crimes you want—my dog, who was my best friend in life, is dead, and I’m three years from retirement” is not the best way to be a cop, but apparently it’s better than the alternative.

Getting along with your meathead Pisan neighbour is as simple as accepting his offer to help fix your car and politely but firmly shutting him down when he asks if he can “borrow that” while leering at your wife.

Dude, you didn’t need to dress up, write a cover letter, or even show up to this meeting on time. I know you. You’re the first result when I google “vaguely ethnic businessman.” You’re hired.

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DON’Ts

Japanese porn doesn’t have anything on what we coerce drunk women into doing at music festivals.

Michael Jackson was infamous for all the insane shit he spent money on throughout his life, but it’s what he arranged to have happen postmortem that’s most definitive.

The official company car of every profilephoto-less dude who’s ever sent you a private message on OkCupid.

Thousands of years of evolution have led man from douchin’ it up in a cave while wearing a leopard skin to douchin’ it up in the club while wearing a leopard skin.

R. Kelly tried to warn the world of his schizophrenic death wish in “I Believe I Can Fly,” and instead of putting him into treatment, you motherfuckers gave him a Grammy.

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DOs

What if Lena Dunham’s New York were real? Wouldn’t that be amazing? For white women, I mean.

A sitcom about a deer who has sex with the decapitated head of his best friend on a webcam for cash he will eventually use to build a private army of human slaves will be the second-highest-rated TV show for its time slot in 2021.

That ass, tho. But that bag of dicks, tho. But no, really, seriously: that ass, in that pastel floriated romper, tho. But that bag of thick long pale white dicks wrapped up all together in that sensible container, tho. But that ass.

Xanax is a great way to calm down, but a much more natural solution is to fit time into your day to get down to the shoreline for some sunset masturbation.

When the Pulitzer Prize committee finally recognises web-article trolling as a significant art form.

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$10 TICKETS MOONLIGHT.COM.AU

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Unbroken

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Birdman

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The Imitation Game

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Horrible Bosses 2

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The Theory Of Everything

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The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

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DON’Ts Whoa, we got a regular couple of Hunter S. Thompsons on our hands! Here’s the thing, though: Hunter S. Thompson was a miserable asshole, and no one should emulate his behavior.

Every painting of the Garden of Eden tries to romanticise the origin of the human race, but odds are if Adam and Eve actually existed they would look like these two 311 fans.

It’s cool that Adult Swim provides marginally talented lunatics with work, because in the wild, outside the context of some larger joke, they are the most depressing people in existence.

But no, really, why do young white males have to exist again?

Some folks go to art school to learn how to create objects that challenge our notions of the world around us.

Others fuck around with tequila.

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MOMMY

BY ROBERT MELEE

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SHOOTING THE EDGES A Photographic Survey of Russia’s Borders

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This project was supported by the IdeasTap & Magnum Photos Photographic Award.

BY MARIA GRUZDEVA

epicting the vast outline of the world’s largest country in one photographic series is a daunting prospect. Russia’s border meets with 16 other nations (not including Abkhazia and South Ossetia), and at more than 12,000 miles long, it spans almost every conceivable visual landscape. Maria Gruzdeva’s four-year-long survey, titled The Borders of Russia, took up this challenge. With plans dictated by the seasons and weather conditions, and with access contingent on military approval, the project was forced into an organised sprawl. “When I was just starting the project, I didn’t have time to think about it properly,” Gruzdeva said. “I didn’t have all these regions planned out and then think, When I’ve finished photographing all those places, I’ve finished the project. I saw it as a work in progress from the start. If I had actually taken the time to think about it properly before I started shooting, looking back, I would have thought it was too much.”

Alongside shooting photos for the project, Gruzdeva meticulously recorded her travels in notebooks, combining handwritten names and facts with small contact prints to create a more comprehensive record of her journey. “The nature of work I was doing was primarily documentary, so all that information was an important part of the project. It adds another dimension to the work in general—the facts accompanying the images make them almost more real. Even for me, some of the things I was witnessing seemed at times a little out of this world. Together with the information, the images become a sort of evidence.”

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WELCOME TO

AMERICANA, BRAZIL The Town Where the Confederacy and Slavery Live On

BY MIMI DWYER, PHOTOS BY JACKSON FAGER

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ne day last spring, near an old rural cemetery in southern Brazil, a black man named Marcelo Gomes held up the corners of a Confederate flag to pose for a cell-phone photo. After the picture was taken, Gomes said he saw no problem with a black man paying homage to the history of the Confederate States of America. “American culture is a beautiful culture,” he said.

Some of his friends had Confederate blood.

Gomes had joined some 2,000 Brazilians at the annual festa of the Fraternidade Descendência Americana, the brotherhood of Confederate descendants in Brazil, on a plot near the town of Americana, which was settled by Southern defectors 150 years ago. The graveyard is usually empty save for its caretaker or the odd worshipper drawn to its little brick chapel. On the April morning of the festa, a public-address system blaring the Confederate battle song “Stonewall Jackson’s Way” had interrupted the cemetery’s silence. Brazilians in ten-gallon hats and leather jackets called out greetings.

For miles around the graveyard, unfiltered sun beat down on sugarcane fields planted by the thousands of Confederates who had rejected Reconstruction and fled the United States in the wake of the Civil War—a voluntary exile that American history has more or less erased. Their scattered diaspora has gathered annually for the past 25 years. The party they throw, which receives funding from the local government, is the family reunion of the Confederados, one of the last remaining enclaves of the children of the unreconstructed South.

Brazilians filed past a Rebel-flag banner emblazoned with the Southern maxim: heritage, not hate. They lined up at a booth where they traded Brazilian reals for the festa’s legal tender, printout Confederate $1 bills. (The exchange rate was 1:1—the Southern economy had apparently survived.) Kids flocked to the trampoline and moon bounce. Old-timers staked out shade beneath white tents. Early on, the line for fried chicken grew almost too long to brave.

Under a tent, I picked at some chicken and watched a young blond Brazilian woman maneuver an enormous Confederate-flag hoop skirt into a chair. I wondered what she made of the symbol.

She introduced herself as Beatrice Stopa, a reporter for Glamour Brazil. Her grandmother, Rose May Dodson, ran the Confederado fraternity. She’d been dancing at the festa since she was a kid.

I asked if she knew there was a connection between slavery and the American South. “I’ve never heard that before,” she said. She wasn’t sure why her ancestors had left the States. “I know they came. I don’t really know the reason,” she said.

“Is it because of racism?” She smiled, embarrassed. “Don’t tell my grandmother!”

Brazil itself outlawed slavery in 1888, more than two decades after the end of the American Civil War. Despite outwardly progressive efforts since then, the country has struggled to rid itself of the institution. The government passed legislation strengthening worker protections, including a 1940 constitutional

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amendment prohibiting employers from submitting their workers to “conditions analogous to slavery.” But as Brazil grew more desperate to modernise in the early 20th century, farm owners started coercing wage laborers with debt and holding them in bondage. In recent years, government inspectors have found Brazilians trapped in debt on charcoal farms in Goiás, Haitian workers who have died on World Cup construction sites, and Bolivian immigrants in sweatshops at the center of São Paulo.

The town the Confederates built has been caught in this dragnet. On January 22, 2013, the Brazilian Ministry of Labor orchestrated a sting in Americana, the town where many of the Confederados had settled. It found Bolivian immigrants manufacturing baby clothes under the roof and supervision of two Bolivian bosses. The prosecutors broke up the factory, and in the suit that followed, they deemed the conditions they’d found execrable enough to constitute slavery.

Of all the people I asked at the Americana festival, not a single one had heard of slavery in his town. lmost everyone had come to the festa dressed as an American—in jeans and boots, Johnny Cash T-shirts and camouflage. Visitors haggled at a booth stocked with Southern paraphernalia: aprons, quilts, commemorative glasses, a used copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. An amplified voice called the crowds to pull their chairs up to the main stage—an enormous concrete slab with a flag painted across it and the words xxvi festa confederada emblazoned at its top. The mayor of the nearby town Santa Bárbara d’Oeste surveyed his assembled constituents and welcomed the state representatives in attendance. “It’s the first time I have the honor being here as mayor,” he beamed, leaning over the microphone as descendants in homemade hoop skirts and sewn Confederate grays standing behind him hoisted flags up long, thin wooden poles. “But I’ve been here many times as a spectator, a fan.” The banners of São Paulo, Brazil, Texas, the United States, and the Confederacy flapped languidly in the breeze. “North American immigration has helped build our region, has helped build Santa Bárbara d’Oeste, has helped build the city of Americana,” he proclaimed. “That’s what we celebrate today.”

By and large, the thousands of Texans and Alabamans and Georgians who sailed to Cuba and Mexico and Brazil failed. They folded into cities and set up doomed plantations on rain-forest plots. By 1918, they’d dwindled enough to merit ethnographic study, and the American Geographical Society dispatched researchers to learn their ways.

But not Americana. Led by an Alabaman colonel, its settlers introduced cotton and turned the town into an industrial textile powerhouse. For generations their children spoke English with a drawl. Today the city of 200,000 boasts Latin America’s largest cowboy-rodeo arena. The festa brings it great pride.

Men dressed as soldiers led the crowd in the Brazilian national anthem; one trumpeted an off-key “Taps.” In the States this kind of gathering usually culminates in a battle reenactment, but the Confederados offered tamer fare, mostly dance performances headlined by a long-bearded local celebrity known as Johnny Voxx, whose black hat, sunglasses, black-leather-trimmed jeans, and black cowboy boots made him look like the hero of a spaghetti western.

Passing me a business card, Voxx said he’d googled a bit before he booked the Confederado gig. “I started studying just to know if the people here were racist or not,” he said. “But like they say, ‘Heritage, not hate.’ I wouldn’t be here if it was a party to celebrate

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racism.” He stumbled through the English—what little he knows he learned from music and watching Bonanza—and I wondered what his interpretation of country music could possibly sound like.

But when he belted out “Cotton Fields,” the crowd doubled. His intonation was perfect—the man sounded like Hank Williams.

I couldn’t help bringing up the historical contradictions over and over—to Voxx, to descendants, to a group of local men who ran a weekly country-western movie club. But nobody seemed as uncomfortable as I was. “Our prejudice is very small compared with other people’s,” Pedro Artur Caseiro, a member of the movie club, told me. I asked what he loved about westerns, and he smiled dreamily, his chest puffed in affected military decorum, his hand on his wooden sword. “Good always trumps evil,” he said. “Today what’s missing, it seems like people don’t believe in goodness.”

Real Southerners—Confederate enthusiasts—had made the pilgrimage too. Ambling through the yard in his uniform, Philip Logan, a tall and portly Civil War reenactor from Centreville, Virginia, inspected the headstones: Ferguson, Cullen, Pyles.

Born: Texas. Died: Brazil.

Accompanied by his girlfriend, a Brazilian woman with a bonnet and parasol whom he’d met online, Logan exhaled. “This is nearly perfect,” he said. “This is what we want. I don’t attach anything political. I like black people.” As an active member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, he reckoned constantly with what he considered exploitations of his heritage. “There’s just so much animosity,” he said. “Here it’s like, seeing the Confederate flag, nobody cares. If I waved a Russian flag nobody would care.”

At the entrance to the festa, two muscled bodyguards patted the attendees down, checking their arms and necks against four Xeroxed sheets of paper that outlined in Portuguese 42 white-supremacist symbols—the SS, the Iron Cross, the swastika, KKK. They’d been instructed to eject anyone with these markings from the party. It had been a problem in years prior.

As the party wound down and attendees made their way back to the fields where their cars were parked, I asked Érico Padilha, a non-descendant local, what he thought of the Confederate-slave connection. “I really don’t like this idea, celebrating something about the South, because of slavery. I really don’t like it,” he said. “But here this party is not about politics, I think. It’s about the culture.”

A hillside near Americana

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he Confederados decamped for Brazil for a number of reasons—their children still bicker over why. Brazil had been trying for years to match North American and European agricultural development, and Emperor Dom Pedro II saw in these disaffected Southerners an opportunity to import American prosperity. He set up informational agencies across the South and offered subsidised passage to any American willing to emigrate.

Newspaper ads for chartered ships appeared nearly every day, as did editorials mocking the plan, and Confederates jumped at the offer of cheap land on which to build new plantations, fantasising about restoring the economy they’d watched crumble in the States. This would be possible because Brazil would allow them to keep their slaves.

Although Brazil outlawed the slave trade in the mid 1800s, it dragged its feet in banning slavery outright. Southerners wouldn’t have been able to produce competitive cotton without it, and both the Confederates and Dom Pedro knew it. Even before the Civil War, Southerners had held conferences on moving slavery to the country. Once they emigrated, prominent Confederate officers scrambled to buy operational fazendas already staffed with slaves. Cotton and tobacco didn’t grow well in Brazil’s soil, but established crops like coffee, orange, and sugarcane certainly did.

Brazil’s race relations shocked Confederate sensibilities enough to send many émigrés back to the United States. “The black, who some admit will one day be our equal here, will already

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Beatrice Stopa, a Confederado descendant and reporter for Glamour Brazil

be found occupying the foremost and most honorable walks in society,” one prospector wrote of Brazil in the Galveston TriWeekly News after scouting the country for plots. He added, “Although the white fears he will someday cast his ballot in the same box with him here, he will find him not only voting there, but making laws—laws to govern whites who go there.”

“So pronounced was their distaste,” writes descendant Eugene Harter in The Lost Colony of the Confederacy, “that in 1888, when a senator opposed to slavery was assassinated on the eve of Brazil’s emancipation, the Confederados were first suspected.”

The public, however, felt differently. Lore holds that crowds gathered to celebrate outside Princess Isabel’s palace as she signed abolition into law more than two decades after the American Civil War had ended.

“We never had a war in Brazil about slavery,” João Leopoldo Padoveze, a Confederado whose ancestors were once slaves, told me. Like many, he asserted that the abolition of slavery was peaceful because Brazil never had a problem with racism.

The concept that Brazil is a “racial democracy” has shaped the country’s cultural identity for decades as a point of national pride. The Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre coined the term after he witnessed a man being lynched when he was a student in the Jim Crow South. Horrified, he came home with a newfound appreciation for his country as a place where ethnicities mixed freely, which he argued was evidence that in Brazil racism did not exist.

But even as Brazil wrote racism out of its history, slavery continued. Landowners, including Confederados with fazendas, hired wage laborers in place of their slaves. In turn, these laborers—impoverished farmworkers—have been replaced by a workforce that includes the tens of thousands of slaves, many of them immigrants, who live in Brazil today.

It wasn’t until the 1970s that rural activists set up rescue centers for escaped workers and started to collect the stories in an effort to eradicate the practice. They presented their findings—evidence of thousands of Brazilian workers whose abuse and bondage the state had systematically tolerated—to the International Labour Organisation, and in 1995 the ILO declared Brazil in contempt of its own constitution.

The shaming moved President Fernando Cardoso to make a now famous radio address that summer. “In 1888, Princess Isabel signed the famous Golden Law, which should have ended slave labor in this country,” he said. “I say ‘should’ because, unfortunately, it hasn’t stopped.” Brazil would establish a task force to find and punish slavery across all industries. In the two intervening decades the government has taken multinational companies like Zara to task and freed 47,000 workers legally defined as “slaves.”

Brazil’s “secret inspection operations,” as one ILO brochure dubs them, are some of the world’s most rigorous. The country has publicly acknowledged and committed to reforming its abuses of labor on a scale few others have. This June, for example, activists won a 15-year battle to pass a constitutional amendment allowing the state to expropriate the land of businesses and farms found using slavery—an unthinkable penalty in the US. n a drab office in Campinas, labor inspector Joao Baptista Amancio slid a stack of files on the Americana slavery case across a table. The sting had ended in a great, and rare, success. Amancio’s office had followed the case to the top of the supply chain and levied $95,000 in fines on Lojas Americanas,

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the national brand that was selling the clothes. Though Brazil’s antislavery operations are some of the world’s finest, successfully prosecuting a case is slow and arduous. Conditions need to be egregious.

Amancio, a soft-spoken bureaucrat in Reeboks and khakis, raided the factory along with another inspector, four federal police officers, a prosecutor, and a judge. They were following up on a 2011 case in which they’d found six undocumented Bolivians making clothes in a home factory but had elected not to prosecute the work as slavery. They wanted to make sure that the sweatshop had stayed closed.

Instead they found five Bolivians making baby clothes in a broken-down shed with cracked walls, water damage, and a moldy ceiling caving in. Four young women shared a grimy concrete cell, sleeping on makeshift bunks, their clothes strewn across their beds and on the floor. They had no furniture to speak of; they couldn’t close their doors. Amancio said they worked 12-hour days, six days a week, churning out fabric on faulty sewing machines. They were paid, but irregularly and based only on how much they produced.

Two of the workers fled when the Ministry of Labor descended. Amancio’s office never found them—he suspects they’d run to São Paulo. Flight is not uncommon, Amancio told me. Factory overseers trap workers in abusive conditions by convincing them that the Brazilian authorities will deport them for working illegally, even though Brazil accepts Bolivian migrant workers as a part of a free-trade agreement.

“They fear being caught by authorities,” Amancio said.

“That’s what holds them. They only trust the employer, the guy exploiting them. He exploits that fear.” The three who stayed in the Americana factory all listed Gabriel Miffia Alanes, their overseer, as their emergency contact for the ministry.

The workers hardly spoke. They hunched over their machines, feet exposed, looked at the ground, and avoided questions. So the ministry used its discretion, picked up on subtler things. Workers glanced at Alanes for visual cues, regarded him with what the ministry called “reverential terror.”

But the clincher was the door. When the authorities asked the workers to show them the keys they used to get in and out of the factory, none could produce one. The door locked from within, and the ministry said this showed that Alanes kept his employees trapped inside. he case in Americana is somewhat typical of Brazil. It matched the story of another Bolivian immigrant I met one night outside a Peruvian restaurant near a strip called Cracolândia,* a drug-plagued strip in São Paulo. Edwin Quenta Santos worked there as a server—the first real job he’d had since escaping his violent cousin’s factory in Guarulhos, not far from the São Paulo airport. He lived in a rat-infested, windowless concrete changing room near the restaurant and slept in a child’s plastic race-car bed. He still wasn’t working legally, and made minimum wage, though he consistently worked a few hours past the supposed end of his shift. “We could say it’s still a little bit like slavery,” he said, letting out a laugh.

Edwin called his story his “testimony”—he’d never spoken to the police, never told his children or his wife what he’d endured.

He’d moved on and tried to forget, but then he’d heard rumors that his cousin Severo Oyardo Santos was running a sweatshop

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* See ANOTHER BULLSHIT NIGHT IN CRACK CITY, page 38.

once again. He wanted people back home to fully understand what Severo had done.

In 2009, Severo visited Edwin in La Paz, Bolivia. Severo had lived in São Paulo for about ten years, and Edwin was shocked at how well he seemed to be doing. He bragged that he owned a factory that was expanding, and he was looking for more help.

He told Edwin that he could triple his income if he moved to Brazil to work. Edwin said he borrowed about 500 reals ($190) from Severo for a plane ticket and an additional 500 reals to tide his family over until he could send back his first check.

“I thought, Well, if he is lending me five hundred reals just like that, it means everything is going to be OK over there,” Edwin said.

When Edwin arrived in São Paulo, paid traffickers known as gatos sidled up to him as he waited with his suitcase for his cousin. Gatos prey on Bolivians who arrive in the country with no connections, offering work in unlicensed clothing factories hidden in back offices or homes. This kind of work—dispersed, small-scale exploitation rather than obvious torture on farms— is booming. Last year was the first on record that Brazil busted more urban slavery rings than rural ones. “They offered to pay for my hotel, said they had rooms available for work.

They kept offering,” Edwin said. “Then my cousin arrived.”

Severo drove Edwin to his compound near the airport and introduced him to the 20 or so extended family members already working there. They threw a little welcome party in the cramped kitchen. The concrete house was three stories high, and it had no front door—just a gated carport with a padlock, whose key Severo kept hidden. Severo parked his car on the street, reserving the carport instead as a home for his guard dogs. If Edwin wanted to leave outside of the one trip a week his cousin allowed, he’d have to scale the back wall and make sure to be back before he was caught. He knew the kind of punishment his cousin could inflict—he recalled watching him beat his children. “He’s bigger than me,” Edwin said.

The workers followed a strict schedule, rising at five and working till midnight, sometimes stopping only for a 15-minute lunch. They drank water from a well covered in algae.

They slept six to a room on the compound’s top floor or else in the sewing factory itself, pushing their machines aside at

Severo Oyardo Santos’s compound in Guarulhos, Brazil, where Edwin Quenta Santos was held in slavelike conditions

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night and sliding in thin mattresses. Edwin didn’t know how to make clothes, so he started out cooking and cleaning as his family members sewed.

According to Edwin, when he asked his cousin for money, he screamed that it was Edwin who owed him money. They’d talk wages only once he put a dent in his debt for the plane ticket and loan. Severo was evasive and would lie to family members who wanted to settle their accounts, refusing to pay them in full.

In Edwin’s time at the factory, the only worker who managed to persuade Severo to give him the money he was due was a cousin with papers who had threatened to report his boss to the federal police if he didn’t pay up and let him go.

Edwin struggled to learn to sew. He fumbled with the machines, ruining fabric. It took him a month to make what his cousins could make in four days. A businessman who contracted

The Confederados are light-skinned upper-middle-class Brazilians, the legacy of the few Southerners who succeeded in preserving a simulacrum of their crumbling plantations. with Severo would show up at the house and demand faster production. “If my cousin said he couldn’t do it, he would say, ‘That’s your problem, you have to deliver tomorrow,’” Edwin told me. On those nights, he and the others often did not sleep.

His family in Bolivia begged him to send money. Eventually they moved to a cheap rental house, and his wife took their children out of private school. Edwin lied when his son and daughter asked how he was doing; he felt too ashamed to admit the situation. “Imagine that I came from Bolivia with a good plan in order to overcome the low lifestyle of my family,” Edwin explained. “Imagine how my children would have reacted, or my wife, or my parents. That’s why I contained myself. I felt incapable of doing anything.”

It grew increasingly obvious that Severo had no intention of compensating anyone fairly, and they all slowly stopped working. A cousin or a nephew would say he wanted to leave, and Severo would tell them to pack their bags. He’d load them into his car and drop them off penniless at the bus station in Guarulhos. Edwin didn’t know where each had gone. He waited, still in debt and without connections in Brazil, as work in the factory slowed and then came to a halt. Eventually, only he and Severo’s children remained. Then one evening he found his bags packed and out on the curb. Edwin slept in the locker room at a soccer field for three days, collecting himself before he headed into São Paulo to look for work. He ultimately made his way to the Peruvian restaurant near Cracolândia.

The afternoon after I met Edwin, I drove to Severo’s compound in Guarulhos and waited for his car to pull up. A stout man with a puggish face slammed the door and waddled toward the gated carport.

“Who’s judging me?” he demanded when asked if he’d been running a factory. “I have to know.” There was no factory inside, he said, just his children, home from school, and a cousin or two visiting. He showed me his home. On the second floor there

was an empty, white-tiled room filled with gleaming sewing machines. A heap of felt filled a bin in the corner. Nobody was working, but the machines were spooled.

“It’s all lies made up by jealous people, good-for-nothings,” Severo said.

I asked why there were so many machines inside if he wasn’t running a factory. There’d been one in the past, he confessed.

But he’d closed it.

“Seamstresses only want to work little and earn lots, and that can’t be, you know?” he said. “So better to end that.” he morning after the Confederado festa, I drove the 30 miles from the old Southern graveyard to the address the ministry’s records listed as the sweatshop run by Gabriel Miffia Alanes and Eusebia Villalobos Tarqui, the Bolivian couple who’d been caught with slaves in Americana. The GPS led to a bulldozed lot, the plywood and steel skeleton of a house built atop it. On the corner I saw a shoddy two-room building, its yellow-brown walls the same colour as the dirt. I wondered, as I walked out to a man in a bucket hat and work boots, if that shack had been the factory.

The man squinted at me as I asked him what he was doing.

Puzzled, he said he was at work building a bank. He hadn’t heard that there had been a factory here, but there were some Bolivians currently living in the house right across the street.

He didn’t know anything about them—who they were, if they worked—but they only ever left in the morning and at night.

They walked by with their heads down and never said hello.

It took a few minutes of knocking on the house’s rust-redpainted metal door for a man with black hair and sallow cheeks to stick his head out. His forearm, stuffed into the pocket of his shorts, bore a scorpion. Behind him baby clothes hung on a clothesline against a concrete wall.

I asked him if there had been a factory in his house. “Yes,” he said. “But it’s been closed for a while.” The ministry had come around months ago. “There were no problems,” he said.

“Everyone had their papers.”

When I asked if he’d heard about slavery across the street, he bristled. “It’s not slavery,” he said. “When I first came from Bolivia, I worked from seven till midnight. I wanted to work those hours. The owner never forced me. If I worked like a Brazilian, from seven till five, I wouldn’t make enough money.”

Grasping, I brought up Alanes, the Bolivian neighbour caught with slaves in his factory the year prior. Did he know him? He hesitated, and then he said, “That’s me.”

Of course. The address I’d gone looking for—the one in the ministry’s files—led to the house where Alanes and his family slept. This was their workplace, the factory across the street, where he’d allegedly kept his workers locked inside. A year after the ministry raided Alanes’s sweatshop, freed his workers, and successfully linked the case to a national chain, the sweatshop still stood, and Alanes was still inside it.

He disappeared into the house, but soon after, a woman wearing a scrunchie came to the door—Tarqui, his wife. She laid out the situation: The only people working in the factory these days were herself and her husband. They made shorts for a São Paulo private school, but if they showed the logo, they’d lose the business, which they couldn’t afford. That understood, she opened the gate and motioned for me to follow.

A concrete walkway led past small cinder-block dwellings to an enormous tin-roofed pavilion propped up by plywood poles at the back of the lot. Fabric, plastic wrapping, and cardboard boxes covered the floor. Two faded laminate posters—one with

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an old lineup for Palmeiras, a São Paulo soccer club, another with an aerial mountain shot of La Paz—were tacked onto the water-stained walls. Light fixtures dangled from the ceiling. Part of the roof had collapsed and showed the sky. A dozen yellowed sewing machines rested on card tables.

Tarqui turned toward me in the room’s corner, picked up a pair of red nylon school athletic shorts, and folded her arms.

She said the school paid 90 centavos—about 35 cents—per pair and she and her husband churned out about 2,000 per week.

In exchange, her children attended the school. She insisted that her children never worked. (Amancio, the labor inspector, said he suspected otherwise.)

To hear Tarqui tell it, she fell into managing a sweatshop by accident. In 2001, she moved to Brazil at the invitation of a Bolivian she knew who’d married a Brazilian man and needed a nanny. She boarded a bus and braved the two-day ride to São Paulo. She eventually left the nanny job to work in a factory; after a while, she and her husband opened their own. They’d pick up contracts, have a week to make 1,000 pairs of shorts.

Unable to do the job themselves, they’d go meet Bolivians in the town square. They hired one, then another, and by 2011 the Ministry of Labor was knocking on their door.

“Here I feel a little lost,” Alanes told me. “Tired too.”

The ministry ordered HippyChick Moda Infantil, the company that sold Alanes and Tarqui’s clothes to Lojas Americanas, to pay both the workers and the factory owners severance and “moral damages.” It took five days or so for HippyChick to pay the workers. After that, they boarded buses and left for good. Alanes had no idea where they’d gone. It’s this absence, more than anything, that marks Brazil’s record of the case in Americana, and of its slavery operations writ large. The workers gave no testimony and left no trace.

As for the lock and key: At first, Alanes said the ministry was lying. Later, on the phone, Tarqui admitted that they’d kept the door locked, but insisted that workers had access to a key. She said that they’d been robbed before. In November of last year, Brazil’s federal judiciary opened a criminal case against Alanes for keeping workers in conditions analogous to slavery, a crime punishable by up to eight years in prison. aniel Carr de Muzio, the de facto Confederado genealogist, swung open the heavy wooden door to his house in a gated ten-year-old development called Jardim Buru in the São Paulo countryside. A pickup truck with a Confederate flag sat in the driveway. De Muzio grew up in Brazil steeped in his family’s Confederate heritage. His grandmother referred to Abraham Lincoln as “that man” until the day she died, and his grandfather threw away his baseball cards depicting black players. In adulthood, de Muzio remained devoted to his American roots, making his money by translating English to Portuguese and speaking with a Southern drawl.

Inside de Muzio’s house, a sunken den with chandeliers gave way to floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over a backyard filled with eucalyptus trees and subtropical varieties of lemon.

On a credenza next to a glass tray of alcohol sat three miniature flags: Brazil’s, the United States’, and the Confederacy’s. Walking through the house in madras shorts and a T-shirt, de Muzio showed off his collection of family and Confederado memorabilia—books and papers and crinkled old photos. A stained copy of Facts the Historians Leave Out: A Youth’s Confederate Primer rested near his computer alongside a book called Lost White Tribes, in which de Muzio is featured.

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Sitting in his back-porch rocking chair, looking over his verdant yard, he tried to disabuse me of the notion that the Confederados came to Brazil to keep practicing slavery. Slaves had nowhere to go after the Civil War, he told me. Brazil looked like a great option. “I’m sure they came voluntarily,” he said.

“These people, you know, they were raised by their masters—and they knew very little of how to get along by themselves on their own. They probably were very afraid of being alone.”

When I asked de Muzio if he’d heard of contemporary slavery in Brazil, he told me that he had—Haitians on construction sites, Bolivians in factories. His brow furrowed as he threw eucalyptus charcoal on the stove. “Now, that hasn’t got a thing to do with us,” he said.

Today, the Confederados are, for the most part, lightskinned upper-middle-class Brazilians, the legacy of the few Southerners who succeeded in preserving a simulacrum of their crumbling plantations. They celebrate a mythology that hardly contends with the past and keeps itself blind even to the present.

At the festa, I had met Cindy Gião, who was a visitor, not a descendant. She said she knew next to nothing about the Confederacy. She’d come on the invitation of her father’s friend, Robert Lee Ferguson. Gião guessed she was Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and maybe Dutch in heritage. But she couldn’t say for sure, and neither could most of her friends.

No one knew, she said, “because it’s so mixed.” That’s what so many Brazilians envy in the Confederados—a connection to one’s past.

For the Confederados, the legacy of the South is all innocence, no reckoning. Their Confederacy is a collection of sounds and words and images: a Johnny Cash song, a western, a flag. White Southern bitterness has melted into kitsch—or else denial, oblivion. These are the blindnesses that render slavery invisible today.

“Brazilians are not very into our history,” Gião said. “We learn it in school, but we don’t have parties to celebrate what our ancestors did for us.” Then she turned toward the stage to listen to a rendition of “Summertime” from Porgy and Bess and watch as a man hoisted the Brazilian flag up alongside the Stars and Bars.

Gabriel Miffia Alanes continues to operate a home factory even after being convicted in 2013 of using slave labor.

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THE INTERIOR FRONTIER

Rudy Wurlitzer’s Underappreciated Masterpieces

BY JONATHAN DIXON

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hen asked how he’s doing, the writer Rudy Wurlitzer has a handful of standard responses: “I’m tap-dancing on a rubber raft,” he’ll say, or “I’m still on this side of the grass,” or “I’m stretched out in front of the Trail’s End Saloon, staring into the big empty.” Maybe he believes that. But to an outside observer he would seem, at 78, to be faring pretty well. His hips and knees are periodically attacked by surgeons, so he walks with a limp, but he’s got the handsomeness of an elder statesman and a perverse mind working at its peak.

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He was “crouching in a corner” when I visited him at his grand Victorian home in Hudson, New York, last summer. The walls there are lined with the work of his wife, the photographer Lynn Davis—pictures of ancient Egyptian and Cambodian temples, icebergs and waterfalls, monuments eaten up by time and the elements.

Wurlitzer carries himself quietly and with a genuine humility. “Who cares what I’ve got to say? Who wants to hear it?” he said when first approached about being interviewed. “I think I’d rather just crawl under a rock.”

Cinefamily had just made inquiries to Wurlitzer about mounting retrospectives in Los Angeles and New York of the films he wrote in the 1970s and 80s—road movies, westerns, and unclassifiable metaphysical excursions— and he seemed deeply ambivalent.

When I asked him whether he was going to go through with it, he crossed and uncrossed his legs, shifted in his seat, shook his head, and looked pained. “I can’t. I just can’t do it.” He trailed off for almost half a minute. “I just can’t look at the old work. It makes me feel all kinds of things. It embarrasses me. It makes me anxious. It’s not worth it at this age, physically or emotionally. That’s why I don’t really like doing interviews anymore. I’m always aware that there’s so much on either side of the past, and I just want to stay in the present. Especially as I get older.”

Since the late 1960s, Wurlitzer has been a screenwriter.

If you’ve seen Two-Lane Blacktop or Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid or Walker, you’ve seen his work. None of the films he wrote raked in box-office millions, and many screenplays he’s written have gone unproduced. But he enjoys a reputation that makes people speak about him in superlatives—that he’s one of a kind, that he’s his own genre, that there’s no one, no one, quite like him. His work makes people want to mount retrospectives on both coasts.

Wurlitzer is also what’s best described as a cult novelist.

Fiction launched his screenwriting career, which in turn sustained him as he wrote four more experimental novels and a memoir. His novels came into the world quietly and then disappeared the same way. But they insist on keeping themselves alive, being reissued several times and each one having its devotees.

Director Robert Downey Sr., who speaks with Wurlitzer almost daily, told me, “He’s so unique, it’s hard to analyze him. That writing is tight. It’s absurd. It’s everything. Those first three books will be around for a long time. And there’s no genre there. But they are all absolutely out of one person’s brain.”

Composer Philip Glass, a friend of Wurlitzer’s since they were both 17, said, “I’ve worked with a lot of other writers, but he’s the best. I really wanted to get him into working in theater because he knew how to write for movies so well. He’s able to give you clear, verbal resolution of an idea without too many words, and his language is really a vernacular language, the language of everyday words. I think of him as a quintessentially American writer—just the clarity of his writing, the economy of it, the rigor of it.”

Wurlitzer is a quiet legend who worked elbow to elbow with louder legends. He worked and made for the sake of working and making and never got very craven about the reward. He was, he says often, grateful to be surviving. Once, on the phone, he told me a story that got at

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the essence of how he carried himself through his life and work and why his name isn’t spoken with the frequency and volume of some of his contemporaries’.

“I revered Samuel Beckett,” he said. “I was living in Paris in the early 60s. I was just a young dude on the drift. And I knew Beckett would come to this one café at a certain time. I would take a position in view of his table, and he’d sit there with his drink, and eventually Alberto Giacometti would come in and they’d nod to each other, and Giacometti would sit down and have a drink too. They would not say one word to each other, and then they’d get up, shake hands, and go on their way. I was so impressed by that. What an amazing communication they must have.

That almost made me tremble to watch them. I never introduced myself to Beckett, though. I just couldn’t. I didn’t want to bother him.” urlitzer was born in Cincinnati in 1937 and grew up in New York City at the tail end of the Depression and during wartime deprivations. His family subsisted in a sort of ruined privilege. Wurlitzer’s grandfather had amassed a fortune making musical instruments, but most of that was gone by the time Rudy arrived.

His father had a name as a dealer of stringed instruments and owned a store in midtown Manhattan. Wurlitzer had musical training from the beginning. “When I was born,” he told me, “my grandfather and father put a miniature violin in my crib. So I was fucked.” His father would sometimes entertain visitors like violinist Jascha Heifetz, and Rudy was always asked to play. His response was usually to try to run away.

As he got older, he ran farther and farther: to an oil tanker that sailed the Mediterranean; away from his Columbia University education to Cuba, just as Castro’s troops entered a euphoric and jubilant Havana; into the Army; to Paris and Majorca; and finally back home to New York City in 1964, where he took an apartment in the East Village.

By the time Wurlitzer settled downtown, the country’s cultural weather was becoming curious. There was a rising pitch of activity in Vietnam, greater turbulence in the civil rights battle, and post-Beat acid consciousness beginning to wash in from the West Coast along with the interest in Eastern beliefs that attended it. In the East Village the streets were mounded with garbage, and living there involved genuine bodily risk, but the scene was thriving.

Wurlitzer and his friends spent long nights in the Cedar Tavern, cigarettes between their fingers, drinking and arguing about music and writing and art. There were performances and happenings to witness in lofts and galleries.

They’d see Charles Mingus and Ornette Coleman at the Five Spot Café, or John Coltrane at the Village Vanguard.

Bob Dylan was putting on his dandified, surrealist speedfreak persona, and no one was oblivious to the energies he unleashed.

“In the days when I was being formed in New York there was great permission. It was a very different time in that way,” Wurlitzer told me. “There were people like [Claes] Oldenburg and [Robert] Rauschenberg. You were rubbing up against people like Jasper Johns and certain musicians.

An early friend of mine whom I spent a lot of time with was

Film stills © Universal Pictures and courtesy of Everett Collection, portrait on opposite page by Rachel Stern, opening-spread photo by Roberta Neiman

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Two-Lane Blacktop, 1971. Laurie Bird and James Taylor

Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, 1973. Kris Kristofferson, Charles Martin Smith, and Rudy Wurlitzer

Walker, 1987. Ed Harris (out in front)

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Philip Glass, who was trying to break down the orthodoxy of music. John Cage was a big figure for me because he enlisted silence in his work and I found it very moving.” nd there were other methods to help blast at orthodoxies. “Drugs were definitely in the room, and I tried everything,” he said. “A lot of drugs I couldn’t do.

Cocaine made me crazy—I couldn’t do that. I could smoke dope. I took acid until I didn’t think there was any more to learn from it. Ayahuasca. Mushrooms. I touched base, but—I don’t know—I didn’t really do it that much.”

Wurlitzer had been writing since high school. One of his journal entries from 1955 reads: “I will use this journal to practice writing. I will be able to develop a style or even find out if I have any talent.” While he was living by himself in a 12th Street tenement, he began working on the story of a man in ownership of three memories and a fake octopus in a tank, wandering along the California coast. The Paris Review published it in 1966, and Wurlitzer expanded it into the novel Nog, published by Random House in 1969.

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Of course, the magic couldn’t persist.

The American auteurs might have started with the studios’ benediction, but personal, searching, visionary films lost their draw, and their makers lost their cachet. Wurlitzer had, in fact, already gotten a feel for the direction things would take.

Nog is a laying bare of consciousness. The book pulls back the scalp and chips away the bone to show the neurons and nerves of the human mind twitching and pulsing in new air.

The whole book is a may-or-may-not proposition: There may or may not be a character named Nog, and Nog may or may not be the narrator himself; one event or other may or may not have happened; other characters may or may not be inventions of the narrator. There’s no plot, only movement and motion. Past and present tenses shift constantly in the same paragraph and even sentence; one sentence makes a statement only to be negated in the next. One representative passage reads: I am too comfortable sitting on the sand, my foot drying now, not knowing that I am about to move on. The storm wasn’t invented. I’m sure of that. And the sea was cold and even wet. That was two or three days ago.

But there must be another place, a replacement, one foot having the problem of following the other foot, to another place. Now that there are no other feet to follow.

I stood and sat again. I must be holding back.

A certain utopian optimism still held as the 60s drew to a close.

But in 1968, Wurlitzer had tuned into a quiet-but-getting-louder

signal broadcast by people like the Diggers in San Francisco and the Motherfuckers in New York City, something harder-edged and a little more aggressive, possessed of a violent streak that was rapping at the crash-pad windows. The atmosphere of Nog is bleary and broken. Events are neither good nor bad, helpful nor damaging; they only are. It’s a sort of Zen trip toward the Altamont frontier.

“My obsession was to explore the composition of the self and what’s real and what isn’t real. Which is an ongoing process. With Nog I was trying to take it through that whole process. It was the opposite of a screenplay, where it’s linear and there’s a beginning, middle, and end,” Wurlitzer said.

“That’s the way my mind was working. I was just starting out with no external—no one telling me what to do. I just explored where my mind was. It wasn’t conceptual. It was intuitive. It was done for its own sake.

“The frontier that I’m involved with is an interior frontier,” he continued. “Not to be too pretentious, but it’s about exploring the non-duality of form and emptiness. Which is about what happens when you dissolve your inevitable selfabsorptions and are left with the present. You realise that the past is just like everything else—it’s a dream. And it’s just as much of a fiction as if you were actually writing fiction and we choose to say or choose to remember or can’t remember how to remember whatever it was you were trying to remember. It comes out filtered and redefined and has an envelope of fiction to it. Because we’re all basically fiction.”

Out in Hollywood, in 1970, director Monte Hellman was preparing to begin work on Two-Lane Blacktop. Hellman, a protégé of C-movie impresario Roger Corman, hated the shooting script, about a cross-country auto race, and loved Nog. He pretty soon made an easy leap of logic, and one day Wurlitzer’s phone rang in New York with an offer to go to LA and rewrite the screenplay. Wurlitzer took a bungalow at the Chateau Marmont, and as the Manson trial was about to start and the blood was still wet on the campus of Kent State, he began writing. Wurlitzer knew absolutely nothing about cars but read as many hot-rod magazines as he could find and hung out for a time with some stoner gearheads in the San Fernando Valley.

The result was a very peculiar and existentially torqued road movie. Starring James Taylor as the hyper-intense Driver, and Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson as the Mechanic, Two-Lane follows the men as they race GTO, played by Warren Oates, across the country. Very little happens, and there’s very little spoken. The colours are stunning, the landscape is beautiful, and the beginning and endpoints don’t matter. The important thing is the moment, the motion, and the pure act of driving. We’re given nothing of anyone’s history, and what little we do get is all lies. We’re also given fine lines like: THE MECHANIC: You’d have yourself a real street sweeper here if you put a little work into it.

GTO: I go fast enough.

THE DRIVER: You can never go fast enough.

Esquire called it the movie of the year and published the screenplay in its entirety in April 1971. Wurlitzer suddenly found himself with a lot of cachet.

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Two years before Wurlitzer began his Hollywood residency, the old studios were in serious decline. Run mostly by men born in the late 1800s, they churned out failure after failure with no sense of what moviegoers might best respond to. Until, of course, Easy Rider was released by Columbia in July 1969. Directed by Dennis Hopper and starring Hopper, Jack Nicholson, and Peter Fonda, Easy Rider was shot for around $400,000—and to everyone’s shock grossed millions upon millions of dollars. More important, the other studios clamored to give anyone tuned into the counterculture a chance to write and direct and—they hoped—duplicate Easy Rider’s success.

That was the atmosphere Wurlitzer arrived in, and as he wrote his second novel, Flats, upon completing his work on Two-Lane, he embraced it. He became close friends with people like Hal Ashby, Nicholson, and Downey. There were days full of writing and networking and long—very long—nights of carousing. Beyond Hollywood, the Weather Underground couldn’t stop blowing things up, and the pace of action in Vietnam got even quicker, but the bacchanalian textures of movie life in Los Angeles kept begging to be touched.

Of course, the magic couldn’t persist. The American auteurs might have started with the studios’ benediction, but personal, searching, visionary films lost their draw, and their makers lost their cachet. Wurlitzer had, in fact, already gotten a feel for the direction things would take.

After the success of Easy Rider, Hopper leveraged his clout to make a film in Peru, and in the glow of approbation for Two-Lane’s script, Wurlitzer cashed in on his. He persuaded Universal to let him direct a film set in India and traveled there in 1971 with some producers and moneymen to scout locations. While Wurlitzer was overseas, Hopper’s film was released. Appropriately titled The Last Movie, it was an artistic and financial fiasco, every frame of it smeared with drugs.

Panic tremors ran through the studio corridors. Permissions were rescinded and productions canceled. Wurlitzer was one of the casualties. Universal pulled the plug.

Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote once about what he termed the “acid western,” saying that in most westerns “there’s a movement toward enlightenment and freedom,” whereas the acid westerns journey toward death. Acid westerns, according to Rosenbaum, “are revisionist Westerns in

Rudy Wurlitzer, left, and Sam Peckinpah on the set of Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid

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A poster for the 1988 film Candy Mountain

which American history is reinterpreted to make room for peyote visions and related hallucinogenic experiences, LSD trips in particular.” Wurlitzer, he wrote, “is surely the individual most responsible for exploring this genre, having practically invented it himself in the late 60s and then helped to nurture it in the scripts of others.”

Wurlitzer’s next project would be a prototypical acid western, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, directed by Sam Peckinpah, financed

by MGM, and featuring Bob Dylan among the cast. One of Pat Garrett’s producers, Gordon Carroll, approached Wurlitzer about doing the screenplay. Peckinpah was a Two-Lane fan, and he and Carroll agreed that Wurlitzer could do justice to the film Peckinpah wanted to make: the sort of exploration of killing men and their personal codes and betrayals that Akira Kurosawa might have undertaken, an even more philosophical journey than Peckinpah’s 1969 success, The Wild Bunch.

MGM was struggling financially when production began in 1972. The studio had made a cripplingly big investment in Las Vegas casinos and hoped that Peckinpah’s film might put money back in the coffers in time for a late-summer shareholders’ meeting. To hedge their bets, MGM gave Peckinpah

70 days to shoot, not much longer to edit, and cut every budgetary corner it could.

“Peckinpah was very much an ingrained and revered outlaw in his way. But that film was what made him so extraordinary,” Wurlitzer said. “Peckinpah was constantly at war with the powers that be, with the studio, with the money people. He loved the war, and those who were around him got the benefit of that.”

The Pat Garrett set was chaos. To counteract the pressure, Peckinpah drank on scale with his ambitions. He was demanding more and more rewrites from Wurlitzer. After shooting finally finished, MGM used one of Peckinpah’s work prints to assemble a cut of its own, 17 minutes shorter than the director’s edit. Peckinpah demanded his name be taken off it, and MGM refused. The film was a mess and a flop. Wurlitzer reeled at what the studio had done and recoiled from the new attitudes that were palling the industry. He flew to Nova Scotia and wrote Quake, a novel set after an earthquake has reduced LA to ruins. It was a close look at the evil that men do in an atmosphere of lawlessness. It was also Wurlitzer’s middle finger to Hollywood. He left town and never really went back. He’d work on films for years to come, but not theirs. n a summer afternoon in 1977, when Star Wars was breaking every cinematic record, Wurlitzer was driving on Route 85 in New Mexico, cutting through the flats and scrub and sand with Albuquerque at his back and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains humped up ahead. He came along a line of trailers and trucks loaded down with cameras and lights. When he saw teams of people around the vehicles, he slowed down to look and recognised the faces of bit-part players and crew members he’d known five years prior when he’d worked on Pat Garrett.

He stopped the car and stepped out into wicked heat and a zealous sun. He spoke with friends and acquaintances and discovered this was the production for Peckinpah’s latest film, Convoy, a cocaine- and liquor-fueled romp involving truckers, cops, and CB radios.

Wurlitzer made for Peckinpah’s trailer, rapped on the door, and walked inside.

Sam Peckinpah lay naked on a bed attended by a beautiful, semi-clad nurse who was ramming a shot of vitamin B12 into his ass with one hand and giving him a reach-around with the other. Peckinpah stared at Wurlitzer for a second, then reached over to a side table and picked up a pistol and leveled it at Rudy.

“Where the fuck have you been?” said Peckinpah. Then he passed out.

“Where was I and what was I doing in those years?”

Wurlitzer writes in his memoir, Hard Travel to Sacred Places.

“Writing a book, a few film scripts in between a failed love affair, hiding out in New Mexico, studying Dharma in Nepal, surviving in New York. Drugs, sex, and rock ’n’ roll. Trying to meditate. I can’t remember the lineup.”

n 1984 Wurlitzer published another novel, Slow Fade, and penned a series of scripts with Alex Cox, who wrote Repo Man and Sid and Nancy. Among these was the 1987 film Walker, a surreal, bloody biopic about William Walker, the 19th-century despot of Nicaragua. The next year, Wurlitzer and photographer Robert Frank co-directed Candy Mountain, another insane road movie. Wurlitzer went on to write scripts

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Poster © Republic Pictures and courtesy of Everett Collection

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for Bernardo Bertolucci, Michelangelo Antonioni, and a few other European directors. He penned two libretti for Philip Glass and wrote Hard Travel to Sacred Places, a memoir about Buddhism and the extraordinary grief he experienced when Lynn Davis’s son and his stepson, Ayrev, died in a car accident.

“I kept busy,” Wurlitzer said. “I was lucky in that I got to pick and choose what I wanted to work on. I needed to put coin on the table. It was getting more and more impossible. But eventually, I found it necessary to get rid of my movie agent in LA. Not because he wasn’t doing enough—but because I was afraid I’d be offered something terrible and I wouldn’t have the courage not to do it.”

There was one project that wasn’t a matter of picking and choosing. Starting around 1984 or 1985, Wurlitzer wrote a screenplay called Zebulon, a particularly wild acid western involving a fur trapper, Zebulon Shook, who suffers a curse causing him, after being shot, to wander in limbo between the worlds of the living and the dead. He takes a mess of bodies with him on his drift. He connects with, departs from, and meets again family members and fellow outlaws and random passersby, all the while pursued by psychopaths angling for the bounty on his head. In the end, he’s sent deathward into the Pacific, lying in a dugout canoe.

Hal Ashby wanted to tackle it, but it didn’t get on. Alex Cox came close, even getting Richard Gere to give a verbal commitment, but Gere bowed out and the financing never shook down. Jim Jarmusch, who traveled in some of the same New York City circles as Wurlitzer, got his hands on the screenplay and initiated a series of conversations and meetings. Together, they parsed the script and speculated on the story until their differences in opinion overbalanced their agreements. They shook hands and took an amicable leave of each other.

A couple of years later, in 1995, Jarmusch released Dead Man, starring Johnny Depp and a fantastic Neil Young soundtrack, about a man cursed to wander between the worlds of the living and the dead after being shot. He takes a mess of bodies with him on his drift, pursued all the while by psychopaths, and is finally sent into the Pacific to die lying in a dugout canoe. Wurlitzer wasn’t involved or credited.

“He should have sued,” said Cox. “I would have. Even studios don’t operate that way.”

Wurlitzer opted against it. Too toxic, he thought. Mostly, Wurlitzer said, more than any consideration of cash and credit, he was saddened that a friendship had ended.

“I read Zebulon, and I’d read a lot of scripts at that point in my life,” said Lana Griffin, an editor, script consultant, and longtime friend of Wurlitzer’s. “It was the best script I’d ever read. I was shocked. It shook me to the core because I thought, If that hasn’t been made...”

The screenplay kept making the rounds, but Dead Man had made it a long shot. Finally, in the mid 2000s, Wurlitzer told Griffin that if Zebulon were ever going to see the light of day, it would have to be as a book. For the next few years he worked on his fifth novel, The Drop Edge of Yonder, which the Two Dollar Radio imprint published in 2008.

“I think Rudy is in a class of his own. People who engage with his work are so affected by it because not only is he writing about a journey, an interior journey, but he takes the reader on that journey successfully,” Griffin told me.

“It’s successful in terms of being an entertaining read and, at the same time, sending you on your own journey into your

unconscious. He always says he writes to know what he’s thinking. He’s always in process and it’s always being discovered, and therefore it’s very free.”

I’ve never been able to not think of Wurlitzer as one of the last few of a heroic group still standing, people who changed the tenor of our creative culture. With publishing still caught in a confused state of transition, a recording industry in stunned collapse, a coprophagic colossus of a motion picture industry—and that’s not even talking yet about the worlds of art and theater—the impulse to do anything creative seems as insignificant as pissing in the ocean.

And that Wurlitzer isn’t quite done in this climate, that he won’t ultimately admit defeat, that he would write to ensure that his vision, Zebulon, would arrive somehow and somewhere out in the world makes him heroic still.

A week after I met Wurlitzer at his home in Hudson, he called me up on the phone and asked me to come back. “I feel like I maybe have more to say, or at least ways to say what I said better,” he told me.

Wurlitzer opted against suing Jim Jarmusch over ‘Dead Man.’ Too toxic, he thought. Mostly, Wurlitzer said, more than any consideration of cash and credit, he was saddened that a friendship had ended.

The next afternoon, I was back with Wurlitzer in Davis’s studio. He was talking at length about being an artist. It was part musing, part requiem, but it also had more than a hint of challenge. “I think that now more than ever the megacities are getting to be more and more impossible hell-worlds,” he told me. “I mean not just how much it costs to live in LA or New York or wherever. The confusion, the distractions, there’s no sense of community. People who can have a small sense of community and feed each other that way and be spontaneous and have a relationship that’s about one to one rather than being plugged in is more and more important.

And I think that will grow, because I think it’s the only way to survive.”

He had been agonising too over a cold email he had received that morning. “He got the address from my website, I guess, and there was just one line: ‘Dear Mr. Wurlitzer, I’m a big fan of your work. Can you tell me what I should do to become a writer?’” he told me. “And I haven’t answered him back yet. I don’t know—get a day job and maybe think about trying to use your hands? Maybe pick up waiting [tables] or something? Be careful? I don’t know what kind of advice to give. I mean, just the thought of what it means to become a writer now and face the commercial aspects of it, what it means to survive... I don’t have the answer. I don’t know where it’s going. So I don’t know how to respond to him. I guess maybe plant your ass in a chair and write. And pray for endurance.”

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HALFWAY TO NOWHERE Out of Prison, Not Yet Home

BY ERIC BORSUK, ILLUSTRATIONS BY STAVROS PAVLIDES PUBLISHED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH THE MARSHALL PROJECT

After years of mandatory drug sentences and other tough-on-crime policies, the United States now imprisons more people per capita than any other country except, possibly, North Korea (where the statistics are sketchy) and the Seychelles. Those American sentencing policies are starting to change. But the new emphasis on probation and other alternatives to incarceration has meant more business for the private companies and nonprofit groups that run residential reentry centers, or “halfway houses,” which help move inmates out of prison and back into their communities. This is one man’s story about life in a halfway house.

I

walk out the front doors of the prison at ten o’clock in the morning. For the first time, I am standing in the “sliver.” My mother and sister rush to me, beaming with tears in their eyes. We hug and kiss while my father snaps pictures on a digital camera. No more clanging steel gates, no more guards shouting orders over loud speakers. An oversize American flag sways above us; rust-coloured leaves float down through the crisp fall air. Autumn, from the Etruscan root autu- and the Latin auctumnus, signifying the passing of the season. Six years in a box with only a dictionary for a friend: My mind works differently now.

It’s hard to remember myself before all this, as a 19-yearold college kid who thought it was a good idea to join some buddies in stealing a first edition of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and other rare books and manuscripts from a university library. In prison, you start to forget after

a while even why you’re there. Who you were, what you wanted—the steady, quotidian punishment grinds it away.

For years all I could see of the “real world,” as inmates call it, was a thin strip of pavement just beyond the razor wire where I would watch visitors passing in and out. I called it the “sliver.”

Before we reach the car, a prison official chases us down and demands to see my father’s camera. Visitors to Federal Correctional Institution, Ashland, a low-security prison in northeastern Kentucky, are not allowed to take pictures while on prison property. “Security issue,” she explains, deleting photos of my pale, gaunt face.

As soon as the car starts moving, I feel nauseated. I can’t remember the last time I was transported by anything other than my own two feet. My mom passes me a brown grocery bag reeking of bacon and sausage. From the size of it, she must have bought nearly everything on the menu

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at a local diner. When she asked me a week ago what I wanted for my first meal, I just said “breakfast.” It was an exciting thought at the time, but now I can’t take a bite. I roll down the window, close my eyes, and breathe deeply. My dad turns and asks how it feels to be free. All I can think about is vomiting.

We pull off the highway at a rest area, and I bolt for the men’s room. Instead of dry-heaving, I freeze in front of the mirror. It’s the first time I’ve seen myself outside of prison. My clothes don’t look right; something is off. Toilets flush; doors swing open and closed. I feel paralyzed, like a stone at the bottom of a river. Men walk in and out, giving me strange looks. A freak—from the Middle English freke, meaning “bold creature.”

My dad is normally a slow driver, but today he’s speeding.

The trip from the federal prison in eastern Kentucky to my new halfway house in Louisville should take a good three hours, and the Bureau of Prisons has allowed me exactly three hours and 15 minutes. If I’m more than one minute late, I can be declared an escapee and the US Marshals Service will take charge of my return. Some inmates avoid the stress by taking the Greyhound, or at least saying they will. The Bureau of Prisons gives you more time for the bus, so if you arrange for someone to secretly pick you up at the station you can end up with two or three days of freedom if you’re going home to another state. When I asked fellow inmates what they would do with that extra time, the response was usually the same: “beer, pizza, and pussy,” though not necessarily in that order.

One of them, a pasty, pear-shaped young man about my age, in his mid 20s, takes me on a tour. He gets sweaty just walking me around the house, which has a cafeteria, a fitness room, separate televisions for men and women, and rows of pay phones.

Other residents size me up as I pass by. The shot-callers are easy to spot, especially in an environment where the men can show off in front of the women. Coed or not, it feels like my first day in prison.

I spend the rest of the day filling out forms and watching videos about Dismas Charities, the nonprofit group that runs the halfway house. Named for St. Dismas, the penitent thief who was crucified alongside Jesus, it operates 30 residential reentry centers in 13 states. One video assures me that Dismas promotes rehabilitation through “evidence-based practices,” empowering offenders with “education, employment, and support.” Its motto is “Healing the Human Spirit.”

Days pass. I sit around waiting to be told to do something, but they just tell me to keep waiting. I am allowed fresh air only at certain times of the day, in a small, fenced-in area adjacent to the halfway house. I can see, hear, and even smell the city—it’s so close—but I can’t touch it. Most days I end up smoking cigarettes and watching reruns of How I Met Your Mother with my roommates, a couple of drug dealers just out of state prison.

I try reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated, but I can’t concentrate. My mind races; I can’t sit still. All I can think about is getting out. The longing was so much easier to suppress in prison, when the outside was more distant. There, everything faded: friends, family, love. I remember the morning I woke up feeling like I had lost my dreams. My imagination could no longer access my past and could only work from images of my dim, narrow prison life. I promised myself that when I got out I would appreciate freedom—really appreciate it. But in the halfway house, trapped in between, I still dream of prison.

Limbo—from the Latin limbus, the region that borders hell.

ONE RESIDENT FRESH OUT OF FEDERAL PRISON STABBED A WOMAN TO DEATH WITH AN ICE PICK IN THE BATHROOM.

I arrive at Dismas House in Old Louisville with only minutes to spare. The building is a renovated, neo-Gothic church with redbrick towers and lancet windows. All the doors are locked, but after waving my arms in front of a security camera for a couple of minutes, I am buzzed through. A slender, middle-aged African American man, dressed in a button-down and slacks, sits behind a Plexiglas window at the front desk. He asks me what I want, and I say I’m reporting from federal prison for supervised early release. No, I’m not, he informs me; there were no arrivals on the schedule. After much explaining, many mouse clicks at his computer, and a phone call to someone, he finally agrees to admit me.

I push on the door, wanting to say goodbye to my family on the sidewalk, but it’s locked from the inside. The intake process has already begun, the deskman says, so I can’t go anywhere without formal permission. He is already waving a handheld metal detector around my crotch as he explains my situation, and he quickly moves on to the Breathalyzer test. I am then escorted to a room in the basement to urinate in a plastic cup as the desk guy watches. While I wait for the drug-test results, another staffer, called a resident monitor, rummages through my duffel bag for contraband.

The monitors are like the prison guards of the halfway house.

They keep the residents in line and run the day-to-day operations.

Some of my fellow residents kill the time with drugs, and there are plenty in the house to choose from. K2, also known as spice, is popular because it’s available at convenience stores and supposedly not detected by the unscheduled drug tests. One night one of my roommates asks if I want to try some. It’s like synthetic marijuana, he says—all natural ingredients. Out of boredom and curiosity I give it a go, smoking the entire joint in the bathroom by myself. When I return, I see panic in his eyes.

He says I was only supposed to take a couple hits.

For the next ten hours I hallucinate in the worst way. Muffled voices blare over the loudspeakers, sounding every time like someone is shouting my name. I wonder if my counselor is finally calling me to her office. I ask other residents if they heard my name being called, but no one else can decipher the announcements.

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For the rest of the night I hide in my room, frantically jotting down thoughts in a notebook to calm myself.

I wake up from a dream about prison—the unrest, the din.

Next to me in the bed is a piece of notebook paper with my handwriting on it. It says, “Don’t let the darkness eat you up,” which I think I heard in a song on the radio. Men are shouting nonsense outside my door. Some mornings I jump out of bed disoriented, my heart pounding, thinking I missed the cell-block head count. I’ve been to the hole before, and I don’t want to go back. But then I see my halfway-house roommates lying in their beds, staring at me like I’m some kind of nutcase.

After the standard breakfast of rubbery eggs and grits, I head to the men’s room with a disinfectant spray bottle, rubber gloves, scrub brushes, and mop bucket. The house will not “open” until all residents complete their daily chores. New guys get bathroom duty, same as in prison. I start with the toilets because guys always burst in needing to go—it never fails—and then I move on to the showers. Everyone just rushes through their chores as quickly as possible, but I take my time. I figure I have to use the bathroom too, so it might as well be clean.

More than a week passes before I finally meet with my counselor. She gives me permission to leave the house each weekday morning for the sole purpose of finding a job. I need to produce a list of five potential employers I will visit, and the list has to be approved one day in advance. Residents scour the Yellow Pages for any business that seems acceptable, but the trick is to find ones close to one another because we only get four hours and have to use public transportation to get around.

Dismas requires that I inform any potential employer of my felony status, and the manager of any place I apply must sign a detailed form to prove that I actually filled out an application. If I do not return to the house every day with at least five managers’ signatures I am in violation of the halfway house’s terms.

Many residents are so fearful of returning without their signatures that they resort to forging. But counselors spot-check these entries, and often residents are caught and disciplined.

Once I secure employment, the halfway house will garnish 25 percent of my gross wages. It’s called “paying for your bed.”

I have been assigned by the federal Bureau of Prisons to stay in the reentry center for six months. If I meet all the requirements, the community corrections manager—the director of the halfway house—can grant early release and place me on home confinement, with supervision by a federal probation officer.

But even then, I would still have to pay for my bed for the full six months. So in theory, several residents could end up paying Dismas for the same bed.

At night I exercise in the fitness room and search for jobs online. The house computers are controlled by internet-filtering software and only allow access to job-search engines. On one list I find a Dismas posting for a full-time resident-monitor position at my halfway house. “Enjoy meaningful work

that positively impacts your community,” it says, “assisting individuals to heal so they can once again be productive and responsible citizens.” According to the description, the monitor ensures the residents’ accountability by enforcing all rules, responsibilities, and restrictions. The job pays $9 an hour. No experience necessary, and only a high school diploma or GED is required.

It’s pretty clear to me that the monitors need more training than they get to deal with the kinds of people who are coming through. A while back, one resident fresh out of federal prison stabbed a woman to death with an ice pick in the Dismas bathroom. Even for those who are more stable, it’s a precarious time.

But almost every day, I overhear the monitors threatening to send residents back to prison if they don’t do what they’re told.

And some of them do get sent back.

GUYS ON THEIR WAY OUT OF PRISON WOULD SOMETIMES GET INTO FIGHTS ON PURPOSE, JUST TO AVOID THE HALFWAY HOUSE.

One night a commotion erupts near the front of the house and everyone rushes to see what’s happening. One of the longtime residents, a hulking man with tree-trunk limbs and dark bags under his eyes, is shouting, “I’ll burn this place down!” The man, who is known to be mentally unstable, hurls the sign-in clipboard at the wall.

“You want to go back to prison?” the egg-shaped resident monitor demands from behind the Plexiglas window of the reception desk.

“Y’all don’t know me!” the man continues. “Y’all don’t know where I’ve been!” He stomps down the hallway, kicking the doors.

The resident monitor goes on the PA system to order everyone back to their rooms.

One of my roommates tells me he was standing nearby when the monitor accused the resident of withholding his weekly 25 percent payment. The man works at Dizzy Whizz, a fast-food joint a couple of blocks from the house, and he returns from work every night in a grease-stained uniform stinking of French fries. He doesn’t talk much, just works all day and visits with family on the weekends. He insisted that he had paid his cut, but the monitor said he hadn’t, and his visitation privileges were being revoked. He had a visit scheduled for the next morning.

The rest of the night we lie on our beds, listening as the man screams and beats his fists against the wall outside in the common area. The resident monitor, still behind the glass window of his office, is talking to the man over the loudspeakers, warning him to return to his room.

Eventually the police arrive and the house goes quiet.

In prison, other inmates would tell me the halfway house is the worst part. I found that hard to believe, but nearly every repeat offender would say that. Guys on their way out of prison would sometimes get into fights and lose their good time on purpose, just to avoid the halfway house. Some would refuse to go at all, and ride out their final months in the hole.

Now I’m starting to understand.

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CROOKED MEN: THE BEAUTY QUEENS AND BATTLE-AXES OF ORGANISED CRIME

By Roberto Saviano

When people hear what I do, they often assume that I write stories exclusively about men, but women have an important, if complex, role in Italian criminal organisations, a role that Mob Wives can’t even come close to depicting. Female gangsters are subject to arcane rules, rigorous rituals, and inseverable commitments. Caught in a confusing place between modernity and tradition, they can give death orders but can’t take lovers or leave their men. They can decide to invest in entire sectors of the market but can’t wear makeup when their men are in prison—that would amount to confessing a betrayal, as if they were out looking to get laid.

Apart from a few rare exceptions, the mafiosa exists only in relation to her man.

Without him, she’s like an inanimate being— only half a person. That’s why mob wives appear so unkempt and disheveled when accompanying their men to court—it’s a cultivated look meant to underscore their fidelity. When they’re well dressed and gussied up, their husbands are nearby and free. The man commands, and as he commands, his power is reflected on his woman and communicated through her image. This is the case for the Neapolitan Camorra, for the ’Ndrangheta of Calabria, and for some families of Cosa Nostra.

That’s also how it is in the Mexican cartels, which consider the woman a kind of trophy for a drug trafficker, a reflection of his virility and power. The more striking a woman at his side, the more strength he elicits.

The popularity of beauty pageants in some states in Mexico, as well as Latin America more generally, is no coincidence. There is no better way for a woman to display her good looks and win over a drug trafficker— which, for some, can mean an escape from a life of poverty into a world of luxury. In some states, like Sinaloa, for example, there are few other ways for a girl to get a taste of wealth and power than to become a narco’s wife. The tradeoff is clear: Drug traffickers give these girls money and a comfortable life, while the girls, through their beauty, give the narcos pleasure and prestige. The woman is such an asset to the drug trafficker’s résumé that some narcos will even rig the beauty pageants she competes in. With the cartel’s help, she brings home the title, and the drug trafficker gains eminence by having her at his side. That’s why many women in Sinaloa invest in enhancements to their bodies from a very young age: They get breast implants and butt lifts in hopes of becoming more attractive to cartel members and changing their lives.

Though they have similar mentalities, the women of Mexican cartels tend to be more modern and uninhibited than the women of Italian Mafias. Yet the expectation that mob wives should make themselves dowdy and almost invisible doesn’t mean they’re entirely lacking in freedom—actually, they’re often the ones who command in place of their incarcerated husbands.

Regardless of where they’re from, women in organised crime tend to have similar life

stories. Husband and wife have often known each other since they were teenagers and are married between the ages of 20 and 25. It’s customary to marry the “girl next door,” someone a man has known since childhood and can be sure is a virgin. The guy, on the other hand, is generally allowed to have mistresses—before the marriage and after. In recent years, however, the wives of mafiosi have required that their husbands’ lovers be foreign—Russian, Polish, Romanian, Moldovan—women they consider to be socially inferior and incapable of building a family and educating children properly.

Having a mistress from Italy or, even worse, from one’s own town is damaging because it destabilises the family balance—not only in the sense of the relationship of the nuclear family but also the relationships of the clan.

A man can’t risk taking the wife of another boss as a lover, betraying the sister of a fellow clan member, or making a fool of his own wife in front of the entire town. These acts would create disagreements and feuds and would jeopardise the life of the clan. It’s a behavior that violates the code of honor on which the mob is founded, which means it could be punishable by death.

The specter of death haunts mob marriages constantly, and in Mafia-controlled lands many women dress exclusively in black. It’s a sign of mourning. Mourning for a murdered husband or slain son. Mourning because a brother, nephew, or neighbour was killed. Mourning because the husband of a co-worker was taken out or because the

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Illustrations by Jacob Everett

son of a distant relative was assassinated.

There’s always a reason to wear black. And underneath the black, they dress in red. In the past, women would put on a red undershirt to remember all the blood that had to be avenged; today they often wear red lingerie, especially when they’re young. It’s a continual reminder of the blood that their own pain won’t allow them to forget, and the contrast with the black really highlights the terribly intimate colour of revenge. To be a widow in criminal territories means losing one’s identity as a woman almost entirely and retaining only that of mother. As a widow, you can remarry only if you meet several conditions: Your sons must agree to the marriage, the man must be the same rank as your deceased husband, and, above all, you must have mourned for as much time as the clan prescribed, all the while remaining abstinent.

A female boss I remember well because I saw her come to power in the area where I’m from is Immacolata Capone. She was a businesswoman, but, according to the Anti-Mafia District Directorate of Naples, she was also a godmother of the Camorra.

A member of the Moccia clan, Capone had a primary role in the management of public works for the Zagaria clan of Casal di Principe—one of the most powerful families in the area. She had the important and delicate job of obtaining the “anti-Mafia certificate” (the document that guarantees a business is clean and free of criminal associations) for the clan’s businesses. Without this certificate, the Camorristi would not have been able to bid for public contracts.

One day in the early 2000s, she met the Camorrista Michele Fontana, known as “the Sheriff,” and he told her that he had a surprise for her. He put her in the front seat of the car, where she immediately heard noises coming from the trunk. When Capone asked for an explanation, the Sheriff just told her not to worry. They drove for a while and arrived at a palatial villa in the countryside outside Caserta, about 20 miles north of Naples. At that point, Michele Zagaria—one of the most powerful bosses of the Casalese clan, condemned to life and finally arrested in December 2011 after living 16 years as a fugitive—emerged from the trunk of the car and went inside. Shocked by the presence of the boss, Capone couldn’t speak to him even

though they’d been partners in successful deals for years. According to some sources, the boss took his place at the center of the parlor, which was covered in rare marble and represented just one of his numerous villas, and began to talk about contracts, concrete, construction, and land—all while petting a tiger on a leash. It was a cinematic, almost mythic scene, drawing on the kind of imagery that crime families use to cement their power.

Raised in the environment of the Camorra, Capone was a tiny woman with a strong character, able to intimidate anyone when discussing business. She grew up under the guidance of Anna Mazza, wife of the boss of the Moccia clan and the first woman in Italy to be convicted of Mafiarelated crimes for her role as the head of one of the most powerful criminal and business associations in Southern Italy. Mazza— initially taking advantage of the reputation of her husband, Gennaro Moccia, who was killed in the 70s—soon assumed a leadership role in the clan. Known as the widow of the Camorra, she was the brains of the Moccia family for more than 20 years.

Mazza instituted a sort of matriarchy in

the Camorra. She wanted only women in positions of prestige because, according to her, women are less obsessed with military power and make better mediators. This was her way of running the organisation.

Having learned from Mazza, Capone was able to construct an entrepreneurial and political network of great importance. Many Camorristi courted her in order to become consorts of a high-ranking boss, sharing her bed and business deals. But Capone’s talents brought about her own demise. In November 2004, a few months after the Mafia eliminated her husband, they killed her in a butcher shop in Sant’Antimo in the province of Naples. She was only 37 years old. The police never discovered a motive for the murder, but the clans may not have appreciated her attempt to climb the ranks. Her fierce ambition may have frightened them, and given her business acumen, she might have even attempted to undertake a big deal on her own, independently of the Casalese family. The only thing we know for sure is that Capone had successfully navigated the pressures, limitations, and expectations put on women to leave her mark on mob history.

Translated from the Italian by Kim Ziegler

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RECORD REVIEWS Best Album of the Month:

TOBIAS JESSO JR.: Goon

(True Panther)

Here’s a dude who has long hair and probably will steal your girl because he’s so freaking good-looking, and you want to hate him and spend your nights dreaming his head would turn into a giant penis (because it kind of already looks like one), but you can’t hate him because he makes music that’s so fucking good. Goon, his debut record, recalls singer-songwriters from the 70s—Graham Nash, Randy Newman, Harry Nilsson—and his sweet falsetto is the kind of voice that makes you feel like you can run to the moon. In 20 years, “Without You” will be a go-to for jukeboxes in dive bars, still the perfect soundtrack for that perfect drunken make-out with that perfect person.

CALIFORNIA DREW

train that might beat the shit out of you and fuck your bitch at the same time, all while transporting large quantities of processed cocaine across state lines.

ERIC PUNDERMANN

slapped on its bones and guests like Tink, Riko Dan, Kelela, and Sicko Mobb clamoring for the mic. I’m all for it.

WAKA FLOCKA SEAGULLS

KID INK

MADONNA

Full Speed

Rebel Heart

RCA

Interscope

You should be able to describe a rapper in a single sentence: Rick Ross sells drugs on the moon, Drake makes acting like a pussy seem cool, Jay Z is the American dream personified, etc. As for Kid Ink, well, he’s got a lot of tattoos and exists just in case Chris Brown goes full-on Taxi Driver on us and shoots up a brothel.

REGGIE NOGLE

TRINIDAD JAMES The Wake Up EP N/A

It’s a bittersweet achievement that perhaps Trinidad James’s most compelling musical effort to date dropped after he lost his major-label record contract. Let’s hope the underdog can keep mining this “Kid Cudi of the South” sound and emerge like a goldtoothed phoenix, instead of spending the rest of his life as the butt of every meme rap joke.

CAPTAIN QUEEFHEART

CARTER TUTTI Carter Tutti Plays Chris & Cosey CTI

Roughly speaking, from when Throbbing Gristle split up in 1981 to the turn of the century, the “Sonny & Cher of the death set” released electronic, industrial-leaning dance music as Chris & Cosey. Since 2000, they’ve gone by the name of Carter Tutti. This album, rather confusingly, is essentially a modern studio re-recording of old Chris & Cosey material played by Carter Tutti after being road-tested during their recent live shows. However hard it is to categorise, it’s clear that this torrid and extremely satisfying mix of proto-acid, new beat, techno, and bleep and bass is excellent.

THE GREEN CORNETT

FUTURE BROWN S/T Warp

CASINO Ex Drug Dealer 2 Freebandz

Casino is one of those guys who, if it weren’t for all his talk of murder, drug slinging, and sexual impropriety, would be great as an extra on Thomas the Tank Engine.

As in, he kind of raps like a sputtering freight

I hear you have misgivings about Future Brown. I hear you think they make watered-down urban music for high-end catwalks and Frieze subscribers. I hear you think they knocked down the ghetto and built luxury apartments complete with an art-gallery annex on the rubble. Still, what I hear is a record that’s essentially the glowing neon skeleton of Fatima Al Qadiri’s Asiatisch with a bit of meat

There’s something weirdly admirable about a gazillion-year-old person saying “fuck it” and doing the same stuff that young people are doing. Madonna making an album with Diplo and Avicii is basically the same thing as your uncle who fought in Desert Storm Snapchatting his girlfriend a picture of his wrinkly, white-haired balls. Most of you is all “AH DUDE WHAT THE FUCK,” but there’s still that part of you that’s like, “You go, crazy uncle! Be modern, even if it makes you look dumb as shit.” So go ahead and show those wizened testes to the world, Madge!

KORTNEY KOCKS

APHEX TWIN Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments Pt2 Warp

Let me check, but I think it’s OK now to say that Syro wasn’t as jaw-droppingly awesome as the internet unanimously declared back in September. In fact, once you waded through that album, checked out his six-year-old son’s tracks, and negotiated the data dump of files he stuck online, the promise of even more new Aphex Twin music coming soon actually kind of filled you with dread. Happily, this batch of computer-controlled drum-and-piano pieces is easier to swallow, though if anyone else released these, you’d wonder why they’d just jizzed out a load of jazz-funk fluff.

LES PANINI

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RECORD REVIEWS Worst Album of the Month:

OF MONTREAL: Aureate Gloom

(Polyvinyl)

Idea for a modern-day Chinese curse: May you only listen to Of Montreal albums made after Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? I know there must have been a time when “Prince undergoes a nervous breakdown” seemed like a glittering treasure trove of possibilities, but listening to Kevin Barnes’s 13th album of arch blaxploitation funk, teeth-itching glam whimsy, and songs about beating off his dad, I think it’s about time someone had a word with him.

DEAN FUNK

THE SOFT MOON Deeper

electro crooning just don’t work. Weird for the sake of weird is not weird, it’s annoying.

SVEN BENDER

Captured Tracks

The modern crop of post-punk and minimal-synth musicians would have you believe their influences are long-lost Belgian coldwave bands that released one cassette demo in 1982 before disappearing forever. Good for Luis Vasquez of the Soft Moon, then, for sounding so unashamedly like the ludicrous but great stadium goths Sisters of Mercy that he’s basically a twirled cane off of being Andrew Eldritch in the “Lucretia, My Reflection” video.

FLORENCE RIDA

CHROMATICS Dear Tommy Italians Do It Better

Chromatics are the most average band of all time—if you took every band and made them form a line from best to worst, Chromatics would be in the exact fucking middle. People remember great stuff, and they remember horrible stuff. Meanwhile, history will be neither kind nor unkind to Chromatics, because history will not remember Chromatics at all. Good day, sir.

KEN HAM

COLLARBONES Return Two Bright Lakes

Okay, I get it. Vapor-wave and sports-lux aren’t going away anytime soon. But can we please think of the music? All these layers of atmospheric synths from 90s R&B tracks, vocals that don’t sound like vocals and

KING KHAN & BBQ SHOW

something to rhyme with “Mephistopheles.”

Somewhere out there, there’s a pile of broken glass that hasn’t been rolled around in.

Somewhere there’s a Christian who hasn’t seen him push a crucifix up his ass. Time to give the people what they want.

FLORENCE RIDA

MOURN S/T Captured Tracks

Bad News Boys In the Red

It’s a valiant return to the dirty-as-fuck garage-dancing days. So flip up your raw-edged denim skirt and prepare to receive sloppy cunnilingus behind the keg of skunk beer, ladies—it’s on. King Khan’s latest effort is mostly a lot of fun, not unlike pretending you can waltz after shotgunning a third bong rip from that hot mechanic. But there are brief moments too akin to when you can’t find your underwear post-party—what the hell is that last, yowling track, Khan? And where the hell is my underwear?

B. GRIMM

Melting glaciers. North Korean dirty bombs. Humanity enslaved under the yoke of malign artificial intelligence. Lots of reasons to be afraid about the future, but the debut album by Catalan teenagers Mourn is not one of them. Witness: 11 grrrl-punk songs called things like “Your Brain Is Made of Candy” and “Boys Are Cunts” as played by three hobo P. J. Harveys and a young man who can’t believe his luck.

LIL LOUIS

MARILYN MANSON The Pale Emperor Cooking Vinyl

PEARLS Pretend You’re Mine Remote Control

Brian Warner sits alone in his trailer, gazes at the black olive bobbing around in his glass of absinthe, and lets out a long, deep sigh. Idly, his thoughts turn to the album that he really wanted to make—the one in which he croaked like an emphysemic Iggy Pop through a set of outlaw country songs.

But you know what they say—once the God of Fuck, always the God of Fuck. Sadly, he reaches for the lipstick and pulls on the fishnet stockings. Resigned, he smokes a bit of opium through a monkey skull and tries to think of

Your band is not as attractive as Pearls.

Your band doesn’t look like it appeared from the pages of a 1988 issue of Elle.

The Brood or Final Warning, or whatever shit name you are calling your band, probably doesn’t sound as attractive either (because you know when you say “pearl” we think “clitoris”). From the glam rock pomp of “Big Shot” to the fuzzier and rockier “Dirty Water”, the Melbourne three-piece dazzle. Get

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RECORD REVIEWS Best Cover of the Month:

PALMBOMEN II: S/T

(Beats in Space)

As concepts go, an album of fucked-up Chicago house tracks named after minor characters from the X-Files didn’t have me salivating until I realised that the guy behind Palmbomen II is Kai Hugo, the suave Dutch disco producer who scores video games in his spare time and once put out a sumptuous synth-pop record called Night Flight Europa. Curdled, garish, and strangely enchanting, Palmbomen II (palmbomen means “palm trees” in Dutch) is Hugo’s LA art record—he recently relocated there—so let’s hope he moves away as soon as possible before he’s brainwashed by new age hippies.

THEYDON BOIS

jealous. And no sorry, they can’t play a Thursday night show with Final Warning.

JOSE BAUTISTA

TWERPS Range Anxiety Chapter

pletely contingent on whether you think killing a mountain lion is the dopest shit that a human being can do or an offense worthy of capital punishment.

CARL GNARSOM

NITE FIELDS Depersonalisation Felte

If you’re from Melbourne, Twerps can do no wrong. If you’re from Australia, Twerps can do no wrong. If you’re from overseas, Twerps can do no wrong. Have things changed that much on Range Anxiety? Nup. But it really doesn’t matter because this sunny indie pop just doesn’t do wrong. Keep doing you Twerps; this is going great.

TOM HUTCHINS

CHOOK RACE About Time Independent

Exactly. About time. It’s taken ages for these Melbourne slouches to release their debut LP. They seem pretty relaxed.

Maybe too relaxed as parts of this record sound like they’ve just chugged a Quaalude Power Shake or call Far North Queensland home. They nail that chilled sound though.

Stripped back but melodic guitar strumming backed with girl and guy vocals. It may be casual but casual in a very good way.

JOSE BAUTISTA

KID ROCK First Kiss Warner

Recently, the news came out that Kid Rock killed a mountain lion, to the applause of Ted Nugent. Your enjoyment of the new Kid Rock album is almost com-

I listened to this through headphones on a stressful workday when it felt like the weekend would never arrive and I’d be stuck in cold coffee, late morning purgatory for eternity. Lucky for me the dark drones hummed in my skull, lulling me as close as I’d get to peace in the whole day. I found myself transfixed, suspended in a meditative state as I settled into a human pace and felt the morning washing through my fingers.

By the time the album ended I was at peace and it felt like time has started moving again.

But I was at work, so fuck you guys.

DAVID’S LUNCH

SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE Hexadic Drag City

Ben Chasny, the preternaturally talented guitar savant behind Six Organs and Comets on Fire, has devised an entirely original way of writing music called hexadic—which generates all the tonal fields, chord changes, lyrics, and scales—after which his new album has been named. I, for one, really hope it catches on so that next year Taylor Swift, Mac DeMarco, Sting, and Drake all have to release albums that sound like a youthful Butthole Surfers trying to do a live cover version of Miles Davis’s Dark Magus at gunpoint during an earthquake.

PC PETE

SLEATER-KINNEY No Cities to Love Sub Pop

I saw Sleater-Kinney at Lollapalooza in 2006, just before they went on indefinite hiatus. That same trip, I bought my first weedsmoking device, peed in Lake Michigan at night, and vomited in public. With the onslaught of Carrie Brownstein and Co.’s regenerated interest in making balls-out, awesome rock music again, it seems reasonable to expect this year might even inspire my first vape. Who knows. If not, at least there’s this great reunion record—I’m getting too old for weed anyway.

BECA GRIMM

POND Man It Feels Like Space Again EMI

The small guy from Tame Impala tries his hand at busting out some prog lite. Real prog of course is meant to be wanky, over blown, and excessive. The kind of music that takes you on a journey where you end up face down, semi naked with a public transport officer’s knee in your back. The journey here is way more pedestrian. Think more Regurgitator than Syd Barrett. Yeah it’s a bad thought huh?

JOSE BAUTISTA

WEAK BOYS Weekdays/Weekends Strong Look

Do you like your music simple? I do. I want to hear dudes sing about hangovers, South Australia, dogs on farms, Diane Keaton, shit landlords, and more hangovers.

And I want it set to that dole-wave Australian

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RECORD REVIEWS Worst Cover of the Month:

YOUNG GUV: Ripe 4 Luv

(Slumberland)

See the little vomiting smiley next to this review, Sum 41 songwriter, former child actor, label owner, guitarist of Fucked Up, and all-around awesome guy Ben Cook?

See the streams of puke bursting out of that little guy’s mouth? That’s all for you!

Yes, for you, Mr. Multitalented! Because this record is fucking horrible, from the name of this project to the titles, cover art, and—good God, let’s not talk about the music! Young Guv is like college radio shitting on mid-90s power pop and then, without wiping, standing up to piss a little stream of lo-fi surf rock over the whole mess because you just had to go.

A WRITER IN NEW YORK

chill lo-fi thing that people seem to be losing their shit over.

TOM HUTCHINS

THE POP GROUP Citizen Zombie Freaks R Us

GANG OF FOUR What Happens Next Metropolis

Funny, I thought when classic bands reformed with only one original member it was a horrible and cynical cash-in move, but because the band in question went to art school, it turns out it’s “a testament to the integrity of the concept” (thanks, Michael Azerrad!).

Guitarist Andy Gill leads an entirely new lineup of the once brilliant British post-punk band, and of course the results are stupendously terrible. I could point to the floppy political commentary of “First World Citizen” or the tinny digi-metal of “Obey the Ghost of the Colony,” but if it’s OK with you I’m just going to use the phrase “Alison Mosshart guest vocals” and leave it at that.

RONNIE BARKER

NOEL GALLAGHER’S HIGH FLYING BIRDS Chasing Yesterday

Oh man, is it Esteemed-British-Post-PunkBand-Craps-All-Over-Their-PristineReputation Month? They better not rush out that New Order album for any reason.

RONNIE CORBETT

MOON DUO Shadow of the Sun Sacred Bones

Damn, look at that beard. I’d say Ripley’s let himself go, but he’s been rocking that Fraggle Rock maggot look since he was two. Kind of guy to go to an orgy to eat the fuckin’ grapes.

BONES JUSTICE

pixelated Pegasus, booming out bighearted psychedelic hymns and periodically plastering you in perfectly syncopated blasts of magical horse dung.

CHARLES HANSON

VARIOUS ARTISTS A Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble (Exploding in Your Mind)— the Wizards of Oz: Compiled & Mixed by the Amorphous Androgynous Monstrous Bubble

Ah, you see, this is what good psych sounds like. Guitars so acidic it’s like an angry volcano god has just jizzed hot lava into your ears. Hyper-phased Hammond organs that sound like the hidden rocket boosters under Notre-Dame Cathedral, firing up for take-off. The kind of heavy use of echo that has probably been responsible for several herds of whales beaching themselves in psychedelic confusion over the years. This is the fourth in an irregular series of mix albums and sees the Amorphous Androgynous duo drawing on rare and ridiculous sounds from Australia, and bar the slightly dad-esque inclusion of Tame Impala, this comp is a total (bong) ripper.

JAY DEE

Sour Mash

Poor Noel. Despite having lyrics that scan like all of the input options for some cruel, Noel Gallagher random-lyric-generator Facebook meme, this album borders on being very good indeed. But there will be literally only two responses to it: Ageing Brit-poppers will deem it “OK but no Oasis,” and everyone else will think it’s shit despite never hearing it. But in the obnoxiously glammy ramalama of “In the Heat of the Moment” and the brilliantly languid Balearic soul and jazz-rock freak-out of “The Right Stuff,” Gallagher senior is finally breaking out of the songwriting shackles that have bound him since Morning Glory.

R. KIDD

DAN DEACON

P.H.F

Gliss Riffer

Grind State

Domino

Crystal Magic Records

If I’d traveled back in time to tell a younger you that one of the most accomplished minimalist composers of the 21st century would fit the description “8-bit hobo in hipster girl’s spectacles,” I bet you wouldn’t believe me. And you’d probably be like, “Who are you, and why are you telling me this? Ugh, get away from me, man.” But I just have to tell someone about Dan Deacon and Gliss Riffer, an album roughly the sound of Steve Reich and Terry Riley soaring above you on a

Formerly Perfect Hair Forever, now simply P.H.F, this is an Auckland artist who plies a bonkers take on bedroom garage pop. His label says it plays like “an all-cheatsunlocked play-through”, and I can hear that.

Mr PHF offers everything he’s got then pours distortion all over it. It’s pop-punk, but not the kind that your little sister listens to. That kid from Wavves on the other hand would be all over this.

TOM HUTCHINS

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Truly All day alternative every day

2015-02-23 12:15 PM

FULL BLEED |

Joseph Wolfgang Ohlert

Berlin-based photographer Joseph Wolfgang Ohlert recently went to San Francisco to photograph drag queens and trans people for his first book of photos. By day, Joseph met queens at their homes for quiet portrait sessions. At night, he followed them to such hallowed institutions as Trannyshack, Midnight Sun, the Stud Bar, and Moby Dick to document them in full bloom.

Look for more of Joseph’s spectacular portraits this month at VICE.com/photos.

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VICE MAGAZINE VOLUME 13 NUMBER 1

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FREE VOLUME 13 NUMBER 1

THE OFF THE DEEP END ISSUE

@emmalucey

BE PART OF THE STORY. The best thing about a picture is that it acts as a return ticket to a moment otherwise gone. As the winner of our #FollowMeContiki project, Emma Lucey will be on a mission to create amazing travel experiences throughout Europe.

So don’t let those moments fade, be inspired – go on another adventure.

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