VICE MAGAZINE VOLUME 13 NUMBER 2
FREE VOLUME 13 NUMBER 2
THE MAGIC HOUR ISSUE 2015
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T H E
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VICE NEWS TRAVELS TO NIGERIA TO SEE HOW THE MILITARY IS RAMPING UP ITS FIGHT AGAINST BOKO HARAM.
T H E WAR AGAINS T
BOKO HARAM S T O L E N R U M . C O M F A C E B O O K . C O M / S T O L E N R U M I N S T A G R A M @ S T O L E N R U M
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TABLE OF CONTENTS | Volume 13 Number 2
Nina Leen, Tommy Tucker Dries Off After a Bath, 1944 (detail). Leen was a mysterious and under-recognised Life photographer who shot more than 40 of the magazine’s covers between 1945 and 1972.
34
COMBUSTIBLE MATERIALS Oil-Refinery Workers in Texas Picketed for Their Lives
38
ROLLING IN THE DEEP The Future of Underwater Warfare
40
12 14 22
WHEN MALCOLM X MET THE NAZIS
YOUR PORN IS WATCHING YOU And Sending Your Browsing History to Other Companies
44
HARRAGAS The Ephemera That North African Migrants Leave Behind
54
WOMEN OF THE ARNOLD Photos by Jen Davis
62 70
30
’CHOKE TRAUMA Oh Hey, What’s in Your Salad?
EMPLOYEES OF THE MONTH FRONT OF THE BOOK
A POUND OF FLESH The Economics of Organ Transplants
32 48 74
THE WORLD OF VICE DOs & DON’Ts A BETTER EDITH: CrossFit Misfit
76
CROOKED MEN: A Country Flees Its History of Corruption
HOW TO BEAT A POLYGRAPH TEST To Avoid Prison, I Mastered the Art of Self-Deception
MASTHEAD
The Pope Disses Mexico, an Italian Surgeon Wants to Perform Head Transplants, Turkey Has Baby Mama Drama, Blue-Collar Norwegians Love Uppers, and Uyghur Imams Are Coerced into Dancing
The Strange Alliance Between the Nation of Islam and the American Nazi Party
42
Cover by Matthew Leifheit
78 82
RECORD REVIEWS JOHNNY RYAN’S PAGE The Castration Truck
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Australian Institute of Music For more information visit aim.edu.au or call Sydney: 02 9219 5444, Melbourne: 03 8610 4222 CRICOS CRI COS O 00 00665 66 C 665
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WORDS Hugo Anderholm, Ryan Faith, Flaminia Giambalvo, Mark Hay, Haisam Hussein, Ryan Max, Sam McPheeters, Brian Merchant, Jack Mills, Davide Monteleone, Lauren Oyler, Theodore Ross, Johnny Ryan, Roberto Saviano, Wyatt Williams, Edith Zimmerman
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PHOTOS Eve Arnold, Jen Davis, Flaminia Giambalvo, Bruce Gilden, Nina Leen, Joseph Maida, Davide Monteleone, Bobby Scheidemann ILLUSTRATIONS Heather Benjamin, Brandon Celi, Jacob Everett, Stephen Maurice Graham, Haisam Hussein, Richie Pope, Geffen Refaeli, Johnny Ryan, Ole Tillmann, Armando Veve CONTACT MAGAZINE EDITORIAL/VICE.COM
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EMPLOYEES OF THE MONTH
JEN DAVIS Jen Davis is a New York–based photographer who for the past 12 years has been working on a series of self-portraits dealing with issues regarding beauty, sexuality, identity, and body image. She recently turned her lens onto other people, has begun to explore men as a subject, and is interested in investigating the idea of the relationship—both physical and psychological—with her camera. Her first monograph, Eleven Years, was published last spring by Kehrer Verlag and was accompanied by a solo show in New York City at ClampArt. A month ago, she went to a bodybuilding competition in Ohio, and we’re pleased to publish the photos from her trip. See WOMEN OF THE ARNOLD, page 54
ARMANDO VEVE Armando Veve is an artist working in Philadelphia. After studying illustration and fine arts at the Rhode Island School of Design, he began pursuing editorial illustration work in conjunction with his studio projects. Since then, his delicate, goofy, and often surreal drawings have found their ways into numerous publications, including the New York Times Sunday Review. A drawing he did for the New Republic was included in the Society of Illustrators’ most recent Book and Editorial annual exhibition, a survey of the best illustrations of 2014. We previously commissioned him to illustrate an excerpt from Akhil Sharma’s novel Family Life. See ’CHOKE TRAUMA, page 70
WYATT WILLIAMS Wyatt Williams lives and writes in Atlanta. His features, essays, and short stories have been published by the Paris Review, Eater, the Literary Review, the Collagist, and other publications. His writing has been awarded by the Association of Alternative Newsmedia and anthologised in Best Alternative Longform Journalism. He previously served as the culture editor of Creative Loafing and the deputy food editor of Atlanta magazine, but now keeps his office at an urban goat farm. When he was younger, he rode a bicycle from Florida to California. He is at work on a novel about a country singer and a nonfiction book about meat. See COMBUSTIBLE MATERIALS, page 34
EDITH ZIMMERMAN Edith Zimmerman is the founding editor of the women’s site the Hairpin. She has written for the New York Times Magazine, GQ, and Elle. She is probably best known for the blog post “Women Laughing Alone with Salad” and for a drunken profile of Chris Evans, written when he was about to become Captain America. (“But whatever,” she says. “Hi Chris! Haha.”) She listens to ASMR videos almost every night—always by Maria, a.k.a. “GentleWhispering,” and almost always her “Crinkle Shirt” video. This has been a surprise, but it is so good, she says, though it sometimes feels lonely. This issue marks the first installment of a monthly column about enriching her life.
HAISAM HUSSEIN Haisam Hussein’s longtime interest in maps and visual art led him to the graphics department at Condé Nast Traveler (after a brief stint at a bridal magazine). He spent 13 years there honing his infographic chops and drawing hundreds of maps. More recently, he’s been putting his skills to use freelancing for magazines like the Atlantic, Rolling Stone, and National Geographic and as a regular contributor to Lapham’s Quarterly. His work has covered topics as varied as crime, love, food, terrorism, revolutions, and drugs. When he’s not clicking away at his desk, he’s either building things for his new home, experimenting with the laser cutter in his basement, or traveling.
Illustrations by Geffen Refaeli
See CROSSFIT MISFIT, page 74
See A POUND OF FLESH, page 30
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A HyperDemocratic Plan for the UK
FRONT OF THE BOOK OK
Turkey’s Baby Mama Drama
Turkey’s Health Services Department—and help young Turks avoid having “Are you my real daddy?” conversations. While the law is unenforceable to the point of being ridiculous, breaking it is punishable by up to three years in prison. The East-vs.-West, tradition-vs.-modernity tensions that characterise Turkey’s 21st-century politics (and delicious food) are very much at work here, too. Led by Dr. Heather Paxson and Burcu Mutlu, the new study will “explore whether families are utilising gender selection technology to achieve traditional son preference standards, or more modern, balanced families.” |LAUREN OYLER|
AN ITALIAN NEUROSURGEON WANTS TO PUT OLD HEADS ON NEW BODIES In Soviet Moscow a surgeon named Vladimir Demikhov created a kennel of monsters. He gained international notoriety in the 1950s for his two-headed dogs, which limped miserably around his lab like the stunted, feeble litter of Cerberus. The Russian Dr. Moreau grafted the heads of more than 20 puppies onto the shoulders of larger hounds. Few survived more than several days, giving the lie to the notion that two heads are better than one. Yet his research paved the way for that most elusive of treatments, the head transplant. The procedure, which involves attaching a severed cranium to a beheaded corpse, is a much harder
feat to achieve than the creation of conjoined twins. It first occurred in 1970 at Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve University, when Robert White stitched the head of a Rhesus monkey onto the shoulders of its decapitated companion. The monkey, which lived for a
little more than a week, had full use of its senses, though its chopped spinal cord left it a quadriplegic. Now an Italian neuroscientist claims to have found a way around the paralysis issue, and he hopes to perform the first human head transplant by 2017. In a recent paper in Surgical Neurology IInternational, Sergio Canavero says h he would varnish the spinal cord in polyethylene glycol, a sealant he thinks p h has “the power to literally fuse together ssevered axons.” Afterward, as the patient sslept in an induced coma, electrical pulses would trigger neural regrowth. p The initial, guillotine stage would be a T b bit simpler: He’d put the patient’s head iin a deep freeze to lower its need for
oxygen, give it a clean whack, and sew its veins and arteries to the donor’s cadaver. Canavero thinks the surgery would be a boon to those who suffer from muscular dystrophy, metastatic cancer, and other systemic ailments. According to the New Scientist, he’s already begun taking the names of volunteers. His colleagues in the field have responded with laughter, derision, or outright concern. Such is his reputation for quackery that neurosurgeons at NYU Langone, the Mayo Clinic, and Johns Hopkins refused to comment, not wanting to be associated with his name. In the medical mainstream, the consensus seems to be that Canavero is dead from the neck up. |RORY TOLAN|
Illustrations by Ole Tillmann, Katharine Hamnett photo by Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty Images
The National Science Foundation recently awarded a group of researchers from MIT a grant to investigate why Turkish women are traveling to North Cyprus to select the gender of their future children before undergoing in vitro fertilisation (IVF). As in several countries (including the UK, Canada, and Australia, but not the US), using pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) is highly regulated in Turkey; non-medical PGD is illegal there. But engaging in subversive “reproductive tourism” is nothing new for Turkish women. While people from all around the world travel to Cyprus to snag IVF on the cheap, egg donation, sperm donation, and surrogacy were banned in Turkey in 1987, and in 2010 that ban was extended to prohibit Turkish citizens from seeking “cross-border reproductive care” by stipulating that donor cells for IVF can come only from a spouse. Turkey was the first country to institute a policy like this, designed to “protect the country’s ancestry”—so said I˙ rfan S¸encan, director of
British punk-fashion incendiary Katharine Hamnett is helping to launch a radical political project called MyMP. The campaign is fronted by UN adviser Richard Wilson and aims, he says, to put voters first. If MPs sign the pledge, MyMP will ensure that they actively solicit their constituents’ positions on votes and then support their constituents’ stance. It launched in March, and so far Tory MP Zac Goldsmith has committed to Wilson’s pledge. Like most good ideas, MyMP was born in a bar. Wilson was drinking in Stroud, England, last year, just after the Scottish referendum’s landslide turnout. “A few of us were so frustrated that, in the internet age, our MP didn’t even ask our opinion on any of the big votes in Parliament,” Wilson said. “It just didn’t seem right. I decided to stand as an alternative to the mainstream parties.” Hamnett—whose line of oversize white tees boasting brash, politically subversive slogans brought her fame in the 80s—joined MyMP earlier this year. “She’s involved with everything, really: the design of the logo, shaping the campaign, producing a ‘Self Rule’ slogan T-shirt,” Wilson said. “I’m really not sure MyMP would have got off the ground without her.” |JACK MILLS|
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FRONT OF THE BOOK K
Dance Dance Uyghur Revolution n
A Prom Where Everyone Gets to Be King and Queen
from a majority to just a plurality in their own homeland. Now they watch China (for example) banning children from mosques to purge what it says is dangerous Islam, and they fear that they’ll lose their culture along with their independence. Many see this dancing as an explicit form of cultural whitewashing. The state once promoted traditional Uyghur dances but now pushes Han pop as the sign that you’re not an extremist. “Not all Uyghur dancing is religious,” explains Uyghur World Congress spokesman Alim Seytoff. “By forcing Uyghirs to do… what we call monkey dancing against their own will… it’s extremely offensive.” It’s especially insidious because the Chinese state’s competitors are using a translation of “Little Apple” into Uyghur that replaces the song’s saccharine love lyrics with patriotic mantras. That’s brainwashing incarnate, delivered with spite and gyration. |MARK HAY|
Prom has always been an elitist event, a popularity contest that most people leave feeling like a loser or extremely numb (read: drunk). But imagine a world where everyone had an equally lovely date and everyone got to be prom king or queen. At Cottonwood Classical Preparatory School, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the senior class came close to such a utopian gala when students voted to have their prom be communism-themed, or, in their words, “promunism.” The alternative school has always allowed its students to come to a consensus on the theme of its senior prom, and this year the student body chose to honor what they’d been learning about in history class: Joseph Stalin, Kim Jong-il, and Fidel Castro. VICE talked to Sam Obenshain, executive director of Cottonwood, and he explained that the choice had nothing to Co do with fetishising the suffering caused by oppressive communist regimes. Rather, “promunism” was a term the seniors felt “repreg resented their education and what they’ve studied.” res Some students were made uncomfortable by the theme, however, leading Obenshain and the 38 teenagers in the Class of eve 2015 to reconsider the vote. The seniors decided that they 20 didn’t want to make light of a term that has many negative did associations attached to it. “They didn’t want something as ass small as their dance—in the grand scheme of things—to cresm ate any heartache,” Obenshain said. Now, their prom will be, well, prom-themed. “There will be punch-flavored punch and we pie-flavored pie.” |ZACH SOKOL| pie
The general gene perception of hard-drug users tends to be that they’re people from vulnerable social groups, such as criminals or junkies. In Scandinavia, another perception is that amphetamine users include students and people who like to spend their weekends out clubbing. But a new study from the University of Oslo shows that blue-collar workers, such as carpenters, bricklayers, and fishermen, are common users of uppers too—all for the sake of trying to sustain long working hours. Although the study shows new findings in Norway, drug use within blue-collar jobs isn’t a new phenomenon. In fact, it’s common for workers in Thailand pulling long hours to take yaba, which contains methamphetamine. The amphetamine users interviewed in the study—all of whom work in blue-collar jobs— explained that the drug helped to relieve the strain and boredom of their tedious jobs. It all seemed to come down to a “work hard, play hard” mantra, explained Sveinung Sandberg, who co-authored the paper with Willy Pedersen.
“Unlike other illicit drugs that are more in opposition to mainstream values, culturally amphetamines are a bit different. They confirm rather than challenge mainstream society’s fundamental values,” Sandberg told VICE. As one amphetamine user working as a painter explained, “I love working. Using amphetamines is about increased effort, keeping the speed up. I really worked bloody efficient.” Also in the study, the workers explained that amphetamines could be combined with regular work and family life with almost no risk of detection. That’s because the physical symptoms are close to zero when amphetamines are used in small doses. |HUGO ANDERHOLM|
Illustrations by Ole Tillmann
This February, footage emerged from China’s Xinjiang Province showing Uyghur imams busting pop dance moves and chanting pro-Communist slogans. This was part of a Beijing-sanctioned cultural program, organising regional dance contests to, for example, the Mandarin hit “Little Apple.” Yet rather than see this as a sign of levity, many claim that China coerced the imams (who are technically state employees) and others into participating to help Sinicise and secularise Uyghur culture. Dance competitions are common in Chinese community building, and the state has launched tons of cultural programs to improve their image in restive Xinjiang recently. But rumor has it that this craze stems from fears that Uyghurs, stereotypically musical people, were losing their taste for dance due to the creeping influence of a foreign, puritanical, and radical form of Islam. Yet many Uyghurs believe China uses the specter of radical Islam for control. Conquered in 1949, they’ve experienced mass Han immigration, turning Uyghurs
BLUE-COLLAR NORWEGIANS LOVE UPPERS
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FRONT OF THE BOOK
John Legend Loves Civil Rights and Dirty Bahraini Money John Legend and Common won Best Original Song for “Glory” at the 2015 Oscars, and as they accepted the award, Legend gave a moving speech about the struggle for global civil rights. Eight days later, Legend was scheduled to perform at a state-sponsored concert in Bahrain—a country notorious for its human rights violations. Headlines and editorials in the Western media called Legend a hypocrite. Three days before the concert was scheduled, three men were sentenced to death after the state falsely accused them of killing a police officer and giving them a sham trial, according to an Amnesty International report. Mohamed Hassan, a blogger who had to flee Bahrain after he was imprisoned and allegedly tortured for criticising the regime, wrote an open letter to Legend urging him to take action and use the concert as a platform to speak out against the Bahraini government.
Despite everything, the show went on. Legend closed the concert with a speech about justice that brought the crowd to tears right before he performed “Glory.” “We continue to fight in America to move toward this just society, and we pray the same for the people of Bahrain. And for those who stand for justice, accountability, freedom of expression, freedom of peaceful assembly, freedom to organise without fear of retribution, please know that I stand with you,” he said. “I think he could have done more, but at least he wasn’t hypocritical about it,” Hassan told VICE. He had hoped that Legend would visit other parts of Bahrain, especially his hometown of Sitra, where people are “hunted like rats” because of their ethnicity. “It’s a tough situation,” Hassan said. “I don’t think he was given the freedom to move around Bahrain, but I think he said enough.” |ANGELINA FANOUS|
Imagine the Maine-ification of Utah: Lobster beds sprout in dry desert, L.L. Bean elbows out the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and 12 percent of the Latino population vanishes without a trace. More total Maine-ization might also do away with Utah’s lingering affection for execution by firing squad. This may seem like a harmless mental exercise. Pointless, even. But when His Holiness Pope Francis worried about the “Mexicanisation” of his home country, Argentina, in an email published online in late February, the Mexican political class was mightily offended. Granted, he wasn’t referring to swapping chimichurri for salsa roja, but rather Argentina’s relative concord for the nightmare of drug violence that afflicts the United States’ southern neighbour. That said, it’s still a strange international tiff that resulted in Mexico’s secretary of foreign relations, José Antonio Meade, writing a formal letter to the Vatican to express his “sadness and concern,” Francis’s blaming of Mexico’s woes on the Devil, and the Pope’s surprise revelation that he doesn’t see his papacy lasting much longer. On February 21, Pope Francis wrote a short email to a friend in Buenos Aires who runs an NGO that combats some of the worst things
humanity gets up to these days, including slave labor, forced prostitution, and drug trafficking. The friend, who is running for mayor of Buenos Aires, published the email on the organisation’s website, presumably hoping to publicise his connection to El Papa. Two days later, it blew up in the press, yielding the emo outburst from Meade—who resembles something of a cross between Tim Taylor and Alan Partridge— mentioned above. The Vatican’s spokes-priests quickly explained that the Pope intended no offense to the fine people of Mexico. Francis further made good by granting a revealing interview to Mexican TV reporter Valentina Alazraki that ranged from the controversy over his published email to his “somewhat vague sensation” that, as his pontificate enters its terrible twos, he will follow his conservative predecessor’s lead and resign someday rather than dying in office, as is most popes’ druthers. While that bombshell made more global headlines, Francis’s explanation that he sees Mexico’s suffering as punishment from the Devil was less widely reported. He further clarified that he used “Mexicanisation” in the same way one would
use “Balkanisation” without intending to demean the people who live there. His best intentions aside, this only supports Mexican officials’ fears that they’ll be stigmatised as a region synonymous with violence and bloodshed. Cue image of Meade furiously scribbling in his diary about another slight from the Holy See. |RYAN MAX|
Illustration by Ole Tillman, Pope photo by Andreas Solaro/AFP/Getty Images
Mexico Fumes Over Papal Dis
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Take a sneak peek at the first 25 films from this year’s program at sff.org.au
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FULL PROGRAM RELEASED 6 MAY
3-14 JUNE
W BA E’R CK E !
OPENING NIGHT + GALA
SLOW WEST
THE HUNTING GROUND
STRANGERLAND
On Opening Night we celebrate the world premiere of Ruben Guthrie. Experience the red carpet glamour of the Festival’s biggest night at the State Theatre. Opening Night is proudly presented by Lexus Australia. Tickets on sale now.
World Cinema Grand Jury Prize winner at Sundance, this darkly funny and unconventional Western is both thrilling and romantic. With brilliant performances by Kodi Smit-McPhee, Michael Fassbender and Ben Mendelsohn.
Academy Award-nominated director Kirby Dick (The Invisible War) r and producer Amy Ziering tackle the tough issue of sexual assault on American college campuses in this confronting documentary.
Nicole Kidman makes a welcome return to Australian independent cinema in this striking film about the disappearance of her two teenaged children, and the cop (Hugo Weaving) who tries to solve the case.
FOODIES
BEATS OF THE ANTONOV
THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY
LOVE & MERCY
An insightful look at a new breed of well-to-do bloggers: self-styled culinary jetsetters, dining at the best restaurants in town. From New York to Copenhagen and Tokyo, they share their mouth-watering experiences with followers online.
Winner of the People’s Choice Award at Toronto, this eloquent documentary celebrates the resilience of Sudan’s war-torn Blue Nile and Nuba Mountain communities through their rich musical culture.
This chronicle of a lesbian S&M relationship, that becomes increasingly more intense through ritual games of dominance and submission, is a stylish homage to European erotica: kinky, funny, sensual and romantic.
Starring Paul Dano and John Cusack, this moving portrait of the musical genius Brian Wilson, explores his life’s seminal moments: The Beach Boys’ hits, the recording of ‘Pet Sounds’ and his battle with mental illness.
NECKTIE YOUTH
DEATHGASM
BIKES VS CARS
54: THE DIRECTOR’S CUT
In this visually stunning tale of disaffected youth, Jabz and September take a drug-fuelled trip through the affluent suburbs of contemporary Johannesburg, one year after the livestreamed suicide of their friend Emily.
This fabulously funny and gory Kiwi horror flick was the talk of this year’s SXSW Film Festival. When metalthrashing teen misfits Brodie and Zakk accidentally summon a hideous entity from hell, carnage and hilarity ensue.
The joy and potential of two-wheeled transport, in an era when the design of our cities is determined by the automobile, is explored in this globetrotting (São Paulo, Toronto, Stockholm and LA) documentary.
A new cut of this spirited 1998 cult classic about legendary New York disco Studio 54, reveals the film’s homoerotic original vision. The all-star cast includes Ryan Phillippe, Mike Myers, Salma Hayek and Neve Campbell.
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A PIGEON SAT ON A BRANCH REFLECTING ON EXISTENCE
THE CROW’S EGG
EISENSTEIN IN GUANAJUATO
GOING CLEAR: SCIENTOLOGY AND THE PRISON OF BELIEF
Swedish master Roy Andersson brings his trademark absurdist humour and singular vision to this winner of the Venice Golden Lion: an utterly fascinating series of vignettes populated by a bizarre cast of characters.
Dubbed the new Slumdog Millionaire, this is a funny, charming South Indian tale of two mischievous, resourceful brothers from a Chennai slum who become determined to taste pizza for the very first time.
Daring, sexually explicit and wildly funny, Peter Greenaway’s latest film depicts the great Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s visit to Mexico in 1931 to shoot a film – an experience that would shape his career.
This eye-opening look at the Church of Scientology, from Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney, tells the story of L. Ron Hubbard and his church’s rise to power, with a little help from A-listers like Cruise and Travolta.
99 HOMES
DREAMCATCHER
THE LOOK OF SILENCE
MR. HOLMES
During America’s 2008 housing crisis, a desperate construction worker (Andrew Garfield) reluctantly accepts a job with the ruthless real estate broker (Michael Shannon) who evicted him and his family from their home.
This compelling portrait of former sex worker Brenda Myers-Powell, who mentors Chicago’s streetwalkers through her foundation, earned Kim Longinotto the Documentary Directing Award at this year’s Sundance.
Joshua Oppenheimer’s unmissable companion piece to his Oscarnominated The Act of Killingg (SFF 2013) focuses on the victims of the 1960s Indonesian communist purge, their families and community.
Aged 93 and long-retired, Sherlock Holmes (the great Ian McKellen) is determined to solve a mystery that has tormented him for decades. Battling his fading memory, he sets about cracking one final case.
SERGIO HERMAN: FUCKING PERFECT
KABUKICHO LOVE HOTEL
BEST OF ENEMIES
HOW TO CHANGE THE WORLD
This intimate, mesmerising portrait captures a turning point in a Michelinstarred chef’s life and career. Can a driven perfectionist, who expects nothing less than the fucking best, shift gear and slow down?
Atsuko Maeda (Tamako in Moratorium, SFF 2014) stars in this bittersweet portrait of disaffected Japanese urbanites, where a love hotel in Tokyo’s red-light district plays host to its occupants’ illicit goings-on.
The infamous 1968 televised clash between left-leaning novelist Gore Vidal and conservative author William F. Buckley, Jr. is the subject of this entertaining doco from Robert Gordon and Oscar-winner Morgan Neville.
This fascinating documentary charts the birth of Greenpeace: from 1970s Vancouver to international status, featuring excerpts from eco-warrior Bob Hunter’s writings and compelling archival footage.
Y YOUR NIGHT CAN CONTINUE LONG AFTER THE CREDITS LO HAVE ROLLED! H H Head down to the Sydney Film Festival Hub at Town Hall to argue Fe about, then agree to disagree on ab the film you’ve just seen. th
AT TOWN HALL FULL PROGRAM REVEALED 6 MAY
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Ex Expect a richer program with more parties, talks and performances pa than ever before, an exciting new th exhibition and the return of the ex elegant Herman Miller Lounge. Image courtesy of the artist Joan Ross, and Michael Reid gallery
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A Pound of Flesh The Economics of Organ Transplants BY HAISAM HUSSEIN Thirty years after the first successful organ transplant, in 1954, the United States passed a law banning the sale of human organs and established a donor registry. This prohibition led to even fewer available organs as demand increased dramatically. Today, 21 patients die annually while waiting for a healthy organ, while some patients resort to hiring a black-market organ broker. There’s currently a push to remove the ban on organ sales, as Iran did, in 1988. Iran is the only country that allows organ sales, and it has no waiting list.
MOST COMMON TRANSPLANTS These organs made up 97 percent of all transplants in the US in 2014. 1
KIDNEY
Removes waste from the body. It is the most commonly transplanted organ, since donors can survive with only one kidney. 1954, in Massachusetts
17,106
2 LIVER
Detoxifies chemicals and filters blood. Can be transplanted whole from deceased donors or in segments from living donors. 1967, in Colorado
6,729
3 HEART
Circulates blood. Donor hearts come from brain-dead patients on life support and, as a result, can be hard to come by. 1967, in Cape Town
2,655
4 LUNG
Pulls oxygen into the body. Living donors can give a lobe of one lung; double lung donors must be pronounced brain-dead. 1963, in Mississippi
1,925
5 PANCREAS
Produces several key hormones, aids in digestion and nutrient absorption. The majority of transplants are to treat diabetes. 1966, in Minnesota KEY
245
First successful transplant
Amount transplanted
AN INCREASING NEED The gap between supply and demand continues to widen.
LIVER 15,289 HEART 4,096 LUNG 1,609 PANCREAS 1,078
KIDNEY 101,699
NUMBER OF ORGANS NEEDED 123,771
AVAILABLE DONORS 14,412
1991
2014
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THE RED MARKET In most countries, the sale of human organs is illegal. Organs must come from registered donors, and as a result a huge demand is created. Patients in wealthy countries often turn to the global “red market� for much-needed body parts, which are obtained through purchase, coercion, theft, or murder. The World Health Organization estimates that organ trafficking nets more than $1 billion each year. ANNUAL TRAFFICKING PROFITS One organ sold every hour
Brooklyn photo by AP/Louis Lanzano, surgery photo by Michelle Del Guercio/Getty Images, scar photo by Tang Chhin Sothy/AFP/Getty Images, ball-grab photo by iStock, prisoners photo by ChinaFotoPress/Getty Images
Organs Diamonds, gems
Small arms
Organs
Wildlife
Humans
$900 million
$1 billion
$1.2 billion
$10 billion
$32 billion
In the first organtrafficking case in the US, a Brooklyn man caught in a massive FBI sweep pleaded guilty to brokering black-market kidneys.
Five people from an organ-trafficking ring were arrested in Spain for offering cash to poor immigrants in return for kidneys and sections of liver.
Eritrean refugees fleeing to Israel have their organs stolen by Bedouin smugglers in Sinai, Egypt, who ship the organs to hospitals throughout Cairo.
Police in Russia are investigating the case of a Muscovite who had his testicles stolen after being drugged by an attractive woman he met at a bar.
After years of pressure from the international community, China has finally agreed to discontinue harvesting organs from executed prisoners.
THE GOING RATE The red-market cost of buying and selling a kidney around the world. Egypt
Paid to donor
Paid by recipient
China Israel Moldova Ukraine $10,000
$50,000
$100,000
$150,000
$200,000
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THE WORLD OF VICE |
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A Guide to Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Going
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MOZAMBIQUE Industrial Fishing Is Wiping Out Sharks
There are more than 4,000 industrial fishing boats sweeping the Indian Ocean, many of them dropping more than 300 lines a day, each armed with more than 3,000 hooks—that’s about a million hooks every day. While tremendously effective at catching fish, this method does not discriminate, and the fish that are reeled in—often already dead—include hundreds of sharks, despite the fact that in some places, like off the coast of Madagascar, catching sharks is illegal. Shark fins are incredibly valuable, and the appetite for these fins, and shark meat in general, is leading to a decimation of the world’s
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shark populations. “When the sharks go, everything else starts to change,” marine biologist Boris Worm tells VICE. “Where sharks are disappearing, the ecosystem becomes unstable, and it disintegrates the fabric of the food chain.” These sharks are just the canary in the coal mine. Researchers estimate that if the rate of industrial fishing continues at its current pace, we could end up with no seafood species at all by the middle of this century—and local fishing communities in the Mozambique Channel are already feeling the effect. Watch Countdown to Extinction now on VICE on HBO.
NEW YORK The Reckless Disposal of Radioactive Waste
Ridgewood, Queens, was once home to the Wolff-Alport Chemical Company. For decades, the plant processed earth metals and disposed of the waste product, radioactive thorium, by flushing it down the sewer or burying it. They closed their doors in 1954, but the recklessly disposed thorium still lingers, making the site the most radioactive place in New York City. The area where the plant used to be is so radioactive that the Environmental Protection Agency has recently designated it a Superfund site. So we headed to Queens to explore the impact that the radioactivity has had on the surrounding businesses and to talk to the EPA about the site’s history. From the new condos going up across the street to a nearby bodega, we met people who’ve been directly impacted by the 61-year-old nuclear relic and spoke to others who had no idea it existed. Check out this episode of Transmissions, coming soon to Motherboard.VICE.com.
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SWEDEN Feasting on Reindeer Meat Like a Viking
Ever heard of palt, spettekaka, or surströmming? In The Munchies Guide to Sweden, our host Ivar Berglin explores the cuisine of his home country and Europe’s emerging culinary star. From reindeer to fermented herring, Ivar eats his way through the dishes that define the nation. He constructs a traditional smorgasbord in Gothenburg, carves up a whole goose in Malmö, sacrifices a reindeer with the indigenous Sami people in snowy Umeå, and eats like a Viking with Swedish techno legend E-Type in Stockholm. Finally, Ivar hits some of Sweden’s top restaurants and meets chefs who are embracing a fresh culinary approach called new Nordic cuisine. If you’re expecting meatballs, prepare to be disappointed. But (SPOILER ALERT!) there is a hot tub. Watch The Munchies Guide to Sweden now on Munchies.VICE.com.
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MEXICO The Fruit-and-Mud Cure
We went to Espinazo, a little town in northern Mexico, to witness the biannual pilgrimage to El Niño Fidencio, attended by more than 40,000 people. Otherwise known as José de Jesús Fidencio Constantino Síntora, he earned a huge number of followers after the Mexican Revolution due to his gift for healing people. It is said that he used to perform surgery without any anesthesia and caused his patients no pain. He made it so disabled people could walk again and blind people could see, and according to urban legend, he cured Mexican president Plutarco Elías Calles of leprosy. His followers say that his spirit possesses them, allowing them to heal people. They cure the sick by putting them on a swing, throwing fruit at them, and submerging them in a mud puddle. Check out this episode of Mexicalia, now playing on VICE.com.
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JAPAN The Worst Internships Ever
Japan is facing a serious labor shortage, thanks to its aging population and fear that immigrants will dilute its pure gene pool. We recently traveled there to investigate a government-sponsored plan for keeping the world’s third-largest economy afloat: an internship program that attracts foreign workers from China, Vietnam, and the Philippines—but lets them stick around for only three years. The idea is that the workers return home with a transferable new skill. But we saw that many are being forced into a form of indentured servitude—being placed in unskilled positions, like oyster shucking and construction, underpaid, and beset with insurmountable debt. Despite international condemnation, Japan plans to bring thousands of new foreign “interns” to build the infrastructure for the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo. Watch Japan’s Labor Pains, coming soon to VICENews.com.
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Combustible Materials Oil-Refinery Workers in Texas Picketed for Their Lives BY WYATT WILLIAMS, PHOTOS BY BOBBY SCHEIDEMANN
Matthew C. Bowen, 31, killed in an explosion and fire. Darrin J. Hoines, 43, killed in an explosion and fire. Kathryn “K. D.” Powell, 29, died of injuries resulting from the explosion and fire. Lew Janz, 41, died of injuries resulting from the explosion and fire. Matt Gumbel, 34, died of injuries resulting from the explosion and fire. his list is tacked on a board near the entrance of the United Steelworkers Local 13-1 union hall in Pasadena, Texas. The small print goes on and on for pages, filled with the names of USW members across the country who have died at work. The bulletin hangs near sports trophies and a Coke machine, a simple reminder that in this line of work death is part of the job. Just three weeks before my arrival in Pasadena, the union—which represents more than a million workers at industrial sites, including oil refineries and chemical plants—had decided that enough was
T Shell Deer Park, near Houston, where union workers joined a nationwide refinery strike on February 1
enough. On February 1, 2015, one minute after midnight, 3,800 USW workers walked off the job at nine oil refineries around the country. The industry hadn’t seen a strike like this in 35 years. Their contracts had expired, and the union and oil companies couldn’t resolve an argument that some said was about the dangerous conditions endemic at oil refineries. Union officials claimed that their members were overworked, that an “unhealthy and unsafe reliance on outside contractors to handle day-to-day maintenance” was jeopardising refineries, and that better training was necessary to avoid accidents. Shell, the industry’s lead negotiator, said that USW’s demands were unreasonable, that they were being asked to give up “flexibility in hiring to accommodate economic cycles and maintenance schedules.” Either way, if the strike grew to a full nationwide walkout, as union officials suggested it could, it had the potential to affect 64 percent of all oil produced in the United States. There was no precedent for what that could do to the economy.
In the meantime, the workers in Pasadena and around the country were going without a paycheck. I left the local union hall and drove five miles to the picket line at Shell Deer Park, an oil refinery and petrochemical plant. At each entrance, pairs of union members walked back and forth across the road, holding signs that read this is an unfair labor practice: strike. Tucked into the grass were handmade, less polite messages: nothing lower than a scab except a usw-union scab and today is national recruit scab day at shell deer park. The refinery at Shell Deer Park is the size of a small city. First built in 1929, it’s since expanded to a sprawling complex of 1,500 acres (three times the size of the East Village in Manhattan), complete with offices, a firehouse, a medical center, a rail system, and shipping docks. Every day, 340,000 barrels of crude flow into this facility to be treated, broken down, and otherwise refined into gasoline, heating oils, and chemicals to be sold around the world. Clouds of thick steam and towering mechanisms can be seen from miles away. In comparison, the handful of union members holding picket signs at the entrance looked more than a little outmatched, like Dorothy and the Tin Man standing at the gates of Oz. They couldn’t do much except walk quietly back and forth with their signs while keeping an eye out for scabs—co-workers who have crossed the line and gone back to work. On occasion, a car honked in support. The strikers had been warned to be careful when speaking with the press so that the union could control the message. After a while, though, one of the workers approached me saying he might be able to talk if I agreed not to use his name. “Can you call me Santana?” he asked me later. I said yes. That weekend, Santana and his wife— let’s call her Debbie—met me for enchiladas and margaritas at a local bar to tell me his story, a life devoted to working at Shell Deer Park. Starting in the ninth grade, he took vocational courses that would help
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prepare him for a job at the refinery. By the time he graduated high school, he had four years of training. Shell hired him in 1984 and, by his account, paid him a great wage. He and Debbie married young, had two daughters, bought a house, and lived well. Which isn’t to say that it was easy: Santana often worked 16-hour double shifts for multiple days in a row. “Your union brothers and sisters, the ones you work with, they become your primary family. The one at home kind of becomes secondary,” Santana told me. “But you try to do your best.” As time went on he picked up little habits, like calling and checking in with Debbie after working overnight shifts. One morning in 1997 they were chatting on the phone when Debbie suddenly heard him say, “What the fuck?” Then the line cut out. “I’m holding the phone to my ear, and the windows are shaking,” Debbie told me. “We live five miles away. I just remember putting the phone down and saying, ‘He’s dead.’” According to a report later filed by the EPA, the explosion at Shell Deer Park was felt as far as ten miles away. The local highway was shut down. People living in the Deer Park neighbourhood were ordered to stay in their homes. A fire raged for ten hours while Debbie waited, assuming her husband had perished. Later that afternoon, when Santana emerged unharmed, something had changed for the both of them. The explosion had been relatively minor—only a few people had been injured, and Santana was far away from it—but the possibility of an accident, the realisation of how quickly his life could be taken, had become all too real. Safety, he said, is the ability to trust one’s co-workers. Santana asked me, “If I can’t trust the brother to my left or the sister to my right, how the hell do I go to work in the morning?” he president of USW Local 13-1, Lee Medley, is a big man, a fourthgeneration union member, the descendent of coal miners in West Virginia and Pennsylvania who followed work after the Great Depression down to refineries and plants in South Texas. He is built low and stocky and carries a gut like a bowling ball in front of him. He wears union blue the way a college-football fan wears his team colours. If you ask him whether he knows anyone who’s been hurt working at oil refineries, he’ll rattle off a list that will make your head spin.
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“My family was at Texas City in 1947 when it exploded. I’ve had a cousin burned up. He lived through it. My dad’s been crushed. He spent eighteen months recovering in bed. And my uncle’s had a chain fall drop on him and crush his face. You know, we’ve been through the pain.” The message that Medley wanted to telegraph more than anything else, the thing he said in every conversation, usually multiple times, was, “This is not a financial strike.” Union workers are, quite simply, very expensive. At Shell Deer Park, USW members make an average of $37 an hour and have benefits including sick days and health insurance. Their jobs are protected by numerous rules detailing exactly when and how union workers can be hired or fired. They earn pensions after they retire. Retirement, in fact, may be part of the problem. As experienced workers leave the workplace, replacing their knowledge and training can be difficult. On top of that, the economic climate hasn’t been kind to the unions. In the United States, union membership is the lowest it has been in 70 years. As those experienced workers leave refineries, it isn’t hard to imagine why Shell and other companies have shifted toward hiring independent contractors—who don’t have union protections—to handle more and more daily maintenance and other jobs at refineries. Even doling out large sums of overtime pay to existing union workers can be more affordable than the long-term costs of hiring another union worker. Unfortunately, the vocational and training programs that prepared workers like Santana aren’t offered in high schools or by companies like they once were. Medley said that oil companies aren’t addressing the growing gap of experience between retiring workers and new contractors. “The problem is they look at training as a cost, not as an investment,” he told me. Shell seemed to think these concerns were exaggerated. When asked for comment, Shell explained that “contracting companies working at our facilities have safety standards that meet or exceed Shell’s safety standards” and that ample training programs are offered by the company. That did little to impress the workers I talked to. The night I met Santana, he invited me to go to Bombshells, a Hooters-style restaurant where well-proportioned women in skimpy outfits serve large glasses of cold beer. After working four 12-hour shifts in a row, the guys like to come here and wind
SCAB: An employee who goes to work despite there being a strike or is hired to keep the company running
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TOP TO BOTTOM: A striker at Shell Deer Park keeping watch for scabs; a union member at the picket line; Lee Medley is a fourth-generation union member and president of USW Local 13-1.
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down. They call it “Thirsty Thursdays.” They weren’t going to let a strike get in the way of their beer-drinking schedule. At the table, Santana introduced me to a couple of his union brothers. None wanted to give their names, but they were fine with letting me listen in. Let’s call them Tony, Andy, and Bill. Mostly, they wanted to talk about scabs. “I heard one guy never even paid his union dues because it was against his religion,” Tony said. “The fuck does religion have to do with your union dues?” Andy asked. “Exactly,” Tony said, shaking his hand in the air like he was jerking a cock. “And another guy, I heard he just bought a ’Vette. Like, you gotta cross the line so you don’t miss the payment on your ’Vette? You think that bill’s more important than my bills?” But I wanted to know whether they thought the plant was safe. I mentioned that Shell maintains that it is, and that some say it is more dangerous to work in a meatprocessing plant than an oil refinery. Tony nodded his head. “Yeah, if something goes wrong at the meat processor I might cut my thumb. If something goes wrong in Deer Park, we blow up the neighbourhood.” Bill nodded in agreement. “Bottom line is, we get paid what we do because we’re babysitting a bomb.” Nobody likes to talk about dying at work, but these guys seemed to be used to the idea, like it was something that could just happen. Everyone ordered another round of beer. n the same night I spent at the bar with Santana and his co-workers, Medley met with Shell’s negotiators at Deer Park’s La Quinta Inn. These meetings are typically formal: The company submits a new contract offer or the union responds to the most recent offer. Medley, like other local union presidents, is expected to sit across the table and speak on behalf of the union. But during negotiations, Medley said, he’d reached a breaking point with the formality. “Twenty days of no sleep, worrying about my people, and then I get a piece of paper that doesn’t change anything and doesn’t help anybody? I told them, ‘We reject this piece of crap fully and completely, and y’all can go fly a kite.’” The next day, February 20, the strike spread to the refinery in Port Arthur, the largest in the nation. Two more refineries in Louisiana promised to join soon after.
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TOP TO BOTTOM: USW offered hardship payments to union members; homemade signs showed the tension between Shell and the workers; more than 150 union workers gave up and returned to work before the strike was resolved.
t its peak, the strike spread to 7,000 workers at 15 refineries. Some predicted it might last all spring, but on March 12 the union announced it had tentatively agreed on a new contract with Shell. As expected, the contract included the typical small annual raises for USW workers, the same medical benefits, and a “no retrogression” clause that preserved the terms of earlier agreements. But it only addressed the concerns about staffing and safety with a promise to review those issues in the future. “There’s no concrete changes,” Santana told me. “It’s just something they say they’re going to look at. What does that mean?” Even Medley, when I called him, admitted, “It’s not everything we wanted.” The resolution might have come about because the strike was fraying at the edges. The union offers hardship payments, the kind of thing that helps members take care of their mortgage or medical bills, but for some that hadn’t been enough. According to Shell, more than 150 USW workers at Shell Deer Park alone had given up and gone back to work. On March 19, the USW Local 13-1 called on its members to vote on the new contract. It passed, with an overwhelming majority in favor. “I don’t feel any safer, but people want to get back to work,” said Santana, who had voted against it. A few days before the agreement, I had called Santana and asked him whether he thought it was all worth the fuss—missing a paycheck for months while the union and the companies fought over a couple of lines on a contract. He responded by asking whether I knew what it was like to build a plane. I said no. He asked me to imagine putting together each part of a plane myself—the engine, the rudders, the spark plugs. “If you did it yourself, you know you can trust it. At the moment when you take it off the runway and into the air, you know what you’re flying with,” he said. Then he asked me to imagine only building half of the plane myself, being told that the rest of the plane was made by someone else, someone you weren’t sure was as trained or qualified as you. “What are you going to be thinking about on that runway? Do you really want to take it up in the air?” Santana got quiet. I thought maybe the line was dead. A few seconds later he said, “That’s what we’re fighting for. We just don’t want to find out we have a problem at twenty thousand feet.” With the new contract, he said, that fear hadn’t gone away.
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Rolling in the Deep The Future of Underwater Warfare BY RYAN FAITH ILLUSTRATION BY RICHIE POPE
n early February, Robert Ballard, the oceanographer who discovered the wreck of the Titanic and JFK’s lost PT-109, addressed the biannual gathering of the US Navy’s inhouse super scientists at the Office of Naval Research. The group had come together to discuss innovative technologies the Navy should be taking advantage of, but amid all the buzz about lasers, railguns, and fire-fighting robots, Ballard gave a speech in which he casually mentioned an idea he’s been kicking around for decades: the concept of terrain-involved submarine warfare. “The warfare future of deep submergence is living in the terrain,”
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Ballard told the rapt scientists. Any time an oceanographer tells you that the future of deepsea submersibles lies in the mud, it’s worth a look. What may sound like just putting wheels on submarines actually means introducing the seafloor as a whole new war-fighting domain— one that would totally transform the way we conduct wars now. Ballard demonstrated a sub’s very real ability to operate on the ocean floor and its very real advantages back in 1985 in an underwater exploration near Iceland’s Reykjanes Ridge. Ballard took the NR-1, the Navy’s deep-sea research submarine, down 3,000 feet and drove
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it around volcanic peaks, even hiding in the occasional lava tube. At a length of 150 feet and weighing 400 tons, the NR-1 could support a crew of 13 for up to a month. More important, the NR-1 had both portals and retractable wheels. The sub had been designed in part to search for equipment lost on the ocean floor, a job that made interacting with the terrain a necessity. The wheels allowed it to roll along the seafloor, while submersibles that tried to hover just above the bottom would drift with the currents. Meanwhile, the portal allowed the pilots to see where they were driving their vessel to, into, or onto. Ballard dared the Navy to find the NR-1 while he tooled around on the ocean floor. After two weeks of searching, the Navy still wasn’t any wiser about his whereabouts, and he came back to the surface. Now is the time for an underwaterwarfare innovation like this. The technological advantages that submarines have long relied on to keep themselves safe are losing their potency. A report released in January by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington, DC, defensepolicy think tank, documented the ways in which the old rules for protecting submarines are rapidly changing. Sub-hunting techniques have made serious advances, combining bigdata processing with more exotic sensors, including sniffing for minute amounts of radiation produced by sub reactors or using carefully tuned lasers as a kind of optical radar. Meanwhile, each new technology to make subs quieter and harder to find is getting more and more expensive. Submarines that roll around on the seafloor can avoid a lot of the trouble of these shifts. Traditional subs (and the surface ships they fight) still rely on sonar to search for stuff. They quietly listen for the telltale sounds of nearby enemies, like engine noises, and send out sound pulses to locate objects by monitoring the echoes created when they’re hit. But these techniques are pretty much useless on the seafloor, where the complex terrain of mountains and canyons jumbles up the sound waves so much that it’s impossible to make any sense of the sounds subs receive. Navies also use very sensitive magnetic detectors to locate the giant, metallic mass of submarine hulls as they move underwater. But this method is less effective in some kinds of seafloor terrain where basaltic rocks interfere with the magnetics. Between the sonar and magnetic interference of the ocean floor, it
can be very hard to find something, especially when that something is moving around and hiding in the terrain. p until 1,000 BC or so, humanity fought wars in just one domain—on land. In the three millennia since then, warfare has expanded into five additional arenas— sea, undersea, air, space, and that redheaded stepchild, cyberspace. Conflict in each domain is governed by wildly different basic assumptions about strategy, physics, and everything else. For all practical purposes, the undersea domain today extends down a couple thousand feet or so or to just above the seafloor, whichever is shallower. Anything deeper than that is aqua incognita: Hulls collapse, death ensues, and everything ends badly. But if you start to look at the undersea domain from the vantage point of a terrain-involved submarine, things start to change—and change fast. Traditional submarines don’t look like stealthy predators hiding below the ocean waves anymore; they start looking like big, fat blimps wallowing helplessly in the water above. New terrain-involved submarines become aquatic helicopters, landing and taking off from the seafloor wherever they want. The most advanced bottom mines, like the US CAPTOR (basically a torpedo that hides, listening for passing ships, waiting to launch at a target), become the seafloor equivalent of surface-to-air missile sites. Rocky, complex seafloor terrain is no longer a navigational hazard, instead becoming a source of cover and concealment. Active sonar (which subs hate to use because it reveals their location) turns into the seafloor equivalent of radar, while undersea passive sonar networks become the basis for whatever the hell you call the seabed equivalent of an integrated air-defense network of radars, missile sites, air-traffic controllers, and command centers. These changes aren’t set to happen right away. Current fighting submarines don’t usually go anywhere deep enough to interact with most of the world’s ocean floors and are likely too large to flit around. Meanwhile, deep-submergence vessels capable of going several thousand feet down are small, slow, require a mothership, and generally can only operate for a few days at a time. Nonetheless, advances in remotely operated vehicles and autonomous underwater vehicles brought about by a massive growth in ultra-deep-sea oil drilling and the emerging field of seabed mining will be critical
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in making any terrain-involved-submarine concept a reality. This change isn’t about subs on wheels. It’s about putting landing gear on submarines and treating the entire ocean above like the sky. With this, everything anyone ever thought they knew about fighting in the sea and undersea domains is now suddenly up for review. hile this is all unsettling, it gets even spookier. Anything that makes some subs easier to find and kill threatens nuclear-ballistic-missile submarines, which have long been the nuclear deterrent of last resort because they’ve been the best-protected part of the world’s nuclear arsenals. Even if an attacker can hit every single square inch of a country in a surprise nuclear attack, it would still be vulnerable to a devastating counterattack launched by subs hiding at sea. Because of this, the majority of the US nuclear arsenal is submarine-based. The ability to counterattack, even in the face of a devastating sneak attack, goes a long way in preventing anyone from getting an itchy nuclear trigger finger. This logic has been a key part of how the big nuclear powers have thought about preventing (and fighting) nuclear war for decades. But seafloor warfare could change that too. Nations all around the world (including the US, Russia, and China) are signatories to the Seabed Arms Control Treaty, which bans placing nukes on the seafloor (at least outside of the 12-mile coastal zone). Now, if any nation withdrew from the treaty to build a seabed nuclear-missile base because it no longer felt its nuclear-missile subs were secure, it could easily spark an arms race. Seafloor warfare could threaten the stability of the nuclear deterrent to the point where we see a whole new round of arms proliferation. The thing about treaties is that they’re not forever. Eventually someone decides to quit or cheat, or technology advances so much that the treaty becomes a historical relic. The US withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2001 to pursue its missile-defense program. In early March, Russia completed its de facto withdrawal from the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, which limits the size of armies deployed to Europe. There’s no reason to believe that the existing treaty on WMD on the ocean floor or, indeed, any future treaty limiting seafloor warfare will do any better in the long run. Even if this isn’t an idea whose time has come just yet, it will come sooner or later.
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THE NR-1: The submarine could support a crew of 13 for up to a month but had no kitchen or bathing facilities. VICE 39
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When Malcolm X Met the Nazis The Strange Alliance Between the Nation of Islam and the American Nazi Party BY SAM MCPHEETERS
Members of the American Nazi Party listened to Malcolm X speak at a Nation of Islam rally in Washington, DC, on June 25, 1961. Contact sheet © Eve Arnold/ Magnum Photos
n Sunday, June 25, 1961, ten members of the American Nazi Party arrived at a Nation of Islam rally in Washington, DC. The party’s founder, George Lincoln Rockwell, led them inside the Uline Arena, a quartermillion-square-foot stadium that would later host the Beatles’ first US concert. Ramrod-straight, square-jawed, and with a merciless, piercing gaze, Rockwell looked like a Hollywood villain straight out of central casting. (“How much taller he is than Hitler,” Esquire noted in an otherwise withering essay. “And how much betterlooking.”) The Uline had nearly sold out. The Nazis were outnumbered 800 to one. The fascists hadn’t come to make a bloody last stand. Instead, guards from the Fruit of Islam, the NOI’s paramilitary branch, frisked the men and ushered them to front-row-center seats. Their crisp brownshirt costumes and swastika armbands stood out against the suits and ties surrounding them. Despite the 90-degree heat, Rockwell and his men waited hours for the event’s main attraction. There is no record of anyone cracking a smile at the situation’s absurdity. The night’s keynote speaker, NOI leader Elijah Muhammad, canceled his appearance because of illness. According to historian William Schmaltz, Malcolm X delivered a speech, followed by an appeal for donations that singled out the few Caucasians in the audience. Rockwell contributed $20. When Life photographer Eve Arnold raised her camera to capture the Nazis, Rockwell— presumably alerted to her Jewish ancestry by
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the Muslims—allegedly rasped, “I’ll make a bar of soap out of you.” (She replied, “As long as it isn’t a lampshade.”) vert anti-Semitism, it turned out, was something the two groups could bond over. While Rockwell pushed his hatred of Jews to frothy extremes, Muhammad backed a range of racist theories, including the hoax that the Jews had financed the slave trade. (Malcolm X was cagier about his anti-Semitism, often deferring to Muhammad’s conspiracy theories
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rather than offering his own.) To publicly rage against Jews in the summer of 1961 may have offended the general public even more than it would today. Six thousand miles away, the Adolf Eichmann trial, in Israel, had captivated the world and dramatically increased coverage of Holocaust atrocities. Division of the races was another mutual bugbear. Malcolm X’s speech that night was titled “Separation or Death.” Inside the arena, Rockwell told reporters, “I am fully in concert with their program, and I have
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the highest respect for Elijah Muhammad.” The question of where to send America’s blacks—the NOI wanted a chunk of the US, while the ANP wanted a full deportation to Africa—was, he said, his only quarrel with the Muslims. This wasn’t quite true. The Nazis and NOI also disagreed over whether black people were human beings. Over the course of his three-year career as an open Nazi, Rockwell had repeatedly referred to African Americans as “ring-in-the-nose niggers,” “basically animalistic,” and “no better than chimpanzees.” With the alliance, he’d suddenly slapped a massive asterisk onto his own white supremacy. Remarkably, the NOI had a history of such partnerships. Six months earlier, Muhammad had sent Malcolm X to a topsecret meeting with the Atlanta Ku Klux Klan. In a throwback to Marcus Garvey’s 1922 Klan summit, the two groups brokered a bizarre truce: local mosque safety in return for NOI support on racial separation. But that meeting had served a purpose, no matter how tenuous. The alliance with the Nazis held no obvious benefit for the Muslims. The differences between Malcolm X and Rockwell were existential. Where the former had risen from a life of crime to national prominence, the latter had exerted himself—and destroyed his family and finances—to become a national pariah, sinking from a decorated Navy officer to a delusional Nazi commander in just six years. The Washington summit would have provided a bitter contrast to Rockwell’s normal, meager gatherings. An audience of 8,000 was something he could have only dreamed of. Even the building’s imposing vaulted ceiling hinted at the fascist architecture he saw as his inalienable destiny (throughout his career, he made repeated references to controlling the United States by 1972). For the Nazi leader, the alliance served a fantasy rooted in grandiose absurdism. “Can you imagine a rally of the American Nazis in Union Square,” Rockwell later wrote his followers, “protected from Jewish hecklers by a solid phalanx of Elijah Muhammad’s stalwart black stormtroopers?” And where Malcolm X was famously complex, Rockwell self-identified as a cartoon character. With the media controlled by Jews, he’d reasoned, mainstream political protest from the extreme right was doomed to failure through obscurity. “I tried and nobody paid attention to me,” he later told an interviewer of his pre-Nazi political activities. “But no one can ignore Nazis marching in the streets.”
Following this logic, the ANP produced a variety of merchandise catering to the juvenile bigot. One item, The Diary of Anne Fink (16 pages of Holocaust atrocity photos with jokey captions), was advertised in The Rockwell Report as “sick humor,” an odd allusion to Mad magazine, Lenny Bruce, and a world of Jewish, “degenerate” comedy that the Nazis should, logically, have railed against. One result of this oafish marketing was that Rockwell recruited exceptionally inept personnel, attracting hordes of Nazis he admitted were “unbelievably stupid.” And yet he persisted in shooting for the lowest common denominator’s lowest common denominator. The ANP mocked the anti-segregation Freedom Riders with a VW van dubbed the “Hate Bus.” Some ANP picketers wore Groucho Marx glasses and rubber noses in their protests. Why would the famously disciplined NOI ally itself with such caricatures? possible answer came eight months later. On February 25, 1962, the ANP was invited to a second rally, this time the NOI’s Saviours’ Day convention in Chicago. Rockwell addressed the crowd after Muhammad. Facing an estimated 12,000 African Americans, the Nazi leader pulled no punches. “You know that we call you ‘niggers.’ But wouldn’t you rather be confronted by honest white men who tell you to your face what the others all say behind your back?” As a public speaker, Rockwell was entertaining without being particularly authoritative (in cadence, he mimicked comedian Red Skelton). His was not the voice of a führer, and the Chicago International Amphitheater wasn’t his Nuremberg Rally. Surely the irony of the moment wouldn’t have escaped him; this was the largest crowd he’d ever addressed (and would ever address again). “I am not afraid to stand here and tell you I hate race-mixing and will fight it to the death,” Rockwell continued. “But at the same time, I will do everything in my power to help the Honorable Elijah Muhammad carry out his inspired plan for land of your own in Africa. Elijah Muhammad is right. Separation or death!” The audience teetered between polite applause and boos. Two months later, Muhammad, writing in the NOI newspaper, admonished his flock for their frosty reception: “If they are speaking the truth for us, what do we care? We’ll stand on our heads and applaud!” This mutual nod to “honesty” and “truth” gives us a peek at the possible foundation of
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the alliance. Rockwell and Muhammad saw each other as authentic, as people willing to speak the truth—their versions of it—no matter the cost. Their marketing to their constituencies depended on this image, and each man drew legitimacy from the appearance of being a straight shooter. Rockwell’s existence was useful to the NOI as a recruiting tool, his physical presence a testament to Muhammad’s own authenticity. Malcolm X wasn’t part of this legitimacy trap, and he made it known that Rockwell’s high esteem wasn’t reciprocated. When the Nazi was applauded in 1961 for donating $20, Malcolm X laughed into the microphone and said, “You got the biggest hand you ever got, didn’t you, Mr. Rockwell?” As the civil rights struggles of the 50s gave way to the triumphs of the early 60s, both men found themselves operating in the vast shadow of Martin Luther King Jr. The Nazis, challenged by the juggernaut of legislative triumphs following King’s actions, dug in. Malcolm X, faced with a growing gap between his NOI rhetoric and the successes of nonviolent action, softened his tone. After leaving the NOI in 1964, Malcolm X used the movement’s alliance with the Klan as a charge against Muhammad. The following year, he sent a telegram to George Lincoln Rockwell: This is to warn you that I am no longer held in check from fighting white supremacists by Elijah Muhammad’s separatist Black Muslim movement, and that if your present racist agitation against our people there in Alabama causes physical harm to Reverend King or any other black Americans who are only attempting to enjoy their rights as free human beings, that you and your Ku Klux Klan friends will be met with maximum physical retaliation…
AMERICAN NAZI PARTY The ANP was founded in 1959 by George Lincoln Rockwell in Arlington, Vriginia. Rockwell was assasinated eight years later by a former ANP member.
Within three years, both men were dead, allegedly assassinated by former allies. But the ghost of the alliance lives on today. The Nation of Islam, under the auspices of Louis Farrakhan, maintains an open partnership with white supremacist Tom Metzger. And in the last decade, the American Nazi Party website established a “Non-Aryan Sympathiser Page,” offering “a means for non-whites to aid in our struggle” with mail-in contributions. Malcolm X’s posthumous alliance was stranger still: mainstream acceptance by the white-supremacist society he fought against in life. The US government eventually awarded him a postage stamp.
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Your Porn Is Watching You And Sending Your Browsing History to Other Companies BY BRIAN MERCHANT ILLUSTRATION BY STEPHEN MAURICE GRAHAM
orty million Americans regularly watch porn online, according to the Wall Street Journal. That’s a lot more than fess up to it, even in anonymous surveys: In 2013, just 12 percent of people asked copped to watching internet porn at all. But thanks to pervasive online tracking and browser fingerprinting, the brazen liars of America may not have a say in whether their porn habits stay secret. Porn watchers everywhere are being tracked, and if software engineer Brett Thomas is right, it would be easy to out them, along with an extensive list of every clip they’ve viewed. Thomas, who lives in San Francisco, recently found himself at a bar, chatting with a member of the online adult-entertainment industry. They got to talking about economics, naturally. While the porn professional insisted that collecting and selling the personal data of users who visited erotic websites wasn’t part of the industry’s business model, Thomas wasn’t convinced. “If you are watching porn online in 2015, even in incognito mode, you should expect that
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at some point your porn viewing history will be publicly released and attached to your name,” Thomas proclaimed in a blog post titled “Online Porn Could Be the Next Big Privacy Scandal,” shortly after. Thomas’s case went something like this: Your browser (Chrome, Safari, whatever) has a very unique configuration, and it broadcasts all sorts of information that can be used to identify you as you click around the web. You’re basically leaving “footprints,” as Thomas calls them (others prefer “fingerprints”), all over the webpages you visit. Thus, it’s a matter of linking one footprint to another—an expert could spot the same prints on Facebook and NYTimes.com as on Pornhub and XVideos. Thomas argued that “almost every traditional website that you visit saves enough data to link your user account to your browser fingerprint, either directly or via third parties.” He’s definitely right that most web pages you visit (certainly not just porn sites) have installed tracking elements
that send your data to third-party corporations, probably without your knowledge. Many, for instance, run Google Analytics, which companies use to monitor traffic to the website. Others have social media “share” buttons and third-party ad networks built in. So, for example, when you click on “Leather Fetish #3” on XNXX, you’re not just sending a request to the porn site—a so-called first-party request. You’re sending third-party requests to Google, to the web-tracking company AddThis, and to a company called Pornvertising, too, even if you’re browsing in private mode. You’re also sending other data that can be used to identify your computer, like your IP address. All that, paired with the continued rise of casual hacking, Thomas says, means that a complete catalog of your personal porn habits is perennially on the verge of being leaked to the public. Thomas believes that it’s not only possible but likely that a hacker will whip up a database that can share your porn-viewing history with the entire internet.
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This, of course, has any number of damaging implications, even beyond the potential humiliation for an outed porn watcher—if you think erasing your internet history wipes out the record of those food-fetish vids or CGI beast porn, think again. Worse, there are still plenty of places around the world where individuals are persecuted for their sexual orientation. A revelation that someone in an oppressive country watched a series of gay porn videos could put that person at serious risk. Pornhub was the only porn site that returned a request for comment. They issued me a statement calling Thomas’s conclusions “not only completely false, but also dangerously misleading.” In their lengthy, compelling rebuttal, Pornhub pointed out the vast amount of server space they would need to store users’ viewing histories—they get 300 million requests a day, and they estimate that storing all of that would require 3,600 terabytes of space. Not to mention that sifting through all of it would be nearly impossible and maddeningly time-consuming. “Pornhub’s raw server logs contain only the IP and the user agent for a very limited time, never a browser footprint,” a Pornhub spokesperson wrote to me. Regardless, it is true that each of the internetsecurity researchers and experts I interviewed for this piece all agreed that porn viewers’ browsing habits aren’t nearly as private as they think, even if not agreed with the extent of Thomas’s pornpocalyptic pronouncements. “I think it’s absolutely a legitimate concern,” Justin Brookman, a privacy expert at the Center for Democracy & Technology, told me. “Private browsing modes don’t prohibit all cross-service tracking mechanisms.” In other words, switching to private when you browse and clearing your history won’t stop porn companies from being able to track you. To get a better idea of what, exactly, is watching porn-site visitors, I used the privacy app Ghostery, which identifies and blocks tracking elements installed on web pages, to investigate the top five most visited porn sites—XVideos, XHamster, Pornhub, XXNX, and Redtube. (It’s worth noting here just how big these porn sites are: According to Alexa, the analytic service, XVideos is the 43rd most visited website in the world. By way of comparison, Gmail is 66th. Netflix is 53rd.) Ghostery revealed that each site has tracking elements installed, and thus is transmitting data to a number of third-party corporations, including Google, Tumblr, and industry-specific ad services like Pornvertising and DoublePimp. Furthermore, most of the top porn sites made explicit the exact nature of the film being viewed right in the URL—XVideos, XHamster, and XXNX are all sending URL strings like
www.pornsite.com/view/embarrassing-formof-exotic-pornography-here to the companies listed above. Only Pornhub and Redtube masked the nature of the video viewed with numerical strings, such as www.pornsite.com/ watch_viewkey=19212. “The URL is one of the basic pieces of information in all HTTP requests,” privacy researcher Tim Libert told me, “so whoever sneaks in their code [e.g., Google, Tumblr] on the page gets that by default. Purely numerical strings [e.g., ‘?id=123’] may not tell you what somebody’s particular sexual preferences are, but you know they are looking at a porn site. In contrast, really descriptive URLs can tell you exactly what somebody is into, so if it says something naughty, well, that’s not a secret anymore.” Another important point, he said, is that incognito mode does “virtually zero to stop this tracking, and at best your address bar won’t auto-complete to something embarrassing, but advertisers and data brokers still get the information. I have no idea what, if anything, they do with it—but it’s all sitting in a database somewhere.” This shouldn’t be all that surprising. It’s a truth about the modern internet that just about anywhere you go, you’re being tracked. Not for any malicious purposes but because web developers, including porn-site developers, have become reliant on these third-party tools, many of which are “free,” to increase the functionality and shareability of their sites. Recent research revealed that 91 percent of health sites—which are supposed to be the most private and secure on the web—are sending your medical search data to third-party corporations. Of course porn sites are doing the same: Libert ran a scan for me, and found that 88 percent of the top 500 porn sites had third-party elements installed on them. The porn sites might not even be interested in saving or collecting your data at all. XVideos’ privacy policy states that “XVideos does not record its unregistered users’ IP addresses or activity,” and Libert tells me that this may be 100 percent accurate—but it is still passing said data, along with those scandalous URLs, to third parties. And again, we can’t be sure what, exactly, those third parties, from Google to AddThis to Pornvertising, are doing with that data. When asked for comment, AddThis said it “does not collect or identify any personally identifiable information from websites that utilise the company’s tools,” and its terms of service “prohibits use of its tools by adult content sites.” However, Ghostery revealed AddThis was installed on some of the biggest porn sites. “From a technical perspective, it’s incredibly hard to ensure zero traceability,” Brookman told me. “After all, we are always tethered to an IP address that could potentially be identified through ISP records.
“I believe that’s how the government finds some people who view and distribute child pornography today,” Brookman added. But it’s also probably how the NSA was able to spy on Muslim men’s porn habits—the agency considered a harebrained scheme to delegitimise potential “terrorists” by outing their predilection for porn, thus, ostensibly, ruining their credibility as faithful adherents to Islam. Not everyone is convinced that Thomas’s nightmare scenario could come to pass. Cooper Quintin, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s staff technologist, says he thinks Thomas is conflating “the threat of data brokers tracking your browsing habits and the threat of hackers leaking information about people’s porn-site memberships. Either one of these things is certainly possible.” But he calls the notion that someone would be easily able to dump all of your porn data into the public sphere “alarmist.” “The far more likely scenario is just that a porn company gets hacked and credit-card data is stolen. If this were the case I think that an attacker would be more likely to sell the creditcard information than release it online ‘for the lulz,’” Quentin said. “I think a bigger concern is data brokers using your IP address to correlate data about what porn sites you visit with tracking profiles that they already have, even when browsing in ‘incognito mode.’” Since brokers are vacuuming up data about your browsing habits all the time, they may be able to tell what porn you like to watch, too—and there are no laws governing what they can and can’t do with it. They could use it to improve the ads they serve on adult sites. Into leather? Perhaps you’re in the market for a new bodice. It’s the data brokers and web trackers (AddThis, etc.) that could build an exhaustive profile of the porn you watch, not PornHub and XVideos, which have an interest in keeping your browsing private—if you can’t trust them, you won’t come back. But as with much of the rest of internet services, porn-site developers have turned to free software and convenient tracking tools that exposes their users’ data in the process. “I do think we should have more explicit security requirements under the law to limit leakage of information that could allow third parties to correlate otherwise unidentifiable data,” Brookman said. Thomas isn’t concerned, though, even if he’s correct, and even if a hacker wanted to take porn revenge on him. He views the end of anonymity, even when it comes to porn, as the new reality of life on the modern internet. “Unfortunately anonymity is just fundamentally incompatible with Javascript and the open web,” he told me. “I’m perhaps fortunate that, were everybody’s porn preferences made public, mine would be on the less embarrassing side.”
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Harragas The Ephemera That North African Migrants Leave Behind BY DAVIDE MONTELEONE
arragas is an Arabic word meaning “those who burn.” Illegal immigrants from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya who attempt to reach Europe by boat are known as harragas because they burn their documents before leaving Africa, or when they’re about to be arrested. The only way out of their home countries is to destroy their papers and lose their identities. The objects photographed here were collected by Askavusa, a group that supports African migrants arriving on the Italian island of Lampedusa. Located between Tunisia and Italy, the island is a focal point for illegal immigration into the EU and has been the scene of numerous disasters involving ill-prepared and overcrowded boats that ferry immigrants to Europe. The most notorious shipwreck there occurred in October 2013 and claimed 366 lives. All of these items were abandoned on such boats in the past decade. While observing and documenting the personal effects of those who tried to reach “the other side,” I came to admire the migrants’ desire to leave their troubled pasts behind and build new lives.
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PHOTOGRAPHY NICK DOREY
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DOs We’ve all had that dealer who shows up to the party uninvited but doesn’t bother anyone. He just chills in the kitchen the entire night, either really fucked up or dead sober. No one can figure out what his deal is, and you begin to wonder whether you’re buying your stuff from a man or an interdimensional trickster god.
Some people never quite grow out of the raising-your-hands-up-for-mommy-to-help-youtake-your-shirt-off stage, and the world is made a better place by every single one of those people.
It’s hard to hold a conversation or trust a human or even remember where you are most of the time in life, so why would you ever be doing anything at all on Earth except exactly this?
In some cultures, it is considered courteous to allow your bush to grow to insane length, if for no other reason than to provide properly inebriated friends the pleasure of a sporadic pubic lap pillow for luxurious napping on the go.
You know when you ask your friend how this dress looks on you even though you already know the answer should be “like a near-blind homeless mom on downers” but still want someone to tell you that you’re gorgeous so you can make a face and disagree and take it off and just wear leggings and a sweater like you wanted and yet still feel like you won? Go ahead and wear the dress.
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DON’Ts It’s good to have an older brother who’s into fashion, so he can show you what’s cool to wear to school so you can make shitloads of friends and be super popular and happy by just looking really hot and from the future all the time.
This could be us, but you won’t sit on my dick for hours in the sunlight while I drink lukewarm beer and reminisce about all the tail I used to bang in the urinal at the hookah lounge just off campus before I dropped out of college and became a part-time assistant manager at Sunglass Hut.
Lots of people are afraid that if we don’t execute serial killers they might get out and kill again, but odds are all they want to do is put on tank tops and board shorts and sign up for Instagram and have a nice fun trip to the beach with their imaginary friends.
This reminds me of a famous quote from the underappreciated, inaudible lyrics of Aphex Twin: “If every food / Turned whoever consumed it into / Looking exactly like its packaging / Who on Earth / Would not stay all day eating / Cool Ranch Doritos?”
This is as likely to be one of those let’s-get-them-all-in-oneplace-and-load-them-onto-trains deals as it is to be a celebration of redhead culture.
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DOs There are few pleasures simpler than hanging with your buds on the fire escape, four stories above a rat-versus-pigeon turf war that’s rapidly escalating to the point where it might make the evening news.
Men may want to marry their mother, but they want to fuck their friend’s dope-seeming older sister at the exact moment they were 14 and she was 23. This is arguably more messed up.
It takes a brave genius to emblazon the full force of his humanity onto the back of a reasonably priced sedan. “Hey, world, I like sugary Looney Tunes blood and hate spelling. We doing this or not?”
Just because the International Olympic Committee doesn’t recognise snow barfing as a sport doesn’t mean it’s not one of Minnesota’s most treasured pastimes.
The only living person known to have had sex with every member of Bone Thugs-nHarmony, both one-on-one and in a group.
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DON’Ts One glance at the poo-smear on a homeless man’s foot can send the unhappiest Dress Barn clerk into a fit of boss-kissing gratitude.
If anything besides a popsicle stick wearing aviators and a hair-gel helmet got out of this car, your jaw would fall off the bottom of your face and start tunneling into the asphalt.
Behind the scenes at the recording of the next Metallica album, it’s just another day at the office.
The class war needs to be kicked up a notch if we’re ever going to get to a place where we’re smoking the rich out of their penthouses with mustard gas and feasting on their innards in the street, but until then, chucking underripe grapefruits at their stupid bald heads is a fine tactic.
As locksmith services go, what Paul’s Backdoor Solutions lacks in being able to get you into your building, it makes up for in trying to get you to come back to his.
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MUNCHIES.TV @MUNCHIES
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2015-05-06 1:52 PM
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WOMEN OF THE ARNOLD BY JEN DAVIS
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very spring in Columbus, Ohio, the Arnold Sports Festival draws some of the world’s best professional bodybuilders to compete for lavish prizes and prestigious titles. Named for Arnold Schwarzenegger, the convention began in 1989 and includes both a female bodybuilding contest called Ms. International and a “fitness and figure� competition, which focuses on muscle definition rather than size. While photographer Jen Davis is best known for her deeply personal self-portraits, she recently photographed a female bodybuilder in Los Angeles and became interested in the ways these women present themselves to the world. In early March, she went behind the scenes at the 2015 festival for a closer look.
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HOW HOW TO TO BE BEAT AT A A POLYGR POLYGRAPH APH TE TEST ST To Avoid Prison, I Mastered the Art of Self-Deception
BY THEODORE ROSS ILLUSTRATIONS BY BRANDON CELI
II
have a story: of illegal drugs, Texas prison, polygraph machines, and a Jewish mother. Don’t we all? It begins one clear blue morning in May 1994, at a highway rest stop in the desert outside Las Cruces, New Mexico. I was driving home from college in Los Angeles, on my way to my mother’s home in Gulfport, Mississippi. I’d been on this sunbaked stretch of tarmac since before dawn, and what with the signs along the road warning of snakes and runaway jailbirds, the rest stop seemed the best bet for a pee. That’s where I met the hitchhiker. “You heading toward El Paso?” he said. This wasn’t him; it was a sanitation worker in an orange jumpsuit apparently doing the man’s bidding. The sanitation worker explained that a truck driver’s rig had broken down and the driver had been forced to hike five miles to the rest stop. Perhaps I could see clear to driving him to the central bus station downtown. It would be about an hour’s trip altogether. I considered asking the sanitation worker why he was being such a Good Samaritan, but the trucker emerged from the bathroom before I had a chance. He was skinny
and wearing acid-washed jeans and a Panama Jack T-shirt. He had a light-blue tattoo on his forearm that I couldn’t quite make out, bad teeth, and steel-toed work boots. He was working on a cigarette and squinting in a way that suggested there was no truck. I must have appeared out of place in this lonely oasis, and perhaps like a target. Or maybe I just looked like a kindred spirit. I was wearing dirty shorts and a T-shirt from the Rolling Stones’ Steel Wheels tour. I had a goatee and rings in both ears. And Teva sandals. “Let’s go,” I said. I was 21, reckless, and lost, an English major desirous of picaresque high adventure and experience. The damage to my personality caused by exposure to Camus and Sartre and Dostoyevsky and Hunter S. Thompson, not to mention Conan the Barbarian and Raiders of the Lost Ark and video games like Defender, can’t be overstated. I understood “real life” in only the most vaguely Kerouacian terms and lacked the fortitude to summon these clichés into consequential being. But I was predisposed against almost nothing. For me, the answer was yes, whatever the question.
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I’d left Los Angeles a few days earlier, after my last exam, hungover and in possession of a chubby grey tabby named Gordon. My 1986 Jeep Grand Wagoneer, a hulking brown beast with decorative wood paneling, had suffered a series of near-comedic mishaps in the months before my trip. A burglar had staved in the driver’s window one night and stolen the Benzi box pull-out radio that I had stupidly hidden under the seat instead of taking inside. I replaced the glass only to wake one morning a few days later and find that someone else had broken the vent window and emptied the ashtray, in which I had left perhaps $3 in change, mostly pennies. I didn’t get this one fixed, mostly because I liked the way it looked, me driving about with a shattered window, one arm dangling outside, cutting through the wind with a certain insouciant neglect. I also figured there was nothing left to steal, but I was wrong: Another morning I woke to discover the car gone. The police somehow recovered it a couple of weeks later, and it was in that Wagoneer—recently stolen, window smashed, stereo missing, Gordon mewling existentially from his carrying case—that I drove east through the vastness of the Chihuahuan Desert with the hitchhiker. The hitchhiker let it be known that I should keep up his pretense of being a trucker, and so I did. He talked of the open road, the cities, the ladies, and the emptiness. He mentioned some difficulties he’d had with crystal meth, although he admitted it had its place if you needed to avoid falling asleep at the wheel. He talked about a stint in the Navy and one in prison and a kid he hadn’t seen in a while. He kept saying that I’d done him “a solid.” I told him my stories and invented a few better ones. When I finally dropped him off in El Paso, he insisted that I accept compensation for the ride. He didn’t have any money, but he did have some pretty excellent—his term—LSD. He gave me four tabs as thanks and wouldn’t take no for an answer, although he would take $20. I watched him shamble off to the bus station, melting into the large crowd of drug users and vagrants milling around outside. I slipped the tinfoil package of tabs into my wallet, just under my driver’s license, and headed back to the highway. The next day, passing through Kerrville, Texas, I was pulled over for speeding. The police seemed unusually alert as they quizzed me on my particulars. It turned out that someone in the bowels of the Los Angeles municipal bureaucracy had neglected to update the legal status of the Wagoneer. The car, filled as it was with my messy belongings and a cat half dead from heatstroke, and presently making good speed along an interstate within figurative spitting distance of Mexico, was still reported as stolen. I tried to play it cool, which is to say that I didn’t play it cool at all. I stumbled through an explanation about the car theft and stuttered as they rifled through my belongings. I always liked to think of myself as a sort of undiscovered Steve McQueen, righteous and rebellious and unselfconsciously sexy. In truth I was much closer to Woody Allen in Annie Hall, liable to sneeze a tray of very nice cocaine across the room. Which is essentially what I did next:
Asked to show my license and registration, I fumbled to retrieve my license from my wallet. It was stuck on something I couldn’t quite dislodge, a thing about which I should have been careful. Finally I yanked it free, and in so doing, I literally flung the tinfoil packet of LSD at the police officer, striking him in the nose. was cuffed and placed in the front seat of one of the cop cars. The arresting officer was one of those hangdog redheads with light-brown freckles and a permanently disappointed air. He drove with one hand, adjusting his sidearm from time to time. We talked as he took me to jail, or mostly he did, delivering a benign lecture on the evils of drugs and the benefits of right-flying and the like. (Poor Gordon was incarcerated too, at a local shelter.) Who knows what he had in mind. Perhaps he thought I could be saved—a slender gold crucifix poked out between the buttons of his uniform—or maybe he was just playing the role of someone who saved people. “What do you reckon this stuff of yours is, son?” the officer asked at the peak of our chummy intimacy. This isn’t as odd a question as it might seem. I had inspected the goods in the tinfoil, and it didn’t resemble the LSD I’d seen before. Instead of small squares of perforated paper I found tiny slivers of an amber-coloured, gel-like substance, similar to fingernail-size shards of Neutrogena soap. I sensed an opportunity with the police officer and quickly invented a story that contained elements of the truth along with one very specific lie. I described my experience with the hitchhiker-trucker, although instead of admitting to the purchase of the narcotics, I said that the man had tried to sell them to me and I had refused to accept them. He’d then slipped the stuff inside a pack of cigarettes, which he’d accidentally left in the car when I’d dropped him off in El Paso. “He told me it was LSD,” I said, but since I had yet to sample the goods, and had never intended to do so, I couldn’t say for sure. (This was true—I’d had bad experiences with hallucinogens and planned to give the drugs away.) “Far as I know, it could be Life Savers.” The officer smiled his cop smile. “We both know that’s not true, don’t we?” he said. I shrugged. After a sleepless night in jail punctuated by the muffled cries of a hogtied prisoner too belligerent for the main holding cell, I was able to contact my mother and stepfather in Mississippi. My mother arranged a lawyer for me, and he passed my version of events along to the authorities. I have enough respect for the intelligence of Texas lawmen to suspect they found my story about a hitchhiker “leaving” some acid in my car to be an unimaginative brand of bullshit.1 But I was a white boy with an attorney, and it was easier for everyone to afford me the provisional benefit of the doubt. My lawyer arranged my release (and Gordon’s) on $25,000 bond and into the custody of my parents.
1
No one, and I mean no one, has ever believed me that the hitchhiker actually even existed.
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A deal was struck: I would pass the summer with my family, gainfully employed at my stepfather’s auto-repair shop. At summer’s end, I would return to Texas and undergo a polygraph test. If the test confirmed my tale, the charges would be dropped. If not, since LSD possession was a felony, I could serve up to two years in jail. y stepfather owned a repair shop in Gulfport. Randy was a big, sunburned man with an open and unassuming face, a workingman’s calloused hands, and forearms swollen from cranking ratchets. He met my mother when I was 11, did the repair work on her VW Beetle, asked her out until she said yes. Quickly I developed a deep attachment to him. At the risk of cliché, I loved him like a father. It was an embarrassment to tell my mother that I’d been arrested; I was ashamed to admit it to Randy. As the baby mechanic at the shop, I did oil changes and brake jobs, balanced and rotated tires, replaced spark plugs and belts, and made coffee. The other mechanics in the shop were African American, and the working dynamic resembled a cross between a Richard Wright novel and a male-centric telling of The Help. Bill (not his real name) was a Baptist minister and Army veteran, who rented a couple of lifts from Randy and took the overflow jobs we couldn’t handle. Butch (a fake nickname not dissimilar to his real one) was a former semipro ballplayer and a deacon in Bill’s congregation. He walked with a limp from an old basketball injury and mostly swept up and told stories in an African American Mississippi drawl so impenetrable that I couldn’t really speak with him. Bill’s cousin O. J. (actual nickname) did odd-jobs and minor repairs as he debated a future in college or the military. I played basketball with him one evening after work at a local recreation center. He was taller and quicker than I was, and he joked about white boys and their jump shots and we never did it again. The undercurrents of racial, class, and male tension would surface periodically. Bill would complain that Randy gave him the hardest work to do. (Randy paid him by the job; complicated repairs took longer and therefore brought in less money.) It bothered Bill, but he also derived a certain passive-aggressive pride from it too. “Don’t like to get your hands dirty, anymore, do you, Randall?” he would chortle. And he made sure always to call me “Mr. Taaaed” as he was instructing me in the rudiments of auto repair. Likewise, Randy provoked in me a niggling sense of inadequacy. Growing up in Mississippi, I had never been able to match his muted machismo, physical strength, and husky presence. I flopped at football, knocked quite unconscious in one game. I flubbed being handy, wrecking whatever repair project befell me. I couldn’t pop a wheelie, caught no fish, never stood up on water skis, and lost those fistfights I was unable, through cowardice, to avoid. Randy, meanwhile, was American in a way that Jews like my mother—born of that postwar generation caught halfway between model minority and mainstream
privilege—worshipped, envied, respected, and desperately wanted their children to become. For her, and by extension for me, Randy represented a masculine aspirational ideal that I could never attain. Still, I liked working at the shop, even if I wasn’t any good at it. I enjoyed coming home at night and washing the grease from my hair, feeling the soreness in my forearms and shoulders. Actually, it’s not really accurate that I enjoyed it. More than anything I liked saying that I worked on cars. I even toyed with the idea of staying on at the shop instead of returning to school, although I knew I wouldn’t do it. Other days I kidded myself info half-believing that, if I failed the polygraph test in Texas, I would flee to Mexico, perhaps, and to a life of adventure and dissipation of the sort I recognised from my book collection. Or instead I would confess everything to the police in Texas and be sent to prison. A couple of years seemed a manageable punishment in this event; one that in the lamest terms possible, I figured would be good for me. don’t remember the conversation when I told my mother that I had lied to the police in Kerrville and that, if I took the polygraph, I was bound to fail. Make of that what you will. I do recall her sending me to a psychologist to determine whether a sojourn at some form of rehab center might help matters. The therapist deemed me a “drug abuser” and not a “drug addict,” and we left it at that. “I wasn’t concerned that you were a druggie,” she told me recently. “Just that you were a fucking idiot.” My mother had left my father in 1976, when I was three, and we moved to Mississippi about five years later, when she was recruited by a local hospital to establish a medical practice. I split the ensuing years of my childhood commuting between the Gulf Coast and Greenwich Village, where my father remained. But even today, three decades after my mother came to Gulfport, the South keeps its distance from her. A five-foot-tall Jewish transplant from Queens, New York, she is possessed of a screaming Napoleon complex, an indomitable maternal will, and a flair for profanity—“I don’t give a flying fuck!” was a common refrain from my youth. She was never meant to blend into the Bible Belt. In Mississippi, a constellation of slightly askew personalities orbited around my mother. They gravitated to her domineering personality, helped resolve disputes, offered diplomatic assistance with the locals, fixed her computer. They accepted her mechanic husband with a bemused shrug and endured her fuck-up kids because she offered no opportunity for them to do otherwise. This proved to be of use in the plan my mother hatched to keep me out of prison. An associate of hers, she told me over breakfast one morning,2 knew how to defeat a
2
My mother, the doctor, earned the money in the family and still sent me and Randy off to work at the shop with a big breakfast.
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polygraph test. He had briefed her on some basic techniques, which she shared with me.3 Self-hypnosis seemed to be the basis of it. Pick a focal point in the room and stare at it. Take care to control your breathing. Count back from ten a few times. Use these simple techniques to fix yourself in a lightly meditative state and remain there. Polygraph machines, she told me, cannot distinguish between truth and falsehood. They merely record physical arousals—elevation of heart rate and blood pressure, respiration, and skin temperature—brought on by the emotional stress of deception. Control these responses and for the purposes of the test you are telling the truth. “Telling the truth or not telling the truth, you were going to take it,” she recently recalled. “What were you supposed to do?” The associate had been skeptical that the plan would work. “He didn’t think you’d be good enough to do it,” my mother said. But I guess she figured I could deliver a falsehood with a convincing air of truth. The associate suggested a practice run, to see whether I possessed a faculty for believable fabulism. He had connections at a security firm, discreetly located out of state in Alabama, and he arranged for me to face the polygraph there in advance of returning to Texas. If all went well, I would proceed with the real thing. If it did not… well, the plan stopped at all going well. he practice test took place in Mobile, Alabama, in early August. Randy drove me. A summer downpour loomed, and the towering thunderclouds cast everything in a washed-out grey glow, like outtakes from an old black-and-white film. The sense of distance, of moving through a cinematic set piece, provided a welcome calm, but I tried to resist taking too much ease from it. I felt deeply tired, from the stress of the impending test and work at the shop and maybe the new allergy medicine my mother had prescribed for me earlier that week. She had also said no to coffee that morning, afraid the caffeine would provoke a false positive on the polygraph, and I kept drowsing into a light sleep. The sun punched a hole through the rainclouds just as we arrived at the security office, and everything snapped into crisp focus. A wash of nerves spread down my back and into my groin, and I wondered whether I’d be able to pee before the test started. A buzz-cut security specialist with a blank face opened the front door and waved us inside. I stepped from the car and drew in a deep Gulf Coast breath: gasoline and cut grass. Randy clapped one hefty paw on my shoulder and squeezed. “You ready, boy?” he asked.
3
This associate had helped secure my lawyer in Texas and had performed the same service almost exactly a year earlier, on the same trip, when I’d been pulled over for speeding in Kearney, Nebraska, and arrested for carrying two tabs of ecstasy. I pleaded no contest to attempted possession of a controlled substance, a misdemeanor punished with a small fine. The arrest was expunged from my record once I made it to 21 without committing further crimes against the Cornhusker State.
I went inside without answering. The buzz-cut man directed me to sign in and then told Randy that there was coffee brewing and suggested he make himself comfortable. We left him in the waiting room and entered a room in the back, a blank box of papered walls, piercing fluorescent lights, and a couple of framed posters attesting to the state’s fishing and hunting delights. The drop ceiling of acoustic tiles reassured me. Its corners and edges would serve well as hypnotic focal points. I could use them to help control my breathing and narrow my visual range. The polygraph machine sat on a pressed-wood desk in the center of the room. It was a squat rectangular box festooned with Apollo-program vintage knobs and switches and, at one end, a spooled ream of graph paper and three ink-jet leads. Like everyone, I had been introduced to similar specimens in countless TV shows and movies. It was laughable in its familiarity. I sat down, and the man began arranging the sensors about my body. These included a blood-pressure cuff around one arm, two respiration pneumographs around my torso, and a galvanometer fitted over one finger to check my skin temperature. He described the function of each sensor, told me a little bit about the upcoming interview, and added some disclaimers about false positives. I dismissed any thoughts about the lie at the heart of my story: I had paid for the LSD, but my freedom depended on the believability with which I could say I hadn’t. He asked whether I was ready, and I said yes. My nerves had subsided, replaced by a light tingle of anticipation. I was eager to get started. The first thing he asked me to do was lie. The polygraph machine, which the examiner referred to as “she,” needed a falsehood to establish my reaction pattern. He read my address and asked whether this was my residence. I said no. The leads on the polygraph skittered across the graph paper, and we were on our way. An eerie sense of detachment settled over me as I recounted the story of the hitchhiker. I stared at the ceiling until the edges of the tiles began to spin. The blood roared in my ears. My breath rose and fell in rhythmic measure. A wave of nausea and dizziness rushed in and then subsided, followed by an unnerving lightness, a sensation between flying in a dream and hyperventilation. Everything felt serenely comfortable otherwise. I told the examiner that the man had offered me LSD and I had refused it. He placed the tabs in a pack of cigarettes, put it in the ashtray, and forgot to take it with him when I left him in El Paso. The awareness that I was lying never left me. Yet the deceptions felt pleasantly wearying—gentle, somehow, not burdensome in any way. “Well?” Randy asked when I met him back in the waiting room. “Who knows.” A few days later, my mother heard from the security company. I’d passed. n 1730, Daniel Defoe (justifiably better known for Robinson Crusoe) published a short tract titled An Effectual Scheme for the Immediate Preventing of Street Robberies and Suppressing All Other Disorders
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of the Night. “There is a tremor in the blood of the thief,” he wrote; investigators would do well to “take hold of [an offender’s] wrist and feel his pulse, there you shall find his guilt.” One hundred and sixty-five years later, a pioneering criminologist and physician in Italy named Cesare Lombroso modified a hydrosphygmograph—an archaic piece of equipment that measured pulse via water displacement—and used it to monitor the physiological changes in suspects undergoing police interrogation. It wasn’t until February 2, 1935, that polygraphic evidence was first used at trial, during a murder case in Wisconsin. (This year was the case’s 80th anniversary.) A lie detector was employed to determine whether the defendant had—straight face— shot the sheriff. The accuracy of polygraph tests, of course, remains deeply dubious. In 1984, a man named Gary Ridgway was questioned about the murder of a woman and passed a lie-detector test, while another man failed and was suspected, though not convicted, as the culprit. Twenty years later, Ridgway confessed to the murder; in the interim, he’d killed at least seven other women. In 1986, in Wichita, Kansas, Bill Wegerle was ostracised from his community after failing two polygraph tests following his wife’s murder. DNA evidence later exonerated Wegerle and identified his wife’s murderer as the serial killer Dennis Rader. Since the end of World War II, at least six spies for the US government successfully passed polygraph tests while working as double agents. The Supreme Court, in 1998’s United States v. Scheffer, found that “there is simply no consensus that polygraph evidence is reliable”; and in 2003, the National Academy of Sciences deemed polygraph research “unreliable, unscientific, and biased.” Despite all this, about 70,000 applicants to jobs with the federal government take lie-detector tests each year, and the FBI, CIA, and police departments including the LAPD use polygraphs to interrogate suspects. Locating evasion and dishonesty within the body is a deeply weird concept. And so the basic premise of the polygraph reveals its core contradiction: Truth and self-control are the not the same thing. Yet the idea of lie detection nonetheless retains the high gloss of social credibility. The polygraph reveals nothing essential about honesty, but fail a test and you are a liar. It’s a logical mess. To convince someone of your veracity, you must maintain the appearance of honesty; to do that requires deception; and that’s dishonest, even if you’re telling the truth. reparations for my return to Texas were under way when the lawyer called. The police laboratory in Kerr County had finally completed the analysis of the contraband seized from me at my arrest. The results were negative. The hitchhiker had thanked me for the ride (and my $20) by ripping me off. The LSD was as innocuous as the Life Savers I had mentioned to the arresting officer. Without actual drugs in my possession, I could not be charged with a crime. No need for a repeat polygraph. I was free to stop lying.
At the end of the summer, I left home for Los Angeles. Before I departed, my mother reminded me to stop taking the allergy medicine she had prescribed. It was no longer necessary, she said. I detected an odd note of self-congratulation in the way she spoke, as if there was something she wanted me to know but wasn’t sure it was a good idea to tell me. I prodded, and eventually she talked.
LOCATI LOCATIN NG G EEVA VASSIIO ON N A AN ND DD DIISSH HO ON NEEST STY Y WITH WITHIIN N TH THEE BO BODY DY IISS A AD DEEEEPLY PLY W WEEIIR RD D CO CON NC CEEP PT. T. A AN ND D SSO O TH THEE BA BASSIIC C PRE PREM MIISSEE O OFF TH THEE P PO OLYG LYGR RA APH PH R REEV VEEA ALLSS ITS ITS CO COR REE CO CONTR NTRA AD DIIC CTI TIO ON N:: TRUTH TRUTH A AN ND D SSEELF LF-CO CONTRO NTROLL A AR REE N NOT OT TH THEE SA SAM MEE TH THIIN NG G.. Like the trucker’s LSD, my allergy pills hadn’t really looked like allergy pills, or none that I had ever seen. They were small, hexagonal tablets, light blue in colour and embossed with a letter I. The letter, she now told me, stood for Inderal, a hypertension drug used as an off-label remedy for stage fright. Lacking faith in her nefarious associate’s techniques to thwart the polygraph, my mother had taken matters into her own hands. She had drugged me so that I might more capably lie about my drug use. I wanted to thank her, tenderly, to express my affection and respect and sympathy. Tell her that I understood that the truth demands deception and that she had wielded it like a weapon and an expression of love. But I had no language with which to make these things clear between the two of us. I left for college and banished the episode from my memory. I once asked my mother what she would have done if I failed the practice test. Would she really have allowed me to go to Texas and face the real thing? Perhaps the better strategy would have been to retract my lie and try to make a deal with the police. “No idea,” she told me. “Maybe get you a better lawyer.”
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’CHOKE TRAUMA BY RYAN GRIM ILLUSTRATIONS BY ARMANDO VEVE
h hey, what’s in your salad? Avocado? Chicken? Love it. Are those white things artichokes? Well, shoot. I’d be all over that salad if it weren’t for those ’chokes. I haven’t touched a ’choke in 20 years. You’re probably wondering why I haven’t touched a ’choke in 20 years. It’s difficult for me to talk about. Wanna know why I haven’t touched a ’choke in 20 years? When I was a child I suffered artichoke trauma. It was September 1995, the first day of sixth grade, and my mom was packing my lunch. “Shit’s changing around here,” she said. “You’re practically an adult, so from now on you’ll have to pack your own lunch. I’ll be busy fighting with your father in the morning and won’t have time to pack it for you.” But I didn’t want to. “Pah-lease pack my lunch,” I said. “Fine, I’ll keep packing that shit. But you have to realise that some mornings I’ll be too busy arguing with your father to pack a good, nutritious lunch. You’ll have to eat whatever I pack.” I said that was fine. Big mistake.
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The first two weeks of school my lunches were great: ham sammies, chips, juice—the juice I liked—all that good stuff. There must have been ten nutritious lunches in a row. But one day I opened my bag and found a can of Diet Rite and one celery stick with margarine. That is not a nutritious lunch. My friends laughed at me and called me poor. They laughed so hard the teacher’s aide came over and told them to hush up. The next day my lunch was worse: another Diet Rite (this time it was half-empty, with Saran wrap covering the top) and a stick of Fruit Stripe gum. Now, Fruit Stripe is a fine gum. For 20 seconds maybe! Once its flavor ran out I was very bummed. I was so bummed that the teacher’s aide came over and asked what the matter was. I said nothing was wrong. That night I was like, “Mom, what’s up with these lunches? A half-empty Diet Rite? Fruit Stripe?” “Listen: Lately I’ve been very busy fighting with your father in the morning and haven’t had time to pack nutritious lunches. You’re welcome to pack your own.” I was like, nah, no thanks. Next day in the cafeteria I opened my bag to discover a raw artichoke. That’s it, one ’choke. And it wasn’t even plump. Maybe at one time the ’choke was plump but had withered, or maybe it was withered all along and had never plumped on the vine or tree branch
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or whatever ’chokes grow on, but at the time I didn’t know how to tell plump ’chokes from withered ’chokes, and I still don’t know, so we’ll never know whether it was always withered or not. Still, one raw ’choke, withered or plump, is not a nutritious lunch. I was bewildered, and I was bummed. My friends laughed and called me Artichoke Boy. They made such a ruckus that the teacher’s aide came over. “What’s the deal?” she said. “My mom packed me a raw artichoke for lunch, and they’re making fun of me. But it’s OK—I deserve it. I should start packing my own lunches because I’m practically an adult now.” “Come with me,” she said. “I’ll get you some nutrition.” She led me into her office and told me to lock the door, and I did. She opened a desk drawer and pulled out a Snickers bar, a bowl of hummus, and pita bread. “Eat, eat. You’re skin and bones.” She took off her sweater, and her V-neck tee revealed very much. She touched my cheek and said, “Mmm, is that stubble?” “Yes, I’m practically an adult now.” She poured me a glass of Scotch. “Drink this,” she said. “It’ll put more hair on your face.” She put her hand down my shirt and tickled my back. “You might even get some hair on your back. Maybe your neck too. That would be fine with me. I like a man who has hair to spare. Don’t get hair on your shoulders or hands, though. I wouldn’t like that.” “OK, I won’t.”
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“My husband… ugh, he hardly has any hair. That’s why I call him the Porpoise. No hair, no principles, no money. That’s my Lionel. Do you have a girlfriend?” “No.” “Are there any girls at school you like?” “No.” “That’s good. Girls will mess with your brain. Only a grown woman can set you free.” She had a shot of Scotch and took off her shirt. “I may only be a teacher’s aide, and not a real teacher, but I can still teach you boys a thing or two about nutrition.” And that’s how I lost my virginity.
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A BETTER EDITH: CROSSFIT MISFIT By Edith Zimmerman
We gave the writer Edith Zimmerman a monthly column because we love her. But like everyone, she could be better, so we asked her to write about doing things that improve herself. Follow her over the next year as she gets better and better until she reaches perfection in March 2016. Have you ever seen a picture of yourself and thought, That can’t possibly be me—who is that person? But it is you, and you’re forced to acknowledge, maybe for the first time in a while, the way you actually look? I had a moment like that a few months ago. My pub trivia team had won the thing we’d been trying to win for years, and so we took a group photograph, and it was great, although after I saw the picture I faked some of the happiness, because I felt a little undone by realising— somehow, suddenly, in that instant, I guess I was finally able to see—how far I’d let my actual appearance get from the way I thought of myself. I knew I had gained weight, but I naively kind of thought that maybe I just carried it well. I mean I knew that TECHNICALLY I’d gained like 30 or 40 pounds—I still don’t want to get on a scale—but somehow I thought maybe it worked for me, or was the invisible kind of fat. Haha. So I decided to try CrossFit, because it seemed frightening and intense, which is the opposite of my life. There are apparently about 11,000 CrossFit affiliate gyms around the world, up from 13 in 2005, nine years after it was “invented.” A lot of people call it a cult and make fun of it. But the people photographed in the endless CrossFit trend pieces usually look pretty amazing, and I was definitely open to becoming addicted to and annoying about it, to becoming part of their cult, if for some miraculous reason it stuck and I could maybe end up like one of the women in cool sports bras and Spandex shorts whose bodies are so fit they’re frightening. But then I actually went to a CrossFit class. The gym—or “box”—felt like an industrial-style, gladiator-type training cavern that had been tucked behind an unassuming, normal-size door on a Brooklyn side street. It was filled with black metal jungle gyms, bars and gymnastic rings, and stacks of weights—also rows of kettlebells
and medicine balls, racks of jump ropes, a bay of rowing machines, and a corner piled with wooden crates—but mostly big expanses of open space padded with black mats and Astroturf. At the beginning of the class, we went around saying our names and fitness histories and hopes. Some said that they ran or swam or played basketball. I said I didn’t exercise at all, hoping it might give me an excuse for whatever came later, but then a cute couple who arrived late also said they didn’t exercise. And then they were so fast and strong at seemingly everything and never out of breath. Especially when we were learning burpees, a horrible exercise in which you drop fully to the ground, then jump up—if you can—back to standing, and then clap your hands over your head as you hop up in the air. And then do it all again. Over and over and over. After around ten of these, I realised that I had at some point begun making audible groaning noises, kind of like in tennis(!), which was exciting because I don’t think I’ve ever groaned from exertion before. Then we finished with four minutes of plain air squats—20 seconds of going up and down like you’re peeing, followed by ten seconds of rest, eight times over—which maybe doesn’t sound too crazy but was almost certainly the hardest I’ve ever worked out in my life. I fell down immediately afterward, on the first steps I tried to descend, walking off the mat to the locker area. But I was so tired I didn’t care whether I looked stupid, and at that point all I wanted was to go home and lie down. And never come back. Concern over people doing CrossFit too intensely, or with improper form, has led to at least one lawsuit, in 2008, in which the plaintiff, a Navy technician, sued his gym (not CrossFit itself), claiming that his trainers’ instructions gave him rhabdomyolysis, “a condition in which damaged skeletal muscle tissue breaks down rapidly” and that is often caused by “extreme physical exercise.” (Quotes from Wikipedia.) He had been peeing blood and was hospitalised for a month, and he eventually won $300,000. To raise awareness about improper technique, CrossFit CEO Greg Glassman has run several articles on rhabdomyolysis in CrossFit’s (non-peer-reviewed) online publication,
CrossFit Journal. In one 2005 post (three years before the lawsuit), Glassman wrote: To date we have seen five cases of exertional rhabdo associated with CrossFit workouts. Each case resulted in the hospitalisation of the afflicted… The hardest hit was extremely sick, the least afflicted had no complaints other than soreness… Soreness doesn’t adequately explain the discomfort of rhabdo, however. The worst hit, a SWAT guy, recounts that six days of intravenous morphine drip barely touched the pain. The illustration accompanying the post, under the word “RHABDO,” was a drawing of a jacked but bleeding and miserable-looking Krusty-esque clown, hooked up to a dialysis machine, his kidneys on the
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Illustration by Heather Benjamin
It was like there was a whole other body inside my regular one, waking up. And she was angry and mean, not because I was bothering her but because it had taken me so long to remember she was there.
floor. The clown cartoon eventually came to be known as “Uncle Rhabdo,” and one writer later called him, in a popular 2013 Medium post, “CrossFit’s unofficial and disturbing mascot.” At home, the pain made me unexpectedly giddy and euphoric. Even though I wasn’t experiencing rhabdo, LOL, I kind of loved the ache and burn—I could barely sit down normally, and if moving quickly or going up and down the stairs had been part of my job description, I might have had to take the week off. It was like there was a whole other body inside my regular one, waking up. And she was angry and mean, not because I was bothering her but because it had taken me so long to remember she was there. And I loved hobbling around and screaming when I sat down, “IN CASE ANYONE HAD FORGOTTEN THAT I WAS DOING CROSSFIT DID I MENTION CROSSFIT.”
So I signed up for what’s called the “On Ramp” session, a two-week, six-class beginner course in which you learn how to do all the actual CrossFit exercises appropriately, and which is required for anyone who wants to continue doing it. The session I chose began the morning after the first class. It turned out that the gym was a lot quieter at 6 AM and only four of us had signed up. And our coach was really nice and seemed gentle and sympathetic to how intimidating it was to be there. He also seemed great about understanding everyone’s personal limit and at helping without making anyone feel stupid or disgusting. He was also very fit, in a weight-lifting way, and he had a big beard. So we all chatted a bit and then started learning some CrossFit, and for the next hour, I panted and sweated and felt weird, doing push-ups and sit-ups and pseudo-pull-ups
(with a big rubber band), and I kind of had fun, or not fun, but something like satisfaction, and when I went home I couldn’t shut up about how I was “doing CrossFit.” But over the course of the next two weeks, something shifted. What started as a desire to become FIT AND STRONG (i.e., skinny and hot) sort of changed into being about making my coach and the people in my class like me, and about looking forward to being around them, in just a goofy, simple way. Because it was clear from the get-go that I couldn’t keep up, exerciselevel-wise, and that almost everything had to be amended to fit my physical limitations. But that was kind of freeing, because the workouts were still exhausting; it just wasn’t so terrifying or comparison-based. And it was nice to just be in a room with some new people, doing a new thing, looking like an idiot.
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CROOKED MEN: A COUNTRY FLEES ITS HISTORY OF CORRUPTION By Roberto Saviano
Nightclubs, art galleries, infinity pools, luxury resorts. I’m speaking not of New York, Miami, or Paris but of Tirana, the capital of Albania. Albania, a country that many people would not be able to find on a map. Tirana has more than 800,000 inhabitants and is growing with the return of the Boat Generation—those who fled to Italy at the beginning of the 1990s. They are coming home to find a more stable country, both politically and socially, with an economy trending upward as the financial climate stagnates elsewhere in the West. Lost to the world for 41 years during the reign of Enver Hoxha, one of the most ferocious communist dictators in history, and smothered in the fallout for decades, the country is finally coming into its own. Once a land of emigrants, it is now a land of plenty. How can I talk about Albania without extolling or demonising an economic boom that is so different from the dismal conditions
of Greece, Spain, or Italy, my birth country? In Europe manufacturers are moving there en masse. Today people are investing in Albania because it offers business opportunities that Italy doesn’t and will not be able to in the future. Putting money into the nation is a wager that people hope to win because, though it’s a country that has been corroded by corruption and organised crime and has a justice system with enormous issues, we can no longer turn a blind eye to the fact that these problems also exist elsewhere. The only difference is that in places like Italy, we pretend that everything is fine, that the political machine works. Doing business in Albania, with its 15 percent corporate income tax, is a risk worth taking for some people. The Albanian prime minister, a young socialist painter named Edi Rama, makes the “total absence of unions” a point of pride for his country, as he is aware
that at times, far from protecting the weakest segments of society, unions enshrine privileges. Around 400 Italian businesses are active in Rama’s Albania, and according to his government, they employ 120,000 people. All the while, critics raise questions about workers’ rights and scant wages, which are far lower than salaries in Italy and many other European nations. Fraud, bribery, and nepotism are mainstays of politics. And even though the improved economy has brought vast social changes to the country, organised crime remains a serious problem, one enmeshed in the fabric of Albanian society—something outsiders would do well to appreciate. In fact, crime is a major export of this growing global power. It’s easy to get distracted by all the high-rises and glitzy fashion boutiques, but understanding Albania means understanding the point where tradition and modernity meet.
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Illustrations by Jacob Everett
The Mafia here has two competing branches: the Albanian mob, based in Tirana, and the Kosovar mob, based in Pristina. Linked to the Italian Mafia, the clans are founded on hard and fast rules of fealty and discipline. There is a traditional code that regulates everyday life in all of its dynamics: the Kanun, a text whose tenets haven’t changed in centuries. Regarding feuds, for instance, it dictates that when two families are killing each other and one of the targets decides to never leave his house again, his life will be spared. He must, however, maintain the arrangement and never set foot outside his doorstep. Despite the modern, democratic advances of the past few decades, this way of thinking has a strong influence on daily life here as well as politics. While it is not officially acknowledged, everyone knows that the principal reason the countries of Kosovo and Albania are not united—in regions where people feel like brothers and would like to be under the same flag—is the conflict between their criminal organisations. The Kosovar and Albanian mobs have always been rivals. Global in its reach, the Albanian branch has long held power in the United States. Zef Mustafa is one of its most notorious American bosses. He’s also a prominent money launderer for the Gambinos, one of the Five Families of New York. The Albanian clan has extended its power around other parts of the world as well—from Sweden to Belgium. Naser Xhelili, known as the “Albanian Connection” to Swedish authorities, runs various operations including drug trafficking, while Kapllan Murat, called the “Getaway King,” is a master prison escapee and one of Belgium’s most infamous mafiosi. For years the Albanian mob also managed prostitution throughout Europe, because the different Mafias in Italy and Corsica considered such an activity dishonorable. Through prostitution, the Albanians came into contact with the Italians, and eventually the organisations became partners for the control of the heroin and marijuana trades. The Kosovar Mafia is equally famed for its international connections, especially its Italian ones. During the 1990s, it united with the Apulian Mafia in Southern Italy, known as the Sacra Corona Unita, and called itself the Sacra Corona Kosovara. Czech intelligence reported that the Kosovo Liberation Army, the guerrilla movement that fought against the Serbs for Kosovo’s independence, had essentially made Kosovo a Mafia state that was at the disposal of both the Camorra—the Neapolitan mob— and the Sacra Corona Unita.
From 2008 to 2010, Dick Marty, a Swiss politician, led an investigation for the Council of Europe into Kosovo’s prime minister, Hashim Thaçi. He found Thaçi to be the brain behind a network for the international trafficking of weapons, drugs, and human organs. While Thaçi is no longer prime minister, he still holds office, serving as foreign minister and deputy prime minister. The reports on his criminality had no effect on his career.
Edi Rama, the prime minister of Albania
When I consider the new Albania, I think about not only its troubled past and present but those desperate for a new start. I will never forget when, at the end of the 1990s, I made my first Albanian friends. I was an Italian student in Germany, and while riding the bus I began chatting with a group of guys who knew my language—men who were working on a construction site a little outside the city. I had understood they were Albanians because they spoke Italian well (like most Albanians, who for years had looked toward Italy with the same eyes with which Italians had long watched America), but not well enough to camouflage a foreign accent. And yet they didn’t want to tell me what city they were from and how they had ended up in Cologne. In time I came to know them better and to understand that they were ashamed. Ashamed of being judged. Ashamed of a country in ruins, pillaged by despots and crime lords. Ashamed of having to seek asylum in Italy, which, having forgotten its own history of immigration, has felt invaded for decades by refugees from every corner of the globe. And today Italy reserves for those who reach its coasts the same welcome Italians received when they were treated like animals in the United States, Germany, and Switzerland. These men were identical to me, but I was reading books while they had to travel
through half of Europe to find work. In those years few people predicted the economic collapse that would strike Western markets, and I felt lucky. Lucky to be Italian. Now I see the same optimism in Albania, a country on the rise and a candidate to enter the European Union. Though people still leave for the other shore of the Adriatic, now they do so more and more to study. To study and then to return to their homeland, since Italy and most of Europe have very little to offer at the moment. The verses of the poet Pashko Vasa, who wrote during the Albanian national movement when it was part of the Ottoman Empire, seem to hold more currency than ever: “Wake up, Albanians, rise from your sleep, / Together as brothers swear an oath, / And do not look toward churches or mosques, / Albanians’ faith is in Albanianness!” And yet doubt remains, such as the skepticism of the writer Fatos Lubonja, condemned to 17 years of forced labor in a gulag during the dictatorship. Lubonja has suggested that the ideology of the regime has merely changed form, shifting from a national-communist to a national-Europeanist worldview and allowing the Albanians to simply bury their past. This idea emerges clearly from the words of the entrepreneur Agron Shehaj, a popular symbol of the young people who fled with the Boat Generation and have returned to Tirana with foreign degrees. Today Shehaj is 37 years old and has settled in Tirana after living in Bolzano, getting an economics degree in Florence, and spending time in New York. Shehaj had left Albania with his family only to return in 2006: He opened the first call center aimed at the Italian market, and today he directs a company with 3,000 employees. He’s keen to see Albania become part of the EU and always tells his friends: “To live like Germans, it’s necessary to work like Germans...” This is a common sentiment in Albania—one that smacks of a desire to run from one’s identity. The new Europe originates in Albania, a country of almost 3 million inhabitants that wears on its face the indelible traces of unconceivable suffering, still visible in the form of profound contradictions. It is a modern capitalist state enjoying a bustling, optimistic economic rebirth, but also a massively corrupt post-communist society still peddling its old vices throughout the globe: money laundering, sex trafficking, arms dealing, and the sale of illicit drugs. These are cracks that can’t be erased in a handful of years. Cracks that, in order to be filled, require the study and attention of those who, from afar, observe, analyze, and retrace common lines, without judging. Translated from the Italian by Kim Ziegler
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RECORD REVIEWS Best Album of the Month:
BILL FAY: Who Is the Sender?
(Dead Oceans)
If you want to make the rest of your afternoon sound like an astronaut’s funeral— like the most perfect, loyal astronaut’s funeral—look no further. If you want to understand what it sounds like to taste human tears off a catered turkey sandwich, just fucking stop right there. If you want a Kafkaesque lesson in how to be more Kafkaesque, pour yourself a glass of rotten milk and listen to this motherfucker over and over and over and over again. WHALEBONE
DEATH GRIPS The Powers That B Harvest
I’m 95 percent sure that Death Grips are a vast internet musical conspiracy perpetuated by 4chan, and that all the combined PR for their continued half-baked releases and fan-betraying PR antics is the collective effort of the thousands of 14-year-old Swedish kids that populate the forum. I have my suspicions that a few influential meme bloggers on Tumblr may be involved somehow as well. Those first few records were good, especially as a musical accompaniment to your BMX ride to work at the movie theater. It’s a tough three miles, sure, but someone’s gotta be able to afford to fill Mom’s Volvo with gas. UNCLE RUMPUS
KENDRICK LAMAR To Pimp a Butterfly Interscope/Aftermath/Top Dawg
One summer’s day, during a humdrum BBQ, the woman who used to live with my girlfriend had a full-blown nervous breakdown in front of me and her sorta boyfriend. She pissed all over the floor like an animal. That’s nearly as bad as a girlfriend texting you “You should think about getting an STD test” a week and a half after you tell her you’re in love with her. Ladies, if you’re about to fuck a guy who lives in a dorm room, I bet you a billion dollars he thinks it’s gross for someone to swab his penis. Fellas, you know how you’re always worried that you’re gonna get a boner at the doctor’s? These STD doctors flick your dick like
it’s overcooked gnocchi. Now listen: I’ve felt two really confusing emotions due to Kendrick Lamar. Right out the gate, I reinforced a wall with wood and books during the breakdown because my girlfriend’s former roommate kept wailing “Bitch, don’t kill my vibe” over and over again, like she was amping herself up to murder us; little did I know, she was having one of those “silent raves.” What’s more, there is no emotion in the English language (though I’m sure there is one in German or the type of Dutch spoken in Flanders) for when an attractive lady doctor rocks your testicles while you babble about how trifling love is until she tells you that although don’t have cancer, your heart could explode at any minute. For men, this situation is as dizzying as walking a dog blindfolded through a corn maze. It’d be like if you started dating someone who lived with a crazy person who used to be a lawyer and behaved like South By happened every weekend and that Kendrick Lamar was Jim Jones, but in place of Kool-Aid, Kendrick gave away lobster-claw Bloody Marys by the bucketful, exuding a vibe not to be fucked with. Once you have a vibe, you don’t want anyone to fuck with it. I take Xanax for the same thing, and it costs less than $2 a pop. Kendrick Lamar convinced George Clinton that he was the new Eric Clapton, which indicates that maybe music is no longer an imprisoned... hahaha, gotcha. HOLIDAY NISSAN
ACTION BRONSON Mr. Wonderful VICE/Atlantic
We were gonna give Mr. Wonderful Album of the Month if Action had written his own review of the record (which we put out), but he didn’t. So we’re just gonna give him the classic conflict-of-interest smiley face instead. Fuck, that’s obnoxious! REVIEWS EDITOR
CANNIBAL OX Blade of the Ronin IGC/iHipHop Disribution
Wanna hear some non-El-P production and some bullcrap about Pokémon? No? Really?! Man, I wish I could at least endorse this on the principle that The Cold Vein is an untouchable classic—but we’re a long way from that one. I’m gonna go YouTube that Def Jux doc from 2002 and imagine this never happened. That being said, why wait so long to put out a record at all if you can’t top rhyming basement with adjacent in the first place. B. J. ARMSTRONG
TWIN SHADOW Eclipse Warner Bros.
A year ago, I visited this awful college friend who had moved to LA after a long stint on the East Coast. “I don’t know how I ever lived in New York for so long without losing it,” he said to me between taking rips from his e-cig and sips of a $15 juice that smelled like donkey semen. “It’s just, like, so much chiller here. I finally feel like the real me.” A couple months after my visit, this guy went to Coachella and popped molly for the first time while Twin Shadow played. He was wearing a leather jacket and had to be rushed to the chill-out tent after suffering heat stroke and shitting himself mid-set. To this day, he says it was the best concert of his life. DJ PJS
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RECORD REVIEWS Worst Album of the Month:
MARK KNOPFLER: Tracker
(Virgin EMI)
If JNCO can attempt to make a comeback in 2015, I guess the dude from Dire Straits can give it a whirl, too. Let me stop you right there, by the way. I don’t give a father fuck if Mark Knopfler has been going at it hard his whole life, releasing records and shit. It amounts to a snail’s fart of influence to anyone but that crew of powder-white micropenises who’ve Soap’d their way down the rails of life. Also, isn’t Mark Knopfler a Nazi? HARLOW BOOT
ALISON WONDERLAND
LOTIC
Run
Heterocetera
EMI
Tri Angle
sure Mark Sultan hasn’t done sound at Red7 ever. Not even one time. ABE SEEDY
JEFF THE BROTHERHOOD As instructed by the title, I listened to this on the move. I dubbed it to tape, placed the bootleg cassette copy in the Walkman that I randomly found last week while cleaing out the attic, pressed play, and sprinted out the door. I’m reasonably fit these days and only really stopped when the 43 minutes of the recording had finished. The experience was euphoric. Now it could have just been the endorphins, the fresh autumn air, the strangers I high-fived while crossing the bridge over the duck pond in the park, or the $50 I found on the pavement near the ATM but this album was start to finish a good time. ERIC LIDDELL
There’s this Cronenberg movie called Scanners in which telekinetic humans fuse their minds with technology. Lotic is almost definitely a Scanner, but on top of being able to manipulate a laptop into creating futuristic techno music, he probably uses his powers to make factory machines come to life and engage in metallic, spark-filled orgies with no safeword. This record sounds like a world where soulless cyborgs experience all the ecstasy and sexless humans are left to watch them poke one another from a distance in a postapocalyptic club-cave. GIMP MAN JR.
Wasted on the Dream Infinity Cat
On top of the fact that these guys make unabashedly balls-out dude rock and have an admirably goofy shit-eating attitude despite being workhorses and running a successful label, they look like the inbred McPoyle twins from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. They’ve also decided to wean themselves off the evil sterile teat of Warner Bros. What more could you possibly ask for? DADDY GNARBUCKS
SOMA COMA Dust
HOWLING
Cool Death
Sacred Ground Inertia
House hunting is a special kind of agony. Those early Saturday morning inspections surrounded by successful power couples that put all the decisions you’ve ever made into sharp perspective suck super hard. What have I done that means I now sit here on this curb and fill in two copies of forms only to experience a variation of generalised rejection? Yes, it’s a chore. Unless you’re a billionaire. Then it’s probably a lot like choosing your favourite topping at Cold Rock. Make a bad decision and there’s always another icecream cup tomorrow. And listening to this album feels like listening to the lives of those billionaires who never made a bad decision in their lives. Expensive and tasteful. I’m happy for them. RICH PENNYBAGS
THE KING KHAN & BBQ SHOW Bad News Boys In the Red
I was at SXSW or Chaos in Tejas or one of those excuses to do bad blow in the Porta-Potty at Red7 last year, and someone told me the dude from King Khan was doing sound, and I was like, Wow, here’s a guy who is so good at being front and center and destroying faces every night that he’s actually doing the music world a mothersucking service by making other bands sound good live. Later I thought to myself, Wow, here’s a guy who is so good at being front and center and destroying faces every night because he can make other bands sound absolutely awful live. I did a quick Google search, and I’m pretty
I lived in a punk house for two months. At first the gigs and late night parties were fun and the fact that everyone lived on red wine, ciggies and cheese and mayo sandwiches was how I expected five unemployed musicians would exist. But things started to turn with the foot infection and the police raid. Some of us blamed hard drugs. I blamed lack of money and responsibility. This record reminds me of the week before I moved out PENIZ PUMPZ
LIGHTNING BOLT Fantasy Empire Thrill Jockey
Here we have something like 77 contact microphones set up systematically through an especially petite wormhole as it funnels the VICE 79
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RECORD REVIEWS Best Cover of the Month:
AMERICAN WRESTLERS: Self-Titled
(Fat Possum)
You want to hear some real Illuminati shit? I worked at VICE for five years only to quit to be in a band that everyone said sounded like Pavement. I was always a little bit sore over never getting the coveted gold VICE ring. Years later, I’m in Sydney, Australia, hanging out with Stephen Malkmus, who tells me he just fucking got one for playing a VICE party—nay—extravaganza. I bet I shrugged and said something like, “Seriously?” and the Malk said he would mail me the ring he got—he doesn’t want it. And here I am again. DICK PEE
wake of an esteemed celestial wizard’s heroic fart. Pummeling glittery guitars paired with the wizard’s college roommate’s cousin’s former dental hygienist performing what appears to be the beginning of a promising self-exorcism makes my Dr. Seuss hat stand straight up; what about yours? Could you leave the black light on for me, please? Gives me powers. Thanks, y’all! BECA GRIMM
broke it up. Soon after, my mom drove me home. We got ice cream on the way, and I licked it contemplatively. That was a very important moment in my young life, Isaac. Everyone should have his heroes taken down a peg. DINGUS CORIANDER
reactions; when he could put on “Title Track” and feel somehow more aware of the physical space around him. But he just starts the album over again, and again he feels nothing. RIVER DONAGHEY
RUSSELL ST BOMBINGS Russell St Bombings Smart Guy
GIRL BAND The Early Years Rough Trade
You ever have one of those days when everything just sucks so goddamn much? Your wife divorces you and your mom dies; then at the end of the day, you Dutch-oven yourself in an ALF sheet on your best friend’s futon. I can’t tell you what this record did for my misery. You get the picture; I’m a piece of shit. HARPER G.
COURTNEY BARNETT Sometimes I Sit and Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit Polyvinyl
This stage of Courtney Barnett’s career is cool. Eating cheese in green rooms while waiting to perform on US late night television programs is actually pretty fun. It’s when she has to sit on a couch and actually talk to Jimmy Kimmel that it’s going to start sucking. JOSE BAUTISTA
NOEL GALLAGHER’S HIGH FLYING BIRDS
DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE
Chasing Yesterday
Kintsugi
Sour Mash
Atlantic
Like a Rube Goldberg machine That sucks out your brain And pull-unties your sweatpants REVIEWKU
MODEST MOUSE Strangers to Ourselves Glacial Pace
I once saw Isaac Brock lay into a homeless kid in Portland with a vitriolic Ayn Rand rant about how he slept under bridges but survived, by-fucking-God, without bumming bucks like some shithead. The kid pushed Isaac, and he reeled back to swing before some roadies
It’s 2015, and Seth Cohen is 27. RISD was a lifetime ago, and Chrismukkah even longer. His comic career is done, and each Chris Ware New Yorker cover further wilts his desire to draw. His new sketches feel destined for the sock drawer, next to his wedding ring from Summer and other emblems of his failures. Now comes “the new Death Cab album.” Cohen sits and listens, then listens again, anxiously replaying Kintsugi and trying to find some meaning in it, though the songs are as cold and foreign as the title itself. Still, he sits, hoping with each restart that the music will bring him back to a time when things were easier; when albums gave him visceral, emotional
Named after a 1986 attack on the Melbourne police headquarters, Russell Street Bombings are the duo of Al Montfort and Zephyr Pavey. You may know from their Eastlink and Total Control, but what present here is disjointed instrumental forays, some warped acoustic stuff and muttered lyrics. It’s strange and great both in its looseness and the way it will have Total Control fan boys wondering when the synths are going to come in. OZONE LIAR
SUFJAN STEVENS Carrie & Lowell Asthmatic Kitty
While I’ve never tried to quit drugs, I’m pretty sure that the first relapse must feel a lot like listening to the new Sufjan Stevens album. I know it’s embarrassing, but I feel so warm and comfortable as his whispers blanket me. In the back of my mind—a voice—a sense of dread: I know this isn’t going to end well. I didn’t even touch this stuff for like eight years. I’d made so much progress! I was listening to rap music. I was happy. Now I’m choosing to throw it all away—and for what? A sad-eyed Christian man singing about his mom and his stepdad and masturbating while you check your texts. Am I gonna die like those other junkies who get tuned up after taking nearly a decade off the needle? HANDSOME FUNHAVER
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RECORD REVIEWS Worst Cover of the Month:
WUTANG PARENTAL ADVISORY: Explicit Content Volume One
(Self-Released)
Reviewing new Wu-Tang stuff is like the final scene in Enter the Dragon where Bruce Lee keeps fighting mirrors: It’s impossible to tell if I think this is kinda average because I’m not compensating enough for the shadow of the original Wu-Tang Clan oeuvre or because I’m somehow being too critical for fear of having overcompensated in the first place. But fuck it. This sounds like it’d mix well with Rich Boy circa 2009, it’s cool they released the first single in multiple remix-friendly formats, and “Stay Up” is in the early running for the top drunk-strolling-around-the-city track of the summer. RIP Osiris. DJ BLUMPKIN THE BLUMPKING
PURITY RING Another Eternity 4AD
Love ’em or hate ’em, I still wish that instead of a band, Purity Ring were a proto-futuristic masturbation apparatus/gang that existed solely as a Subreddit where you could crowdsource jelly-filled chocolate cakes with pornographic images printed on them (however that would work, don’t ask me) but also where there were Bible verses over the porno and you could send the cakes to your friends and enemies alike! CEE-LOO BIAFRA
MADONNA Rebel Heart Interscope
In 2015, I think it’s a fairly good barometer of how out-of-touch a person is when she releases the hounds on someone who leaks her dingleberry of an “art thing.” I just want to know if she took the trip to Israel herself, adorned in a Stargate headdress and an expensive cloak as she stepped out of her helicopter, the one that ultimately took a nerd to prison. And I wonder if she said, “Bitch, I’m Madonna” before the nerd got chloroformed or whatever happens in a scenario like this. CLOUDER SANDBONE
myself outright 20 years, on this vessel between Wellington and Bicton. Magic gets real good ’round near Karori Rip; something about the swells, eh? I think I met Björk once; that’s a bit of all right. Musicians sail for free given they put on a performance—passengers hate it, though. That’s why I have the wand, eh? Little sleight of hand’ll keep anyone happier than a ruckus.” NIGEL THE BOAT MAGICIAN
SARAH MARY CHADWICK 9 Classic Tracks Rice Is Nice
Sarah Mary Chadwick is responsible for both the album art and the songs on her second solo album. But the edgy cover will probably get more attention than the music and that’s a shame as some of the tracks such as “I’m an Apple With No Skin” involve cool and sophisticated songwriting. But life is full of lessons. Present weird sexual Human Centipede like art and expect to pay a price. MR. GURN
VARIOUS ARTISTS Cinderella: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
instruments. Who the hell is in charge at the Magic Kingdom these days? FRENCH CANDLESTICK
VARIOUS ARTISTS Furious 7: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack Atlantic
There are a few mysteries that may always baffle the female gender, and the way these brain-bleedingly bad movies satiate men’s lust for oil and blood is one. But let me tell you, it’s sick as shit to watch Vin Diesel’s creatine-inflated brachioradialis muscles pilot a GTO out the back of a goddamn airplane midflight. Fucking fuck. [Frothing sound.] JOHN GREY JR.
SCHARPLING AND WURSTER The Best of the Best Show Numero Group
Tom and Jon have asserted themselves as the true masters of radio for this generation. They’re the Two Stooges of the Orson Welleses of our time. When these motherfuckers get on the phone, forget it—magic rains in folks’ ears and out their privates. BRANTLER FOOTSTEEM
GABI Sympathy Software
Disney
BJÖRK Vulnicura One Little Indian
Our reviews editor asked a magician on a boat in New Zealand about the new Björk record, and this is what he said: “I met Jay Z. I met Kanye West, too. I’ve magician’d
I realised the other day that all Elton John did for the Lion King soundtrack was steal Roxy Music songs off Stranded and make them about warthogs sucking their own dicks. The people behind this ’Derella soundtrack couldn’t even be bothered to do that. Anyone with a gun can force a bunch of piano players to smoke cocaine and masturbate themselves with some woodwind and brass
It’s hard to find someone who doesn’t like Breaking Bad. I always avoided it because so many people declared it mandatory. Then one day when I felt like I could either commit suicide or watch it, I put the whole damn thing on my MacBook Pro, and now look at my dumb ass watching Better Call Saul. AWESOME BROOM VICE 81
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VICE NEWS TRAVELS TO NIGERIA TO SEE HOW THE MILITARY IS RAMPING UP ITS FIGHT AGAINST BOKO HARAM.
T H E WAR AGAINS T
BOKO HARAM S T O L E N R U M . C O M F A C E B O O K . C O M / S T O L E N R U M I N S T A G R A M @ S T O L E N R U M
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VICE MAGAZINE VOLUME 13 NUMBER 2
FREE VOLUME 13 NUMBER 2
THE MAGIC HOUR ISSUE 2015
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