All illustrations courtesy of the Naruyama Gallery.

I am sure if I had accepted a certain marriage proposal, my life might have continued in an ordinary way, but I refused that humiliation. Later when I would have accepted it, the suitor had passed away. It was of natural causes. 

My father disowned me, and for a while I lived in a women’s dormitory. When my resources were exhausted, I spent several years doing the things that I needed to do. It was at this time that I began to see black ghosts.

My mother received a report of my circumstances from my aunt, and she begged my father to send me to the city, where he owned several apartment buildings. Seven years had passed, and his temper had subsided. He agreed on the condition that my mother join me in the city and supervise his properties.

When I was growing up, my mother had enjoyed an active social life, but that had changed since she began to have eczema. It covered her shoulders, arms, legs, stomach, and face. She bathed in a potassium-permanganate solution, but it only reduced the itching and dyed our bathtub indigo. 

She had become a shut-in and then an intellectual. In the city, she watched silent movies at night. She saw poetry in her old ghost movies, and watched them over and over again. I don’t like ghost movies, even from the silent era. She watched them late at night, in her room, on her laptop computer and in the morning, she talked to me about the actors.

“Ichikawa Danjũrõ IX was opposed to appearing on-screen, but he was convinced that to do so was a gift to posterity. He is said to have channeled Tokinoriki very well. A few years ago I read Tokinoriki again. I was forced to read excerpts in school, but I could not get past the intricacies of court protocol, and the opacity of Taira’s diction. I don’t know what has happened, but the text has opened up for me and now it is like I am speaking to a friend.” 

“That is fascinating,” I said. A gust of wind blew through the tree outside, and petals landed on the dining table. Ghosts are not all bad.

***

I earned significant sums of money irregularly doing translation for foreign speakers. I had an office south of the old palace. Every year after 25, a woman diminishes in value. After 31, time is up. It was different in my case because I was in communication with the black ghosts.  

Edward was introduced to me by email through Murata’s press agent. I was surprised and even confused by his note. I read and then reread it. Yes, I thought. He is flirting.

He took a place in my thoughts, and I formed an impression that he was desperate and insane, like most lonely people. It is ordinary to keep the translator in the loop when laying out the brochure, in case of misunderstandings. In fact, some clients ask me to handle this and other organizational matters, but I suspected Edward was different. When he sent his picture to the graphics department, I thought, He is handsome. But anyone can appear that way.

During our first telephone conversation we spoke about the logistics of his visit. Due to the time change, I spoke to him from my bed. My mother was watching a movie with a piano soundtrack turned up very loud, and I heard something new in Edward’s voice. It was a precise intelligence. I explained to him that, depending on the duration of his stay, it would be customary for me to provide some guidance to the city. 

***

Edward called frequently after that. Due to the time change, I always received his calls at night. The third or fourth time we spoke I had been drinking, and we began to speak personally. He told me about his history of drinking, and his recovery. I told him that I lived with my mother in an apartment, and I didn’t speak to my father. 

He said, “Why do I always fall in love with unusual women?” 

“What do you mean?”

Murata had placed Edward in the outlying areas for one week and in the city for four days. Although Murata had recommended a country-based English-language translator, he and Edward did not get along. Also, Edward said, the other translator’s English was good, but he was unable to understand subtleties, such as humor and tone. We agreed it would make more sense for me to come to the country. He said that he would speak to the press agent at Murata and arrange for us to stay at different hotels, but I told him that would not be necessary. 

It’s hard to lie to my mother, because she is an expert liar. I told her that I was going to the country for work, to translate for a Murata guest speaker for the cotton panel. I said, “She is supposed to be quite an influential business lady.”

My mother said, “If you want to go and meet a man, I am happy for you. By all means, do what is necessary to change your situation.”

***

Since the incident, I did not drink, due to a court order. Occasionally, however, I drank with my mother in small amounts, or alone at a place around the corner. I confessed this to Edward. I said, “Earlier tonight I had wine with my mother. Generally I don’t enjoy drinking wine, but sometimes we share a bottle. My mother likes white wines.” 

“One bottle between two people is not a lot of wine.”

“I take more than my share, and besides, I am not supposed to drink at all.”

“Why aren’t you supposed to?”

“The courts have said I can never drink. I wore a monitoring anklet for one year. However, there are other opinions on the matter. I would like to talk about it, but I am not permitted to do so. It’s the culture.”

He said, “I like the way you talk after you’ve had a glass or two of wine. You should have one before we meet. We are all human.”

“But I can’t.”

“Why?”

“Because you do not drink. I think it is healthier if we both do not drink when we are together.”

“That’s true. I do think it’s healthier in the long run, for me, if you don’t drink, but the first night we meet, I want you to be happy and relaxed. I think that would be good for us.”

***

I took the train to the country. The train was full and I had to stand. A boy in his school blazer was eating chips and drinking a large can of beer. He had frizzy hair and pockmarked skin. The bar in the dining car was crowded with men in black suits. I ordered a mixed drink, but my adrenaline overrode the alcohol, and I had to order two more to feel any effect. Then I had a fourth, but I didn’t drink it all. I have always had a temper. At 23 I was in a relationship with a man. It seemed like a good relationship, but I always had a funny feeling. Sometimes he would text message on his side, with his back directed to block his screen. He often went for appointments and came back vague about what had passed. When I was suspicious, he was accusing. It went on like this for two years. I always had a strange feeling, like he could give me something that I wanted, but I did not know what it was. He had scratches on his back one night and when I asked him why, he said we should see his psychologist. She was an old lady and he had her completely fooled. He lied to her about his symptoms to receive certain medications. When I told her my fears, she said they stemmed from my bad relationship with my father. Then I came home early one day from work and found him in bed with a girl I had known a long time. She was a girl who didn’t have any thoughts of her own. She was always a little bit poorer and a little bit uglier, but she would show off to me.

I said, “At least I know the truth.”

He said, “And what is the truth?”

Isn’t it funny that this simple conversation would lead to manslaughter? Once two old men who guarded my father’s building fought over a game of chess. They had worked together for seven years and were best friends, but their words turned to blows and—with no premeditation or intent—one killed the other. Something similar happened between me and my friend. Since that night, she has been a vegetable.

***

Edward was taller than me by two inches. He had eyes like a boy who had ridiculed me when I was a child. That boy was an only child. Once his mother tried to start a riot on the soccer field. She broke a piece off the barrier fence and stormed onto the playing field. If you ever said that to the boy who had ridiculed me, he turned red and shouted, “Lies!” That was a lot of fun. Another fun thing, his stepsister had a disability, and she talked with a funny voice. It was fun in the afternoons to call her, and ask for her on the phone. Her father was one of those adults who is intimidated by young children, so for a long time when we asked, he put her on the phone. Then you could imitate her voice. But after a while, the father refused to put her on the phone, so then we tormented him. We imitated his voice, and that was even better.

“I think I know you,” Edward said. I shook his hand. He put an arm around my waist and took my hip. He said, “I am glad you are so small.”

I said, “We should go to baggage claim.”

Suitcases were coming off the ramp. People stood in a crowd around the chute.

“I was worried,” he said. “I got so lucky. My previous wife was not fat, exactly.”

He got his hand under my shirt and squeezed my side. He stuck his fingers into my ribs. “I was thinking, ‘What am I going to do if she’s fat?’”

I slipped out of his arm and said, “Which one is your bag?”

“It’s that one.” He pointed to a beat-up suitcase. He picked it up. It looked heavy, and I noticed that he was strong.

***

I had explained previously that it was not possible for me to sleep with a man before marriage, and getting into his hotel bed, I reminded him of this. I said, “I will only be able to rest beside you.”

He said, “Of course,” and a couple minutes later I was shouting. I realized after that I had shouted something profane. It was something I did a couple of times that night. 

Later, I was on top of him. Our hotel room overlooked an athletic center. The center was closed after nine o’clock, but two black people were there. They were walking on an asphalt track. They were walking in the particular way, slowly and without looking around. They did not bounce up and down with each step. It almost looked as if they were floating above the ground. One wore a hooded coat made of satin. Edward said, “Why are you staring out the window?”

Toward dawn he asked, “Do you like me?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Well, you shouldn’t fuck someone unless you like them. You should at least wait until you’re sure.”

I didn’t answer. 

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I think I deserved that.”

***

His presentation the following morning was at TEC conference center. He opened it with a long and complicated joke. It would not translate to the audience, and so I said, “The businessman has made a joke, so everyone please laugh now.” 

Since we were not drinking, we ate at restaurants and we saw movies. One movie was in 3D, and as a joke we put our glasses on before the previews, which made us seem foolish to the other people in the theater. 

“I’m not seeing the effects at all,” Edward said.

“I can see them,” I said, looking at my hand.

“Wait, maybe now I see,” Edward said. Then he whispered, “They are worried we’re going to be like this the whole movie.”

We had not ordered popcorn. The man beside us was fat, and he had a big bucket of popcorn. Edward saw me looking at it and said, “We’ll just ask that fella there.” My ghosts took care of it. About 15 minutes into the movie, the fat man walked out. He left his popcorn in his chair.

I said, “Take it,” and Edward did.

It was a midnight showing. It let out after 2 AM. A strange figure stood on the landing of the movie theater, a black woman. She stood one or two flights up, against the stucco exterior of the theater. She was maybe 40 years old. She wore a shapeless black dress. She might have been homeless. She watched us.

“Look,” I said. “Look at that strange woman.”

“She looks like the women who come to you in dreams.”

“It’s funny that you say that.”

“I think she is a man.”

I didn’t say, “That is not a human at all.”

The woman moved, and I saw it was a teenage boy. He wore a black shirt and black shorts that reached his knees. I said, “Let’s hurry and get to the hotel. Let’s take a car.”

By chance one passed, and I flagged it down. Edward followed me into the backseat. But our driver got onto a one-way going the wrong way, then took an inappropriate turn and took us onto an express lane. I wanted to tell Edward things that should not ever be spoken. Some things should not ever be spoken, and so I just said again and again, “This is strange.”

In the lane of opposing traffic, a Camaro pulled up beside us. It was driving backward, against the flow of traffic in its own lane, so that it drove parallel to Edward and me. Inside were two young black men, who both turned to regard us. 

I said, “I think I better stop.” And Edward said, “I feel like I have been sucked into your universe.” 

I said, “Don’t talk about it.”

In five days we saw all the good movies. I tried to take him to a strange eel bar I’d heard of, owned by a Japanese poet, but I got lost and couldn’t find it, and so I pretended it was my intent to show him the inaugural tower. 

***

On the third day in the city, after we agreed to marry, when Edward was going to meet my mother, we began to drink. 

“I don’t want to go to the hotel bar,” I said. “It’s depressing. It’s the afternoon. There are other places. We should take a taxi to Rub A Dub. Tonight is reggae.”

It was raining.

“I want to buy you a nice bottle of wine,” Edward said. “I can’t do that here. Maybe we could try the hotel.”

“My mother will be expecting us soon. We have already had a bottle, in four glasses.” 

After finishing a bottle of nice wine, it was time to go. I wrote a text message to my mother that said, “We have had wine.”

“There’s wine in the house,” my mother answered. “I bought it for the two of you. It’s in the cabinet under the trash bags.”

My mother had completely rearranged the furniture, and half-dismantled the shrine. She had vacuumed and cleaned. She is a very neat woman under ordinary circumstances, but now—down to the finest detail—the apartment was immaculate. I could see she had stood on the table, taken down the crystals of the chandelier, and dipped each one in solution. She was tossing the salad. The meal was arranged on the counter, along with as some smaller dishes. I introduced her to Edward.

I said, “My mother said she is honored to meet you.”

“Please tell her that the honor is mine. Tell her she is even more beautiful than her daughter.”

“My mother said you are flattering an old lady very well, and please continue. She also asked if you would like a glass of wine.”

“Please tell her yes, and thank you very much for going to all this unnecessary trouble.”

“My mother said houseguests are a great pleasure. She said she used to have them quite often, and she preferred, whenever it was possible, to do all of the cooking and service herself. She said that is traditional here, but she has heard not in America.” 

My mother went to the kitchen. She had bought a $40 thing to aerate the wine. It came in a glossy box that showed American models drinking wine. 

“Wine needs to breathe,” my mother said.

I brought Edward a glass and he drank it. Then he said, “Bring me more wine.”

He drank a little, and then he said, “Eddie Murphy was so brilliant in his prime. He’s just brilliant. He’s a brilliant comedian.”

I told my mother what Edward had said. She said, “It’s true.”

“They don’t have them like this now—just ask your daughter. She would know.”

His tone made his meaning clear, but my mother did not understand. She said, smiling, “What does he mean?” 

I said, “He means I slept with a lot of men when I was alone, and you and dad would not take my calls. He means I am a whore.”

My mother stood up and went to her room. She closed the door behind her. 

“See,” I said, “you’re very drunk and you embarrassed everyone. You made her angry.”

“I see that.”

“I think it would be best for us to go.” 

I called a car. While we waited for it, I put up the leftovers from dinner and cleaned the plates and bowls. My mother had already cleaned the kitchen, so there was very little to do. When I was done, I said, “What are you thinking?” 

“I am trying to decide if I will go back to the country.”

“Oh.”

“You would send my things in the morning.”

“Yes.”

“Now you’re making it worse.”

I looked out the window.

“You embarrassed me,” he said.

“You called me a whore.”

“You’ve had sex with hundreds of guys.”

“Not hundreds. Something like 30. Many women have.”

“Maybe they have the sense to lie.”

I got up and went to lie on my bed. All the pillows as well as the duvet were gone; my mother must have borrowed them. I put a towel under my head. Half an hour later Edward came in and lay beside me and said, “What are you doing?”

We held each other like children. I said, “You smell like Chex Mix.” It was only 9 PM. At one o’clock, my eyes opened. I nudged Edward and said, “Let’s go back to the hotel.”

“What?”

“Let’s go back.”

But he turned over. He had drunk a lot, and so I went back to sleep. 

***

“Are you going to come out and practice with me and Patience, or are you going to stay in your room with that ma-a-an?”

It was a little after seven, and Edward and I were in the missionary position, because we thought it would be more quiet.

I said, “I think I’m going to stay.”

“OK,” my mother said. Her tone was clear.

Edward rolled to the side and we stared at each other.

“She knew,” I said.

“How?”

“The sound of my voice.”

“No, she didn’t.”

Edward cleared his throat.

“What do you want to do?” I said. “What if we get dressed and go and have coffee?”

We went down to the bay. We sat on a park bench facing the ocean. He said he understood my definition of desire. He used the names of philosophers I didn’t recognize, and he made a definition that was not mine. It was analogous, or a part—but not mine. 

He started insulting me. I made the kind of remarks he had made to me. He said, “I left my first wife because I couldn’t make her happy. The woman I left her for was not special in any particular way; I loved her because I made her so happy. My psychology is much simpler than yours: I want to be loved. If I am not, then—” he made a gesture of tossing away garbage with one hand. 

I said, “I am going to go back up and read.”

“OK. I think I will sit here a while.”

I didn’t move. He got up. He sat on the ground and stretched out stomach up on the grass, making a pillow out of his shoes.

“You are hurting my feelings,” I said. “I understood everything you said, and I feel nauseated. In case you didn’t know.”

“Then you feel like I do.”

I said, “Let’s go walking.”

We walked a ways. A baby seagull stood beside a bench. We tried to see how close he would let us come. The seagull was nervous and felt our gaze immediately. He looked at us like predators. Then—almost like a human—he tried to look away, as though convincing himself he was being paranoid. We took another step forward and waited. The seagull did not move. We took another step. The bird eyed us again. He fluffed his feathers. We waited. He made a motion, considering flight, then stayed. We waited, waited, took a step, and he flew away.

Edward said, “Why do you think people get married?”

“Different reasons.”

***

Edward sneaked drinks all day. We did not end up going back to the hotel. By nighttime, he was loose on his feet and moving strangely. He insisted on carrying my purse. It fell off his shoulder and it dragged, caught under a chair, and nearly tipped him over. 

“Let me carry it,” I said.

“No,” he put the purse back on his shoulder. The purse slipped again, caught on a chair, and was dragged along the floor, out the door, along the sidewalk to the corner, where he went out into the street and waved for a cab.

In the cab, he played some racist music on his phone. I asked him to please turn it off. He played the song to its end, singing along, and scolding me for my rude choice to play such racist music. 

I said, “You think I am 36 years old and unmarried because I accept any man who comes along? You think I don’t know how to be alone?”

“You just proved it,” he said. “You just proved it, because when you said that it hurt my feelings.”

“Hm.”

“You are desperate for a man and would take the first one to come along. You don’t love me, you just agreed to marry me because you want a baby. You know that I am fertile.”

I lay down across his lap. It was after midnight. I was afraid to be alone with Edward. I was very angry. I asked him again to be quiet, and he said, “I’m perfectly within my rights to play music.” I sat up and directed the cab driver back to my mother’s building. Edward—hearing from my tone and gesture—said, “Just look for the one that looks like a motel that has been taken over by homeless people.”

***

My mother was asleep. I made Edward hot milk. When he was out cold, I noticed his phone. I looked at the screen. He was in touch with a woman named Sandra Williams. She had written to him earlier that day: “I dreamed you married a psychiatrist who was 45 years old.” 

I wrote to her, “That is funny. I wonder why you were dreaming that! :D”

I waited, but I guess she was asleep. I wrote, “I guess u r passed out, or having sex with your little dog.”

“Next time he cums suffocate him like autoerotic asphyxiation and grind the dog-dick meat into momos. :D”

A number, with no name, had written, “This is crazy, just so you know.”

I wrote, “Who is this?”

“Are you kidding me?”

“No.”

“Are you OK?”

“Yes. :D”

“It’s the person you’ve been engaged to for a year!!”

“What’s crazy about that?” I wrote.

“Call me when you can talk.”

“Is it crazy that I love you?”

“Why do you say those things?”

I went to the bathroom. I found the small box of potassium-permanganate crystals. I woke Edward up and said, “Electrolytes.”

“Huh?” He was sobering in his sleep. He wanted to be held. He reached up to take me into his arms.

I said, “Electrolytes, for a hangover. Tastes terrible, but makes you feel great the next day.”

“Mm.”

“Only thing is you have to swallow it all. This much,” I showed him the handful. 

I said, “Put them in your mouth, and before you can taste it, swallow them with this,” I handed him a jug of water.

He did as I asked. In the morning, he was dead. You will want to know how I went on after. My black ghosts were helpful and happy. I think it was harder for Edward’s ghosts. For a little while, before news of his death reached America, I had a good time, toying with them on his phone.

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One of the strategies that Patricia Highsmith employs in her first novel, Strangers on a Train, is to bounce the narrative between two characters. As the title suggests, these two strangers, Guy and Bruno, meet on a train at the beginning of the book and discuss killing people in each other’s lives in order to duck suspicions based on motives. Guy doesn’t take Bruno’s suggestion seriously, but after Bruno kills Guy’s wife, Bruno pressures Guy to murder his father. The structure of the book allows Highsmith to jump from one character to another and put them in completely different parts of the country, but because of their relationship and the vacillation between the two storylines, they feel as if they are very close to each other. It is almost a split screen effect, where they are living their separate lives distinct from each other, but the parallel structure brings them close together. It feels as if they’re in the same frame.

The linear form of the book prevents the stories from being played at the exact same time as a split screen might in a film (although split screens are rarely used this way in movies). But the two threads are woven in such a way that causes the reader to experience the stories as if they were happening simultaneously, at least that is the understanding conveyed. This technique causes the reader to go through one thread at a time, injecting a force of energy into the narrative. When each section is taken up again, it is resumed in the midst of the most crucial moments for that character. The back-and-forth transitions trim the fat and streamline the storytelling.

The book, which was published in 1950 and adapted into a film by Alfred Hitchcock the following year, begins with Guy’s perspective. Guy is the moral and stable character. It retains his point of view in the opening section in order to establish that Bruno is a madman. Highsmith writes about sociopaths often (the Ripley novels all follow the acts of a murderous psychopath), but she is able to keep readers engaged because these characters either have sympathetic human desires. In the case of Tom Ripley, he wants to be on the inside, to be liked (less so in the book than in the movie), and not to be lower class. In Strangers on a Train, we are able to endure Bruno because he is mediated through Guy, or in the very least we aren’t forced to stay with him for too long before we are shifted back to a Guy’s perspective. The filtering lens of Guy’s point of view in the beginning highlights how crazy Bruno is. And because we are in close proximity to Guy at the beginning, it causes us to align ourselves with him. Guy is the protagonist, but Highsmith often cuts away to Bruno to show what he’s up to behind Guy’s back. When she does this, we are not really aligned with Bruno even though we have been brought much closer to his thoughts and actions. We aren’t seeing him through another character’s perspective, but we still retain our allegiance to Guy.

Guy is the sane one (relatively) in the book. So when we follow Bruno as he starts on his self-motivated mission to kill Guy’s wife, we are still seeing him from Guy’s  standpoint. It is an ironic perspective because the close third-person relationship with Guy has been defied. Guy isn’t in these scenes and would have no way of knowing the subtleties of what happened during Bruno’s pursuit and execution of murder. But because Guy has been established as the protagonist, we see Bruno as an evil and distant agent acting against Guy. We in no way connect or feel sympathy with Bruno because he acts in such an extreme way, and his reasons for killing Guy’s wife are so crazy and are bound up in his desires to solve his own problems. He wants his father dead because his father controls his money and because he is cruel. So, Bruno’s emotional connection to his violent act against Guy’s wife is rooted in his own desire to have his father offed and a subtle attraction to Guy. Because the motive for his actions are so distant from the murder of Guys’ wife, and because his desire for murder doesn’t fit the wrongs he feels his father has inflicted, we have no sympathy for Bruno. But we are engaged with his sections, not because of an emotional connection, but because his actions will have such a big affect on our hero, Guy.

If we stayed with either of the characters for too long and didn’t switch between the two, the book might get bogged down in shoe leather. But because it alternates between them (favoring Guy) it can be implied that much of the shoe leather happened during the transitions. We don’t have to stay with Guy as he goes about his architecture career and plans his next marriage and then experience the murder of his estranged wife through his limited perspective. We are made privy to Bruno’s actions in close third person proximity, and thus have more knowledge than Guy. And because the reader is given that privileged ironic perspective, much time can be saved watching Guy figure out what happened. The story is propelled forward because it doesn’t need to time showing how Guy is caught up to speed about Bruno’s involvement with his wife’s death. Ultimately, the book is telling a story for the audience. It is told through segments that would take much longer in real life, but here, because the reader is aware of everything, the same rules don’t apply and things can be truncated and sped up. The sections compliment one another and allow the pace to be maintained because we don’t have to wait for the characters to figure things out. We get to see what happens on both sides at once.

Follow James on Twitter: @JamesFrancoTV

Previously - 'American Psycho': Ten Years Later/Twenty Years Later

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Behind the Debauchery

Every two years since 1895, Venice has hosted the most important contemporary art exhibition in the world. Over a period of six months, the Biennale welcomes over 375,000 visitors and raises millions of Euros in sponsorships. In 2013, 88 nations were represented.

But while everyone was talking about the art at the Biennale, we went to Venice a few months before the official opening to meet artists, curators, and producers, and to understand how such a massive art event is made as well as its impact on the city and its citizens.

Every year, the Bilderberg Group—a collection of some of the world's most powerful people—gets together to discuss how to keep on being powerful. Now, considering that the past couple weeks haven't been great ones for democracy (shouts to Turkey and the NSA!), I don't blame you if the prospect of powerful government officials holding a closed-door meeting with the financial elite gets your goat a little. Especially since while the big swinging dicks gathered in Watford, England, last weekend, unemployment in the UK continued to rise, cities in Turkey kept on burning, and the war in Syria remained the stuff of nightmares.

While you might look at these worldwide messes and see a lot of basic human weakness and error, conspiracy theorists read the news, see the word Bilderberg, and immediately start connecting the dots: the puppet masters are poisoning the water supply, they're enslaving your mind—bad events aren't the result of human weakness or error at all, but a malicious plan being orchestrated against humans by a New World Order of aliens from space. You can argue that with a guestlist that includes David Cameron, IMF chief Christine Lagarde (one of 14 women among 134 delegates), David Petraeus, and the heads of BP, Goldman Sachs and Shell, the Bilderberg Group should make its high-level discussions open to the public. Unfortunately, the legitimate demand for allowing media inside the conference gets discredited by the swarms of conspiracy theorists who show up at the event each year to stand outside the gate and scream stuff about secret occult societies.

Sure enough, when the Bilderbergers arrived at the five-star Grove hotel in Watford, they were joined by the biggest crowd of conspiracists to date. In fact, the protesters had decided to create an official event and so the inaugural Bilderberg Fringe Festival was born, complete with a campsite, makeshift press tent, security, and the biggest names in the conspiracy world, including David Icke and Alex Jones. So what's the latest in secret truths dreamt up by the powerful to fuck us? I went down to the Grove to test the (fluoride-saturated) waters.

When I arrived, the police had put a one-in, one-out policy in place. "The event has already exceeded capacity," they shouted. "We intended to have 1,000 people there; there are now 2,000. Please keep off the grass."

"Keep off the grass? Is that what we're paying our taxes for?" one guy shouted, to whoops and cheers from the crowd. I waited patiently for my turn to get closer to the fringe festival, along with a bunch of totally legit media organisations, like InfoWars, WeAreChange, and Truthjuice. Everyone seemed nervous and the air smelled of Cannabis Cup-winning weed. I wondered whether these two phenomena might be connected in some way. 

Indie Meds, who "put the pieces together" himself.

After watching journalists who figured it wasn't worth the wait to get inside peel off all around me, I finally got through. Alex Jones, the keynote speaker, hadn't begun his speech yet, so I started making friends.

"What’s your name?" I asked a guy in a brown robe.

"Indie Meds. That’s my enlightened name since I started to wake up."

"When did you wake up?"

"I started to wake up about a year ago, when I had a stroke on the left side of my brain. Afterwards, my aware side woke up and I started to notice that the news was a load of rubbish. I started doing my own research into Egyptian pyramids, the Mayans, sacred geometry, the whole package—and aliens. They all sort of came together in a package and I put the pieces together myself."

"What ties all those things together?"

"The message is the same—back to the Mayans, back to the Egyptians and back to the Atlantians even before that: you are God; you are one."


At the back of this photo, past the security, is the Grove, where the Bilderberg Group was meeting.

"What does this have to do with Bilderberg?"

"Bilderberg’s just part of the power game," Indie Meds told me. "All the wars, all the media, all the politics, all the religions. I’m sure they’re tied in with the Vatican, too. Once you start doing research, you find you can link everything together, and once you’ve linked it together it changes your outlook on life."

"OK. What’s the costume for?"

"Because I like dressing up as a Jedi."

After speaking to Indie Meds, I was still confused. What did it mean to be "awake"? Do I need to have a stroke in order to wake up? And how did sacred geometry have anything to do with a load of powerful people who meet once a year without any cameras present? I asked some more people for help.

Philis (left) and Jud Charlton.

Maybe Jud Charlton and his ventriloquist dummy, Philis, could help me wake up.

“The idea with Ventriloquism Against Conspiracy (VAC) is that we come together," Jud said.

"If I came on my own, it’d be no good," chuckled Phillis.

"Fair enough," I replied. "What's the conspiracy?"

“It's all about: let’s get the information out. Let’s get all the stuff that they’re doing out.”

Many of the "awake" people seemed to spend a lot of time sleeping.

"What are they doing?"

“Well, that’s the issue, isn’t it?"

I stared blankly at him for a few seconds. "Yes. Wait—what's the issue again?"

Before I could ask any more questions, a wave of hollers and people shouting the Star Wars "Imperial March" song told me that Alex Jones had taken to the podium. The main event was about to begin.

 
Alex Jones before his admiring audience.

I'm sure you know who Alex Jones is. If you're not, he can best be explained as kind of like a WWE wrestler who adopts the persona of an extremely paranoid person every time he enters the ring. He seems to have mastered the debating technique of overwhelming you with such a torrent of falsehoods that you couldn't possibly address them all in real time.

"If you think hundreds of raped children and necrophilia is anything, that again is only the surface," he began, gently feeling his way into the swing of things.

There was a lot of weird electrode shit going on.

"They might kill me for getting up here and telling you this, but they have been putting out cancer viruses—that’s why there are hundreds of new bizarre cancers that never existed," Jones continued. "That’s why, 30 years ago—I've talked to medical doctors—doctors would fly across the country to see a child with cancer. Now I can walk out my front door and see children with cancer playing in the playground any time I go there, with their chemotherapy roach poison injectors hooked up to them!"

The crowd cheered.

"These cops. Every one of these cops. Within six years, 40 percent of them will have cancer."

The crowd laughed and cheered. Haha! Cancer.


A little girl breaks through the security line, presumably to join the Illuminati.

"Seriously. By 2030, it'll be more like 70 percent, so these cops will remember when they're burying their young child of cancer and they'll say, 'Oh, this cancer never existed 20 years ago, but all the kids are getting it. Now, let's not discuss why it’s happening, let’s discuss donating money to find the cure.' It's like if Jack the Ripper was stabbing people and we looked for a way to heal them instead of finding Jack the Ripper!"

In case you didn't understand that, which is excusable because it makes literally no sense, what Jones is essentially advocating is, "Instead of giving money to cancer research to find out where new cancers come from and how to treat them, let's stop that and start accusing businessmen and politicians of inventing new, impossibly secretive ways to mutate our genes." It's unclear what exactly the Bilderbergers are getting out of giving everyone cancer.

He then led the crowd in a chant of, “We know you are killers!” Presumably this was aimed towards the Grove Hotel, a good 650 yards away.

Towards the end of the speech, a lone provocateur jumped up and began accusing Jones of being part of the New World Order himself, infuriating the loyal crowd, who yelled, “Police! Arrest him!” The level of irony in the air was suffocating me. I couldn't help but imagine the provocateur preaching to his own devoted legion of bedraggled conspiracy theorists: The Bilderberg Fringe Festival Fringe Festival.

At the BFFFF, you can be sure there will be yet another provocateur who will interrupt the first one’s speech with passionate cries for the truth (the real truth). Hundreds of years from now, when everything is exposed to history, it will come to surface that that guy—the conspiracy theorist who dared to doubt the conspiracy theorists who in turn doubted the mainstream conspiracy theorists like Jones, who dared to doubt the Bilderberg New World Order—was right.

Trevor, a.k.a. Noisy Parrot.

Despite being buried beneath an avalanche of new information, I still didn't really come away from Jones's speech with any proper understanding of what was going on. So I asked some people if they could dumb it down for me.

"What do you think the main point of Alex’s speech was?" I asked Trevor, who goes by the name Noisy Parrot.

"Trying to enlighten us to what’s going on behind the scenes."

"What is going on behind the scenes?"

"Well, it’s the Bilderberg meeting."

I sighed. "Why do you have elf ears on?"

"Oh, they’re actually fairy ears. I roll with a group of fairies."

Janet (left) and Valerie.

I turned to two of those fairies, Janet and Valerie, to ask, "What do you guys think the main point of Alex’s speech was?"

"Just to spread awareness, I think," said Janet. "To see so many like-minded people come together, it makes me think that there is a shift happening."

"Yeah," Valerie agreed.

"A shift in what?" I asked. "Please can you explain to me what I'm supposed to be aware of?"

"So many people I know are finding things so incredibly different in the past few years. I think people are starting to wake up," said Janet, before prancing away with Valerie. I'm guessing they were off in search of better vibes and people who weren't asking them questions about why they were asking questions.

But I had every right to be frustrated. I'd come here to figure out what was going on inside Bilderberg—or, at least, what these people thought was going on inside Bilderberg—and no one could give me a straight answer. It was around this time that I began to notice a worrying number of children playing around the "spiritual healing zone" that had apparently been set up to counteract whatever dark ceremonies were going on at Bilderberg. I couldn't help but wonder how many of these kids were being ushered into a life of paranoia and strange looks every time they tried to strike up conversations about what "really matters" during history classes.

But maybe I was just being cynical. Maybe they regularly contribute much-lauded op-eds to InfoWars and were here of their own accord? Maybe, with their naive, uncomplicated take on the event, they could help me to finally wake up?

I asked a little girl what she thought about the Bilderberg Conference.

"Ummm. Very fun!" she said, to my surprise. Very fun? Did she have a part to play in the New World Order, too? Was this all some kind of game to her?

"What do you think is going on over in that hotel?" I probed.

"I’m not sure," she said. I wasn't convinced.

"Is it where the New World Order meets to discuss eugenics programs?"

"Yeah!"

I got out of there as fast as I could before she injected cancer into my blood.


This lady's shirt reads, "I went to Bilderberg 2013 and all I got was this lousy New World Order."

By now, I'd met lots of very opinionated people who didn't seem to want to disclose any opinions other than the fact that the Bilderbergers were the guys behind cancer. But I didn't quite feel awake yet. Now, I've been to enough of these type of events to know that you can always find hot girls at the hula hoop circle, and I thought that maybe the hot girls could help wake me up.

Francesca.

Francesca had a killer smile. If auras are real, she definitely had one, and I could totally feel its energy. I think she could feel mine, too.

"What brings you here today?" I asked.

"I’ve come here to spread as much unconditional love as I can. To everyone. And I think it’s working—I can feel it."

"Me too, I think it’s working. What do you think was the main point of Alex’s speech?"


Fringe Festival security guards escort someone away.

"They’re just making people aware, which is great. I love the fact that they’re here doing the right thing and speaking the truth."

"What are they making people aware of, specifically?"

"Of what exactly is going on in the world. We’re not listening to the media and all that. This is actual, y'know, important stuff."

I was a little upset that Francesca didn't have any answers for me, either, until she told me that she loved me and hugged me goodbye.  

Bryony.

"What brings you here today?" I asked a girl named Bryony.

"People, everyone, connecting and information," she replied.

"What information, specifically?"

"Uh, about the… people in there. What are they called?"

"Bilderberg?"

"The Bilderberg, yes. We shall not surrender to these people who are trying to control us and oppress us. And poison us."

"How are they poisoning us?"

"They’re poisoning us by putting fluoride in the water and genetically modifying nature."

"So does everyone in there support water fluoridation?"

"Like, here’s the thing—I came here with an open mind. I know there are people in there who are trying to do the right thing. I came here to connect with people and to love."

I had expected conspiracy theorists to jump me from every angle while they tried to explain the "truth," but the people at the Bilderberg Fringe Festival I spoke to got flustered and couldn't really tell me what they believed, at least not in a way that I could understand. The only thing everyone seemed to agree on was that Bilderberg is somehow controlling/killing us through water fluoridation. I can't help but thnk that if that was the case, they wouldn't really need to meet for more than five minutes to discuss how to do that. ("Let's put some more fluoride in the water supply!")

It's no wonder that in times of economic hardship people want someone to blame, but if the hippies and shock jocks at the BFF can't channel their anger into something useful, it discredits everyone else who's genuinely fighting for change. We all know that when you take drugs everything seems connected in some giant cosmic conspiracy, but the solutions to the world's problems aren't as simple as trying to expose a secret cabal of lizard people intent on ruling the world. Solving the world's problems takes a lot more hard work and dedication than that, and less scapegoating of non-existent entities.

Follow Matt on Twitter: @Matt_A_Shea

More on conspiracy theorists:

Conspiracy Theorists Are Dangerous Enemies To Make

America's Not-So-Secret Paranoid Underbelly

The Frenzied Conspiracy Theories of Jeff Boss

For the past couple of months, in celebration of last week's release of Tao Lin's latest novel, Taipei, we have been featuring a weekly selection of photos taken by the author during his recent trip to Taipei, Taiwan. While there, he took thousands of pictures with his iPhone, pictures which he has divided into albums titled things like "Taipei fashion," "Taipei carbs," "Taipei babies," and "Taipei signs," among others. In the final installment, Tao takes us inside Taipei's extensive subway system.

Taipei is out now from Vintage and you can buy it here. To read an excerpt from the novel that we published a while back, click here.

"Evolution of the Taipei Metro, 1987-2015" (via)

Previously - Taipei Public Art

Follow Tao on Twitter @tao_lin

This is one fucked-up movie. There's no other way to say it, really. As fans of director Nicolas Refn and his alter ego Ryan Gosling have surely heard by now, their follow-up to Drive was pretty badly received at the Cannes Film Festival last month. How bad? Well, there was booing, maybe some hisses, and plenty of people who left the press screening well before the credits—and certainly after more than a few eyes—had rolled. Booing, as has been reported before, is a sort of spectator sport at the festival, and over the years plenty of films have been unceremoniously jeered. Among them, Taxi Driver, Wild At Heart, and Crash, which puts Nic Refn in stellar company. Even his fellow Dane, Carl Theodor Dreyer, the great master of highly charged silence and glacial pacing, was given a clamorous reception for his final film, Gertrud, at Cannes in 1965. So you could say that this is indeed a long tradition that carries on to the present day. That said, Only God Forgives is not exactly the Taxi Driver of our time, and opinions about Refn's film, so divided now, may not be destined for revision.

While I wasn't at Cannes, I was in France that week, and almost immediately after the press screening had concluded, theaters in Paris began showing the film. I just couldn't pass up the chance to go. It's not scheduled to open stateside until July 19, which was too long to hold out. And now that I've seen the film, I have to admit that while it's well worth seeing, it wouldn't have been worth the wait. Only God Forgets? Although the film doesn't need to be retitled or retooled before it comes to a theater near you, it's likely that whatever expectations you have will probably not be met. Refn may have intentionally worked against expectation, not willing to roll Drive 2 off the assembly line, especially with Gosling at the wheel, and for this he is to be admired. And yet when you left the theater after seeing Drive, you were thinking about when you would see it next, the friends you would excitedly share it with. I had felt this way about Refn's previous films as well—Pusher and its sequels (1996, 2004-05), Bronson (2008), and the incredible Valhalla Rising (2009). The stories they tell are viscerally engaging, by turns brutal, comical, and hallucinatory, with Refn mapping a canvas in which figures both physically and enigmatically inhabit a brooding, unforgiving landscape, or cityscape—a kind of heathen earth. Drive sent many viewers back to those earlier works of Refn's, and made them believers. Only God Forgives is something else entirely, a film you're not in a hurry to revisit or turn anyone on to.

So what exactly went wrong? Every film starts with the writing, with the story and the characters. Michael Haneke has said that a director has one of the most overrated jobs in the world, that it's the writing that’s difficult, that the story and the characters are at the core of any film. A friend who read an advance copy of Refn's script, who said that it was really promising, hasn't seen the film and was genuinely surprised by the critical thrashing. Obviously something happened between the time that Refn sat at his desk to imagine this story, and when he got behind the camera to set his characters in motion. For one thing, he's said that Gosling wasn't originally meant to play the part, so he didn't know they were going to be working together again until after the script was finished. This may be true, but actors and directors have been known to rewrite material before production begins, and even when they're shooting. Something can happen on the set that's impossible to predict on paper, and once the Refn/Gosling team was back in the saddle, don't you think they would have gone for more of a ride?

Refn certainly made the right choice not to attempt anything even remotely close to a Drive 2. At the same time, he seems as much to have purposefully thrown a spoke in his own wheels as he's freely indulged himself. While Refn may have been able to strike a balance between preening and pandering, it might have been wiser to set Gosling out on at least a half-hearted ho stroll. This may be nothing more than pervey, unwanted expectation rearing its head, but isn't this a big part of why we go to the movies in the first place? Refn knows this very well. Simply put, the character that Gosling plays is so hollow—and like his predecessor, "Driver," almost a silent film actor—so emasculated and impotent, that the star of this film doesn't seem to be its star at all. In one scene, Refn sticks his camera directly in Gosling's crotch and in the dim light we see no package, no payoff, and he does this not once but twice, as if to push the point limply home: this character is so emotionally bankrupt that there is no possibility for a "money shot." He's a ghost, as the original script called for, as Refn's story is predicated upon, and yet if the movie doesn't deliver, even if Gosling's character doesn't haunt us when all is unsaid and done, then the fault is neither with the casting nor the performance, and only somewhat to blame on the unmet desire of an audience. It rests somewhere inside that narrative, something the director probably can't acknowledge. After all, he wrote the story he wanted to film, and then put in on the screen, remaining true to his vision.  

In Cannes, Refn was interviewed just after the film endured its negative reception, and the exchange went like this:

"I’m not sure if you’re aware, but at the press screening this morning, there was a smattering of boos and some walkouts."

"Oh, cool."

"You’re excited about that?"

"I mean, how can I expect someone to not react like this when on one hand you are dropping what you do in everyone’s face and at the same time saying, 'Love me, please,' you know? You’re going to get that. You know, great art—horrible thing to say—but art is meant to divide, because if it doesn’t divide, it doesn’t penetrate, and if it doesn’t penetrate, you just consume it." 

It's possible that an even worse move for a filmmaker, rather than rushing headlong to happily meet expectations is, conversely, to turn 180 degrees away from them. It's quite possible that a murky, highly-stylized pastiche—and for Euro critics this would certainly be perceived as arty pretension from an "Americanized" director—with a de-sexualized leading man to boot, would never go over well in Cannes. In that rarefied, some might say biased, environment, journalists breathing in the salt air would also smell blood. And yet something tells me that Refn can't be too sanguine about the film's reception stateside, despite its cerebral/sensational dynamics. After all, in a more populist setting, an audience ultimately wants to be entertained, to get some bang for its buck, as well as for the movie to continue in their heads after they've left the theater. If this is the case, Refn can't confidently expect a much more enthusiastic reception than he's gotten so far. As for penetration, there is one moment in the film that is absolutely guaranteed to get under people's skin, not only on an incestuous level, but for the fact that it is also poignant and slightly necrophiliac. It made me wonder: in the face of seductive abandonment and abuse, how far will humans go to insert themselves into the lives of unloving loved ones while the body is still warm? 

So why did Refn make what seems to critics, though not to his longtime followers, such a big U-turn? Maybe to be taken seriously as an artist? To offer no other recourse than for us to acknowledge his seriousness and artistry? Is that why the film was booed? That’s only part of the reason. Add in the fact that the story is just not that well staged, that there aren't enough interesting characters who move fluidly and unexpectedly in and around Gosling's character to really animate him and the proceedings. In Drive, the film was populated and choreographed in exactly this way. In Only God Forgives, a near-lifeless character surrounded by a pervading mood of inertia cannot be saved by all the thrilling, sadistic violence—and vengeance—in the world. There is, however, one great character, Gosling's viperous, poisoned mother, Crystal, who is played bitch- and pitch-perfectly by a totally transformed Kristin Scott Thomas. The description of her character that has been making the rounds can in no way be improved upon: Donatella Versace meets Lady Macbeth. And it's an image that she herself is in many ways responsible for, from conception to performance.

In one great scene, when Gosling improbably takes his prostitute companion to meet his mother at a sedately expensive restaurant, the exchange between mom and his "date" politely goes down like this:

"So Mai, what do you do for a living?"

"I'm an entertainer."

"And how many cocks do you entertain in your cum dump?"

Gosling, for his part, is left with nothing to say. Scott Thomas, even more so than the avenging angel played by Vithaya Pansringarm, is the central compelling character in this film. Injected with "Crystal meth," it comes to scary, visceral life whenever she is on screen, no less than when she recoils and becomes almost human. Even the great Anjelica Huston in The Grifters doesn't come as close to the high-pitched game of maternal cat-and-mouse that the Scott Thomas character seems to have invented and serves up cold on the stage. When Crystal says that she wanted her revenge as a head on a platter, she is most certainly not speaking metaphorically. And when she casually discusses the sizes of her two sons' dicks, it's as if she has seen them much more recently than when she last changed diapers. Only Mom Forgives?

The violence will make some uneasy, and it underscores part of what's wrong with this film by placing the problem with Gosling's character in very stark relief. When he takes a merciless beating, you don't care at all. You don't root for him, you don't want to see him get up and fight back. It's somehow satisfying to witness him take such punishment, and then to see him in the following scene with one of his eyes fused shut. (And hard not to be reminded of the character "One Eye" from Valhalla Rising, and the astounding performance of Mads Mikkelsen.) You could say that when Gosling's character gets his ass kicked, there is a conflicted libidinal thrill. Just as in the boxing ring, one guy will be turned into a piece of meat by another, a punching bag, down on his knees—with all that implies—and then lifelessly laid out, flat on his back. 

The self-styled God of this film, a sadistic chief inspector who has appointed himself judge, jury, and executioner, is also a family man who improbably seeks refuge in the profound, plastic sadness of a karaoke bar. Like Gosling's character he is also mostly speechless, except for here, as he becomes his own ventriloquist. (It is one of the film's most perversely unexpected scenes, and pure Refn.) This conception of the "punisher" is nothing new. From Clint Eastwood and Dirty Harry to Takshi Kitano and Violent Cop, it's a toxic formula that has been perfectly distilled over time, a poisoned well to which we still go back for a sip now and then. Lines that were once clearly drawn are now routinely crossed, and the anti-hero has become the only believable hero in our time. But despite all the severed limbs and emasculation in Only God Forgives, neither of the central characters fulfill this part.One blade is sharp and another is dull.With the portentousness of the inspector and all he is meant to represent on one side, and the flimsy cipher that is Gosling's character on the other, both the battle between them and the climax of the film are anticlimactic and unsatisfying. How could it be any other way? The story is so seriously skewed that in a sense it has no center. As Refn would have it, you can't fight God, or you can't fight and win. The counterargument, of course, is that there's simply no reason to fight something you don't believe. Shadowboxing may turn out to be the least of Refn's transgressions, though miscalculation is probably a better term. Because in the end, his Big Problem is that Gosling and his character, for the two are intimately entwined, serve neither as our antihero nor an object of desire. And for this—in a story of vengeance that lures so many into its web—no director should be forgiven.

Previously by Bob Nickas - Why. I Hate. Graffiti.

The author's students pose with a Michael Jackson impersonator, the rapper Lucky Lou, and their finished book.

Since Katrina hit New Orleans, I’ve been teaching English after school in some truly forsaken public schools. In the past, I’ve helped kids from kindergarten to eighth grade hone their writing schools by composing and recording original rap songs. This year, however, I was placed in a language immersion school with writing-oriented students, so we attempted a more challenging project: a book of their writing and artwork about music from their hometown of New Orleans and elsewhere. Five months in, as we were editing the book and digitizing it, all of their handwritten work was stolen from my car by some jerk who just wanted my laptop. Sure that the kids would have no interest in redoing all of that work, I took a few days off school to lay in bed and moan and wonder how I’d break it to them.

But the next Monday the kids were entranced by my true crime story. To my surprise they got right back to work. (Also, I promised them a lot of candy.) During the last two months of school they rallied and in the end published a 46-page, full-color book. Though the final book consists of first drafts from the last two months (the stolen writing had gone through one or two rewrites), the kids’ intelligence and humor is nonetheless readily apparent, and the book succeeds in providing some insight into how children feel about music, musicians, talent, and fame.

For the book’s first section, the students listened to albums by unique local musicians, described the music, and told the reader whether or not to buy the records. They were asked to describe instrumentation, the vocals, the production, and the mood of the music, among other traits. Along the way they learned the difference between facts and opinions, and how to apply both to a piece of writing. The book features reviews the kids had published earlier in a New Orleans zine, plus few new ones, like this critique of longtime local reggae and dancehall DJ T-Roy:

It sounds like New Orleans is playing funny stuff
 on one album. It has all of the instruments. Like piano and saxophone and Hawaii. The second song sounds the same as the first except more like a rockstar. It sounds like paintings walking around. A guy walks on stage and plays the drum. And it’s funny. It’s fast and loud. It’s soft then it’s loud. It sounds like the movie “The Yellow Submarine.” 
It sounds like people playing music on the street. It sounds like piano and drums. It sounds like rockstars playing New Orleans style. It sounds like everybody is running away from something. It sounds different. Like people dancing. Good music with rockstars taking over the planet with weird hair. Music everywhere. It’s real fast and soft. And good. And long. Aliens taking over the planet with lasers. And there’s electric guitars. –Byron

For the benefit of their parents, the students then compiled facts and opinions about their favorite famous musicians, and then turned those lists into essays. So that these wouldn’t just be gushing fan letters, they were encouraged to also criticize their favorite artists and give them career advice. The section opens with this dope pencil drawing of Nicki Minaj by Starr:

My fifth graders wrote in praise of mostly adult-oriented music, including several pieces on Lil Wayne:

Hi did you know about Lil Wayne? Lil Wayne is from New Orleans. He gets his stage name from his father. Wayne says he doesn’t like his father. Because of that he decided to drop the D from his name. His music sounds like a girl/boy. Lil Wayne is the current CEO of YMCMB. He divorced my god sister, Toya Wright. He has a lot of tattoos. He should not have so many tattoos. He is a former Hot Boy, a group consisting of six people: Lil Wayne, Turk, B.G., Birdman and Ronald “Slim” Williams, Birdman’s brother. Wayne is the son of Birdman, because he says that. He records numerous tracks with Birdman. He doesn’t like NOLA, but he is an avid Lakers fan. He should come back and live in NOLA. –Brian

Lil Wayne is a rap artist. He loves fame, money and girls. When he was 11 years old his mom left him home and he saw a gun and accidentally shot himself close to his heart. Five days later he went to school and everyone was asking, “Can I see your chest because I’m going to be a doctor.” I think he’s cool because he’s a rapper. He is really funny. He’s not an ordinary rapper he’s a crazy artist. He has a child, a little girl named Rejaney. My favorite song from him is “Love Me.” Some people say he is a bad artist. Some people say he just wants to make money. –Wayne

The third-grade ladies focused on more age-appropriate music:

Do you know who is my favorite music artist? Mine is Katy Perry. She was in a movie called “Katy Perry.” She used to have a husband called Russell Brand. I read her book called “Katy Perry’s Life.” I have read all of them. The three things I don’t like about her are that she put whip cream on her chest and the second is that she left Russell Brand. And bad words in her music. She is 20 years old. She wears a blue wig. And wears wacky outfits. –Alyx

My favorite artist is (drumroll please) Justin Beiber! Justin B. is so cute his hair is too. My favorite song by him is “Maria” because in the beginning it sounds like he is on an interview and they are asking about a girl named Maria H. His voice sounds like a girl and I wish it sounded more like a boy. He sings pop mostly. He is from Ontario, Canada. The first song I listened to by him is “Baby.” He once dated Selena Gomez. I wish his head was smaller and that he was taller. Thank you for listening. Have a nice day. Hope you enjoyed this. Hope you learned a lot. –Claire

Jacklyn, another third-grade girl, not only surprised me with her choice—the house artist Deadmau5—she turned her essay into a fictional TV report:

Reporter: We asked local kids what they think about Deadmau5 and they said this!

Kid 1: My favorite song is “Ghosts and Stuff” because it is digital.


Kid 2: I love his mask because it glows, it’s cool.


Kid 3: I love his song “Some Chords.”

Reporter: Then we saw his manager.

Manager: Well, first, he doesn’t write enough songs. Second, he needs more concerts. And third...oh no, time is up!

Reporter: So we will now go see Deadmau5, OK!


Deadmau5: Well, I will tell you most about me. I was born in Ontario Canada.

Reporter: Well, let me stop you, I have a question. I’ve never heard a song of yours before, may you explain them to me?

Deadmau5: Well, they don’t have words so I don’t want to bring your expectations up. They just sound digital, no words unless it’s a remix. I use DJ equipment.

Reporter: My daughter first saw you on the internet.


Deadmau5: Well, about me again, my birthday is January 5.

Reporter: Well Deadmau5, life review is over!

To break up their regular writing sessions, we would take a day here and there to jam on the drum machine and write some raps. Most of these two-couplet rhymes simply but humorously described their authors:

My name is Nya and I like guitar

 It’s so cool that I hang on the monkeybars


I have two dogs that I love

 the one Sachel’s so cute it’s like he’s from above

 –Nya

 

I love chickens dead or alive

When I was in kindergarten I was five


I like to be silly with all of my friends

In my chess class there’s not lots of men

–Renee

 

My mom and dad play music on the streets

My Birthday’s on Halloween I give out treats

Everything’s delicious, but I love meat

But every time I eat, I don’t eat neat

–Dorian

 

My name is Kamri, just like the car

And I shine, just like a star

I’m from the hood and my house is made of wood

Can I just quit? Do you think that I should?

–Kamri

I also put my students to work helping me a bit with NOizeFest, a small festival of nontraditional music that I help host each May in Bywater. This year my students participated in a contest to draw a design for the NOizeFest 2013 T-shirt. Valiant won first place and his family received NOizeFest T-shirts featuring his drawing:

The students’ favorite assignment invited local artists to the school to perform and hold a press conference. While the artists played, the students wrote down five insights and opinions about the performance, and also five questions. The students then got to interview the artists. One of their favorites was Ratty Scurvics, who, along with fronting several rock bands, also plays the keyboards with his hands while pounding the bass and snare drums with his feet in his ferocious one-man band, Singularity. The kids were lucky enough to witness this amazing feat, and even got the chance to play Ratty’s strange musical setup themselves after this round of serious questioning:

Q: What is your favorite food?
 
Ratty Scurvics: I am a big fan of sushi. I also like steak tartare. Which is raw red meat with spices in it.

Q: How did you start playing music?
 
RS: My dad’s a musician. He’s a working professional musician. So I grew up in a household where... That’s where my birthday presents came from, from his playing shows. But I taught myself to play, mostly. I always wrote my own songs. The instrument I started on was the drums.

Q: What do you like better, the keyboards or the drums?
 
RS: My favorite instrument is keyboards because you have so much potential. So many notes you can play at the same time.

Q: How do you play two instruments at the same time?
 
RS: Well, as a drummer you have to play four things simultaneously, and try to put it all together. Whenever I started doing the one-man-band thing it felt pretty natural.

Q: Why do you have a [mannequin head] inside your bass drum?
 
RS: Oh, Lucile! Lucile serves a purpose, because with a bass drum, you want to have something in there to dampen the sound a little bit. Some people use a pillow but I thought it would be funny if I put in a mannequin head. Her hair is stuck and I can’t take her out.

Q: Do you know how to play other instruments?

RS: I play several different instruments. 
I do a lot of solo records where I
 go into the studio and I just overlay instrument on top of instrument on the songs that require a full band. So I play cello, flute, drums of course, piano.

Q: All at the same time? 

RS: Not all together. That’s kind of hard 
to do. The first one-man band that I saw was at a state fair and was playing an organ, and he had drums on his back, and somehow he had a fiddle that was shot through his side that he played with his elbow. That was pretty cool.

Q: How did you start doing the one-man band?

RS: I was in a circus band and we were on tour, touring the country, and everybody in the band quit. I was the musical director, composing all the music, and I had to figure out how to play all those instruments and be a circus band myself for one show. The pressure was on and I learned how to do it.

Q: Did you ever mess up?
 
RS: Absolutely! Mistakes happen all the time. The trick is to be able to push through the mistakes and catch yourself. That’s where the art is.

Q: What is it like when you play the drums and the piano at the same time?

RS: How about you find out in a minute?

Ratty Scurvics performing for the kids

The book closes with the students imagining themselves in the future as rich, famous, and (most importantly) talented musicians. They created stage names for themselves and listed their genre, their instrument of choice, and what they would wear while performing. They discussed their biggest hit song, and gave some sample lyrics. After letting their imaginations run wild verbally, the kids then drew pictures of their famous selves performing on stage, LIVE!

My name is the “Jewish Saint.” I am in the band “Leo the Tiger” with John “Game Master” and Lail “Super Bassist.” I am the singer, guitarist, and sometimes drummer. While John is main guitarist and Lail is the bassist and sometimes drummer. Our genre is pop rock. On stage I wear a blue shirt and white pants. –Hudi

Hey my real name is Jose Cairo. Everyone knows me as DJ From the West. I love to rap and that’s why it’s my genre. I use a very, very high amount of auto-tune. My inspiration comes from my very close friend Clarence Henry aka “Frogman.” I love to be shirtless sometimes. Wear a very distinct pair of shorts, very brilliant and bright Jordans, long socks and Miami Heat snapbacks. My biggest song is “I Love My People.” This is the chorus: “I love my people and they love me so I show them hospitality with the money cause I on one (?).” My favorite city to perform in is Miami because of the beautiful beaches and restaurants. One of my fans gave me a good review, 
he says, “It has a lot of people and very electrifying.” I love to give the fans a concert. –Brian

On May 28, each student who participated received a copy of the finished book. They were as excited as their teacher hoped they would be. Their book release party featured miniature cupcakes and a performance by family-friendly rapper and dancer Lucky Lou, who’d earlier in the year performed and held a press conference for the kids. Lou so looks the part of the rapper in his snapback hat and indoor sunglasses that the students had lined up for autographs even before he performed that first time. This time Lou brought his killer dance troupe to the book party, which included the impressive young Michael Jackson impersonator MJ of NOLA. My student Alex, who wrote the book’s essay on Michael Jackson, nearly lost his mind.

Michael Patrick Welch is a New Orleans musician, journalist, and author of books including The Donkey Show and New Orleans: the Underground Guide. His work has appeared at McSweeney's, Oxford American, Newsweek, Salon, and many other publications. Follow him on Twitter here.  

Previously: On the Death of a Dog I Should Have Loved Better

It's common knowledge that several forms of metal weathered a serious beating at the hands of alt-you-name-it in the early-to-mid-90s, with hair-metal forced into a well-deserved dirt-nap. Hair metal was the only true fatality, despite a wrongheaded revisionist mythology purporting that first and second wave thrash, speed, and power metal bands suffered the same fate. The adaptive gestures executed by many of these bands constitutes an overlooked, yet fascinating collective phenomenon that I like to call "Metal’s Lost Survivalist Endeavors of the 1990s."

Lest any readers take the presumptuous route with the opinion that I’m just going on about a bunch of lesser-known examples of Metallica’s notorious transformation between the release of the Black Album and the Load/ReLoad debacle, I will briefly explain the soon-to-be obvious difference—aside from Nirvana’s Nevermind, no album of the early-90s can match the combined sales and musical impact of Metallica’s Black Album. And it’s not a straight-up piece of shit, either. Metallica could have made five more identical albums over the next ten years and been just fine. Their drastic, from-the-floor-up change was not a survivalist move by any means. It was more akin to a soft drink behemoth using contracted image consultants to introduce a new “Scented Candle Feces Flavor!” campaign. 

Still, every other band on the planet would have self-terminated in the same situation, and Metallica navigated not only that major misstep, but the seven or eight that followed it to present day. As such, their creative pants-pooping was an anomalous and unnecessary choice that deserves the resounding negativity it attracted. The numerous discography detours profiled in this column are products of creative restlessness, panic, environmental necessity, and other more humanistic motives, and while I will write some “critical” content in regards to the albums in question, each and every band covered squared up with, then updated, their original respective strengths, and have chartered a dignifying third act over the last ten or 15 years. 

It only makes sense to start things off with a look at one of the more blatant and absurd instances of Survivalist Endeavors within the realm of real metal (“real metal” is what I term anything betwixt NWOBHM and whatever metal happens to be the noisiest and heaviest development at the moment): The dire duo of Helloween’s Pink Bubbles Go Ape (1991) and Chameleon (1993). 

Helloween peaked almost immediately with their first three albums, 1985’s Walls of Jericho and both of the Keeper of the Seven Keys albums ('87 and '88, respectively). These albums showcase the band’s perfection of a particularly precise, catchy, and unbelievably European (if not absurdly German) form of speed metal, one which they accurately have a proprietary stake in. Helloween were the most successful band on Noise Records (Germany’s Metal Blade, if you will) and the latter of the three aforementioned albums sold over a million copies worldwide. After inching up to mega-stardom behind MTV’s heavy rotation of the video for their golden bubblegum-thrash masterpiece, “I Want Out” (one of the hands-down greatest metal songs of all time) the band lost its secret weapon, the guitarist and vocalist Kai Hansen. 

Kai formed Gamma Ray, who debuted in 1990 with a better version of the thrashy power-metal Helloween had moved into with their most recent work. This, of course, showed the world that a directional shift of some sort was on the horizon with Helloween. But the label friction that punctuated, if not defined, the four years between Helloween’s most successful album and their most hated cannot be understated. In 1990, Noise Records got into bed with a major label (EMI) on the strength of four bands cherry-picked from the roster: Helloween, Celtic Frost, Running Wild, and V2. But Helloween and their management decided to approach EMI behind their label’s back with an attempted alleviation of the middleman, who sued the living shit out of the band and associated parties with 16 different lawsuits. Not only was this one of the oldest fuck-ups in the biz, it turned out to be one that cost Helloween over a million dollars in out-of-court settlements. Helloween showed their gratitude to EMI by delivering two of the worst and most confusing albums to ever be associated with the last quarter-century of metal.

I’m unsure of what to call Pink Bubbles, although “career assassinator” comes to mind. In accordance with the aggressively godawful cover art, Helloween dialed-up the quirk and tried to hit anticipatory fans exactly where it didn't count: the funny bone (with obligatory social commentary and music-biz dissent, natch). Once again, the result was utter failure, a theme the band would thoroughly unpack for a rapidly shrinking fanbase for the next three years. “I’m Doing Fine, Crazy Man” could be considered self-defensive, that is if one were immersed in a battle of the wits with a broke-dick 1985 Ford Tempo, and the album’s single, “Kids of the Century” (that went to number fifty-fucking-three on the UK charts) rocks the always hilarious angle of future-shock, big-brother-is-watching (but blew its cover with deafening laughter). Think copious scenes of band members and other longhaired extras walking around with rubber sunny-side-up eggs covering their eyes and you’re 99 percent of the way there. Hey, Helloween had something to say! Listen up, sheeple!

The Japanese version of the CD includes a b-side called “Shit and Lobster,” a real head-scratcher that can be partially explained by these mid-song lyrics:

“Some get shit and some get lobster/ Take my ass into the sun/ It takes some time to realize/ We cannot eat a gun”

Unbelievably, “Shit and Lobster” is topped by the better-known “Heavy Metal Hamsters” a stab at criticizing the music industry as it's historically considered in the press. It could also be an anticipatory statement about negative fan reactions to the band’s directionless dilly-dallying. I am not the first writer to put this song under the lights, so to speak, nor will I be the last, and its profoundly-misguided nature coats the entire affair in a fog of poor taste. It’s that pathetic. The polar opposite of Napalm Death’s Enemy of the Music Business album meets Weird Al in the ninth ring of hell. Here’s a lyrical sampling that will only serve to increase the bullying element:

“A 20th century Fox came by/ A gold tipped cigarette high in his jaws/ Contracts, PDs, Nose-Bags, TV-shows/ And everything with no remorse”

Or

“What is wrong with our Heavy Metal Hamster?/ Look what they have done our Heavy Metal Hamsters/ Where is the field to run for our Heavy Metal Hamsters/ Some things are left undone for our Heavy Metal Hamsters”

1993’s Chameleon, by some multidimensional stretch of logic and reason, is exponentially worse than Pink Bubbles Go Ape on every level... and then some. Take the humor element utilized on Pink Bubbles Go Ape; something that the band avoided altogether on Chameleon. It may have been shredded to pieces by the language and cultural barriers, it may have been excruciating against the sonic backdrop of tepid power metal buried under all manner of unfortunate instrumentation that has no business on a metal record, but Chameleon is such a categorically bad album that the miscarriage of mirth is actually missed.

 The “They Might Be Germans” agenda remains in the some of the song titles (“I Don't Wanna Cry No More,” “Crazy Cat,” “Music,” “I Don't Care, You Don't Care,” and “Red Socks and the Smell of Trees”), but the budget-Duran-Duran album art and offensively-neutered negative rock, anti-metal metal conjures the dream scenario of a clueless undercover narc dressed in the world’s worst power/speed-metal disguise. 

Rock and metal history is punctuated by timelessly-great albums created against the backdrop of adversity, be it the classic band out of or ahead of their time situation or a dedication to wildly unfashionable influences of the too-recent past. It’s a cliché we should all be grateful for and one that is increasingly rare. Conversely, what we have with Pink Bubbles Go Ape and Chameleon, and many of the future albums to be covered in this series, is the other side of the fence: bad music made possible by bad times. Chameleon got Helloween dropped by EMI and caused further lineup turmoil in a band that had by then become synonymous with such. Both of these albums resembled the band of six years earlier like my dad resembled the man who raced in the actual Cannonball Run, test-flew experimental jets for the Navy, fought in both WWII and Korea (yes, everyone thought my dad was my granddad when we went to the mall) on the morning he woke up after a massive stroke, entering the kitchen with the daily paper held upside-down, saturated in urine and announcing that he can no longer read words. 

Miraculously, Helloween began to pick up the pieces with 1994’s Master of the Rings, a baby-step backwards into the metal they helped invent, 1996’s Time of the Oath, and 1998’s Better Than Raw (the former following the suicide of drummer Ingo Schwichtenberg, to whom it is dedicated) complete the band’s musical rehabilitation with the strongest material since their mid-80s heyday. 

Stay tuned for the next installment of Metal’s Lost Survivalist Endeavors of the 1990s, when we take a look at Kreator’s dance with noise-rock, industrial metal, gothic-weirdness, and the worst compression to ever mire a drum sound. 

http://chunklet.com/

Ron Paul seems to think it could happen. As the former Congressman from Texas recently told Fox News, "I'm worried [that] somebody in our government might kill him with a cruise missile or a drone missile."

Is that even possible? Paul's slight ambiguity aside--he laughs softly throughout the clip--is the specter of extrajudicial killing now just another thing to keep Snowden up at night? Given the US government's unsettling, if still nebulous criteria for assassinating its own citizens on foreign soil, it's certainly possible. Paul could have a point. And it's not like Snowden isn't expecting the hammer to drop in one way or another, and soon.  

Asked by Scientific American about how he thinks the NSA will go after Snowden, who in a series of articles last week pulled the cover off what's a massive and all-seeing digital dragnet that can literally watch thoughts form, former NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake did not mince words: "With everything they've got."

What "everything they've got" will look like remains to be seen. And yet if closed-door discussions to build the case for droning Snowden are actually going down--hell, even if they aren't, or at least not yet--we can try to imagine how the US government is going about it by referring back to a curt White House factsheet (.pdf) that spells out something like America's "criteria" for snuffing out perceived bad guys. Here's what the Obama administration's "can we drone Snowden?" checklist would should look like. 

IS THERE A LEGAL BASIS FOR THIS? 

Presumably yes, there is. The only problem is we have absolutely no idea how that foundation was set, or if it's shifting. 

Remember Anwar Al-Awlaki? The American-born Al-Qaeda cleric was killed by a US drone strike in Yemen in 2011. (Two weeks later, his 16-year-old son, likewise a US citizen, suffered the same fate as his father.) The US insists, however begrudgingly, that the rationale behind the strike that took out Al-Awlaki does in fact exist, yet refuses to declassify the full legal memo. Droning Snowden wouldn't necessarily be without precedent, but how are we supposed to know that doing so would be in accord with a justification that's being kept behind the curtain? 

Oh right, we can't. 

Read the rest over at Motherboard. 

Christian Siriano coat, vintage dress

VIRGINIA WOOLF, 59
Born: January 25, 1882
(London, England)
Died: March 28, 1941
(Lewes, England)
Cause Of Death: drowning

Stylist: Annette Lamothe-Ramos
Set Design: Grace Kelsey
Models in order of appearance: Grace Kelsey, Amelia Fleetwood, Erica Cho, Virginia Talbot, Kumara Sawyer, Thao Dang, Paige Morgan

Special thanks to the Kelsey Family

Suno jacket

IRIS CHANG, 36
Born: March 28, 1968
(Princeton, New Jersey)
Died: November 9, 2004
(Los Gatos, California)
Cause of death: gunshot to the head

The Row shirt, jacket, and pants, vintage necklace

DOROTHY PARKER, 73
Born: August 22, 1893
(Long Branch, New Jersey)
Died: June 7, 1967
(New York, New York)
Cause of death: natural causes, despite several unsuccessful suicide attempts, the first in January 1923, at age 23, by slitting her wrists

Ruffian jacket, vintage Christian Dior skirt, vintage rings

CHARLOTTE PERKINS, 75
Born: July 3, 1860
(Hartford, Connecticut)
Died: August 17, 1935
(Pasadena, California)
Cause of death: suicide by chloroform

Suno dress, Chloë Sevigny for Opening Ceremony x Bass shoes

SYLVIA PLATH, 30
Born: October 27, 1932
(Boston, Massachusetts)
Died: February 11, 1963
(London, England)
Cause of death: carbon-monoxide poisoning

Vivienne Tam dress, Erickson Beamon necklace; Look From London tights

SANMAO, 47
Born: March 26, 1943
(Chongqing, China)
Died: January 4, 1991
(Taipei, Taiwan)
Cause of death: hanged herself with a pair of tights

Issa dress, Morgenthal Frederics glasses, Jenni Kayne shoes

ELISE COWEN, 28
Born: July 31, 1933
(New York, New York)
Died: February 1, 1962
(New York, New York)
Cause of death: self-defenestration

More fashion shoots from VICE:

No Man Left Behind

Can We Please?

Dry Heat

All sketches by Olivia Hinds

Wistar Murray is a writer from Charlottesville, Virginia. She graduated from Columbia University's MFA program in fiction, where she was a 2010 winner of the Henfield Prize. She holds a BA from the College of William & Mary.

What began as a sunset walk to the convenience store with Dylan, who was craving vanilla-flavored coffee and Sugar Babies, evolved into hours of drinking wine product on the railroad tracks until Teddy got off work. Then we could all get serious about getting retarded. As I banged through the doors of the Lucky-7, I was still thinking about the blowjob I had given earlier, looking for something to wash down the taste. A man dozed upright like a mule against the beer fridge. Dylan rapped on the glass beside the man’s forehead but he only mumbled back as though reciting a nightmare. Christmas music played in fits between candy aisles and I bombarded myself with dirty words. You pussy, I thought. In those days everyone either had a pussy or was a pussy incarnate. I managed both. Too many people were talking at once near the beverages, so I let Dylan pick the poison while I concentrated on dollar bills. You beaver, I thought, as I fumbled the money. You vagina. Quiet down before I kill you. I was already drunk. 

In the close-knit world of dog hunting, Tom Varney is a legend, and he has the DVD sales to prove it.

Tom is a former psychotic criminal who later found God and devoted himself to serving his fellow man. In a strange twist of morality, this led to his life's work: shooting wild dogs. The Australian wild dog is a hybrid of the native dingo and larger domestic breeds. The resulting "super dog" is bigger, smarter, and much more vicious. Roaming in packs, they've been known to massacre entire flocks of sheep and bring down animals as large as horses, causing millions of dollars in damage each year. While animal control agencies favor trapping and baiting them, farmers argue that nothing is as effective as a bullet to the head. That's where Tom comes in. He's pretty much retired now, but his methods (including his ability to call dogs up to him by mimicking their howls) have formed the blueprint for a new generation of dog hunters.

Hannah Brooks from VICE Australia sat down with Tom to talk shooting, howling, and who's more bloodthirsty: wild dogs or YouTube commenters.

Rap music videos have warped my perception of the world. After years of watching clips like "Big Pimpin'" and "Tip Drill," my thoughts have become infested with half-naked girls who tug around gargantuan asses. It's so bad, it's hard for me to even see a normal lady without imagining what she'd look like doused in the golden showers of a Cristal bottle or picturing myself swiping my Chase ATM card through her cavernous butt crack.

Given my rap-addled condition, you can see why I took an interest in Brian Finke's ongoing photo project, Hip-Hop Honeys (featured in the gallery above). In the project, Brian has been documenting the women who populate rap videos, enabling us all to have another perspective on the girls who gyrate what their mamas gave them for rappers. Brian's work is an elegant look at a genre of film that is simultaneously beautiful and grotesque, liberating and misogynistic, and artistic and exploitative. 

As a poor addict of oversexualized hip-hop videos, I reached out to Brian to see if I could just stand in the corner with my hand in my pocket as he photographed his video vixens. The renowned photographer, who's had his work featured in publications like the New Yorker and GQ and has published four stellar photo books, got pretty weirded out by my request. To get me out of his hair, he put me in touch with Face Time Agency, the casting duo who's helped Brian get on the sets of music videos to shoot photos for Hip-Hop Honeys. Face Time Agency was started by Jeff Janvier and Session Cruz two years ago. Since then, it has become one of the only major casting agencies in NYC dedicated to urban models for music videos. And that's pretty awesome for all of the voluptuous ladies and gorgeous women of color out there who are getting neglected by the other big agencies. 

Session started out shooting high-quality booty-shake videos for World Star Hip-Hop. While Jeff has been a longtime OG in the casting game. Together, they've brought some of the most beautiful models and biggest butts to the small screen in videos for ass connoisseurs like 2 Chainz, Drake, Kanye, and 50 Cent. I hopped on the phone with Jeff to beg him to let me hang out during one of their video shoots—a plea he flatly declined, afraid I might upset the talent. After that, I figured I might as well do an interview for you guys covering what it's like to make a living off of being surrounded by some of the most attractive women of the world, when all of them are desperately trying to impress you. Here is what Jeff had to say. 

Session is on the left and Jeff is on the right. 

VICE: When you’re trying to find girls for music videos, what are the key qualities that make them right to shake their butts on the small screen?
Jeff Janvier: The ones that I focus on are the ones that’s make money. It’s all about finding people who have valuable assets. I have a big Rolodex, which is filled with models for every occasion and situation. I concentrate on the features I know I can get a lot of money from.

What makes one model’s assets more valuable than another?
Her sex appeal. Her swag. Her devotion. Those are key elements. Of course they have to be attractive, too. Nobody associated with my company will be even semiattractive. I do have a bunch of girls that I’m nice to and will allow to come to the set and be extras. But as far as the lead and special females, they all have to meet a standard of sex appeal. Sometimes I’m looking for specific things like a particular height or a girl with a big booty. We have a girl for every market.

With the big booties, is there a booty scale? How does one compare and contrast the ass?
No. We only put big-booty girls in the videos that require big-booty girls. But it’s more complex. Like sometimes you need a big butt that knows how to dance, or be really sexy. I know girls who have big butts, but don’t know how to dance. In certain situations, their big butt is useless. It’s the same with just being pretty. Sometimes a nice-looking face isn’t enough for a video that requires the girls to actually do stuff on camera.

How do you keep it all organized? You said you have a Rolodex. Is the Rolodex like “This girl has a big booty, but she’s got two left feet” and “This girl's pretty, but she is shaped like SpongeBob”? 
That’s where my mind works miracles. But as far as the Rolodex, I have, like, thousands of girls and I get, like, 30 emails every day from new talent who I can utilize. I organize it according to the videos we’ve shoot. Some girls get upset at me because I can’t utilize them. It gets to the point where I get harassed or event threatened. This job ain’t as easy, but I make it work. If I meet a new girl and I put her on, other females might see that and get upset. Sometimes they will try to hurt the main girl, you know? There are trials and tribulations I have to deal with, but I’ve been doing it for so long, it doesn’t affect me.

What’s one of the most desperate things a girl has done to try to get into a video?
In this industry, I tell the girls, “You think the video world is bad, Hollywood is even worse.” But some people will do just about anything. I don’t deal with females who are willing to do whatever to get in the game. But these girls understand that there can be, like, 20 girls in the video. So, they’ll do more to get that air time in the video, rather than just be an extra in the background.

Are there any girls who get upset with you once they see the video because they didn’t get the exposure they wanted?
Oh yeah, that’s the drama I deal with. I can’t choose everybody. I try my best as a casting director to get everybody that I meet a chance to get in the video. But sometimes I don’t have that much pull. I’m the casting director so I can pick and choose a lot of girls, but unfortunately it is ultimately up to the artist and director to pick who gets that lead role. Some girls get upset when they’re overlooked or not chosen and they try to bring it all out on me. Other people don’t know how to handle situations like that, but I can.

Do you think a girl can make a living off of being in videos?
The video game isn’t like it used to be. Ten years ago, girls could make a living off of videos. They used to get thousands of dollars just for being a video girl. Nowadays, because of the internet and downloading music, the labels don’t put that much money into videos unless it’s a big artist or a big song. Otherwise they try to do it for little to nothing. But if a girl has swag, they can venture out to movies and other options that garner more money. Videos can give you the outlet to establish a brand and do other things with it.

Are there certain ladies who are hard to find? Like, do rappers say to you, “I want an Eskimo girl with a Lisa Simpson face tattoo and a medium-size donkey butt who can twerk while making ice sculptures”?
It’s my job to be able to provide. If I don’t have them, I’m gonna go looking for them. But yeah, there’s always specifics. Some people want Asians in their videos, some people want Russians—it all depends. And I don’t just do hip-hop, I do rock, pop, or anything else you might imagine. So if they want midgets for the video, I have to provide midgets. I don’t just do females either—my core is females—but I do all types of talent. I’ve worked on Sesame Street! I’ll work on anything that cuts a check.

Tell me about the toughest shoot where you had to find a super obscure and specific kind of model.
I would have to say “Birthday Song” with Kanye and 2 Chainz was the craziest. They wanted exotic big-booty girls, but at the same time we had to have clowns and all types of different people like midgets. I had to go above and beyond for that.

Was it hard to get the right midgets? Was Yeezy really particular on what kind of midgets he wanted?
The director was the one really into the midgets. Kanye was more focused on the big-booty girls.

Was Kanye like inspecting the booties on set to get the most robust asses in the video?
Nah. Because I’ve been doing this for so long, a lot of the artists trust me and know that I’m always bringing new faces to the table. They know I have a big arsenal of females they’re able to pick and choose from.  

Can you give any advice to young girls out there trying to be video girls? Like, what would you say to a 16-year-old girl who says she wants to be a video girl?
I would tell them to not make it the focal point at that age. She can take it up as a hobby. If you are going to do it, try to take being a video girl to the next level and become a big model or actress, which involves making more money. Being in music videos is for when you’re young and you want to have fun and get your face out there and establish a brand. 

What do you think of the whole “video ho” stereotype? 
That stems from haters. When I say "hater," I mean girls that were not able to be in the videos started that terminology. Now of course there are girls that act out that stereotype because they do some things. But it all originated from girls who weren’t able to be in the videos who started saying “Oh this girl had to do this and that” to be in the video. But you won't say Halle Berry’s a ho, even though Halle Berry is one of those who had to go above and beyond to get where she’s at? It’s a man’s world so there are a lot of things that aren’t as easy for females as they are for men. Its part of the game and it comes down to whether they want to play it or not.

Would you let your daughter be a video girl?
That’s a hard question—only if I knew her standards and morals were straight would I allow her to get into that. A lot of people don’t have the guidance. They come into this game recklessly and do things they’re not supposed to and fall for certain things because in this game a lot of people talk a good one. You have to realize who’s fake in this industry.

Word. Thanks!

Interested in getting loose in a hip-hop video? Hit up Face Time Agency.

Check out more photo work from Brian Finke.

And follow Wilbert on Twitter: @WilbertLCooper

More things from Wilbert:

Assplasty: Dr. Mendieta's Perfect Booties

Never Party with the Brick Squad

Paul Angelo Wants Gays to Clench Their Sphincters

'The Boondocks' Creator Aaron McGruder Tells Us About 'The Uncle Ruckus Movie'

Desperation is mostly inseparable from masculinity. Men strain for fame, for female attention, for sad, trivial triumphs over one another. We are a people perpetually trying to figure it all out—flexing in the mirror, using lines we've heard before, trying to seem bold and dignified. We're not cowboys or poets. If we are, we wear it as a disguise. Mostly, we are vulnerable and self-conscious and probably masturbating for the third time on a Tuesday afternoon, because we're off and that Lea Thompson scene in All the Right Moves just came on. We are not men, but almost. Note: columns may also contain William Holden hero worship and meditations on cured meats.

It is conceivable that, one day, I will meet someone who has walked on another planet. The person will describe for me the cosmic insignificance of our individual lives and how simultaneously splendid and bleak the universe is. I will make a face and wait for the person to finish, and then I will say, “Yes, but have you seen the fifth episode in the fourth season of Gigolos?”

Gigolos (Showtime) concludes its fourth season this evening at 11 PM. It is sort of an Entourage: People Maybe Addicted to Amphetamines Edition, hitting all the familiar notes of day drinking and homophobia and doing whatever it takes to make it. The show focuses on five Las Vegas members of Cowboys 4 Angels, a straight-male escort agency. The escorts are all meticulously waxed and ostentatiously accessorized, their muscles pumped up like inflatable mattresses. Their lives are measured in deadlift reps and UV rays and financing rates on silver Range Rovers. Their whole existence is tribal tattoos, “breaking a sweat six days a week,” pensive stares, loving life, having mottos, jiu-jitsu, getting “totally transformed,” limousines and bottle service, implausible dick bulges, bootcut jeans.

One member, Bradley Lord, says in a voiceover, as footage plays of him spanking a black woman during a web cam show, “I enjoy life. I even have tattoos on me that say that, 'You know, live every day, live to the fullest, be true to yourself.'” They inhabit a world in which the grandest, most emphatic gesture you can make is to write meaningless bromides onto your body.

Dates are arranged by Cowboys 4 Angels founder and walking receding hairline, Garren James. Among the five members are a long-haired spiritualist who thinks you just have to be, like, sensitive to her needs, man (Ash Armand); the US Marines vet with the perfect body (Lord); and the in-on-the-joke, self-described "feminist," Vin Armani. (Armani is also notable for being a real human person named Vin Armani.)

But if you are watching this show it is for the last two members, Nick Hawk and Brace Land.

At various points of the show’s existence, Land has looked anywhere between 31 and 78 years old. His tan alternates between “fried ham,” “Dorito,” and “clementine rind rotting in a compost pile.” His neck looks like a rhinoceros foot. Brace says he does not know what a glory hole is. When someone tells him, he squints and shakes his head and curls his lips, as if he’s thinking, But what’s wrong with jamming yourself into a girl’s mouth the normal way? Then, in Brace’s brain, a miniature Brace high fives an identical miniature Brace, and the two go shopping for juicers and shirts with epaulets.

Brace has a “natural Viagra” supplement called ROAR. It is not an acronym; he means it like the noise carnivores make. He is a self-proclaimed “sexual god when it comes to having sex,” as opposed to a sexual god when it comes to carpentry or civil rights activism. He refers to sexual partners as “kills.” When one client reveals she is a former adult-film star (Adult Video News hall-of-famer Hyapatia Lee), Brace says, “I’m gonna just do what I do and bang her out better than any other porn schmuck that’s ever banged her out.” Brace is not smirking when he says this. He says it like he feels it is truly and undeniably necessary to his survival as a man. He says it like the outcome of a Will Smith movie hangs in the balance.

Nick Hawk calls himself a "rapper," except his rapping sounds like a person with diarrhea frantically reading the back of an Imodium box. He has all the charisma of the computerized female voice giving you directions from your Garmin. He raps unironically about going "sick in the club" and “getting up in it.” In one line, he says “I make a big entrance/I like to be naked.” His sentences are just barely coherent in the way sentences are when you use a free Spanish-to-English translator on the internet.

While recording “Tippin and Sippin,” a “poppier” song that was going to “take me to the next level,” Nick decided that the missing, essential element to his creative output was female sex noises as backing vocals. He gets three ordinary-looking women to moan unconvincingly in a studio until he realizes, ugh, there’s just no substitute for the real thing, and then has aggressive sex with the last girl while she makes noises into a microphone.

His website features at least 16 different fonts, celebrating that uniquely adolescent idea of IMPRESSIVE: loud noises you can’t turn off and bright sidebars molesting your senses unrepentantly; whiz-bang features that do nothing but provide access to more of his edgy ruminations on hashtags and Gary Busey. In the Survey section, next to “What Sound Or Noise Do You Hate” he puts “Any humility / Crying / Car not starting.” On his BUCKET LIST he includes “Hang glide in Brazil or with eagles,” “Go on tour with music,” and “Cabo—Spring Break.” It is the most generically American Male idea of escapism and luxury that one could possibly fathom. Presumably, future amendments to his bucket list will include “Buy a dope recliner,” “Learn golf,” and “own a Cheesecake Factory.”

Nick has a “penis pendant necklace,” which is literally a miniature silver penis hanging from a chain. If you know nothing about Nick Hawk besides this, understand that this is not a self-aware celebration of himself or a symbol of his occupation, but something very explicit about his ethos. Basically, I have a necklace of a penis because I also have a real penis because man fuck girl in cave.

In his talking head interviews, Nick speaks in a bouncy, sing-song cadence, the way REBORN customers speak in infomercials: BEFORE I FOUND NUTRISYSTEM I WAS A MESS. AND THEN EVERYTHING CHANGED. Each sentence contains a narrative and a triumph and a new identity. Everything he does is some alpha male power play. Nick is almost electrically invigorated by ambition. Not so much by any ambitions in particular, but that as human beings we get to have them. That we get to WIN at THINGS and CONQUEOR our FEARS. To him, sometimes he is conquering genitals and other times he is conquering recording studios. He doesn’t actually do any of this, but he seems completely unaware. There is a sense that Nick Hawk’s brain sees only the rocket, never the pile of rubble. He is a man who owns a wolf. Like, an actual wolf. A Canis lupus.

In one scene in the fifth episode of season four, Nick meets a client who is a female bodybuilder. She is pretty but excessively muscled. The two stare at each other from opposite ends of a couch. She jokes that she probably has bigger arms than Nick does. Nick says if she does it’s “going to be a problem” and immediately stands up and takes off his jacket. He tells her he’s sure he has bigger triceps than she does. They hold their arms against each other’s and determine that his are, in fact, bigger, and Hawk System aborts Rage Sequence. Moments later, while the two are having sex, Nick begins to raise and lower himself into her by performing several one-armed push-ups.

There is no punctuation yet created with which to adequately conclude that previous sentence. Seventeen periods? Do I put the rest of this on a separate website? Do I mail the sentence to you on a scrap of paper so that you can periodically reflect on it? Nick Hawk found a way to combine weightlifting with intercourse. He is a Freudian sonnet. To witness him in this moment is to comprehend the true expanse of human vanity. He has a tattoo on his penis of a comic book character.

Gigolos is unabashedly pornographic. Many of the scenarios are prearranged. The clients are themselves actors compensated by someone affiliated with the show. Whether actual penetration is even occurring on screen is inconclusive. It is an entirely disposable piece of television. But what really is the purpose of discerning what’s fake and what’s authentic in a show about professionals who are inauthentic for a living? Escorts are dedicated to something artificial—fake tans, dyed hair, exhaustingly maintained bodies and personas, disguising their true emotions, making the women feel loved when no one else can love them or when the women don’t have the time to be loved at all. It is a mirage; every bit of it. Of course, “Gigolos: We’re not real, but we’re not supposed to be” probably wouldn’t make for much of a tattoo.

Previously - Ryan Lochte Is a Human Jägerbomb

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

Stanley Cohen (right) in Gaza with one of the two disputed prime ministers of the Palestinian National Authority, Ismail Haniyeh. Photo by Peter Spagnuolo via

The term "polarizing figure" has become a lazy way to describe politicians, pundits, and media figures for essentially being very loud about mostly superficial things. But there are still a number of people around who fit the definition perfectly. Defense attorney Stanley Cohen is one of those people, capable of simultaneously evoking both absolute hatred and adoration from various parts of society. In fact, he's the only lawyer I've ever come across who has a Haters section on his own website.  

Stanley has accumulated a list of clients including Hamas, Hezbollah, the IRA, and al-Shabaab. Most recently, he's added two new clients to his portfolio: Mercedes Haefer, who's accused of taking part in cyberattacks against PayPal as part of the Anonymous collective, and Suleiman Abu Ghaith, Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law and a man accused of acts of terrorism against the United States.

Stanley has been referred to as “the terror lawyer” by conservative US pundit Sean Hannity, a “savage lawyer” by professional anti-Muslim subway activist Pamela Geller, and beat Noam Chomsky and Norman Finklestein to the coveted title of Worst of the Worst Self-Hating, Israel-Threatening Jews.” At the same time, Stanley has been hailed as something of a champion of free speech and antiestablishmentarianism by internet activists, and for defending the human rights of the disenfranchised.

Stanley was kind enough to let me interview him, and we spoke about his nemesis, his career, and getting hassled by the IDF.

Stanley with the American poet Peter Spagnuolo (left) and Yasser Arafat. Photo by Peter Spagnuolo via

VICE: Hi, Stanley. Thanks for taking the time to do this interview.
Stanley Cohen: Sure. So, it's good to know that Eric Holder finally admitted that the US drone program killed four Americans.

In Yemen?
Yeah. They already announced those missing four a while ago, so it’s like, "Gee, guys, did it take you two fucking years to figure this out?"

Eric Holder has become something of a nemesis to you, right?
Yeah—fuck Eric Holder. Eric Holder is no different from every other attorney general in recent history. We haven't had an independent, dynamic, enlightened, historical US attorney general since Ramsey Clark. Basically every attorney general down the line has been swallowed up by the political agenda of whoever the president is, and it’s typically worse with the Democrats than even the Republicans. So yeah—Holder is a good team player, unlike, "I Have a Drone," [Obama] who won’t admit it, but I’m sure goes to sleep at night believing he spoke to the creator during the day. Holder is just a petty hack.

In all your work in Israel or Palestine, have you ever actually had an encounter with the IDF?
Yeah, I’ve had encounters at crossings, I’ve had encounters at the Wailing Wall, I’ve had encounters where I was on an investigation and we were avoiding road blocks because I had to get into Tulkarem [the then-Hamas stronghold in the West Bank] at a time when it was basically locked down, so I got a local cab. It was kind of funny—the Palestinian didn't know who I was, but when I said I needed to get to Tulkarem, he said I couldn't get in. So I said, "Look, if you can get me there and get me out of there, there will be a big, healthy tip for you."

Stanley in Gaza in 2012. Photo by Peter Spagnuolo via

That always helps.
He still didn’t know who the fuck I was at this point. So anyway, we did some off-road driving, got to Tulkarem, met at a client’s family’s house, interviewed the mayor, sat down with some witnesses, and this guy’s mouth dropped. As the interview went on and on, he was like, “Holy shit, I had no idea who you are—this is serious shit.” And then it started to get dark and we said, "Oh, we've got to get out of here because the IDF do raids in Tulkarem at night all the time."

So we jump into the car and we drove into the mountains and did a quick turn coming down. Then, all of a sudden, we were on a little dirt road and we came across a fucking tank, and the tank turned its turret toward us and locked and loaded. And, for some reason—I don’t know; the guy in the turret had to change his socks or take a dump, or something—he turned the other way and went the other direction. So we made it through the mountains to east Jerusalem, where I always stayed, and the driver told me, “I had a great day and learned a lot. But the next time you need a ride, don’t call me.”

Jesus.
I’ve had a thousand encounters. I’ve had bigger battles with Shin Bet [Israel's internal security service] at Ben Gurion airport. One guy said, “If you were Palestinian, I’d take you out back and shoot you in the head. You’re not, but I still might.” There was a screaming match, Shin Bet escorting me to the airplane, taking my computer and saying they’re going to do nefarious searches of my body. I told them I don’t have jack shit. He said, “Well, you’re not going to leave my country.” I told him, “Well good, I’ll do fucking speeches from the airport for the next five years—is that what you want, asshole?” Now I don’t go to Israel anymore; I’m not allowed back in.

You are probably, as you said, the most experienced lawyer involved in terrorism cases. Is the Abu Ghaith [one of al Qaeda's official spokesmen and husband to one of Osama bin Laden's daughters] case your biggest so far?
Well, it depends on what you mean by "biggest." I think the case that had the largest consequences in the world community—which, in those days, weren’t really called terrorism cases—was probably Abu Marzook, who was the political leader of Hamas from 1995 to 1997. That’s a case and a person who was and remains such a critical player in international politics in general—in the Middle East, in the Gulf, North Africa, and now increasingly in central and south African politics. In terms of who’s who, that was certainly the biggest. This is a big case in that it’s the so-called "bin Laden’s son-in-law case," and they get to basically try bin Laden after they murdered him and dress him up like bin Laden in the southern district of New York. It serves a political agenda because it allows the government to say, “See, we can do a trial! We can handle a trial! We’re on top of this stuff!”

Stanley in Gaza with Ahmed Yassin (left) and Ismail Abu Shanab (right), two of the founders of Hamas. Photo by Peter Spagnuolo via

The Knesset—the legislative branch of the Israeli government—once held a special session about you. Could you tell me about that?
I'd heard from a mole that the Knesset has a political committee that deals with issues like lobbying, PR, and money that goes to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. They had a meeting about one of my lawsuits against Israel and apparently we really pissed off a member of the cabinet. The mole conveyed to me that it got quite funny—all the psychobabble shit about me and, you know, how they were going to deal with it.

You're widely known as a defense lawyer for terrorism suspects, but also as a human rights activist. That's something that many people, especially in the US, would find contradictory. What do you think of that?
As a defense attorney, I don't know how you can separate representing political people—which, in my 30-year career, has been thousands and thousands of cases—and challenging the system both in the courtroom and out. If that makes you an activist, then so be it. Whether it's trying to level the playing field through public media and exposure, challenging government conduct and policy, serving as a spokesman for an unpopular message from unpopular people—it's all one big fucking pig fry. And whether it's a stop-and-search case of an African American walking away from Columbia University, who happens to have a PhD, or representing and advising groups that the government claims are at war with the United States, it’s all about activism. You just can’t separate the two.

There was a point where you had to hire bodyguards, right?
Well, I had security for about two months after 9/11. There were some threats—things people perceived as a serious concern. The funny thing about it was that I couldn’t fucking get private security to take the contracts from me, or the clients that wanted to hire them. Al Sharpton and I have had a very contentious relationship over the years, but I remember he reached out to a mutual friend of ours and said, “I know we haven’t always agreed or seen eye to eye, but I really think it’s important that he be protected.” And he was very close with the Guardian Society, which is the Union of Black Police Officers. And they, as it turns out, have a private security investigation firm, so I ended up having off-duty African American cops providing security for me for two months.

Stanley in the Gaza Strip in 1997. Photo by Peter Spagnuolo via

Why didn't you and Sharpton get along?
I was involved in some very serious political battles. Some people thought it was accusations that he was an informant to the FBI, but it really wasn’t about that. I just thought, at the time, that there was a lot of showboating going on in a movement he was involved in, and I thought it was counterproductive and counterrevolutionary. And it created problems, especially the whole Tawana Brawley disaster, and I spoke publicly about it.

Do you find any parallels between your Anonymous cases and the cases in the Middle East that you’re involved in?
Yeah, I do. I think the common strain is that there are movements and individuals. I hate to use the old metaphor, but it's those who choose to stand up and be counted. Most people are comfortable with being passive observers of history. I have a saying that there is no greater crime than the young becoming cheerleaders in the parade of mediocrity, who at a very young age sell themselves short, sell themselves out and start working on their mortgage.  

So what are the similarities with these cases in particular?
The common strain between Anonymous and a lot of movements—social, political, and armed struggle movements in the Middle East, in the Third World, and other parts—is the fact that people refuse to be passive participants or observers. People feel obligated to jump into this dirty mud fight and try to direct, focus, monitor, and expose locally, internationally, globally; the world that is theirs to come. Now, obviously, the people on the ground in Gaza, the West Bank, or the refugee camps have very different issues than people in Anonymous. 

Yeah.
But there are no more globally important and fundamentally powerful issues over the next 30, 40, or 50 years than the war over cyber space. Who owns it, who controls it, and what’s to become of it. It's the penultimate issue throughout the world, and we have those who have controlled the shit for a very long time trying to figure out how they can maintain the stranglehold on a Brave New World. And we have those young and not so young who say, “Fuck, this is a brave new world and, unlike our grandparents and great grandparents who sold this shit to you or sat back while you stole it, we ain’t doing it.”

Thanks, Stanley.

Follow Richard on Twitter: @RichardSP86

More interviews with lawyers who take interesting cases:

Meet the Lawyer Who's Trying to Get Charles Manson Out of Jail

Want to Watch DVDs of People Fisting Each Other? 

Saddam H. Christ

When summertime rolls around, all I want to do is stay inside and try not to sweat. I guess that’s why summer reading lists are a thing. I don’t keep a running list, though. I just have stacks of books everywhere and when the mood hits I grab one. This year I’m determined to get through a few I’ve had stacked inside my house for at least five years now, like Gaddis’s A Frolic of His Own, Perec’s Life a User’s Manual, Sontag’s Death Kit, Sesshu Foster’s Atomic Aztex, not to mention piles on piles of new stuff. There’s so much coming out every week, and most people haven’t even started consuming what they got a year ago, or more. But it’s nice to be buried sometimes, and it’s nice to see that others are buried, too, and absorb shit from what they’re inhaling.

I asked some writers I admire what books they’ve got piled up and waiting and where those books came from.

Jesse Ball (The Curfew) 

1. Board and Table Games from Many Civilizations, by R. C. Bell. Found at Myopic Books in Chicago. A Dover edition of this classic on human play.

2. Memories of the Future, by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. Given to me by a student. NYRB, so I am filled as always with eager anticipation.

3. Baroque Chess Openings, by Richard Wincor. A bizarre book by a brilliant man who appears to have been only a competent chess player. I am also only competent and like his obscure approach (as detailed in the book). I may give his method a try. Also purchased at Myopic.

4. The Nature of the Judicial Process, by Benjamin Cardozo. Purchased at Myopic. A book about how judges think when making judgments (by a legendary justice).

5. Agricola and Germania, by Tacitus (translation). If you don't like Tacitus, your world is a little smaller and paler in my estimation.

6. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas S. Kuhn. A book on systems of knowledge and ways of thinking in science. Bought at Myopic as a gift for someone who already owned it (a prescient gift).

Molly Brodak (A Little Middle of the Night) 

1. The Cousins' Wars, by Kevin Philips. About five years ago I read Wealth and Democracy by him, which is a book that should replace all math books, science books, history books, English books, every textbook in every school in America. This one is considerably larger and deeper and I have a lot of reverence for it, which is somehow why I have not 'let' myself read it yet.

2. Songs of Stories of the Ghouls, by Alice Notley. The few times I've opened this it seemed like a neurotic, rambling, serious inside joke that wanted me to close it back up and not return, but I won't.

3. Canada, by Richard Ford. My mom sent me this book for my birthday because the main character's dad robs banks, which is something she thought I could relate to. The blurb says it is "luminous" and "destined to become a classic" which makes me already hate it.

4. The Penguin Atlas of African History, by Colin McEvedy. This book has extremely beautiful pale blue maps on every other page, showing various anthropological changes to population/politics using various shading patterns and symbols. Someone already highlighted all passages relating to diseases or plagues.

5. Prehistoric Life, by DK Books. I regularly flip through this book but I plan to force myself to read it cover to cover soon. It's childish and has overly colorful digital artists' renderings of extinct animals and plants that will look dated in ten years but it's very comforting somehow. Still, I can't believe I bought this book; it probably cost $50.

6. Inside the Blood Factory, by Diane Wakoski. I bought this book for $1 because I sort of felt bad for it and I also liked the mellow 70s cover style. The poems seem sort of mystical/hysterical and I will feel even more sorry for it when I read it.

Claire Donato (Burial) 

1. New Religious Movements: A Documentary Reader, by Dereck Daschke.

2. Look at the Bunny: Totem, Taboo, Technology, by Dominic Pettman.

3. Ghost, bySarah Tourjee.

4. Foreign Correspondent, by Joanna Howard.

5. Unequal Before Death, by Marcelline Block and Christina Staudt.

6. The Organism for Poetic Research. PELT 2 + accompanying cassette tape.

7. Moscow Symposium: Conceptualism Revisited, Boris Groys (ed).

8. Heath Course Pak, by Tan Lin.

9. Middlemarch, by George Eliot.

10. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll.

11. The Talented Mr. Ripley, by Patricia Highsmith.

12. Fishboy, by Mark Richard.

13. Against Interpretation and Other Essays by Susan Sontag.

14. Music for Porn, by Rob Halpern.

15. Nilling by Lisa Robertson.

16. Exilée / Temps Morts: Selected Works, by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

17. Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, TC Tolbert and Tim Trace Peterson (eds).

18. Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, by Daniel Clowes.

Brian Evenson (Immobility) 

1. Pathmarks, by Martin Heidegger. Always try to start the summer by reading some high theory...

2. Killing Critics, by Carol O'Connor. O'Connor's Mallory is the basis for Salander in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  

3. Remember Why You Fear Me, by Robert Shearsman. Everybody who knows anything about horror and literature has been recommending this one to me. Really looking forward to it.

4. Red Moon, by Benjamin Percy. Werewolves, written by a guy who has a voice like Darth Vader. What's not to like?

5. Signs of Life, by M. John Harrison. Been slowly working through all of Harrison's work, which is excellent. My friend Brian Conn recommended this one.

6. The River Through the Trees, by David Peak. Poor David Peak, crushed by all these big books. But I'll probably start at the bottom of the pile and work up.  

Shane Jones (Daniel Fights a Hurricane) 

1. The Recognitions, by William Gaddis. Have had this on my list for at least a year. I keep dipping in and out, loving it, then reading some other, shorter book. I asked for this on Twitter and a guy in Rhode Island sent it to me. Gaddis blows people up on the page (from the 100 pages or so I've read).

2. Lightning Rods, by Helen DeWitt. My wife read this and liked it. DeWitt seems really interesting and I eventually want to get to it because it's mostly about fucking in the workplace, I think. 

3. The Mandarin, by Aaron Kunin. I'm pretty sure this book is for me, but it's been sitting for like two years unread. Rebecca Wolff gave me this copy during lunch at a Thai restaurant in Albany.  

4. Night Moves, by Stephanie Barber. Ordered this from PGP and then for some reason never read it. It keeps moving around my apartment, following me. 

Sean Kilpatrick (fuckscapes) 

1. Kissssss, by Steve Katz. Caught a review touting Katz’s level as under the common slur of influence. Hope it’s fucking mean enough. Us word saladers get caught yawning too. All right.

2. Expressionist Texts, by Oskar Kokoschka. Some forms of batshit kill together.

3. Desires, by John L’Heureux. “He would walk around on his skinned feet, leaving bloody footprints up and down the corridors, looking for someone to love him.”

4. Nathanael West, by Jay Martin. West never plagiarized Horatio Alger. He popped a dildo in his ear for science. Reading this and Mishima soon. Let’s end how they did.

5. Us He Devours, by James B. Hall. He wrote Yates Paul, His Grand Flights, His Tootings. Here’s the proud simple line being fantastic. Titles like early Arthur Kopit: Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad.

6. Zone, by Mathias Énard. Evenson’s translations. Electric Flesh. Electric Flesh.

7. The Works of Rabelais. Reading this over my short lifespan.

Ben Mirov (Hider Roser) 

1. Strange Travelers, by Gene Wolfe. I like Gene Wolfe's writing a lot. He is one of my favorite writers, but I haven't really read many of his short stories. I've had this book for about a year, I think. I took it from my dad's bookshelf.

2. The Explosions, by Mathias Svalina. Mathias is a friend of mine. I really like his writing. I'm especially attracted to how imaginative it is.

3. Mellow Actions, by Brandon Downing. Brandon's work is always fun to read. I like to think of his poems as collages, but I'm not sure he would describe them that way.

4. The Naomi Poems: Corpse and Beans, by Bill Knott. My friend Clay just moved to Massachusetts. He was clearing out his books and had two copies of this, so he gave me one. I don't really know Bill Knott's work, but a number of poets have recommended him to me.

5. A Perfect Vacuum, by Stanislaw Lem. I've been meaning to read this book for a long time. My friend Clint found it in the Strand in New York, I think. It's a collection of fake book reviews.

6. Hogg, by Samuel Delany. I've always been a fan a Delany's writing, especially his older sci-fi, but also his nonfictional writing. I tried to read Hogg before. I was reading it and then I gave up reading books for a while, but I want to finish it.

7. The Wise Man's Fear, by Patrick Rothfuss. This is the second book in a trilogy about a legendary hero telling the story of how he became a hero. It seems like pretty straightforward fantasy writing so far. I'm sort of losing interest in it.

Adam Robinson (Adam Robison and Other Poems) 

1. Antigonick, by Anne Carson (illustrated (a lot) by Bianca Stone). Read it for the pictures.

2. As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh, by Susan Sontag, edited by her son, David Rieff. You think you like Susan Sontag, but who has the time? These fragments solve that problem.

3. Young Tambling, by Kate Greenstreet. The guy who told me to see Fishbone became my best friend because of it. Go see Kate Greenstreet.

4. The Skin Team, by Jordaan Mason. The publisher told me this is an immersive book. I'll say. I won't even need to fill the bathtub.

5. Nazi, by Jeremiah Rush Bowen. With no preface, Nazi launches into 400 pages of internet people telling each other why they’re Nazis. “You’re a Nazi because you breastfeed.”

6. Goodbye to the Nervous Apprehension, by Michael Heald. The author sold me this for $5. There’s some stuff about Malkmus in it, but in a good way.

7. The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton. It’s like the point is to make me uncomfortable.

Andrea Seigel (The Kid Table) 

1. Crap Kingdom, by D. C. Pierson. I’m a few chapters into this. We have the same publisher, so I asked my editor for it.

2. Ticknor, by Sheila Heti. I went apeshit for How Should a Person Be? So I immediately ordered this.

3. When Panic Attacks, by David D. Burns. A therapist I’m no longer seeing told me to read this and do the exercises for my anxiety because I won't take drugs. I can't seem to get on board.

4. The Emperor of All Maladies, by Siddhartha Mukherjee. This book has been in my bedside reading pile for approximately two years. Every time I try to read more of it, I get anxious that I have cancer (see above).

5. Instyle, December 2012. I like to go through holiday gift guides and cut out things I think people would like. I haven't had time yet because I had a baby.

Previously by Blake Butler - The Miami Heat Reader

@blakebutler

This footage was shot by Robert King the morning of Tuesday, June 11, when Taksim Square in Istanbul was being evicted by the riot police. The Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, had said he would meet with the protesters on Wednesday, but then, all of a sudden, the police entered Taksim Tuesday at 7 AM, saying they wanted to remove some banners. The protestors started throwing stones and Molotov cocktails, and it all escalated from there. There were theories that the Molotov-cocktail throwers were actually police officers dressed up as protesters, but who knows for sure.

More about the uprising in Istanbul:

Watch our documentary, Istanbul Rising

Journalist Tim Pool was livestreaming the protests

Occupiers Faced Down Cops in Istanbul's Taksim Square