Eddie links up with 2 Live Crew rapper Uncle Luke at Club Rol-Lexx in Opa-locka to taste what Luke thinks is the best BBQ in town. Guys come more for the food than the girls. After eating sauced up St. Louis-style ribs and smoked chicken, Eddie and the "Mayor of Miami" take a stroll to another of Luke's hood favorites, the conch truck.

Prism House is a Brooklyn-based electronic duo consisting of Brian Wenner (music/live electronics) and Matt O'Hare (live visuals). They formed in 2011 by O’Hare and Pia Blumenthal, while the two were studying music at NYU. Pia left the group shortly thereafter leaving an opening for fellow student Wenner to fill. I spoke with Brian to discuss the duo’s debut EP Reflections and the single “Need You (Part 1)" that will be released by the Brooklyn label Ceremony Recordings on March 5, as well his musical background and why he thinks a lot of electronic producers these days are “assholes.”

VICE: How did you get interested in making weird electronic music as opposed to playing guitars in bands?
Brian Wenner: I’ve always been interested in electronic music. I played video games all the time as a kid and had the 8-bit sound embedded into my brain. When I heard Kid A it clicked. Eventually I discovered Aphex Twin, Autechre, and Boards of Canada.

Prism House's sound is experimental but not completely avant-garde and has beats but isn't dance music. Are you guys trying to be dance music or experimental music or something in-between?
Matt and I don’t ever ask each other, “Should this be weirder? Or should this be a little more accessible?” But I do love dance music and I look to incorporate some dance elements into what we do but still retain our experimental aspects.

The band’s sound is heady. Do you guys think your shows are best experienced under the influence?
I think so. The visuals definitely work best when someone is on psychedelics. I don’t think you have to be high to enjoy our shows, but it would definitely be a cool experience.

Are drugs involved in your recording process?
Not really. I drink a lot and smoke weed occasionally. I can’t write music well when I’m high. I’ll record something that I think is great then wake up and realize that it’s just shit.

That’s disappointing. What other stuff influences you?
Photography. I use a field recorder to record sounds hoping it tells a story of what I was doing and why I was there. I want my music to have a photographic quality to it. I want to listen to it 10 years now from now and be able to remember certain moments in my life.

How’d you get hooked up with Ceremony Recordings?
Twitter. I tweeted at the Ceremony account, “Hey I think you guys are really cool. I really dig the artists you’re putting out.” Then I met the label’s manager Matthew Gawrych and I just got really good vibes from him. So when I got our first single done I sent it to him not even expecting to get signed. But apparently he really liked it.

Wow it must be 2013; Twitter got you a record deal?
It’s crazy, but yeah.

How’d the new EP come into fruition?
It was supposed to be for this film that would show me recording in the studio. I had no intention of making a full album. But the more I worked on it, the more I started digging the music and it eventually became an EP. I found the lead vocals from the song “The Tracks of my Tears” by Smokey Robinson. Some sounds come from field recordings. I’m also going to let you in on a secret. I go on Vimeo a lot and audio hijack interviews. That’s how I got the voices you hear on the track.

Is that legal?
I think so. The internet is easier to find sounds than going to a record shop and digging through crates. The internet is a limitless crate. I also release a lot of the samples that I use online.

So you are saying, “Here are sounds that I use to make music, you can use them too”?
Exactly.

I dig that.
A lot of producers are too secretive with their music. There are so many assholes that won’t share their musical processes. I’ve read so many bad interviews with electronic producers because they won’t just fucking say if they are using a preset from Logic or whatever.

Are you going to name names right now?
[Laughs] No one off the top of my head. I just like showing people my process because I think people want to know how the sounds were used from my end and that they can go use the sounds however they want.

Brian, thanks a lot for speaking with me.
You bet. Have a good one.

Check out Prism House on SoundCloud

Want more music from VICE? Check these out:

Britain's Nazi Punk Scene Is Alive and Limping

Best Musical Questions for the 21st Century—Kim Fowley Interviews Chris Darrow

Scout Niblett Spreads Love and a New Album

I am watching television at four in the morning and a dozen women named things like Danni and Lyndsay and Monica are laughing at my penis. Not laughing in the way they might if my penis had a ventriloquist act or looked like Abe Vigoda, but laughing because it is pathetic and small and, like, sooo not going to work where are my keys I have to go please don’t call me.

I am watching a particularly ruthless infomercial for ExtaMax, a penis-enlargement supplement. According to its website, ExtaMax works by pushing more blood into the penis’s three chambers than the body has deemed necessary to “stretch the tissue,” which sounds sort of like someone trying to visit the moon by strapping a crate of dynamite to a pogo stick.

A blonde girl named Brianna twists her hands and says, “I feel so bad for the guys who don’t have it going on down there because unfortunately they’re going to have to either, like, get on a lot of steroids so their body looks really buff, or work super hard and make a lot of money, to, like, compensate for it.” In the ExtaMax universe, women are yammering holes who can be satiated only by monolithic cocks attached to men in Barbour jackets; the men are desperate mole people whose lone pursuit is to become Barbour men. To attractive women, small dicks are Chernobyl, the Holodomor, a Godsmack song, Mondays, and the Khmer Rouge fucking them simultaneously.

ExtaMax is humiliation porn: viciously misogynistic, unforgiving, and bleak. It preys on the desperate in a way that is so blatantly contrived, but also brutally effective and constructed like every other infomercial: Here we are, alone, in the dark, thinking about what’s wrong with us, listening to a confident woman holding a microphone and telling us unequivocally that we are defective and hopeless. They make statements that are dire and absolute; there are magnified images of the spectacular, craterous pores of a person who is not you but who is maybe sort of you.

There is such a shocking, vivid element of the ridiculous in infomercials because they are serving this to the delusional, to the helpless, to the obese, the naive, the damaged, the heathens, the women with psoriasis, the men with shriveled, runty dicks. Infomercials reduce you to nothing so that you will need their products to survive. We’re here with Jennifer, whose face looks like a pastrami sandwich. Jennifer, would you like to not have a face like a pastrami sandwich? If you have watched television after two in the morning then you have been relentlessly reminded that you are wrong. All of you: your bald head, your posture, your breath, your epidermis. Delirious televangelists thundering like Lenin at the podium, telling you your attitude is wrong, too, but that he will save you. It will only take 26 minutes plus shipping and handling. Infomercials are their own revolution, wise and inspiring only in that their audience needs them to be.

Watching television at four in the morning is to be profoundly, exhilaratingly free and alone, occupying a kind of fourth dimension where you can become everything but don’t have to become anything. Where you can get rid of your acne with six easy payments, where you are a renegade Godbro listening to Big Tymers in your Jeep Grand Cherokee as you peel out of the high school parking lot, but where you are also still sitting there, semilucid, eating waffles with your hands in the flickering glow of three blonde women nodding and applying creams to each other and trying to change their lives. It is a last salvation; you are safe to dream of plastic, homogenized American vanity without the realities of mirrors and fluorescent lights and people who think your thighs look like stegosaurus feet. Those people exist, but they are not here, only you are, triumphant and scared at the same time.

Infomercials want to know if your ass looks like a bunch of dice wrapped in a giant Band-Aid. Is it made of McFlurry and Domino's garlic dipping sauce? Real asses are the kind Cam’ron would film while taking a handheld camera around a Rite Aid in Dayton, Ohio. The Brazil Butt Lift workout insists you do not need a real ass. You need a synthetic, impossible ass.

Only then will you be loved and confident and conquer all who doubt you. It fetishizes curves and thickness so it can covertly demand less of its workout. Its name and curriculum implies, “You only have to work out hard enough to look like a brown person.” But we want this. We are a nation of frauds and cheats, impostors and illusionists, sucking in our stomachs and puffing out our chests, begging you to notice us, to clap and stare and watch as we pirouette and stand next to our old jeans. I am a new person. I am a superhero.  We are sitters and enablers. The InstaSlim functions like some kind of pachyderm harness that instantly turns piles of fat into something resembling cleavage.

Infomercials are complete fabrications. Every single element. Audience members looking at each other with cocked heads and ridiculous blouses; hosts with their arms held apart as a woman walks out REBORN because “how good does she look folks, amirite?” It is all a lie. Infomercials are presented as a sort of explicitly superficial fairy tale. The exchange is not money for a transformation but money for further indulging this fantasy. People are chanting your name; they are looking at each other in disbelief. You are rich and skinny and tan and cooking chicken in only 15 minutes.

Previously by John Saward:

Why I Love Watching Ron Jeremy Fuck

Octomom Masturbating Is the 38th Wonder of the World

John Saward likes O.V. Wright and eating guacamole with no pants on. He lives in Connecticut. Follow him on Twitter @RBUAS.

Mere seconds after tweeting that my pitch to write this article was accepted, some random guy on Twitter had this to say to me: "Lena Dunham is the voice of a masturbatory, hyper-self & her pathological titty baring represents Generation Shit."

I mean, such vitriole and hate for a woman who makes a comedic television show that you can't even watch on public TV!?!?

For years now, my wife has insisted that I'm a feminist despite my arguments that I'm not. She says that since I believe a woman has the right to work for the same pay as any man that I'm inherently a feminist. My half-hearted response was that I couldn't possibly be. I've never read any feminist literature, never participated in a rally, and I certainly can't stand behind the idea that a woman can do everything a man can (or vice versa). To be clear though, I do believe in equal rights, equal pay for equal work and that, intellectually men and women are equals. I also totally love the way women look naked. So, I couldn't possibly be a feminist, right?

In steps, Lena Dunham and her show that you've no doubt heard all about by now, Girls. A show that I personally find to be wildly entertaining despite the fact that the male characters make my skin crawl. Girls instantly became quite controversial as it's a comedic television show that is breaking new ground by depicting the lives of young, white people in their 20s. Also, it's the only TV show where there's no ethnic diversity. Oh, and and and, it's the only TV show that attempts to take a humorous look at the lives of people transitioning from childhood into adulthood. Oh, jeesh, I forgot it's also the only television show that allows women to be on camera naked. Shit! One more thing, it's also the only TV show that focuses on people of enough privilege and money that they can waste their days away following their whims.

Wait a minute! There are hundreds upon hundreds of TV shows that do all of the above things, sometimes all at once. So what is it about this TV show that makes it such a lightning rod for hate. Hate for her body. Hate for the lack of diversity. Hate for the characters' privileged lives. Hate for the fantasy scenarios of her characters having sex with men out of their league? Oh, wait, I know. It's the only successful TV show that's written and directed by a young woman. That is truly the only thing unique about the creation of this show when held up against the multitudes of other television shows that are doing similar things.

Did Kareem Abdul Jabbar take off his goggles, put down his sky hook, and take to the Huffington Post to publicly shame Judd Apatow (a.k.a., the producer of Girls) when he wrote and produced a similarly themed show called Freaks & Geeks? It didn't have titties, but it did have an entirely white cast of teens set in Detroit fucking Michigan. Was the main character a self-centered girl who used people and her parents to get what she wanted? You bet your ass she was. Did the feminists cry and say "but what does Lindsay Weir stand for!?!?" No, they didn't. Why? Because it was a TV show written and produced for our entertainment. You either liked it or you didn't.

Where are the complaints of racism for another one of HBO's hit TV shows, Game Of Thrones, whose only characters of ethnicity are bloodthirsty, shirtless primitives? Likewise, where are the complaints about the main characters in that show being overprivileged when, clearly, the main characters flounce around like they're goddamned kings and queens. Where are the cries of "goddammit, Daenerys, put your tits away!!!" after every episode in which she whips her tits out? Oh, you don't care because, clearly, it's a show made solely for our entertainment and her tits suit your vision of Playboy tits? Why the fuck would we hold the writer of this show up to any public scrutiny for creating an imaginary realm where old, fat men fuck teenage women in every episode?

Want to talk about privileged white people and vapid, disgusting unrealistic behavior? Let's talk about Entourage! Here is a television show that is meant to entertain us by following the exploits of three young, white men who follow a celebrity around leaching off of his money, cars, houses, booze, drugs, and even his female admirers. There's not a single moment of that show that's not offensive to every single one of us yet it gracefully sidesteps public scorn under the guise of entertainment.

I know, I ask a lot of why's here but can someone tell me why the world at large has put this woman under so much public scrutiny, hate, and controversy? If you can point me to one single thing that sets her apart from her numerous counterparts making television entertainment beyond the fact that she's a young woman, I'm all ears.

So, Lena Dunham, you've managed to do a few things here: You've managed to make me laugh; you've managed to make me cringe at that Adam character too many times; but more importantly, you've proven my wife to be correct (as usual) and confirmed that I am indeed a feminist. The sheer volume of public outcry over your show has pulled off my blinders to the reality of how our culture deals with a successful woman. I apologize that I've not caught on sooner, but, thankfully, it's never too late to change. Now, I'm going to settle in and watch a nation of internet police tweet, blog, Facebook, and, hell, maybe even pinterest the ways that I and you are completely wrong. But don't worry, the number of people fighting for your right to have a job making television shows just increased by one.

Philip Michael Wolfson is an architect from Philadelphia. He was Zaha Hadid's head of design for ten years and now runs his own studio where he works on sculptural pieces and interior architecture. In this episode of Art Talk, we visit Philip in his London studio and he discusses his creative process and shows us a recent piece called "Tsukumogami."

Media coverage of the Carnival Cruise ship Triumph’s recent ill-fated voyage, which ended in sewage-logged ignominy in Mobile, Alabama last week, says a lot about America’s state of mind. Passengers endured horrid conditions. Passengers got more than they bargained for. Passengers were offered a full refund, cruise waivers, $500 cash, and free chartered flights and bus rides home as compensation. Passenger ordeal. Passenger difficulty.

Okay, guys. Let’s talk about what these passengers went through. Instead of taking a four-day cruise departing February 7th from Galveston, Texas, docking in Cozumel, Mexico, and returning to Galveston on the 11th, there was an engine fire at sea on the 10th which left the ship adrift with its power system crippled, and the ship was eventually towed to Mobile, Alabama, where it docked on the evening of the 14th. Food ran low and the ship’s water and sewage systems ground to a near halt. These are facts not in dispute by any account of what happened.

Sure, that’s an ordeal. It qualifies. Four days of food rations and toilet trouble in a large, enclosed space full of thousands of other people. That’s an ordeal for everybody aboard the ship. Passengers, sure, because they paid to be pampered and isolated from the cares of the world and squeezed dry of their money in the process, and enclosed spaces with sewage issues are very much not a part of that bargain. But, also: crew.

A-ha. Crew.

I’ve lived on a cruise ship, where I was a paid entertainer. It was… not for me. But the experience has left me with some reasonably qualified opinions about cruise ships and how they operate. There are many ways to explain a cruise ship to the type of person who’s never been on one and probably wouldn’t want to. David Foster Wallace did a pretty good job in his essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” or at least I assume he did a pretty good job. I tend not to read anything written in a style that turgid about a subject that A) has replaced high school as the current setting of all of my tension dreams and B) I know more about than the author. I’d also recommend Kristoffer Garin’s Devils on the Deep Blue Sea as an overview of the cruise-ship industry. But if you’re just looking for a quick and easy summation of the basic feel of being on a cruise ship, the fastest reference point I can give you is the third act of WALL-E, only with Filipinos instead of robots.

If your reaction to “Filipinos instead of robots” is something akin to, “How dare you! Those are human beings!” then you’re starting to see the point I’m making about the Carnival Triumph. And also: look in the mirror and recount the last time you hung out with some Filipinos or even willfully thought about Filipino geopolitical issues. Listening to or making fun of the Black Eyed Peas doesn’t count. But I digress.

Look at this passage of an Associated Press account of the Carnival Triumph voyage:

In a text message, Kalin Hill of Houston, described deplorable conditions over the past few days.

“The lower floors had it the worst, the floors ‘squish’ when you walk and lots of the lower rooms have flooding from above floors,” Hill wrote. “Half the bachelorette party was on two; the smell down there literally chokes you and hurts your eyes.”

Well, guess where the fucking entire crew of 1,100 lives, Kalin Hill of Houston, Texas. You know, the crew of the ship? The people that live on the ship and make it work and provide service to the 3,100 passengers who come aboard and disembark in cyclical rhythm once or twice a week? Guess where those poor fuckers were. You guessed it. Below you. Where conditions were the worst.

And how did the crew react to these conditions? From the Detroit Free Press:

"The crew was always smiling," Jenkins said. "They need a huge raise."

So basically, the 1,100-person crew of the Carnival Triumph managed to put smiles on their faces for the benefit of tourists, out of a sense of loyalty to a corporation, while their quarters were soaked in raw sewage.

Now I enter the realm of conjecture. Conjecture is the only tool we have, really, when we struggle to digest the official story as told through the official news outlets. Regarding anything. So: allow me to treat conjecture like an appropriate tool for this drifting shit-boat situation from now on, for reasons I’ll discuss. I want to give ample warning about this, though. It’s conjecture based on the life experience and web-based research of a dude who’s spent eight total months on board cruise ships telling lame jokes to old people. Take it with a grain of salt, and call the lawyers off.

I’m not sure exactly what measures were taken aboard the Triumph, but I know that the majority of crew on a cruise ship does not normally have access to passenger areas (most outer decks are passenger areas) without special permission. I’d assume in this extreme case there was some measure of additional fresh-air dispensation afforded to members of the below-decks crew. But I also know this: it was allotted. Regardless of how lenient the crew captain might have been under the circumstances, there was a time when somebody in charge said, in effect, “All right, guys, time to go back to where all the human shit is and get back to work. And try not to let the passengers see you frowning or complaining or, you know, retching.”

I’m fairly sure that the steps taken to alleviate suffering aboard the Carnival Triumph were prioritized passengers first, crew second if at all. I think it is safe to assume that the crew got the worst of the conditions, both in terms of food rations and amenities, since they get the worst of the conditions while everything is running perfectly. That’s fine. The crew is at work while the passengers are financing the operation. (Forgive me: SOUNDS LIKE A SHITTY PLACE TO WORK, HA HA HA.) These are safe and reasonable assumptions.

There are reports emerging that the Triumph (what a great name for this malfunctioning floating tax shelter) had experienced mechanical issues during the cruise prior to the engine fire. I’m no expert on the mechanics of large ships, but I do know from experience that mechanical issues aboard cruise ships are not uncommon. Probably less uncommon than you’d think if you cared to think about it. I’d go so far as to guess (and it’s an educated guess based on my experiences aboard two BRAND NEW cruise ships) that some amount of mechanical failure has occurred on a large majority of, if not every single one of, the world’s existing cruise ships. If this surprises you, talk to somebody you know who’s served time in the Navy or owned a boat. That person will tell you that anything people make that floats on water is going to develop problems faster than just about anything else a human can build.

I also know from experience that due to the amount of money that cruise ships generate every time they set sail, within regulations, any repair which requires long docking periods is avoided in favor of manageable fixes which will allow the ship to operate with a diminished engine capacity, and that’s just par for the course.

I mean, I don’t “know” these things like “privy to the decision-making conversations,” so much as I “know” them like “it seems pretty impossible that a sweater can't be $10 at Old Navy without something bad having happened somewhere.” What I do know is when there’s a problem with the stabilizers the itinerary is more prone to weather-based changes, and the passengers get all upset about it and treat the service crew worse, and then everybody on the crew is grumpier and grumbles about it without being able to do anything. Ships are not a democracy. Mechanical issues are accepted without question by a majority of the crew. They don’t have a choice. Those decisions come handed down from a very high pay grade along a chain of command patterned on the military. The average crew member on these things just has to hope that whatever fix is going to work and something bad like this isn’t going to happen before either their contract is up or the whole thing dry docks for an overhaul.

I’m not saying that the cruise-ship industry is patently irresponsible or doesn’t take regulations seriously. Another thing I’m not an expert on is maritime and international law. I’d imagine it functions the same as law does anywhere else, which is to say that the richest people can exert the most pressure to create advantages for themselves. The cruise ship companies are very rich. Infer from that what you will. Of course like all companies they have a responsibility to their backers that includes limiting the damage from any large-scale PR disasters like this one. So while nobody’s perfect, and profit motives urge these ships out into international waters as often as they possibly can in order for their tax-free casinos to become legal, this kind of thing really isn’t likely to happen. I’ll say that much to the credit of the cruise-ship industry. Clearly it’s not impossible for something like this to happen. It’s just not likely.

Have we heard anything about the Carnival Triumph’s voyage from members of the crew? Of course not. We’ve heard official statements from Carnival’s CEO instead. The crew isn’t going to say jack shit. If you’re curious as to why that is, imagine yourself left for dead in Manila with the money you have in your pocket and no visa. You’d probably prefer to keep your mouth shut and take your chances back on the shit-filled boat. And you’d smile as wide as they asked you to until you got yourself out of this mess.

The story of the crew aboard the Carnival Triumph is probably not all that remarkable. If the same thing happened aboard any given cruise ship, the crew’s reaction would probably be about the same. Put a good face on it, go to work, and bitch and moan bitterly behind closed doors until the ship’s management, for morale, throws an occasional crew party or commandeers the theater’s big screen for a crew viewing of There’s Something About Mary. Then you go back to your small crew cabin that you share with three other professional oil-rag guys. Don’t make waves (sorry) because they have the power to make your life a lot worse than it is.

You give up a few rights, and maybe it’s not so bad because you’re seeing the world and you come from a place where there aren’t any rights to lose. That’s just what your life is like when you work on one of these things. It’s somewhere between way, way better than a Jakarta slum (unless it overflows with sewage like the Triumph did, then it’s about the same) and way, way worse than an average American’s quality of life. Few Americans work on cruise ships. In terms of the international labor pool, Americans tend to be more expensive, entitled, and litigious than their counterparts. So you get a lot of Filipinos and Indonesians. Front of house is Canadians, and Welshmen and Scots, with sprinklings of Slavs and Serbs, and occasional Brazilians, Bahamians, and Jamaicans, because they work hard, and they’re happy to go anywhere warm and sunny that’s not caked in grime. They are good people, most of them, sometimes-naïve adventurers and romantics, and they understand that to work and live on a ship is to occasionally take things like human feces and gastrointestinal distress in stride. “In stride” means “without suing.”

I have no idea what’s going to happen to the crew now. Can you imagine, though, this happening at your work? Covered in shit for four days, asked to smile about it and shepherd a flock of fat complaining idiots facing this kind of difficulty for perhaps the first time in their pampered lives, and then your reward is… what? Is Carnival going to cut these people loose now that the ship is out of commission? Do they stay aboard during repairs, helping to clean the shit off their meager belongings? Do any of them get a waiver for the Motel 8? In Mobile Fucking Alabama? What? What’s going to happen to them? Who knows, because: who cares. They’re just a bunch of Filipinos anyway. Right?

Anyhow, not much of the coverage of the Carnival Triumph’s severe engine malfunction and public-relations fiasco has focused on what did not happen. What did not happen is a lot of people dying. What did not happen is giant flames engulfing a cavernous metal pleasure craft with a functioning casino in it. What did not happen is the ship sinking. What did not happen is a mutiny. Those things could have happened but didn’t because the crew did a good job.

And you know what else the media is not going to cover? What will not happen. What will not happen is the crew of the Carnival Triumph getting a free stay in the New Orleans Hilton and a charter flight to anywhere for their troubles. What will not happen is the cruise ship industry becoming unprofitable, or big fat old stupid American tourists no longer having more money than they need, or huge portions of the rest of the world having as much anything as they should, or the heroic smiling Filipinos and other crew aboard the Triumph suddenly becoming visible, nameable human beings to the fat shit-covered idiots telling CNN all about their horrific ordeal. They are just the “crew.” The crew did a good job. Good job, crew. All of you individual people in the crew.

The Tenderloin is widely acknowledged as the most hellish neighborhood in San Francisco. Out of the city's ten most violent crime plots, the Tenderloin is home to seven. Recent stats estimate the neighborhood has an average of three major crimes per hour, including one-third of the city’s drug offenses, with a yearly mean of two crimes per resident. The population is made up of more than 6,000 homeless people and contains one-fourth of the city’s HIV-positive drug users. Filthy sidewalks and vacant buildings peppered with single-occupancy hotel rooms provide a home to all levels of drugs and prostitution.

My friend Lorian has been employed as a social worker in the Tenderloin for several years now. Her tweets about it (things like: “today: 4 dead clients, 1 murdered provider, 1 client defecated in the lobby, 1 dead dog, & 1 facebook friend posted pictures of nachos.”) got me curious as to what her job is like. She was kind enough to answer some of my questions. 

VICE: I imagine it varies greatly, but can you describe your average workday?
Lorian: The first thing is getting through the door at 9 AM. We usually have to step over clients or random strangers passed out on the benches from drinking and/or using since God knows when. The smell is the first thing that hits you—a stench of urine, feces, poor hygiene—it's really at its strongest in the morning, but you get used to it throughout the day. Then we check our voicemail. Twenty messages from the same two or three clients who either scream their financial requests over and over, simply sit there and breathe, or tell you that witches are under their beds waiting for the next blood sacrifice. Paranoid clients like to fixate on witches, Satan, etc. Anyway, we get ready to open and hand out checks to the clients who are either on daily budgets, or who make random check requests. The budgeted clients are the most low-functioning, as they can be restricted to as little as $7 per day in order to curb their harm reduction. They'll go and spend that $7 on whatever piece of crack they can find, and then two hours later they're back, begging for more money. Clients will find some really brilliant ways to beg. When we're not dealing with clients out in the lobby, which can involve anything from handing out checks to cleaning up blood to clearing the floor for folks having seizures, we're usually dealing with the government agency assholes over at Social Security. I personally work with around 200 clients, so the paperwork and filing can be extraordinary. My “average day” starts at 9 AM and lasts until 7 or 8 PM.

You're in the Tenderloin, right? What's the deal with that area?
Yeah, the Tenderloin is where the majority of our clients live in residential hotels (SROs). It's one of the two predominately black neighborhoods left in SF (the other is the Western Addition), and it's the center of the crack, heroin, and oxy drug culture, and it hosts the transgendered sex-worker scene. It's an incredible neighborhood. There's a preservation society that works really hard to keep the original buildings in place, so the 'Loin has an impressive architectural history, not to mention random shit like vintage fetish-magazine stores, pot dispensaries, and transgender strip clubs. It's literally located at the bottom of a giant hill (Nob Hill), where the old money sits and looks down on the poor black folk, so the geography of SF's class structure is more blatant than in other cities, I think. It's a fucked place: human shit smeared on the sidewalks, tweakers sitting on the corner dismantling doorknobs for hours, heroin users nodding out in the middle of the streets, drug dealers paying cornerstore owners $20 to sell in their stores, dudes pissing on your doorstep as you leave for work, etc. It's a weird, fascinating, and very hard place to live.

Why do you think so many of your clients are paranoid and/or disturbed?
Why are my clients so fucked up? Traumatic backgrounds, PTSD, and severe mental illness (schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and dementia are the most frequent cases we see). And whenever you combine a drug habit with compromised mental health, you usually get a mess of a brain. Abuse, rape, murder, suicide, war—you name it, they've experienced it. Most of our clients live with on-site case management and nursing staff, so their medication is monitored, but when they stop taking the meds, that's when psychotic breaks and fixations happen. I've been the “subject” of quite a few of these fixations. And even though our agency pushes the belief that “housing is healthcare,” the shit that goes down inside these residential hotels can be hard to stomach. A lot of our clients feel safer living on the streets. 

Can you tell me more specifically about the fixations?
The first client to fixate on me was Craig. I had just started working here, and I wasn't quite sure how to handle setting boundaries with clients, most of whom tend to be older men. The sexual harassment is unbelievable. I get everything from “you're just a hole to fuck” to “nice ass, bitch” to “do you want to have dinner sometime?” All of that happens on a daily basis, but fixations are a different beast.

When I first started, I was naïve. I didn't really know a whole lot about “triggering” or psychosis in general, so I let things go too far because I didn't know any better. Craig was my coworker's client, and I noticed him immediately because he looked just like William T. Vollmann. I mean, I was convinced for months that it was Vollmann undercover, working on a new novel or something. Of course it wasn't, but I never really got over that idea. Craig was obsessed with The Munsters, which I used to watch with my dad, so we'd talk about that show a lot. Then he started bringing in Munsters porn. He bought it off the sidewalk. He would show me the DVD case and asked if I thought he should take the porn actresses out to a nice dinner in Fisherman's Wharf, or if he should spend his money at The Gold Club (a strip joint). Then he started writing me notes. Have I ever showed these to you? He would rip notebook paper into strips and tape them together and write with different-colored markers, “I know you're a sexy smart college girl who knows the streets and I know you can't believe everything you see on television but you're pretty and smart and I know I have a mental illness and I don't want to sexually harass you but I want 20 dollars.” He wrote the same thing over and over again and would drop off the notes and run out the door. One day it escalated to the point of him having a psychotic break in front of me.

He came to the office and the first thing he said was that he wanted to do things with me that he could only do with strippers. I told him that was an inappropriate thing to say, and he snapped. All of a sudden he was projecting this memory of a woman he used to fuck and smoke crack with in jail, and something about how he killed her husband. Like, he actually saw me as this woman. So he lunged at me, told me, “You can't hurt me, I'm coming for you, I'm going to get you, the television doesn't tell you everything,” and I ran into the back and locked the lobby doors. He's now banned from our office. That was probably the most drastic case. Usually, it's just poems, letters, and gifts that clients bring to me. Most recently, a client ordered me a pink curling iron. He ordered one for himself, too. He said we could use them together. I've been followed before, but never actually assaulted. 

How does being in the midst of so much mental illness affect you emotionally? 
Man, social work is so fucking weird. People think you're a saint. “It takes a certain person to do that kind of work,” is what I hear a lot. Fuck that. When you're young, you can afford to have ideals and believe in stuff, and think that what you're doing matters, but after watching grown men shit themselves and sometimes try to eat their own shit, not to mention the countless number of times I've had to pick people off the floor and put them back in their wheelchairs because they've been drinking since 6 AM and can't even sit up straight, your measly 32K salary starts to matter a helluva lot more than social justice.

I think I got into social work because I had this idea of it somehow “killing” my ego. It seems silly, but it felt very real at the time. There's a sadness to watching your idealism and convictions go to shit. Not to mention that working in such a thankless and fucked system will kill a sacred part of you. I feel tired. For the most part, people do not want help. They want money or they want drugs or they want death. 

What you do seems important, though. There must be some goodness in it, too, right? I feel like you tweet sometimes about people bringing you weird things they see as gifts or saying nice, if totally bizarre things. Are there moments that help balance the heavy?
I don't really think of what I do as “important,” because days are days and everyone is dying and who am I to think anything of anything. But yes, there are moments, there is goodness. Today a client brought me a huge drawing he made of a tree in Golden Gate Park. It must've taken him hours. He said he drew every leaf. I told him the line work was amazing, and he said, “An amazing tree for an amazing woman.” And then he asked me, “When is the Fourth of July?” Sometimes moments like that are enough.

Previously by Blake Butler - Tim Hecker Builds Mountains with Sound

@blakebutler

My friend Thelonious was consulted in the formulation of this alphabet. He lives in Oakland, CA and he is a true G.

A – Ay, shut the fuck up.

B – Where’s my money, B?

C – C, I told U.

D – 1. Dag: A matted tuft of sheep's wool. 2. Suck a D.

E – The B is on E.

F – 1. F the B. The B stole my wool. 2. Freon – I heard the guy injected Freon into his left nut and died. Then his B tried to sell one of his molar teeth on eBay saying it was Usher’s. She also keyed my car.

G – 1. He was a real solid G. 2. Gat. 3. Gag.

H – 1. Hegumene: head of a nunnery 2. Hell yeah. 3. I’d hit that. 4. Holographic: your boner is real, but tha blowjob is holographic.

I – 1. I could go for an ice-cold St. Ides malt-liquor beverage. 2. Icarus.

J – U shoulda seen this dude, he sparked a J, right in front of the judge. And u could tell, the judge wanted to hit it.

K – 1. The dude had on khakis. 2. Kale 3. I don’t even know what kale is.

L – 1. A marijuana joint, created with two papers that before rolled, form an L shape. Despite popular belief, it's not technically a blunt. 2. I’d do Liv Tyler and Lisa Bonet. 3. This L is gonna be the size of a baseball bat. 4. The dude in front of the judge rolled his L in kale. And you could tell, even though it was kale, the judge still wanted to hit it.

M – 1. Mahogany. 2. Miley Cyrus: I’d tap that too.

N – 1. Nanism: the condition of being dwarfed or being a dwarf. 2. Nanization: artificial dwarfing. 3. Naugahyde.

O – O shit, the judge is a dwarf.

P – 1. Pectoral. 2. The pterodactyl in Jurassic Park 3 looks real as hell. 3. The dude went to get his palm read by a palm reader and ended up getting a blowjob.

Q – 1. When the dwarf judge talks it sounds like she’s quacking. 2. Quagga: extinct African wild ass like a zebra.

R – 1. Rotund. 2. That ass was real rotund and we ain’t talking about a zebra.

S – 1. We’re talking about an ass the size of a stadium. 2. Strobe-light pussy.

T – 1. Tabanid: bloodsucking insect; gadfly. 2. Her brother sings in the tabernacle.

U – 1. C, I told U. 2. Her hair had pieces of urinal cake in it. 3. I upchucked.

V – 1. The librarian was very big, like she’s on the offensive line big. 2. Vapulate: to flog; to be flogged. 3. The librarian woke up in the middle of the night and was like sleepwalking or some shit, and she vapulated all over his ass. She kicked his motherfucking ass in her sleep. Haaaahaaa.

W – Weezy.

X – 1. Malcolm.  2. Xylophone. 3. The librarian had teeth like a xylophone.

Y – 1. Fuck a yurt. 2. Crabs in red Vajayjay nation, like Yugoslavia that country or nation or whatever, but only this one’s Vajayjay nation. Wait, is Yugoslavia still there or did they change that shit? All I’m tryin to say is Y for Yugoslavia. And she had lots of crabs. I also hate yurts.

Z – Zap hippie bitches with your dick when you’re in their yurt and turn them into ice cream cones with sprinkles.

(A True G Cover Art by Mike Force.)

@trentmoorman

The Ellington Kid is kind of based on a true story. Two kids meet up in a standard South London kebab shop and start to spin some urban-legend yarn about what happened to the eponymous kid. Its premise is small and contained. The whole thing could have just been a story overheard at the kebab shop it takes place in, but of course, it has a killer punch line.

The filmmaker Dan Sully skillfully crafts the secondhand story of a gangland stabbing into a cultural conversation piece. The speech, led by the wonderfully ghetto Charlie G. Hawkins from the popular BBC show EastEnders, jumps back and forth from black British comedy to heavy drama regarding the gutted teen found in the same kebab shop. At four minutes, it’d be more efficient and definitely more fun to just watch the short yourself instead of me trying to thirdhand tell it.

Jeffrey Bowers is a tall mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as an art and film curator. He is a programmer at the Hamptons International Film Festival and screens for the Tribeca Film Festival. He also self-publishes a super fancy mixed-media art serial called PRISM index.

Previously - I'm Short Not Stupid Presents: 'Dance Music Now'

I was originally going to title this "One More Year of Doing Cooler Things Than You" but I feel a little less annoying today than I do on most other days. 

So as we all know, last Thursday was Valentine's Day, and while you were staring at your weird girlfriend or boyfriend across a table at Applebees, I was up in the Catskills with my sex lover, doing sex lover things at Kate's Lazy Meadow. If you don't know, Kate's Lazy Meadow is a vacation spot in the woods owned by Kate Pierson of the B-52's and her partner, Monica Coleman. I'm not sure if "partner" means gay partner, or just business partner, but that's what it says on their website. It's a little on the expensive side, but as I see it, you only live once, so why worry about saving money that you don't have anyway?

In order to get to Kate's Lazy Meadow from Brooklyn, NY, we had to take a long ass bus. I like taking long bus rides though because I miss driving, but even moreso, I miss being a passenger. There's something fun and special about not only being excited about the place you're going to, but also being excited about the trip there. Again, it all comes down to learning how to love and live your life. Yolo or whatever. Our stop on the bus was an unscheduled stop, so we had to tell the bus driver the name of some weird intersection to let us off at. When we first got on the bus my gf was like "hey, can you let us off at 5678900 Stickstone road?" But that didn't feel like enough to us, because we're paranoid, so I ran up to him while he was driving and asked "hey, are we almost at 78899798711 Treedirt lane?" We still didn't really know what was going on and some old lady had to pull us off the bus and point down some road with her hand so we knew where to go.

After getting off the bus, we walked for a mile on basically the highway, and then arrived at the cabin to check in. While checking in we got to meet Barry, who handles the main office. Barry is very cute and was wearing a button up jean shirt, and some stylish glasses. HI, BARRY! We gave Barry all the money we had between us (actually my gf did because I'm poor and have nothing) and then went into our cabin to cry about how cute it was. When I made the reservations for this place about a month ago I was told about how I couldn't get it for free, even though I write for a fancy magazine, because they always sell out during Valentine's Day, but I'm 100 percent certain that we were the only human beings there for the two full days and two full nights of our stay. That's okay though. We're happy to give Kate our money, and we don't like people anyway.

Two things you need to know about staying at Kate's Lazy Meadow are that when they tell you that there is no cell phone service, they mean only in the rooms. If you walk down by the creek, you can get at least three full bars. You DO need to bring food with you though, unless you have a car. Thankfully we brought sandwich shit and snacks because on the second night, when we were kinda tired of sandwich shit, we tried to call for a pizza and people were like "no." So if we hadn't of brought groceries, we would have died. 

Here's a quick list of activities experienced during our stay:

1) Sandwiches.

2) Group showers in a shower with water pressure so low, it was like a cute and romantic joke.

3) Not seeing bears, deers, rabbits, or any other sort of animal. Although we did see a duck, although that barely counts, and did definitely step in deer poop.

4) Many rounds of sex that included extreme eye contact.

5) Two nature walks. One where we sat on a log, and one where I forced my gf to go into an abandoned shack that she didn't want to go into. There were shotgun shells inside. 

6) Watched an old horror film called Don't Go in the Woods that was pure insanity, and then on the second night I forced my gf to watch On Golden Pond while I kept looking over at her to make sure she was experiencing the correct emotions.

7) Saw actual stars and pretended to know where things were in the sky.

8) Painstakingly wrote emotional things in the guestbook and then said out loud "our entry is way better than everyone else's."

Go to Kate's Lazy Meadow if you have a million dollars. I plan to go back as soon as humanly possible. CABIN 6A REPRESENT! WOOF WOOF!

Ps. Our very own William Cody Watson, who does our Sad-Ass Music column, made us a VD mix for our trip, which you can also download and enjoy HERE. 

@WolfieVibes 

It has come to my attention that a lot of grown-ass women out there have yet to experience an orgasm, which makes me want to jump off a cliff on to a bed of sharpened dildos. Orgasms are important, and you need to be able to make yourself come. I know it can be frustrating, but you have to keep trying because the entire world runs on orgasms.

I remember masturbating like it was my homework as a young teen because I knew that eventually I’d get the hang of it, and it would put me on par with the rest of the orgasm-experiencing world. That world, of course, includes 100 percent of adult males, who make up nearly 100 percent of presidents and the majority of CEOs and police officers and professors. I’m not really sure why that part’s important, except for the fact that it would make me really mad if everyone telling me what to do could magically blast cum out of their genitals, and I couldn’t. My point is that it was a conscious, effortful process for me, but I persevered and succeeded.

I noticed that a lot of the “instructions” on how to masturbate were purely physical, but that’s clearly not the only ingredient in an orgasm casserole. As we all know (or should know) girls are mental basket cases, just like their mothers, and their mothers’ mothers, and centuries of some anthropological bullshit that I don’t understand, and sometimes that stuff can really get in the way of everything fun. Therefore, I am going to approach this orgasm problem from a meditative standpoint.

PRIVATE SPACE  

One day as I was driving down a busy street during rush hour, I suddenly realized that I was about to have an orgasm, because I was masturbating. That realization was amazing to me, since I could remember feeling uncomfortable about touching myself in my own bedroom, simply because it was inside my parents’ home. Women’s magazines will probably recommend that you find an isolated spot where you can feel comfortable being alone—like in the shower with the door locked, for instance. But I think you just have to confront what it is that makes you feel so shameful about masturbating.

I used to get worried that someone would see my fingers and notice cervical-mucus residue, or see that my face was all flushed and postorgasm-like. Then I realized: Fuck it. I am a disgusting, gross piece of shit, just like everybody else, and if I don’t have an orgasm today I’m going to end up killing someone.

No one will notice that you were masturbating. No one cares. Join the party.

AROUSAL

You have a clitoris, which is supposed to be full of nerve endings and blood flow and all of this magical, orgasm-inducing stuff, so then why, when you touch it, does nothing happen? Are you broken? No. You can’t just mechanically rub your clit and expect something nice to happen. You have to zone out and think about things that make you feel good (horny).

What makes you excited? You don’t know? For some reason, this is often a hard question for women to answer (probably because of centuries of oppression, but I don’t want to get into that), meaning fantasizing about love and sex might require a lot of mental effort. Maybe you’re deeply, truly aroused by the thought of sharing the same values and meaning of existence with another human being. Maybe you’re aroused by the thought of having kids and starting a life with someone you love. Maybe you’re aroused by rape. Whatever it is, you need to dive into it with reckless abandon and know that these thoughts are yours to keep, entirely private, and nothing to feel guilty about.

LETTING GO

This is crucial. A lot of women will get really close to having an orgasm but then stop themselves because the feeling is too overwhelming, or scary, or maybe even painful. In all steps of the process, you have to keep letting yourself go. What does that mean? I guess it’s a combination of A) freezing time in the moment of fantasy, B) getting in tune with your body and carrying out all of its impulses, and C) again, diving into the sensation with reckless abandon. Your body is resilient; it can handle your orgasm. Even if it feels like you have to pee or whatever, just let it out. The worst thing that could happen is your sheets will get wet, and you’ll have to do some laundry. (It’s not pee.)

Which reminds me, when my first boyfriend and I starting becoming “sexually active,” I was 15 and still had memories of being in a diaper and putting Vaseline on my diaper rashes. Unsurprisingly, that made the sensation of him taking off my underwear REALLY WEIRD. That’s super fucked-up, but maybe a lot of people have weird childhood residue like that and don’t realize it. Sometimes all it takes is saying, “Fuck it.”

Basically, my main piece of advice to you is to accept that you are a weird human-animal sex thing, you CAN have an orgasm, and you won’t die from it. 

If you want to look at porn but porn sites intimidate you or piss you off, try getting inspired with James Deen and Nicole Ray, or James Deen and whoever, or Manuel Ferrara and whoever. They know how to treat the ladies.

NOW GO, BE FREE

Previously by Kara Crabb - Let's Colonize Outer Space

Follow Kara on Twitter @karacrabb

Scot Sothern is a Los Angeles-based photographer and a big prostitute fan. Over the past two decades Scot has slept with and/or photographed a plethora of LA's sex workers. His photos have been widely exhibited in galleries in the US, Canada, and Europe. Scot's images evoke such a visceral reaction in the viewer and raise so many questions, that we decided to give Scot a regular column aimed at getting the story behind the photo. The idea is simple: We feature an image from Scot’s archive along with his explanation of just exactly what the fuck was going on when he took it. Welcome to "Nocturnal Submissions."

Four AM, Sunday morning—Saturday night for those of us still awake. At Western and Hollywood Boulevard, where a giant hot dog used to sit on top of a funky food joint and now it doesn’t. I miss all the lowbrow landmarks of LA, the city I love. South on Western, I blow through a yellow light at Santa Monica Boulevard and then down three blocks of street walkers in fuck-me gear like fan-dancing peacocks. I see the LAPD on a corner across from McDonald’s. A couple of bullies in a squad car toying with a couple of working girls on the sidewalk and chasing off all the johns. The johns go home horny, and the girls go home broke.

I’m a matinee cowboy looking for wrongs to right. I turn left onto Romaine and then pull to the curb next to Taco Bell. The girls on the sidewalk check me out but seem a bit perplexed. The cops are idling in the other lane next to me. I ignore them, zip down the passenger-side window, and call out to a freckle-faced cutie in a white pleather jacket and gladiator pumps. “Hey, Tootsie, how’s it goin? You wanna make some money?”

She approaches slowly, looking back and forth at the cops and me.

“Are you a cop?”

“No. Are you?”

“There are cops right there.” She points in case I haven’t noticed.

“Yeah I saw them. Hop in, take a ride with me. I wanna take your picture. I’ll give you 30 bucks.”

“Yeah, OK.” She opens the door and gets in. “You know those cops are right there looking at us?”

“Yeah I know but I’m not breaking any laws, fuck 'em. Buckle up, I don’t want to get a ticket.”

I drive and the cop car backs into and out of an alleyway following me. At the first four-way stop they pull up next to me, squawk the siren, and hit me with the spot. A beefy baby-faced cop looks at me, and I look back. I lower my window, and he starts the interrogation. “Where are you going?”

“Just taking a drive, not really going anywhere.”

“Who’s that with you?”

“Friend of mine.”

“What’s her name?”

I ask the hooker what her name is, and she tells me.

“Her name’s Roxanne.”

“If she’s your friend, why did you just ask her what her name is?”

“We haven’t known each other for very long.”

He’s getting red, and I’m thinking maybe I should stop fucking around before he shoots me. “I just met Roxanne, and we’re going to go and take some pictures.”

“Pictures?”

“Yeah, see? I’m wearing my camera and flash so I hold them up for him to see. “We’re not breaking any laws. I’m a photographer, this is what I do.”

He doesn’t say anything, just looks at me so I ask him if we’re all done and can I go now?

The cop rolls up his window and I go back into drive. They follow us for a block and then turn off. “What’s your name?” Roxanne asks me.

“Scot.”

“You really just wanna take pictures?”

“Yeah, is that OK?”

“Yeah, I guess. That was gangster, they way you talked and what you did. I hate cops.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve done smarter things. I’ve got a thing about cops; they make me flippant like I’m back in high school.”

“I hate cops,” Roxanne says again. “Nobody can make any money with them all hassling everybody.”

The street curves 90 degrees and then changes its name. There’s a nice little park with tennis courts on the left. No parking on the park side and a string of cars on the right side. I’m looking for a spot.

Roxanne says, “You know the reason why the cops try and make it so we can’t make any money is because hos don’t pay taxes, so the cops don’t make any money for themself and they don’t like us.”

We’re in a nice family neighborhood and the denizens don’t want vice and drugs on their doorsteps. That’s the primary reason the cops are herding the girls off to different climes. I double-park in front of a little hacienda with a terracotta roof and a square green yard. Everyone is asleep except us.

I find a nice spot in the park, and Roxanne shows me that she’s not wearing any panties. I take three pictures and pay her for her time. Back in the car she offers me sex, but I want it at a deep discount. I tell her I’d love to and promise I’ll think about her sometime when I jerk off but not tonight. I drive her back to where I found her and the cops are back in place as well. Roxanne gives me a hug before she gets out, and as I drive off, I hear her telling the baby-faced cop we just took pictures and there is nothing he can fucking do about it. I drive home feeling good about myself.

Previously - Close to the Goodyear Blimp

Scot’s first book, Lowlife, was released last year. You can find more information on his website.

What can we tell about a person from his or her face? Quite a bit, it seems. Psychological experiments since the turn of the millennium have indicated we do a good job judging people's sexual orientation, reproductive fitness, criminal proclivities, and even whether they're Mormon or not all based on their faces. A new study suggests there’s another trait we can add to the list: a man’s willingness to express racist beliefs.

There’s an obvious irony to a study that says we can tell if a man will act bigoted based on the shape of his face. But the logic underpinning the study, conducted by researchers at the University of Delaware and soon to be published in the journal Psychological Science, is a circuitous and unexpected one, and it makes a persuasive case.

Turns out it’s all about the testosterone.

Recent research indicates that men with high levels of testosterone have certain facial characteristics that set them apart from men with less testosterone. In particular, they have what researchers call a higher "facial Width-to-Height Ratio" (fWHR) which compares the distance between cheekbones to the distance between the upper lip and midbrow. Men with a higher ratio have faces that appear a bit wider horizontally and bit compressed vertically (see below). Studies suggest they also tend to behave more often in ways we commonly associate with testosterone—including (sorry, guys) a greater willingness to cheat, exploit other people, commit fouls in a hockey rink, and behave aggressively in general.

The difference in fWHR commonly found between men and women seems to emerge during puberty, when most adolescent boys’ testosterone suddenly shoots through the roof. Their narrow, egg-shaped craniums get proportionally wider, a bit more block shaped.

Read the rest over at the new Motherboard.VICE.com.

For astronomers, February 15 was a rather exciting day: we were buzzed by asteroid DA14 and had an unexpected visit from a meteorite over Russia. The internet, broadly speaking, took a more apocalyptic view of the day's events: one rock from space came smashing into the planet, and we narrowly missed colliding with another. There’s something about asteroids and meteorites that really brings out the conspiracy theorists and sensationalist news reports. And some floating around the web last week were pretty brilliant.

Here’s what actually happened: In 2012, astronomers found an asteroid (DA14), started tracking its orbit, and predicted it was going to pass about 17,000 miles above the Earth on Friday, February 15, 2013. Lo and behold, physics works, astronomers were right, and we got exactly the close pass we expected when we expected it.

The Russian meteorite, on the other hand, came as a surprise. It was roughly the size of an average house and came in fast, many times faster than a bullet shot from a rifle. A hole about 30 feet across was found in the surface of a frozen lake west of Chelyabinsk, the expected impact site of at least the main fragment of the meteorite.

Now, the fact that a house-sized meteorite struck unannounced is at least cause for a reappraisal of our meteor-monitoring tech. At the same time, a meteorite colliding with Earth is a random occurrence; it's not a sign that aliens or supernatural beings are planning on destroying the Earth. But that didn't stop people from proclaiming doomsday was at hand.

Read the rest over at the new Motherboard.VICE.com.

When I told my editor that the people behind the Turrbotax parties that regularly provide weird Brooklyn club kids with a place to assemble and look cool were throwing a party at a spa that was to include not only a full bar but saunas and a hot tub, I could tell she was thinking the same thing I was without her even saying it: Nudity. Debauchery. Overly enthusiastic young people making ill-advised combinations of heavy-duty intoxicants and high-temperature environments. Sexy stuff and mayhem.

But when I came out from the locker room, having changed into a bathing suit and sandals (not my usual clubbing gear), I encountered a room full of people lounging in matching white robes while a DJ spun 90s-sounding house music. A few were sipping cocktails, but the general atmosphere—heated to a swimsuit-friendly temperature, which was a pleasant change from the subzero conditions outside—was of people taking all of the motivation to rage hard that you associate with edgy underground dance parties and using it instead to chill out as deeply as humanly possible. One of my companions, sipping on a very spa-like flute of champagne with a slice of strawberry floating on top, pointed out a girl she thought was topless under her robe, but that never developed into anything.

(Side note: giving everyone at a party matching robes is a really simple way to give the whole thing a nice Logan’s Run-cult vibe. In case that’s ever something you’re aiming for.)

Things got slightly more debauched back in the spa area proper, in that people took off their robes so they could get in the hot tub and saunas, but aside from the uptick in exposed flesh it was still exceedingly mellow. Despite the hot tub’s reputation as the ne plus ultra in settings for sleazy decadence, it’s difficult to want to rage when you’re being parboiled into a stupor, and after a few minutes in 160-degree sauna heat, doing anything other than collapsing into a puddle seems impossible.

A few people seemed to want to try. A few girls loosely interpreted the requirement for attendees to wear sandals to include high heels. A few guys and girls who apparently showed up sans swimsuit were hanging out in their underwear. A trio of Polish kids who looked like they’d just barely made the event’s age requirements included one discomfitingly young-looking girl who was walking around in an extremely tiny thong, but most people seemed more skeezed out by her than turned on.

Eventually, after we’d sweated out whatever toxins we’d accumulated during the initial rounds of drinks when we showed up, plus whatever we’d had before arrival, plus probably quite a bit of residual stuff hanging around in our systems, we headed back out to the lounge/bar area. It was 1 AM, prime party time, and people were still primarily concerned with lounging on couches like sun-baked iguanas while another DJ spun more 90s-sounding house music. Our visions of debauchery had been melted away in the saunas and hot tub, but whatever part of our brains may have cared were offline by that point.

One of our group commented that the scene was like a poor man’s Playboy mansion, but it seemed to me more like the chill-out room had come unmoored from a party and while drifting around, spawned its own even more chill-out room. Which I was perfectly happy with.

After showering and changing back into street clothes, I walked back out into the freezing cold, weighing the novel feeling of leaving a party feeling considerably healthier than when I’d walked in.

@milesraymer 

The Burton US Open's 30th birthday party kicks off with the Washed Up Cup, where past US Open competitors relive their glory days by getting boozy and trying to survive an icy slalom run. After sobering up, some of the Washed Up riders discuss the evolution of the halfpipe and how and when it became known as the "superpipe." Then we hear an early-90s party story about how one night Shaun Palmer and Noah Salasnek were wasted and rolled their van off a Vermont back road. We circle back to why the Burton US Open is so important to the history of snowboarding and cap off the episode with the highlights from the 2012 pipe finals.

I don’t recall the exact wording of the note. It was tacked on a corkboard, obscured by notices and fliers, in a basement corridor of Otis Art School, when Otis was in the Wilshire District. Sheree Rose and Bob Flanagan, who took performance art to a place where it really hurt, had just given a seminar, in the course of which Sheree nailed Bob’s penis to a block of wood. Someone in the audience fainted. I had been to many Bob and Sheree events, and at least one person fainted every time. We were leaving the building when I saw the note, jotted on pale yellow stationery in spidery pencil strokes: When I die, I want to come back with a smaller dick. This struck me as the funniest thing I’d ever read, for some reason. The college context, probably. I couldn’t stop laughing. I said, “You have to see this.” Sheree and Bob had already seen it. It had been there for a week. The boy who’d written it had hanged himself right after placing it there for the world to read.

“He had a huge cock,” Sheree said. “It was the only thing about him that anyone cared about. It made him completely miserable.”

Many men, I think, would consider a huge cock an easy cross to bear, but obviously that kid hadn’t.

He had a glancing connection to Louise Nevelson, the sculptor. He couldn’t resist talking about her. His mind was so full of Louise Nevelson that it seemed to contain nothing else. I don’t remember what his paintings looked like. He made frequent visits to Louise Nevelson’s studio, where her several acolytes gathered stray pearls of wisdom, in hopes, I suppose, of threading them into a career necklace. It seemed innocuous at first, to ask someone’s opinion about something and get, instead, something not quite on point, something vaguely like something Louise Nevelson must have said. In photographs, she looked like a ridiculous person. The kind of florid grande dame who relishes being a fag magnet, frankly. I didn’t care for her sculptures, either. Whenever he quoted this oracle goddess of art, I imagined her voice issuing from her false eyelashes instead of her mouth. One morning I realized that I’d been listening for weeks to the secondhand table talk of Louise Nevelson. While I supposed my boyfriend had been seated at the far end of a very long table from her, which was lowering enough to consider, I also felt she was right there in bed with us, so I left him. I had to. He was turning into her.

That reminds me: an American youth in Paris attended a dinner where Gertrude Stein happened to be a guest. He was seated at least a dozen place settings away from the great lady, whose presence so unnerved him that he knocked over his wine glass. Mortified, he frantically mopped up the spill with his napkin, while Gertrude’s voice carried from way down the table: “Don’t worry, you didn’t get any on me.” 

Another person “wired to admire” was a Park Avenue socialite Becky Johnston thought might invest in a film we were writing, an adaptation of the James M. Cain novel Serenade. Mrs. Lypnick was married to a button manufacturer. She had once put money into something on Broadway. She was small and nervous and rich and unmemorable, except for an obsession she had with the Swiss novelist Max Frisch. She carried Max Frisch’s name into every conversation as if offering a platter of delicious hors d’oeuvres. But Max Frisch was more than an appetizer. Max Frisch was also the main course. In no time at all, it would not have surprised me to see Max Frisch step into the room from behind Mrs. Lypnick’s curtains, holding a champagne glass and an elegant cigarette holder. Our movie intrigued Mrs. Lypnick because, for reasons she never specified, it reminded her of him. But then, everything did.

Max Frisch was the vibrant center of a festive realm Mrs. Lypnick could only approximate in his absence by mentioning him as often as possible. As she paraphrased various aphorisms and witty ripostes the distinguished author had reeled off in her presence (“I could never put this as well as Max did, but…”), her Park Avenue maisonette brightened with a luminescence imperceptible to others, but keenly tangible and pleasing to her.

After a few meetings with Mrs. Lypnick, I understood that she had never met Max Frisch. His was hardly a household name. It was by purest chance that I or anyone else Mrs. Lypnick encountered had ever heard of him. It would not have been especially incongruous if she had met him, had even known him well, but I was certain she had conjured him from nothing, or almost nothing. Perhaps she had glimpsed him across the lobby of an opera house or leaving a reception—a fleeting non-encounter that irrevocably scrambled the juices in her brainpan. Imaginary Montauk weekends and yachting holidays with her special friend were more important than anything that happened to her in real life.

Last month in Edinburgh I went to the zoo to visit the penguins. The day was so blowy the treetops thrashed in the wind with a shirring sound like crashing surf. Rain as fine as needles started, and speakers in the trees announced the closing of the park. I only had time to see the giant sloths and pink flamingos and a leathery aquatic mammal I don’t know the name of moving swiftly back and forth under the inky water of its pond. The penguins were diving and feeding, feeding and diving. The zookeepers, in yellow smocks and blue galoshes, hand-fed the penguins whole, dead fish. The penguins snapped the fish up as if pulling them from a vending machine. We love penguins, but that is one-sided. No penguins will talk to you. No penguins will even look at you unless you are close enough to be a threat. Why should they? Unless you are holding a dead fish, no penguins have any reason to go near you. That is the way of penguins, and it always will be.

In the Philippines, almost every week someone in a karaoke bar is killed for singing “My Way” by someone else who doesn’t like his singing. “My Way” is, of course, a hubristic and self-congratulating song, as many Frank Sinatra standards are. But “My Way” is a particularly abrasive song for people who have to listen to someone else singing it. A person who thinks he did it his way is often mistaken, but even if he really did, it’s sometimes prudent not to sing about it.

I was upset when Veruschka told a journalist the story about the rat. I thought of it as my story. Although I had heard it from somebody else, I wanted to use it before everybody in the world heard it too. “I’ll tell you a better story,” Veruschka said. “A famous soccer player became very depressed and one day he threw himself in front of a bus. The driver of the bus was a big fan of the soccer player. When he found out he’d accidentally killed his idol, he went into a depression and jumped off a building. Then the bus driver’s wife became despondent. She went to a psychiatrist, but her life was ruined, so she swallowed an overdose of sleeping pills. The psychiatrist felt like a total failure when he heard about it and hung himself in his office.”

“How much of this is true?”

“Maybe none of it is true. It’s a better story, isn’t it?”

Enzensberger writes of a train passenger who feels lucky to have a whole compartment to himself. A second passenger enters. The first one resents him for ruining his luck. When a third passenger arrives, the first two bond in silent hostility against the intruder. The third passenger mentally aligns himself with the other three in resentment against a fourth passenger who shows up, and so on.

The opposite happens at a roulette table. The gamblers welcome the arrival of new players. As the wheel spins they form an excited family. They buy each other extra drinks, tell stories, joke. They’re thrilled when anybody at the table wins. They share gambling systems and superstitions, talk about their jobs, even exchange business cards, though it’s understood that what starts in a casino ends in a casino. When they lose, they don’t care. When players leave the table, they’re sad.

One night I had won $6,000 by two in the morning. Everybody thought it was hilarious that I kept winning. Until four, the table was crowded. Then one player left. Then another. By five, I sat alone with ten thousand dollars in chips stacked in front of me. I felt abandoned and horrible. I put the whole pile on double zero, which absolutely never comes up. The croupier understood my relief when I lost everything.

A man in my neighborhood used to wish me dead whenever he saw me in the street, as he walked two enormous, snarling, unfixed male dogs. “I’ll be happy when you’re dead,” he would say, or “Anyone can see you’re shrinking with age,” or “You’ll be dead soon,” and he would say this with a big goofy grin on his deranged face, not only on the sidewalk but also in the corner deli, the local bookstore, if he saw me there, never loudly enough to be overheard but very distinctly, implacably, with obvious sadistic pleasure, in the matter-of-fact way that someone might remark on the weather, and this man, who was tall and bald and unpleasant looking in every detail, with eyes that twinkled with insanity behind his thick glasses, had written a novel once, a neighbor told me, and felt that his brilliance had not been sufficiently recognized, and not only wished me dead but wished many others in the neighborhood dead in the course of his dog walks, perhaps everyone he saw. These maledictions went on for two years, and eventually had their intimidating effect. After a time, whenever I left my building, I feared having to confront this person’s madness. Life is difficult enough without this kind of thing. In Regla, finally, I paid a Santeria priest 20 pesos to make this person stop bothering me. When I got back to New York, a woman who worked in the bookstore told me the man with the dogs had died, suddenly, a week before, from a cerebral hemorhage. I don’t really believe the Santeria priest had anything to do with it, but for a moment it was nice to think so. I wonder what happened to the dogs, she said. Maybe he took them to hell with him, I said. But look here, I said. I can’t help thinking there is a lesson in this. He wished me dead. He told other people he wanted them to die. And then his brain exploded.

Previously by Gary Indiana - Apes on a Gilded Treadmill

Photo by Steve Robertson

Hip-hop and punk were born at about the same time (the late 70s), in the same place (New York City), with the same rebellious and aggressive spirit; however, their fashion aesthetics have always clashed. Although there have been some instances of style cross-pollination—Public Enemy rocking Minor Threat gear, Lil Jon cloaking himself in Bad Brains apparel—rap stars have traditionally liked things loose-fitting, expensive, and flashy, while punks go for tight, ripped, and dirty. 

Somewhere along the line that all changed, and today’s MCs look like first wavers at CBGB: The skater degenerates of Odd Future call themselves punks and wear skinny jeans, while the goth-influenced Harlem-based A$AP Mob are regularly seen in Ramones-esque biker jackets. The bigger stars are following the trend too: Lil Wayne went crust punk for a 2011 feature in Interview magazine, and Wiz Khalifa has been known to don a colored frohawk. 

R&B kids are also going punk. Heartthrob Miguel sports a slicked-back pompadour reminiscent of Joe Strummer, and Chris Brown has appeared on the red carpet in a punk battle jacket. Surprisingly, his painted and studded jacket, which features the Exploited, Cro-Mags, and D.R.I. logos (and was first worn by Rihanna), didn’t come from a couture shop for the stars—it originated in the living room of Noel Austin, a 40-year-old from Seattle who owns DNA Fashion Designs. 

Noel doesn’t even know how Breezy got ahold of his jacket. “I haven’t always been the most sane or sober person,” he said. “I’ll see stuff on the street I don’t even remember making.”

Back in the day, Noel refused to sell his gear to anyone. “I’d say, ‘Fuck off, make your own.’” But he finally caved in when he needed rent money. Now he makes jackets for celebrities for $6,000 a pop when he’s not creating gratis pieces for Poison Idea and D.R.I. “I want to sell all my shit to A-list douchebags,” he said. And Noel says that like punks, rappers and R&B artists want the authentic stuff. “They want to look rugged, like they smell of whiskey and cigarettes.”

Australian illustrator James Jirat Patradoon, who created the inverse of Chris Brown’s punk gear by putting together a battle jacket covered in R&B artists’ names, offered some insight: “There’s such a pan-subcultural thing going on; it’s easier to shift from one look to another.” After all, you can now buy bondage belts at Target and H&M.

While it’s clear from their music that some rappers actually get the punk thing, others are clearly posing. “If I saw a bunch of guys in leather jackets with mohawks, I’d think they were a boy band,” James said. “Maybe the new way to rebel is to wear a three-piece suit everywhere you go.”

Want more fashion?

Snoop Through the Ages

Denim All Day

Johnny Marr Takes Music and Fashion Seriously

I don't know if driving a taxi constitutes a high-risk job, but that's what came to mind when I arrived in Mumbai. The city is full of parked cars, in which the drivers lie not moving a muscle—completely unperturbed by the chaos surrounding them. You find yourself thinking twice, preparing to explain yourself to the police. Nobody sleeps that well, you think.

But they do. The people of Mumbai have turned sleep into an art form (they can sleep anywhere and in any position), and the taxi drivers are the masters of that art.

See more of Pedro's work here.

Previously:

Chris Bethell Lies About Manchester

Albert Elm Is Like Photography's Edward Scissorhands