I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: skateboarders are the most creative people on the planet. Mark Gonzales, Ed Templeton, Chris Pastras, Jason Lee, Spike Jonze, Adam Wallacavage, Dave Carnie, Russ Pope, Jai Tanju, Brian Gaberman… those are just a few of the guys who the world owes a debt of gratitude to for making it a more beautiful and interesting place. It is the instinctive eye of a skateboarder in search of spots—or, rather, places to play with his toy—that allows him to look at the urban landscape from a different perspective. And so in a time when anyone with a cellphone is a "photographer,” it makes sense that any skater with a cellphone is a better photographer than the majority of the 328 million mobile phone users in America.

New Jersey’s own Gabe Angemi is a skateboarder with a cellphone. Gabe is a second-generation fireman in one of the poorest and most dangerous cities in America: Camden, New Jersey. The photos he posts on his Instagram are an unflinching look at the human (and often inhumane) conditions that exist in the once great city that Walt Whitman called home and often wrote so romantically about. Gabe’s photos are reminiscent of WeeGee’s in that he often arrives on the scene of a fire or crime before the police.

I recently caught up with Gabe to discuss his photos and life in Camden. The stories he told rattled my cage.

VICE: You were a sponsored skater back in the mid-90s. How did you get into photography?
Gabe: I’ve been an artist my whole life—since before skateboarding was introduced to me. I can remember drawing comic book pictures on the kitchen floor as far back as second grade. Like many skateboarders from my generation, though, the arts are connected… maybe even one in the same. I’m self-taught in just about everything I have ever done; skateboarding from the age of 12 will do that to you. I prefer to figure things out for myself. I had point and shoot film cameras from around my late teens on, and was always shooting. Then, when I became a fireman at age 24, I had to put a lot of things on the back burner to learn my trade. Then, after probie school (new fire fighters are probationary) I just never fully went back to those things—but I had a camera of some kind all along. I used to keep one at work with me up until recently, but on-duty personnel are no longer allowed to have cameras. Now I shoot on my days off more than I ever did before.

I feel like you’re the modern day Weegee—always on the scene before anyone else. How is that possible?
A lot of them were taken while I lived in Camden. A city of about ten square miles, if there was a job nearby I could get up and go shoot. If you’re listening you can go—you gotta be where the interesting things are happening if you want interesting photos. Back then I had a camera on me constantly, so with no family or responsibilities I would just hang around the firehouse on my days off. Since I moved out of the city, though, a family and young daughter keep me busy and I can’t go as often. I still shoot regularly, but I can’t do it while I’m actually on duty anymore. When I’m not playing fireman, I get busy.

Why do you shoot primarily iPhone photos? Are you strictly an Insta guy for fun, or do you have aspirations to do more with these photos?
Dude, the iPhone is incredibly fast and easy to use. What’s the saying? Something like the best camera is the one you have with you at the time? I have 20” x 20” prints from an iPhone at my house—they look just fine.

I guess I have aspirations, yeah, but not delusions of grandeur. I never was good at selling myself to the art world. We’ll see, I really do want to publish a book, but only under the right circumstances. I was in my first group show, 99 Days, at the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, and have been talking to a bunch of people about future shows. I have a few good friends as mentors that I can reach out to for help. I’m going to try selling prints soon. If I’m lucky enough to sell any I’ll be donating some of the proceeds to the Heart of Camden, or Hopeworks in Camden, two non-profit organizations based in the city that I like.

Camden has been the poorest city in America for years, but last year it was also named most dangerous. How do you view Camden?
I view it on a daily basis with my own eyes, my cameras, the fine people I work with, and the rest of the city—many of whom, like me, understand how it got this way. We all know it’s a very complex situation to dig out from under; it’s hardly just one issue. I don’t have the answers, but I ask the questions. If you try, you can see through most of the political bullshit going on there, but the culture is decades in the making and to purvey another, you really have to be willing to try and get the message out, handling many setbacks along the path. There are a great deal of positive things going on in Camden—many of which I’m probably not even aware of—and unfortunately those things are always trumped by the stigma that’s attached to consistently being one of the most dangerous places in our country. For me, viewing it through my cameras and showing people what’s going on is my way of telling the story and asking for help, I suppose.

Ever seen a dead body?
Lost count. Ballpark figure, I guess 50 to 60? I really don’t know. They come one at a time or in bunches from all sorts of mishaps—from fires to industrial accidents. I’ve been assigned to the two busiest companies my whole career, so I typically deal with it one way or another. I’m assigned to our Rescue Company, we do all the extra stuff an urban fire department handles; vehicle extrication, structural collapse, confined space, high-angle rope… basically any other discipline that’s outside the realm of standard fire department operations. One of my wilder mornings involved a triple homicide, if I remember correctly. The assailant tried to light the house off where these folks were all shot up. I can remember masking up about to follow the line in a back door that led through a kitchen, listening to a police officer standing there telling us to “Try not to disturb too much shit.” Three-feet later I’m slipping all over the kitchen floor in blood and casings with several bodies all shot up—shirtless men with holes. We knocked the fire down before it really took off. The department sees this regularly enough, perhaps a bit more in Camden than other fire departments, obviously, but it is the nature of things. It really blows when they’re alive when you get there to help and don’t make it. That usually takes a hard toll on guys—a bigger toll then any of them admit. Kids are the worst. I can still smell an incident close to a dozen years ago that I dealt with involving three kids trapped in a car like it was yesterday; that smell was horror. People really have no respect for how delicate human life is—it really is by a thread.

Recently Camden removed its police force. Can that city, once known as the ‘City Invincible’ ever possibly recover?
Walt Whitman coined that term: “In a dream I saw a city invincible...” Who knows, man. I’d love to see it prosper, that’s what brings me to work, to try and help make that happen. The place has great energy and great people. What happened to the Camden Police is both a travesty and an injustice, but that’s a whole other interview. My answer is yes it can and will recover, but it needs help. It needs people and positivity. The stigma attached to it is perpetuated by people who never spent any time there. The surrounding suburban folks bash it and its people to no end. This South Jersey area really is one of the most hateful, pessimistic, and self-righteous places around. Regardless, I have hope. I’d like to help.

Tell me a couple stories of gnar that you’ve witnessed working in Camden.
This year alone I’ve seen a severely burned, slashed, and decapitated woman set on fire with lighter fluid in a home, and a man fall through the roof of a local commercial facility to his death, taking off some of his head on the way down. These things happen. Accidents are constant. There’s been a bunch of filler in between these things, but I only remember the crazier stuff these days—you kinda just go numb to it. The start of the year was busy. We had six fire fatalities fairly consecutively and I worked four of them. Mike Mercado and I humped a guy out of a fire from a second floor middle bedroom right around new years. I could tell his face had been beaten but it wasn’t easy to see him through the smoke and my mask. Thought he maybe had a chance, but he died. Apparently he had a dispute earlier that day with neighbors. The building he lived in was vacant, as most of ours are. A little late night arson revenge, I suppose. Gnar is the daily agenda for Camden. Fire, police, and EMS folks deal with it every shift there. God Bless them. I’m not sure how repeated exposure to certain things takes a toll on people—we’re all different mentally—but you just gotta tune it out if you want to come into your next shift sane. Or go home to your family without being an asshole.

Previously - Tony Hawk's Son Is a Stoner

Follow Gabe on Instagram for more photos of Camden @Ange_261

And you can purchase prints to hang in every room in your home here.

More stupid can be found at Chrisnieratko.com or @Nieratko

Cry-Baby #1: Margie Rhea Ramey

(via Reddit/image via Hawkins County Jail)

 The incident: A woman thought some people were about to pull into her driveway to turn their car around. 

The appropriate response: Nothing. Putting up a gate or something if it's a recurring problem. 

The actual response: She shot at them with a gun. 

Last Sunday, a man named Oscar Scott was driving with his wife and five children, aged between 4 and 12, in Bays Mountain Park, Tennessee.

Oscar wanted to take a scenic route, so took a turn down a road called Bays Mt. Road. He soon realized it didn't lead anywhere, "We got pretty far down that road and you could see where it turned into an old log road, so I put the vehicle in reverse to turn around."

Which is when 72-year-old Margie Rhea Ramey (pictured above) began shooting at them.

According to Oscar, she shot at them at least twice, with one shot hitting the running board of his car, near to where one of his children was sitting. 

In an interview with the Old Time News, Oscar said "I hadn’t even begun to turn my wheels to pull in her driveway, I just put my vehicle in reverse, and just as quickly as I put it in reverse I heard her hollering and my little boy said, ‘does she got a gun?' About that time she started shooting.”

Sgt. Michael Allen, of the local police department, told the Old Time News, “During a field interview Mrs. Ramey openly admitted to shooting her rifle towards the vehicle because she has had a continuous problem with people tearing up her driveway.”

Margie was arrested and charged with seven counts of felony reckless endangerment. She was released on bail, and is due back in court for a preliminary hearing in September. 

Cry-Baby #2: Olga Rozhoav

The incident: A teacher saved a class of children from a burning building. 

The appropriate response: Congratulating her. Possibly even giving her some kind of award or a medal or something 

The actual response: She was fired. 

Last week, Michelle Hammack was working at Little Temples Childcare in Jacksonville, Florida. 

While her children were taking their afternoon nap, Michelle smelled burning and went to investigate. In the kitchen, she discovered a small fire in the oven. When she opened the oven door, the smoke cause the fire alarm to go off.

She went back to her classroom, woke up her kids, and led them outside to safety. 

While other teachers did a head count, Michelle went back inside the building to make sure there were no children left. While inside, she realized that the fire was small enough for her to deal with, and extinguished it herself. 

Upon returning to work the next day, she was fired. 

Speaking to Action News Jackson, Olga Rozhoav, the owner of Little Temples Childcare said, “I fired her only because she left her room. Even though children are sleeping, the teachers are supposed to be there. It’s not acceptable, and if anybody else does the same thing, I will fire again. I will fire them. No question.”

The Department of Children and Families is currently investigating the incident.

Which of these grumpy old gals is the bigger cry-baby? Let us know in this poll plz:

Previously: A guy who called the cops on someone for singing "Happy Birthday" Vs. Some people who beat up a guy for blowing a whistle

Winner: The birthday guys!

@JLCT

I work less than a mile from the Wendy’s I used to eat at almost every day when I was an overweight high schooler. Several of my chunkiest friends and I would sit inside and eat together. We chose to eat at the restaurant instead of getting it to go so we could easily place a second order if we weren’t full after the first run. I have many fond memories of pushing beef and chocolate sludge into my face there. Somehow I remember those times more vividly than so much of the rest of my time in high school, even if all of my time in every Wendy’s ever seems to blend together, kind of like how I think of god.

Now Wendy’s has this new thing called the Pretzel Bacon Cheeseburger, where they’ve gone and replaced their old bun with what you’re supposed to understand as pretzel dough. Fast food places love to come up with these gimmick items that make ex-fatasses go electric with memories of eating lard treasures, the same way athletes from high school might look back on prom. I’ve been very careful with my diet for years now, and so I rarely let myself indulge as well as I should, but inevitably there comes the time and time and time again that you decide you don’t give a fuck and you are ready to become bigger.

The second I make the decision that this shit is going to happen, Cult Ritual’s “Holiday” comes up on my iPod Shuffle, which opens with what sounds like knife blades being sharpened, then launches into feedback, banging, and shouting. I pull up at the drive-thru and order one single patty Pretzel Burger, to which the attendant responds, “That’s it?” Then she reports my total as $4.66 for a single. This seems insane. I realize I don’t usually pay attention to what I’m charged at fast food places because, like someone about to be stabbed in the dark, I don’t want to know. Around the corner at the second window, as the lady takes my card and reaches through the window with the bag that holds my sandwich, my iPod Shuffle transitions (I shit you not) into The Smiths “Bigmouth Strikes Again,” as well it should. I take my bag and lay it on my lap and drive away mumbling to myself about Joan of Arc.

The burger comes in a sturdy red box with Wendy’s face stamped on it, her open-mouthed smile all made out of a single line. The box reads: “QUALITY IS OUR RECIPE,” which makes me imagine a chubby American burger chef holding up a recipe book with a picture of my burger on one page and “Ingredients: Quality” written in big font on the page beside it. I open the box and look at the baby nestled inside, waiting all alone, the weird cross-shaped X on top designed to create the illusion that the bun was freshly baked.

The food item itself smells different every time you sniff it. First, I remember walking on the beach, during those same years when I was fat and wore a big shirt because I didn’t want anyone to see my chub. If you sniff the center of the cross on top of the bun it kind of smells like the warm free bread they bring you in a basket at corporate chain restaurants like O’Charley’s or something, which is usually only good if you smash enough butter into it to make it not be bread anymore. Sniffing near the cheese reminds me of baseball for some reason; and the bacon, of course, smells like dead meat.

The bread is pretty nice, though on the underside of the top bun it kind of looks like a mushroom head. I kind of want to punch it. The “salad parts” of the burger are, of course, way more desiccated and sorry-looking than in any ad Wendy’s would ever let you see. The lettuce is spinach—at least I think it’s spinach—and has several leaves arranged into what is about the size of a playing card. I don’t know where they get a tomato that produces slices as small as this tomato; it doesn’t seem to have any seeds in it. Where do you get tomatoes without seeds? There are like three so-thin strips of onion kind of tossed on top, and those things definitely have some stink, small as they are, but not good-onion-stink—it reminds me more of when you held an action figure in your fist for too long as a kid and it’s all sweaty and weird with your hand.

Under the vegetables there’s this extra sauce that is as yellow as the cheese. According to the description, it’s supposed to be honey mustard sauce—not that you’ll be able to tell. Oddly, where the sauce touches the cheese, the cheese has kind of turned to liquid, like it got its face melted off. That seems weird. Whoever put the cheese on didn’t aim very well and so most of the slice of cheese is hanging off the edge of the burger and sticking to the cardboard box like it’s trying to clasp onto a life preserver in the ocean to keep from drowning. The bacon ladled onto the cheese/sauce washout is kind of incredibly red. I don’t think I remember seeing bacon this red ever. Looking at it too long, I start to think of Freddy Kreuger’s face. But it’s bacon, so it doesn’t matter what it looks like.

The bottom part of the bun is kind of insanely greasy, so much so that when you try to pick it up it seems to slide away from you. Unlike the liquidated cheese on the top side of the burger, the extra slice of cheese on its butt-area has solidified into some kind of glue that literally won’t let me remove the bottom bun unless I’m willing to rip the bread up into a kind of clumpy white shit. If you pry the edge of the bun up right, you can see the edges where the cheese has turned a strangely darker yellow than normal, clinging to both the patty and the bun like gel.

The first thing I find myself thinking as I bite into the side of the burger with the cheese all sloshing out is, oddly, barbecue sauce, even though there isn’t any barbecue sauce on it. I have to go wash my hands immediately after touching the thing before starting typing unless I’m ready to give my keyboard a grease massage. The collision of things that come into your mouth when you bite in is really a jumble. The bacon is really crunchy, which is good, and stays crunchy while you chew, causing a kind of doggy chorus inside your brain over the whole thing. The bread holds up with the O’Charley’s reference I made earlier. It’s kind of nicely chewy, too. The spinach is in there—again, if it is spinach. I’m still unsure, even after having tasted it. I like the leaves mottling around with the beef, which really just tastes like any Wendy’s burger you’ve ever had. They have good beef; it tastes fresh off the grill and kind of crumbles in the way that ground beef does sometimes. I would call the sauce more of a lurker, as it only shows up as an accent underneath the other stuff; I guess that is what sauce is supposed to do, though sometimes it’s cool when you get a mouthful of sauce.

The second bite is somehow wetter. Why wetter? It kind of makes a sound with my mouth like when you squeeze something Jell-O-y out of a mold. It tastes a little different than the first time. There’s a little less cheese in this bite and I can taste more of the grease kind of working against the bread’s body while I turn it into mush in my mouth. I’m trying to hold the bite in my mouth for a while so I can type and think at the same time. I don’t recommend doing that with this burger; it doesn’t seem to hold up very long. I imagine they named fast food “fast” because you’re supposed to get it fast after you order, but also you should probably eat it fast, because the longer it has to think about itself and cool down to temperatures at which you can taste the thing, the worse off you’ll be.

Same goes for the smell factor. Now that I’ve been sitting here with the burger for around ten minutes the stink of it is really beginning to change. It reminds me more of trash now, but maybe trash someone left out in a nice garden. There are little clumps of either the beef or the bacon in my teeth and gums that appear while I’m kind of sucking my mouth to feel the generally garbage-y feeling that begins to accompany the stink. The word “grout” occurs to me, as does “waterslide after some big boys.” I can already feel the burger reforming in my gut—like there is a definite shift in how I felt sitting in this chair before and after having taken three or four bites of the “sandwich.” My belly seems bulgy and like it wants to be placed on stage with a microphone in a shitty bar somewhere. I don’t want to touch my chest or stomach. My shirt feels different, like I borrowed it from someone. I google the caloric value of the sandwich and find it is 680 calories, providing an odd sort of relief. Six-hundred-and-eighty, in the realm of shit we’re playing around with, is just cute, like a nipple on a giant.

Really now, the smell is all up in my breath. My whole office smells like a locker room full of fat teen versions of me right after having been forced to work out. It feels hard to breathe without thinking about the red of Wendy’s hair, how her blood is red, and what I imagine her flesh to look like. Her freckles seem like a pox now. As much as I have always loved Wendy’s, it’s hard to remember why when you are done. I can feel the grease kind of coating me on the inside, and on my face some, even more so than the smell. And while I’m kind of thankful I can remember the taste of the first bites as a thing I wanted and enjoyed for a moment, I am not thankful for how I will forget in no time at all how it feels after, how I will go back to Wendy’s at the first given opportunity I can allow myself without feeling like a lardboy with the same original pleasure holes inside me waiting to be filled again, having completely obliterated the memory that this food does not belong.

Before I throw this thing away—because at this point I’ve let it get so cold and my brain so emotionally apart from it, it just looks like a weird flat sandwich-shaped man’s head that’s been chopped open—I take one little last bite and get almost all lettuce, slathered in a remainder of the sauce that, having cooled now and gelled up by itself, just makes me think of Lego blocks turned into cream. Grease is all over everything. I don’t feel anything but heavier than I should be, older, closer to death, which I guess is why anybody ever eats anything but lettuce, and now I’m ready to lie down.

More food:

Fifty Shades of Chick: My Polyamorous Chick-fil-A Porn

What Cat Food Tastes Like

Barfing at the Burger King Whopper Bar

@blakebutler

Photos by Henry Hargreaves, Cakes by Amirah Kassem of Flour Shop

Watch this short video of Amirah Kassem's cakes being destroyed:

More photo stuff from VICE:  

Interfearance

The ‘LBM Dispatch’ Brings the Good News

Exogenesis

Australia's new Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. (Image via) 

On Friday, Australia’s newly elected Prime Minister Kevin Rudd declared that asylum-seekers arriving on the country’s shores by boat would have their claim assessed in Papua New Guinea (PNG). If their claims are found to be legitimate, it is PNG where they will stay and not Australia. In an official statement, he said:

“Arriving in Australia by boat will no longer mean settlement in Australia. Australians have had enough of seeing people drowning in the waters to our north. Our country has had enough of people smugglers exploiting asylum-seekers and seeing them drown on the high seas."

Despite claiming to put the safety and security of immigrants first, Rudd’s agenda has since been entirely discredited by seismic revelations that emerged on Tuesday. Rod St George, former manager at G4S—the security outfit that bungled the job of policing the London Olympics and is now in charge of the deportation operation in Australia—revealed that, during their detention in PNG, immigrants are being raped and abused by fellow detainees with the full knowledge of the staff.

"There was nothing that could be done for these young men who were considered vulnerable, which in many cases is just a euphemism for men who have been raped," he said, speaking about the site that he worked at in Manus, a province of PNG. "They just had to stay where they were."

That such a place should be considered appropriate permanent residence for some of the world’s most vulnerable people seems absurd—but apparently not to everyone. Earlier this year, VICE reported on the hellish conditions of the refugee detention center in Nauru off the Australian coast—something that the government was fully aware of and seemed to condone. If opposition leader Tony Abbott is anything to go by, some parliamentary officials think immigrants deserve such treatment. That, in trying to protect their own lives and those of their families, these people—consisting largely of Hazaras from Afghanistan, Shias from Pakistan, Iranians, Iraqis, Kurds and Rohingyas, the stateless people of Burma—are behaving in a way that is “un-Christian.”

That might sound ridiculous, but it's hardly unexpected in a climate where it's thought of as perfectly OK to permanently deport refugees to a nearby developing country.

The refugee camp at Manus, Papua New Guinea. (Image via) 

The decision, which will see Australia peddle huge sums of money into the relatively poor PNG, was greeted with full support from the island's Prime Minister, Peter O'Neill. That said, it may also save the Australian government money, as they're currently forking out $2.3 billion on 600 detainees held across other smaller islands. There is certainly financial gain to be made on both sides, but remove the economic considerations from the equation and the logic begins to fall apart.

Even without the discovery that immigrants are being abused at Manus, the choice of PNG as a long-term base for so many asylum-seekers is still short-sighted, if not downright antagonistic.

PNG has a checkered human rights record. As a developing country, the statutes it has in place to protect these vulnerable asylum seekers are woefully flimsy. The country joined the UN in 1975, but in 2010—after an investigation by representatives of the treaty—was asked urgently to sign the protocol against torture and the death penalty, as well as amend its legislation on filing complaints to the UN committee. To date, PNG has failed to come good on these requests and the country’s humanitarian status hangs in limbo. In addition to the USA already raising concerns over the treatment of women inside PNG, the Department of Foreign Affairs in Australia has admitted that “ethnic disputes continue to flare up around the country… quickly escalat[ing] into violent clashes.”

All of which culminates in the fact that even the country’s own people struggle to live there. As tensions with neighboring Indonesia mount, the country faces its own emigration crisis. Jen Robinson, human rights lawyer and director of legal advocacy at Bertha Philanthropies, explains:

"PNG already has a refugee crisis, with more than 9,000 West Papuan refugees who have fled persecution from Indonesia-controlled West Papua and who remain, according to the UN, 'in need of durable solutions.' Ongoing political violence and persecution against West Papuans peacefully seeking their right to self-determination from Indonesia guarantees this number will continue to rise."

It’s unlikely that a country already suffering such strains will be able to cope with a sudden influx of displaced immigrants. What is likely is that we'll see similar scenes in PNG to those that took place in the Pacific island of Nauru this weekend (which Australia has also been paying to house its asylum-seekers while their claims are being assessed).

The island republic—formerly known as Pleasant Island, with a landmass of just over 13 square miles and a population of 10,000—currently holds over 500 would-be Australian immigrants. On Sunday, asylum-seekers sparked a riot that led to the burning of the detention facility where they're being held, causing $55 million worth of damage, as well as leading to 125 asylum-seekers being held in police custody. It has been reported that over 1,000 Nauru men came out in support of the police and attempted to restrain inmates by wielding machetes and other weapons.

The exact cause of the protest remains unknown. The dismal conditions of the detention facility in Nauru undoubtedly played a part, but news of the legislation to permanently send asylum seekers to PNG surely added further fuel to the fire.

On all accounts, Rudd's PNG decision shows an almost unparalleled lack of sympathy, remorse, or responsibility toward asylum-seekers, compared to nearly all other developed states. In the words of Amnesty International Australia’s Refugee Campaign coordinator, Graeme McGregor, “The new plans to resettle all asylum seekers that are found to be refugees in PNG shows not only a complete disregard for asylum seekers but absolute contempt for legal and moral obligations. Mark this day in history as the day Australia decided to turn its back on the world’s most vulnerable people, closed the door and threw away the key.”

While dumping refugees in PNG may hold immediate benefits for the Australian government, it is also likely to spark long term animosity between the two states. In a Guardian article written this week, Antony Loewenstein explained that since being granted its independence in 1975, PNG views Australia with scepticism and is frequently being forced to accept arrangements, such as the redirection of refugee boats, due to economic need.

Solidarity vigil outside an immigrant detention centre in Melbourne. (Image via)

The insistence by the Australian government to keep immigrants out of the country full stop has arrived as a result of several factors, including a sense of paranoia that the public harbors feelings of racial intolerance. The Australian federal election is taking place in September, where Rudd and Abbott will go head to head. Both are keen to assert their own firm stance on border control. Even Rudd’s predecessor as leader of the Australian Labor Party (ALP), Julia Gillard—a woman who stood firm against same-sex marriage—was resolute. She assured the public that an asylum-seekers’ hunger strike to protests against their harsh treatment in Nauru earlier this year would “get them nowhere.”

It’s easy to see why, at a time of heightened political pressure, the memory of the 2005 Cronulla riots might be at the forefront of politicians’ minds. Back then, 5,000 people gathered in a media-fuelled campaign to stop immigrants from supposedly carrying out violent crimes against locals. What began peacefully soon resulted in the mob attack of an unsuspecting man of Arab appearance outside a hotel, followed by several similar attacks over the course of three days and nights. The Lebanese community took the hardest knock, with several young men being attacked. What had been the inevitable result of mounting tension between white youths and Middle Eastern immigrants became a momentous event in Australian history that alerted the world to the country’s problem with xenophobia and the bias against immigrants perpetuated by its media.

But those events are by no means reflective of the majority, as shown through several demonstrations held this year to force the government into taking a softer line on immigration. As Graeme McGregor says: “The vast majority of Australians are compassionate people who are willing to give asylum-seekers a 'fair go' once they hear their personal stories and are aware of the true facts on the issue. Unfortunately, for years politicians have been using asylum-seekers for political point-scoring and incorrectly labelling people who arrive by boat as 'illegal,' when it is perfectly legal to seek asylum from persecution.”

Propaganda is being put before humanitarian law, and this can only hinder Australia’s progress to achieving harmony and true multiculturalism. The events of last Friday hold devastating repercussions for the thousands of people risking their lives to escape oppressive regimes and forge a better life for themselves in a developed country. They also have the potential to destroy the lives of people living in Papua New Guinea, who haven’t the means or the infrastructure to fare the storm that's heading their way.

Follow Nathalie on Twitter: @NROlah

More worrying immigration stories:

Too Many Tunisians, Not Enough Toilets

Immigrants Are Being Stabbed to Death On the Streets of Athens

Gambling with Chinese Immigrants in Connecticut

Hopgood's Foodliner is the brainchild of Geoff Hopgood. Situated in the middle of Toronto's Roncesvalles neighborhood—a historically Polish area that's now been gentrified—Hopgood's imports the energy and flavor of Canadian Maritimes cuisine and chefs it up slightly. We took the Hopgood's crew out to one of their favorite restaurants, Chantecler, a popular spot in Toronto's Parkdale neighborhood that alternates between decadent tasting menu sittings and a more subdued, lettuce wrap Sunday meal. After that, we headed up north to the Junction neighborhood for drinks at Hole in the Wall. The night ended back at Hopgood's for a seafood party. It was dizzying and delicious. Hope you enjoy it.

More Canadian food adventures:

Bar Isabel

Joe Beef

Guu Izakaya

The title, Never Like the First Time! refers to just what you'd expect—losing your virginity. Back in 2006, acclaimed artist Jonas Odell animated four true stories on the subject of popping cherries, which were recorded in 2002 by his colleague Benjamin Wolff. The loss of one’s virginity is universally considered a milestone moment in people’s lives, one that Odell manages to convey with range and depth. There's the standard stuff like boning at a party or the methodical succession of heavy petting to finally knocking boots. Then there's the more troubling sex that involves peer pressure and abuse.  Each interview is recreated with an animation style that suits its tone and serves its story, which makes each piece feel singular. However, when you see all of the stories together, you walk away with a powerful sentiment you wouldn't get if you just saw one by itself.

While watching the film I can’t help but reflect on my own experience crossing that seminal finish line. My story is pretty typical, although I had to wait until I was 18. It wasn’t that I was afraid of pussy, I just was one. There were many missed opportunities that will forever stick in my mind as mistakes, but in the end, I lost it to a girl I thought I loved. That was a lesson in itself—discovering that my dick can make big decisions without consulting me. Regardless, we were both virgins and wildly unprepared for the deed. I pawed her breasts and she poked my penis, things went this way and that and I came in the condom quickly. Emotions got heavy and we thought our relationship was redefined. I realized that things are very rarely about the actual moment, but more about the memories created. We rely on our memories to shape each future decision and action, but as emotional creatures we know they shouldn’t ever be fully trusted. But what else do we have? Without memories we are destined to make the same mistakes over and over. I’ve pined over lovers who were wrong for me, but after we split I could only remember the good stuff or vice versa. Odell’s film is as much about getting laid for the first time as it is about recalling yourself, your feelings, and who you were at a specific point in time. None of us are the same as we were when we lost our “purity,” but none of us could be and that’s something to remember. It’s never going to be your first time again. Each day is new and there are always more firsts to be had, plus great seconds, thirds, fourths, and fifths. 

Never Like the First Time! was Jonas Odell’s first animated documentary. He made the film back in 2006, where it won the Golden Bear Award for best short subject at the Berlinale Film Festival, as well as a Guldbagge in Sweden, and other prizes  He followed up the film with the equally successful short animated doc Lies in 2008. Both before and after these forays into non-fiction he has been animating fiction shorts, commercials, and music videos, even getting a Grammy nomination and winning an MTV Music Award for the Franz Ferdinand's "Take Me Out" video. 

I wanted to know how one decides to make a project about losing your virginity, without including your own tale of getting a piece of tail. Jonas was nice enough to answer.

VICE: How did this project come to you? 
Jonas Odell: I felt for a while that a lot of animation was becoming quite self-referential, at best referencing other films, at worst referencing other animated films. Doing something based on real people's personal stories felt almost like opening up a window to let some air in. I was also interested in how several stories on the same subject add up to something more than just the sum of the parts when put next to each other, so I wanted to let a group of people each tell the story of the same event in their respective lives.

How many interviews did you have to go through before you found the final four?
About 30 interviews were made in total, and then we went back to do additional interviews with some of the people who we felt might work in the film. The final selection was done based on which stories we felt might work best together and complement each other.

There are an infinite number of cherry-popping stories, why did these four stick out to you?
We really picked stories based on whether we thought we could do them justice in the film. All the stories people told are of course worth retelling, so the selection wasn't about the quality of the stories. Rather, it was about the balance in the film and about what we thought we could do with the stories.

How did you develop the style of animation for each interview?  
I knew early on in the process that I wanted the style of each story to come out of the mood of the story itself, rather than to predefine the style of the film. We used a mix of live action and animation in a couple of the stories where we felt the motion of real people rather than animated ones would provide the right feeling for what we wanted.

What are you working on now?
Apart from commercials and music videos, there is another short based on interviews in production.

Any plans to ever make a feature?
I have one project that we are trying to get financed at the moment. No animation in it, though.

Thanks Jonas and good luck.

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

@PRISMindex

Previously - I'm Short, Not Stupid Presents: 'Madame Tutli Putli'

Miguel Ángel Treviño Morales

Last week’s capture of Miguel Ángel Treviño Morales made news all over the world, and was celebrated in the mainstream press as a blow against Los Zetas and a decimation of their leadership. The New York Times went so far as to claim his capture could represent a “crossroads” in the four-decade war on drugs.

These media reports are mainly based on anonymous official sources and analysts who spend too much time on YouTube. Thankfully, there are still some people out there whose bullshit detectors work. These are the folks who can help us get beyond the official line and understand the on-the-ground impact of apprehending a guy nicknamed Z-40 and putting him in jail.

First, it’s important to have a sense of Treviño’s true role in the organization, a nuance that seems to escape even the most hardened stay-at-home keyboard warrior analysts. I asked Guadalupe Correa Cabrera, who teaches in the governance department at the University of Texas in Brownsville, across the river from Matamoros, Tamaulipas, if the mainstream media has oversold the importance of men like Treviño Morales and the role of hired killers within Los Zetas.

“The problem is the media is looking at the lil sicario as if he were the whole organization,” said Cabrera. She’s writing a book titled Zetas Inc., where she compares their structure and operations to that of a corporation. The way she sees it, the assassins who work for the Zetas are basically like a marketing department, and, far from a cartel overseer, Treviño Morales was more like a top salesman.

“[Los Zetas] generate terror through the news media and social networks with the decapitations, dismemberment, hanging people from bridges, the narco-banners... all of it is a strategy that for them generates a brand. And then you add extorsion, kidnapping, the ‘taxes’ on businesses... that makes them an incredible threat,” the professor said. “But that’s just one part of the organization.”

Correa Cabrera insists that Los Zetas is much more than a drug trafficking organization, having branched out long ago into extortion, pirated DVD sales, control of migrant routes, and more. But on top of mimicking a corporation, the Zetas still follow a military model, and perhaps much more closely than we think.

She points out that the increased military presence in Tamaulipas State, home to Nuevo Laredo, the border city where Treviño Morales was captured, has done little damage to the Zetas and has instead spread the group’s reach.

“It’s taken away very little from them. I mean, it’s made them expand into [the states of] Durango, Coahuila, which are states where there is no trafficking of drugs,” said Cabrera.

If you’ve been paying attention to the drug war in Mexico since Felipe Calderón started his term in December 2006, you’ll probably agree that it is no surprise that using the army to chase around criminal groups is a futile way to slow down the drug trade.

Shannon O’Neill, a US government policy wonk who supports the drug war wholeheartedly put it well when she testified in front of US senators about the Merida Initiative, a US antidrugs aid package, earlier this year. "When the Merida Initiative was signed in 2007, there were just over 2,000 drug-related homicides annually; by 2012, the number escalated to more than 12,000,” she said. “Violence also spread from roughly 50 municipalities in 2007 (mostly along the border and in Sinaloa) to some 240 municipalities throughout Mexico in 2011, including the once-safe industrial center of Monterrey and cities such as Acapulco, Nuevo Laredo, and Torreon."

Data like that makes it clear that violence and bloodshed in Mexico has spiked alongside US funding programs designed (in name, at least) to combat drugs and violence. How does this connect to Z-40, you’re wondering? Sean Dunagan, a jovial former Drug Enforcement Administration intelligence analyst in Monterrey, Mexico, and Guatemala, thinks US policy is what creates people like Treviño Morales, who is said to have killed over 2,000 people.

“The one thing that really stands out, that really isn’t reported, is that we created Miguel Treviño,” said Dunagan. “I mean he is entirely a product of American drug policy. Without our current drug policy he wouldn't exist. He might have been a car jacker who probably would be sitting in a Mexican jail right now.”

Dunagan was collecting intelligence in Monterrey before leaving the DEA and joining a group of ex-cops against the drug war known as Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.

“Our policy of prohibition is what creates people like that. It incentivizes violence to a tremendous degree, so we shouldn’t be surprised when someone rises to the top and commits 2,000 murders to get there, because in the scheme that we’ve created and forced on the Mexican government, that’s necessarily going to happen,” Dunagan told VICE Mexico from his home in Washington, DC. “If we want people like him to stop terrorizing Mexico we need to stop our policies. He’s just a logical product of what we’ve done.”

But instead of focusing on how US policy is at the root of the violence taking place in Mexico, the official story says that by arresting a capo, the Mexican Marines might just have undone a criminal organization that is spread out through vast swatches of Mexican territory. Stratfor, an Austin, Texas, based think tank, did a lovely homage to this version of events by running a headline asking: “Will Los Zetas Unravel Without Their Leader?”

I asked Carlos Resa Nestares, a professor of applied economy at the Autonomous University of Madrid in Spain who has written a series of critical texts on the myths of drug trafficking in Mexico, for his opinion on the intelligence created by groups like Stratfor.

“Stratfor has no fucking clue what is happening. Which is to say, I’ve interviewed Stratfor people and they seem to have no fucking clue. They simply copy what is said in the papers and more or less give it some analysis,” he said, putting strong emphasis on the word fucking (or puta in this case) both times. “It doesn’t seem to be that Stratfor is a serious source of information.”

Resa Nestares insists that the Zetas are in fact a paramilitary group that is more focused on extortion than drug trafficking. He claims that the DEA plays up the links between the Zetas and drugs in order to keep US funds flowing to the drug war.

“Narcos’ principal activity is the sale of drugs, buying drugs cheap, and selling drugs at high costs,” said Resa Nestares in an interview from Madrid. “Los Zetas doesn’t do that. They extort people. They extort other drug traffickers, cantinas, a wide range of things, but they do not dedicate themselves fundamentally to drugs, not even to exporting them,” he said.

Resa Nestares doesn’t think killing Z-40 will create a traditional power vacuum as is known to happen when the heads of traditional drug cartels are murdered and lower ranking members vie for power, attempting to re-create the contacts and routes of their former bosses. He compares the Zetas to a mafia, whose main income source is extortion or providing protection to people trying to avoid it. Recreating this following the killing of a higher ranking member is another story altogether. “What happens when you behead a mafioso? Well, the situation gets much more complicated.”

A ministerial source who asked to remained anonymous confirmed to VICE Mexico Monday afternoon that Treviño Morales, aka Z-40, was being held at the Altiplano Maximum Security Prison in Mexico State. “The two charges for which he was detained are use of illicit funds, and storage and possession of weapons that are for exclusive use of the armed forces,” the source said.

More Mexican drugs:

The Zetas' Leader Has Been Captured, but Is That Really Such a Good Thing?

Los Zetas Drug Cartel Have Their Own Radio Network

Murderous Little Boys Are the Future of Mexico's Drug War

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Welcome to another edition of This Week in Racism. I’ll be ranking news stories on a scale of 1 to RACIST, with “1” being the least racist and “RACIST” being the most racist.

-You might have heard that George Zimmerman saved a family trapped in an SUV. The family canceled a planned press conference fearing blowback regarding being saved by the newest "Most Hated Man in America." I'm going to ignore that and focus on the happy part of this story. George Zimmerman saving a family from certain death finally proves once and for all that he is not a bad person. We’ve been waiting for proof, and we finally have it! On a related note, I saved the last slice of pizza for my girlfriend last night, so based on my knowledge of the “Good Deeds Reward Scale,” I now have carte blanche to give a minor head wound to a middle-aged Korean man wearing bifocals. 3

-A black family in San Bernardino, California, woke up last Sunday morning to find the cutest little wooden swastika burning in the street near their home. One wonders how a person can procure a wooden swastika these days. Is there an Etsy store that sells items for the DIY bigot? Maybe you have to carve them yourself? If so, that must take weeks of whittling. I’ll say this for those of you out there who are racists, you are all very committed to hating people. Sometimes I can’t even commit to wearing underwear, so you’ve got me there. RACIST

Photo via Death & Taxes Magazine

-If there’s one thing I actually hate, it’s Facebook memes, specifically the text-heavy ones that your friends really need you to “share” because they’re “so important.” A meme going around right now is a testimonial from a dead baby named “Antonio West.” The meme describes Antonio as being murdered by a rabid pack of teens in a “73 percent non-white neighborhood.” Since black people don’t care when white people are killed, President Black Hussein Omammy (a.k.a. the Ebony Devil) did nothing when these teens were not charged with the death penalty. The meme goes on to say [all sic'd]:

“I am one of the youngest murder victims in our great Nation’s history, but the media doesn’t care to cover the story of my tragic demise, President Obama has no children who could possibly look like me—so he doesn’t care and the media doesn’t care because my story is not interesting enough to bring them ratings so they can sell commercial time slots.”

Sounds like this baby just wants his 15 minutes of fame from beyond the grave. What has this country come to when dead babies are trying to get on TV? Now, that’s macabre.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the sentence that actually says, “There is no White Panther party to put a bounty on the lives of those who murdered me.” There is, it’s called the KKK, the Neo-Nazis, or any number of other hate groups, who, as you can tell from the above swastika story, are still around. 9

Photo by Flickr User GageSkidmore

-Noted power bottom Ann Coulter receives this week’s Ann Coulter Award for Excellence in Racism for her article, “Unsung Black People.” These “black heroes” are the people who dare to be happy when a person is killed. Ann has had it up to here with all the black folk sticking up for their race. They should be glad when a black criminal gets shot. Also, she really wants you to buy her book, as you can see below:

“You'll never hear a peep about any of these courageous black people, unless you obsessively research every "race" case of the last 30 years, as I did for my book Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama. (All these black heroes appear in my book.) “

Black heroes mentioned in Ann's book include:

• Blade, the vampire hunter
• Ernie Hudson from Ghostbusters
• Fat Albert
• The guy who saved the women in Cleveland who loves McDonald's
• Darryl Strawberry
• Shaft
• Mace Windu
• Idris Elba
• Clarence Clemons from the E-Street Band
• T.I.

If this sounds amazing to you too, then please rush out and purchase Ann Coulter’s sensational new book where she solves race relations in America forever. It’s priced to move… your bowels! RACIST

@YesYoureRacist’s Ten Most Racist Retweets of the Week [all grammar sic'd]:

10. @Walttty717: I'm not a racist, but after being at the social security office I believe all black people know each other #familyreunion

9. @andrew_kuras: There will be a f*cking world war before the government will take our guns away. F*ck you Obama you shit looking ni**er.

8. @Jeremy_Pannoni: Some black people are just allergic to doing work. #notracist

7. @TommyToes: I'm not racist but I'm pretty pissed at the African American race for allowing Tyler Perry's career to happen..

6. @sherlocke2: I'm not a "racist" but of course I will laugh at a funny-looking asian.

5. @themanabraham: If you don't hate Michael after watching Lost you're black. Damn ni**ers whoops not racist, but I do dislike the blacks

4. @getreil1991: I can't listen to JIGABOO music all the time #notracist

3. @patriot4USA: back during segregation a lot people were true racists Whites aren't like that now.

2. @codylashen: My grandma just called Obama a ni**er. #TooFunny

1. @JewishJaguar: you don't see a lot of native americans in high school why are they lazy? not racist but why don't they attend education?

Last Week in Racism: George Zimmerman Isn't White

@dave_schilling

The writer, post gaybashing

Aside from being a part of the Southern California Jewish Karate Boom of the mid-90s, I’ve been about as non-violent as a dude can be. I can count on one hand the amount of punch-having situations I’ve been involved in—three to be exact. When I was in 6th grade, a bully shoved my sister to the ground. I punched him in the ear and he couldn’t hear for a few minutes and thought he was deaf so he started crying and it was hilarious. The other two times, I’ve been the fist-receiver. Once, I was blackout drunk in a hotel room in Vegas and woke up to see my friend fucking my other friend’s ex, so I, apparently, stood over their bed and mumbled “this is weird” enough times that we eventually got into a wrestling match which lead me to bleed all over the hotel room. The other time, I was blackout drunk in Anchorage and I, as a straight dude, got gay bashed. A group of teenage punks hurled all sorts of slurs at me like “Go back to where you came from, faggot!” I responded by getting close to one of them and, smiling, floated these words at their faces: “It’s a shame that such terrible things come out of your mouth... when such beautiful things could go in it.” Their fists broke my glasses but not my spirit, and I somehow blindly groped my way back to my hotel. The rest of my life has been a modest attempt at achieving social justice and just plain existing through exclusively nonviolent means.

After Prop 8 passed in California, I went door to door raising money for gay rights causes. During the Occupy Movement, I brought comedians to the steps of LA’s city hall to entertain and share ideas with the weary masses. I’ve marched on Mormon temples because of their involvement in the passage of Prop 8, the streets of Hollywood during multiple anti-whatever-fucked-up-thing-is-happening protests, and been a part of a human blockade of a Long Beach port owned by Goldman Sachs. I sat in a human chain on the penultimate night of Occupy LA, guarding a ceremonial tent in the middle of the park at City Hall. I had the national lawyer’s guild phone number sharpied to my arm in preparation of my imminent arrest. Bandana covering my nose and mouth from pepper spray, vinegar soaked rags in my pockets to combat the tear gas, I was prepared to do whatever it took for the cause. I saw thousands of my neighbors form a wall of life to protect us. Our arms were linked around a symbol of free expression, alone together in the park. They kept the cops at bay. We won that night. I’ll never forget the feeling of watching the sun come up over downtown. We’d done it.

I woke up the next afternoon more depressed than I’ve ever been. As soon as I opened my eyes it hit me—the LAPD was going to continue to raid the park, night after night, until the morale and resolve had shrivelled to the point where the cops could easily clear us out. I was crippled by that revelation. I drank two bottles of wine and couldn’t leave my bed. I watched live, on my computer, that very night, as the city achieved its goal of silencing the people.

In my life, that was the closest thing I’ve seen to the citizenry accomplishing major change, and it was an utter failure. Every form of activism I’ve engaged in has meant nothing—the war’s still happening, the banks continue to eat our future, and gays are only people in a handful of states. Protests have become glorified parades, following strict routes, with drums, music, and the vibe of a street festival. What we’re doing just isn’t working.

In the months and years since the fall of the Occupy Movement—though I was quite busy with drinking heavily, breaking up with my long-term girlfriend, and gaining close to 40 pounds—I found time to grow exponentially more cynical. Every single day, through innumerable drone strikes, Christopher Dorner, the GOP’s War on Women, the massacre of the Voting Rights Act, Trayvon Martin, Congress making it easier than ever for lunatics to get a military grade assault weapon—every single day, I take one step away from my pacifism. I started reading up on turn of the 20th century struggles of the workingman, like the Haymarket Affair, the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, and the May Day Riots of 1919. One thing that tied the vast majority of these together was the intense violence perpetrated by the state and retaliated by the socialists and anarchists. Could violence, in some way, improve our vain (in both senses of the word) attempts to fix our country?

The Haymarket Affair, for those unaware, is the basis for May Day (or International Worker’s Day) and is widely regarded as the turning point in the fight for the eight hour work day. A peaceful gathering of striking workers and supporters met at Haymarket Square in Chicago on May 4, 1886. Various speakers addressed the crowd of roughly a few thousand people, and it was so passive that even the mayor walked home early. Around 10:30 PM, just as the last speech was wrapping up, the police marched on the rally and ordered the crowd to disperse. Before the cops could advance, a homemade bomb was thrown and it detonated, ultimately killing seven policemen. The fuzz fired on the fleeing crowd, and though the numbers vary, many historians agree that approximately four workingmen were killed and 70 were wounded. One police source told newspapers that during the madness, because of the darkness and confusion, many cops actually shot their colleagues: “It was every man for himself, and while some got two or three squares away, the rest emptied their revolvers, mainly into each other.” To this day, nobody knows who threw the bomb. Cases have been made that it was a prominent anarchist, a Pinkerton agent provocateur, a hired goon from a wealthy industrialist, or simply an angry worker.

Illustration of the Haymarket Riot from Harper's

In the aftermath, the Chicago Police, objectively, acted like complete thugs: ransacking homes without search warrants, arresting hordes of workers with little-to-no ties to the bombing, and conducting an eight week shakedown of labor activists. The trial that followed was a complete circus. Judge Joseph Gary didn’t even attempt to hide his disdain for the eight defendants, and the lead investigator was eventually dismissed by the police force for allegedly fabricating evidence. None of this mattered to the press who called the defendants "dynamarchists," "bloody monsters," "cowards," "cutthroats," "thieves," "assassins," and "fiends." The fact was, seven of the eight defendants had legitimate alibis ranging from them being on the speaker’s wagon at the time of the bombing, to being at home playing cards. Facts weren’t important—all eight were convicted and seven were sentenced to death. Before the execution, one of the defendants, Louis Lingg, committed suicide by detonating a blasting cap in his mouth—which didn’t immediately kill him, instead turning his last six hours of life into utter agony. The governor commuted two of the accused’s sentences to life in prison, but four of the remaining leaders of the worker’s movement were to be killed by the state.

On November 11, 1887, the day of the hanging, the families of the condemned were arrested and searched for bombs. The four stood on the gallows and awaited their fate. The instant before their execution, August Spies screamed "The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today!" The men were hanged, but they did not die immediately, instead they, ironically, slowly strangled to death in front of the horrified crowd.

The lasting effect of these tragic events served to unify the workers in Chicago and around the world, and the workers of America eventually won the eight hour workday. It would’ve never happened without violence—both by and at the citizenry. But this was the 1880s, when police and hired gorillas thoughtlessly mowed down workers by the barrelful—and the bullets in their guns were not made of rubber.

Despite the fundamental problems that plague modern America, we are not being categorically struck down simply for fighting for our basic rights. Therefore, when citizens aim to use deadly force as a form of protest against government oppression (McVeigh, the Unibomber, etc.) it not only spectacularly fails to spread the message, but creates a (rightful) outpouring of support for the victims. More than capable of possessing basic human empathy, what if instead of reckless violence against people, the modern protest movement utilized targeted, symbolic “violence” against property?

Watching thousands of people take to the streets last week to protest the institutionalized racism that lead to a trial acquitting a man who instigated a fight with an unarmed teen, lost the fight, then killed the boy with a gun, I couldn’t help but feel a confusing brew of emotions. I reached out to my friend, acclaimed comedian and union organizer Nato Green, and asked him his thoughts on incorporating violence into our current disheveld state of political unrest.

“I'm not a pacifist, but I think the goal of protesting is to broaden the movement.” He continued, “Violence and rioting only works if that's what people are ready for. If you have a million people that want to smash the windows at the bank, then by all means do so. If you have 20,000 people who want to march peacefully and 20 people who want to smash stuff, then those 20 people are dicks for dragging the rest of the group into their thing.”

1999 Seattle WTO protests, Photo via Wikipedia Commons

His words evoked images of the broken Starbucks windows and dismantled Niketown signs that dominated the airwaves during the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle. “The Battle in Seattle” achieved about as much as any individual days-long direct action possibly can. The protests disrupted the meeting to the point where titans of globalization failed to adopt a single resolution, and the citizens made sure the WTO wouldn’t think about occupying their city again. However, if you ask the majority of activists, cops, and press, it was a failure. Why? Because the media narrowed its gaze on some shattered glass and burnt debris, instead of the protesters’ message. But is that entirely true?

According to the phenomenal, albeit slightly outdated, essay “From Public Sphere to Public Screen: Democracy, Activism, and the ‘Violence’ of Seattle” by Kevin Michael DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples, no, it’s not true. Their analysis shows that because, not in spite of, the symbolic “violence” of a handful of anarchists, coverage of the protests more than doubled. Let me be clear, not just the coverage of the vandalism, coverage of the entire affair. In order to explain the chaos happening on the streets of Seattle, the media were forced to inform the masses exactly why it was happening—and therefore shine a light on criticisms that the WTO is an “undemocratic organization with a pro-corporate agenda that in practice overrules national labor, environmental, and human rights laws.”

They argue that the internet and television’s “public screen” has supplemented and essentially eclipsed the old fashioned notion of the “public sphere.”  The nostalgic notion of politics as a civil, face-to-face dialogue has been replaced by a distracting, publicity-driven, image centric broadcast:

“Citizens who want to appear on the public screen, who want to act on the stage of participatory democracy, face three major conditions that both constrain and enable their actions: 1) private ownership/monopoly of the public screen, 2) Infotainment conventions that filter what counts as news, and 3) the need to communicate in the discourse of images.”

If young people, your regular Joe Mustache or Jane AmericanApparel, want their fair share of the Public Screen, DeLuca and Peeples say they should follow the old news motto “if it bleeds, it leads.”

“Since the civil rights and antiwar protests of the 1960s, activists have learned the lessons of images. They understood Seattle as an occasion not for warfare but for imagefare. The protesters’ chants of "The whole world is watching" clearly echo the 1960s. The whole world did watch—not because 30,000 protesters gathered in one location, but because uncivil disobedience and symbolically violent tactics effectively disrupted the WTO, shutdown Seattle, provoked police violence, and staged the images the media feed upon. An analysis of media coverage of the WTO protests reveals such tactics as necessary ingredients for compelling the whole world to watch.”

They conclude their paper with a sobering assessment of the obstacles inherent in our corporate controlled media landscape.

“The airwaves in the United States are by law the property of the public, but they are leased in such a way that media companies own them for all intents and purposes. The Walt Disney Co. need not grant us a soapbox from which to air our views... In addition, both theoretically and practically the very distinction between public and private has eroded. Still, the public screen, though privately controlled, is public. The complexity of the public screen warrants neither bemoaning a lost past nor celebrating a technological utopia. The charge for critics is not to decry a lacking present or embrace a naive future. The charge for critics is to chart the topography of this new world.”

While the lasting effects of the WTO protests were almost entirely consumed by 9/11, the following wars, and economic meltdown, the anger and frustration at corporate dominance remains and is, if anything, compounded by this century’s rollback of civil rights. Yet still, with few exceptions, violence, symbolic or otherwise is widely dismissed as ineffective.

Nato seems to believe that violent protest works better abroad:

“There are times and places where it works. In Europe there appears to be more mass support for more militant tactics. When I was in Guatemala, I met ex-guerrillas. Their villages were being destroyed by death squads no matter what they did, so they may as well have taken up arms. But here and now, we'll always be outgunned.”

Nato’s right, we will always be outgunned. The way to fight back isn’t by throwing rocks at local businesses or killing cops, but it’s also not by planning sterile, flaccid protest-parades that stay on the sidewalk along pre-approved routes. So how can we commandeer the public sphere without resorting to physical destruction?

One of the worst elements of my generation is that every meatmouth with a Twitter account feels they must craft a “personal brand.” This is how the dominant 21st century advertiser-controlled dialogue has affected the majority. I hate it, however, I feel that our current wave of activists can learn something from the companies we so hate—we must control our brand. That is the only way we can achieve the mainstream success on the public sphere it takes to accomplish our goals. According to Nato, that’s our biggest problem.

“We think it's better to be righteous than relevant, better to be smug than successful. We aren't developing strategies and organizations that are even trying to reach a majority of people. Most people know that [things] are fucked up. If you ask them, most people can imagine a better world. What they can't imagine, and what activists totally fail at offering, is a compelling story about how we get from here to there, and that the way we get from here to there depends on everyone pitching in. So people just drift into apathy and cynicism.”

A big reason why I think the Occupy Movement failed was because of a fundamental lack of organization. We couldn’t stay on message, so we certainly couldn’t broadcast that message to the masses. Part of the beauty of the movement was the rational, open discourse that harkened back to the days of the wobegon public sphere, but even within the sphere, there were too many conflicts of interest. Animal, LGBTQ, and immigrant rights all have a much-needed place in the national dialogue—but not during a months-long direct action about our criminal financial industry. Had we only focused on issues specific to banks such as reinstating Glass-Steagall, moratoriums on foreclosures, capping interest on student loan debt, etc. we may have accomplished something. Hell, at the time, I wasn’t able to see the forest for the trees, either. In a speech I gave to a rather large gathering of occupiers and supporters, I remarked, "Think of America as a car. Alright, so our car is in pretty bad condition—and by that I mean at this point it’s actually just an old wheezing dog wearing a saddle that somebody drew a frownyface on. Now… How do you fix that fucking car?"

If I knew then what I know now, I would’ve started by at least cleaning off the frownyface. Focusing on one goal, or a select few if they’re completely related, until that goal is met is the only way to affect change. If we couldn’t control our message in the realm of the public sphere, how could we protect it from being contorted on the public screen?

This is not a call to violence, symbolic or otherwise, but the fact remains that, right now, there is no more effective way to seize the public screen. If we want to abandon all violence in today’s America, we must use the same tactics the corporate state wields to find a way to connect to the people, while remaining sensational enough to seduce the media. We can do it, afterall it is we, the young and societally “hip,” who have been informing companies with our music, style, and lexicon on how to rip money from our own pockets. We can use these powers of persuasion for good, and if it doesn’t work, then I guess a few dudes can break some windows to bait the cameras.

@ShutUpAndrosky

More on stickin' it to the man:

Egypt's Black Block—An Exclusive Interview

Have the Skouries Protesters Really Defeated the EU, Goldminers, and Terror Police in Greece?

The Brother of a Turkish Protester Murdered by the Police Speaks Out

Art can reflect the soul of a nation. But for the past three decades, Afghanistan has been defined by the art of war that has painted its countryside in broad strokes of red and black.

Despite both the conflict and the former Taliban regime, who opposed the depiction of any human or animal forms in photographs, drawings, or paintings, art has not only survived in Afghanistan, but has re-emerged as a creative and provocative force in the capital of Kabul.

Painter and video artist Raharan Omarzad deserves much of the credit. Omarzad was a student of fine arts at Kabul University, but fled to Pakistan during the reign of the Taliban. While in Pakistan he started an art magazine for Afghans, keeping the creative spark alive in the middle of a national diaspora.

“There was nothing for Afghan artists during that time,” he says, “no way to share our work with others.”

When the Taliban government was forced from power by the Northern Alliance, who was backed up with US air power and special forces troops, Omarzad returned to Kabul and continued publishing the magazine.

With the help of several international organizations like the Open Society and Women of the World Foundations, he also opened the Afghan Center for Contemporary Art and the Women’s Art Center.

“This is a place where we can teach each other new skills and reflect on our country.”

The Center has also held joint exhibitions in Kabul, Germany, and France.

Omarzad shows us the gallery space in the back of his building. It's a high ceiling, loft-like structure with a gravel floor and egg cartons paneling the walls. Inside are more than a dozen engaging works from a recent exhibit called Balloons.

“The balloons in this exhibit are the symbol of empty promises," he says referring to works in which balloons are depicted with burqa-clad women, balloons are surrounded by barbed wired, and even a skeleton holds a deflated balloon in a work called, The Balloon Seller.

While the Center offers Afghan artists a chance to create in a relatively secure environment, including speaking out artistically against government corruption and betrayals, Omarzad tempers his speech like a man who knows the threat to free speech never completely goes away.

“Freedom of expression all over the world has some limitations. You cannot find any country that has full freedom of expression and Afghanistan also has some limitations... ,” says Omarzad. “Working as an artist there is some risk, but you have to accept that risk. Without accepting the risk you cannot be a responsible artist.”

Here the risks have been embraced. While the canvas is small, Omarzad feels Kabul’s contemporary art movement has a chance to reflect a new Afghanistan, in promises both real and empty.

Here is a video tour of the Afghan Center for Contemporary Art.

All text and photos by Kevin Sites.

Photo by Cheney Orr.

Recently, I caught up with my friend Wilsonman. A member of the rap group the Stone Rollers Stone Gang, he’s spending his golden years cruising the streets of New York, laying down smooth rhymes, and frequenting the New York City party scene. Unfortunately, NYPD officers recently beat up Wilsonman when he was leaving a club. I called my man Wilsonman to talk about these cops, America's police brutality problem, and how this violent event will affect his music. 

VICE: What is a typical day in New York City like for Wilsonman? 
Wilsonman: A typical day in the life of Wilsonman consists of recording with the homies of either the Krust crew or Elitetisc Records, smoking at parties that don't allow it, ratchet behavior at open bars, and skating in the hood or the Lower East Side. 

What does ratchet behavior at open bars entail?
Smoking in the cut, puking, getting kicked out, and waking up on the couch. Mostly just having a good time before you wake up and you're 30.

What went down the night the cops attacked you?
I dropped my plug ear gauge and was then kicked out of the club. When I went to retrieve my property from the club, the bouncer swung at me because I was refusing to leave without my belongings. Then the cops showed up. I told them that I have the right to retrieve my property from a residence or business I can't enter or occupy. However, they told me to leave the block, which I attempted to do by hailing a cab. They hailed one for me when I told them they were violating my rights. They then slammed the door on my foot, and then I opened it; my lace was stuck in the door. I was calling my friends that were inside the club, and the cops saw me on my phone, pulled me out of the taxi, and proceeded to savagely beat me after I was handcuffed. Then they pepper sprayed me, lifted me by the cuffs, and brought me to the hospital—without ever telling me what I was arrested for. When I tried to tell the hospital staff, they had me sedated. So basically, I was kidnapped by the NYPD.

Photo by Taji Ameen and Wilsonman.

Has this experience changed your view of the NYPD?
Hell yeah. It woke me up, and I now see New York as a police-run state of hell. I can't even enjoy law and order anymore.  

Has this inspired any of your new songs?
Yeah. I've been writing a lot of antipolice lyrics, because a lot of people have seen what happened with Trayvon. Personally having an incident like this can really push you. I mean, I can let this drag me down and lash out, or I can use this as fuel for my creative fire. I'm going to say there are a few good cops out there, but the NYPD seems to be plagued with a lot of fuckboy cops—especially in areas with high crime rates, like the East New York hood I come from.

Thanks for the full story, Wilsonman.

@RedAlurk 

Previously – Meet the Legends of the Lower East Side

Photo of recent war destruction in Lebanon by Flickr user Masser.

Before war broke out in Syria, Lebanese Sunni cleric Ahmad al-Assir was a respected figure in his country. But as the civil war in Syria has crossed over to Lebanon, Assir’s sermons have turned political, often criticizing Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah for fighting alongside Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s troops. Although these views have caused some Lebanese Sunnis to stop following Assir, they have also inspired many others to support Assir’s crusade against Hezbollah. On June 18, Assir’s men clashed with armed members of the Resistance Brigades, local affiliates of the Shiite Islamist group Hezbollah.

I decided to find Assir and ask him if he was planning on bringing war to Sidon, a small Lebanese city that hugs the Mediterranean.

After clashes earlier in the week, the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) set up a checkpoint a bit down the hill from the Bilal bin Rabah Mosque where Assir preached. I walked up an incline to the mosque, where I met a tall, stern looking man in his 20s. He led me up a flight of stairs to an apartment, located in the same complex as the mosque. There, he introduced me to a middle-aged sheikh, with a gray beard wearing a long white thobe.

This was not the sheik I had come to see.

“I’m sorry but you won’t be able to see the sheikh today,” said the sheikh who wasn’t Assir. “The army arrested two of our men this morning, and it looks like things are going to get fiery.”

Accepting my misfortune, I left the mosque and decided on grabbing a bite from KFC. As I sat down to eat on the outside terrace at around 2 PM, I noticed a sheikh talking to an LAF soldier.

The talks seemed civil at first till two armed men in body armor arrived and began shouting and pointing their rifles in the air. What had been quiet negotiations evolved into a shoving match between these men and the soldiers—and then, of course, came the gunfire.

I cannot say who shot first. Reports later said two soldiers were killed;  I saw a LAF soldier leap off an army jeep, as bullets barraged him and then watched the LAF take cover behind buildings as Assir’s men fired on from above—based off this knowledge and where the bullets hit the jeep, it seems Assir’s men were already in position when the shoving match began.

I rushed inside and took cover behind the counter as a stray bullet shattered KFC’s windows. Aside from the ten or so employees, there were a few young men in their late teens/early 20s, two mothers, and a few children. The oldest child was 11 years old.

With several KFC employees, I watched the battle unfold less than 50 meters in front of us. We saw windows shatter and balconies and cars catch on fire thanks to rocket propelled grenade fire; eventually, the smoke obstructed the view so badly, we could only see thick plumes of gray. The LAF quickly brought in Armored Personnel Carriers and reinforcements to support the initial 20 or so soldiers that had manned the checkpoint, and Assir called for Sunnis nationwide to rally to his side—going so far as asking Sunnis army members to defect. But the LAF was one of Lebanon’s few widely respected national institutions. The troops remained intact.

As the battle wore on, neither the LAF nor Assir’s men seemed to make progress. Assir’s mosque is located atop an incline on three directions; the fourth direction is heavily fortified with sandbags and faces residential buildings. The LAF’s soldiers couldn’t get into firing positions without risking exposure. From KFC we were unable to see Assir’s men, but we could see the LAF, and only one soldier made progress. The gray haired LAF soldier was positioned on a streets corner facing uphill, so he could fire before ducking back behind cover. After a few hours, Assir’s men targeted his position. After firing several rounds, the soldier turned around to return to cover, and two bullets shot straight through his back.  His body lay motionless as his fellow soldiers carried him away.

Hours passed and day settled in to night with no sign of the battle abating. At around 9 PM, the army announced a ceasefire. The soldiers said we could leave now or stay in the KFC for the night. Mostafa Harb, a 19-year-old English literature major at the Lebanese University, offered to take me down to the Sea Road since it was on his way. From there I could catch a taxi back to Beirut.

Mostafa’s mom, Em Mohammad, stepped into the driver’s seat, Mostafa sat in the passenger seat, and Bassam, his 11-year-old brother, and I climbed into the back. Em Mohammad quickly reversed from her parking spot and drove down a road before an army soldier stopped us.

“The road is closed this way,” he said.

Em Mohammad spun around and headed downhill in the reverse direction. As she drove down the winding road, her nerves started to set in, and the car picked up speed. We flew past a group of armed men who yelled at the car, “Turn off your lights!” In full panic mode, she obliged and pressed the gas pedal hard. We flew down the dark street. Oblivious to the two cars blocking the road, she barreled into them.

The next few moments are still blurry. I only remember the car stopping and blood running down my face. Seeing the two cars ahead, a deep fear set in—I checked to see if anyone was badly hurt and then jumped out of the car.

“Get back in!” yelled Mostafa.

I returned to the car. Em Mohammad tried to reverse but smashed into a wall instead. She pulled forward and went back into the two cars. She repeated this once more, and then I decided to exit the car for good.

From across the street, men motioned us over—Mostafa and his family decided to follow my lead. They left the car. We sprinted till we found a man in a balaclava—clearly one of Assir’s guys—sitting outside a house.

“Here, try to stop the bleeding with this,” he said to me, handing me a sweaty hat.

Afraid we might be hit, I hadn’t checked to see where the blood was coming from, and my fear didn’t subside upon seeing we were near Assir’s men—if the army had found me, they could have called an ambulance, but Assir’s men could do little. He told us to wait by bushes, while be brought around a car. While Em Mohammad prayed to calm her hysteria, I tweeted:

Still in Abra. Still fighting. Army said 1 hr truce. tried to leave but got into accident. deep cut beneath right eyebrow. Ok otherwise

— Justin Salhani (@JustinSalhani) June 23, 2013

As idiotic as this sounds, writing out the situation in a calm, journalistic manner forced me to keep my composure.

Shortly after, a car driven by one of Assir’s men arrived.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“We don’t know!” replied Mostafa.

“If we don’t know then why are we getting in the car?”

“You have no other choice!”

I realized Mostafa had convinced himself that his survival was out of his hands. But I knew I had a choice—my mind raced, weighing whether it was better to jump in the car or stay in the open with the armed men. Ignorant about Sidon’s geography and lacking good cover, I decided to jump in the car.

As the car started, the passengers—including the driver—began to pray. Hearing the driver leave his fate to God made me feel clueless, so I prayed too. I’m not sure what I said or if I just jumbled out a bunch of syllables at an attempt at forming English words, but I know an argument in the front seat interrupted my quasiprayer.

“Where do you want to go?” the driver asked.

“We want to go down to the Sea Road,” replied Mostafa.

“That won’t be possible,” the driver replied. “I’ve got a rifle in the car. What if the army stops me at a checkpoint?”

“Then what are we supposed to do?” asked Mostafa, his voice increasing in anxiety.

The driver suggested we find a friend’s building. He drove a bit further before stopping. “This is far as I go,” he said. “May God be with you.”

We exited the vehicle and then started to walk. I envisioned the two bullets that had hit the soldier earlier that day and worried I’d meet the same fate. I demanded to know where we would find safety.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Up ahead,” said Mostafa.

“Where up ahead?”

Mostafa pointed somewhere in the distance. “That building, there.”

Trying my best to keep cool, I said, “Describe it.”

He described the building, and then I ran ahead. Before I reached the building, an armed LAF soldier stopped me—we had just ran through the area where the two sides had exchanged gunfire hours earlier. I told the startled soldier that I wanted to take cover in the building.“

“Go! Go!” he said.

I reached the building and tried to open the door, but it was locked. Around this time, Mostafa surveyed the buttons for a name he recognized. “Just press all the buttons!” I yelled.

I’m not sure if it was because he didn’t want to bother people or if he thought they wouldn’t open the door because they were afraid of armed men entering, but he hesitated. “PRESS ALL THE BUTTONS!” I screamed frantically.

He obeyed. Someone opened the door; we finally made it to safety. Inside, someone cleaned my wound, a deep cut just below my right eyebrow, as Em Mohammad cried hysterically, and Mostafa tried to make sure Bassam was okay.

We tried to rest, but every time anyone fell asleep, an explosion went off outside the building. The army was stationed out front, and Assir’s troops fired at least six rocket-propelled grenades at us, by my count.

The next morning, Em Mohammad, Mostafa, and Bassam made their way to a relative’s house, as I found my way into a Lebanese Red Cross ambulance.

Laying on a stretcher in the back of the ambulance, I felt the car turn sharp corners and looked at the LRC volunteer beside me, who was decked out in body armor and a helmet, with sweat pouring down his face. Only when I saw the hospital roof cover our heads from inside the ambulance did relief finally begin to set in.

Meanwhile, June 24^th, the second day of battle, was more successful for the LAF. They changed tactics and fought their way into Assir’s mosque. Shortly afterwards, the Lebanese Army occupied the bullet riddled mosque, the clash ceased, the LAF took control over Assir’s mosque, shops opened, and civilians returned to the streets.

In the aftermath of the battle, the Lebanese newspaper The Daily Star reported 17 soldiers and at least 25 of Assir’s gunmen had died. I didn’t land my interview. Instead, I witnessed Lebanon’s bloodiest battle in at least four years. And chances are, I will now never interview the sheikh of Bilal bin Rabah. Ahmad al-Assir was reported missing after the battle. He still remains at large.

@JustinSalhani

More about the conflict in the Middle East:

Road to Ruin 

Paintballing with Hezbollah

A Syrian Proxy War Is Being Fought in Tripoli 

Photo by Wyndham Wallace.

Everyone’s got a great sauna story, right? I’m sitting in the hold of a whaling ship on the cusp of the Arctic Circle, where the Norwegian Sea borders the North Atlantic, telling mine.

“It was the launch party for Children Of Bodom’s 2008 album Blooddrunk in Finland. Their label Spinefarm had really pushed the boat out and flown the entire world’s heavy metal press out to Helsinki for a weekend-long playback junket. They’d hired out this big pine and chrome restaurant with huge floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Baltic. Their hospitality seemingly knew no bounds. They had a free bar and expert cocktail waiters on hand. I tested them hard and they knew their stuff.

“They could make Samoan Fog Cutters. So I had eight. Then they played the album a few times while I had five Long Island Iced Teas. It sounded pretty good. After a while the band turned up. They’re all Big Lebowski fans so we started drinking White Russians. There must have been about 40 people there representing heavy metal publications from every corner of the globe. If you had dropped a bomb on that restaurant that evening, heavy metal criticism would have ended overnight. One flash of light, a long haired German in a Nuclear Assault T-shirt saying: ‘Ja. How ironic,’ and then: nothing.

“But strangely, when the band asked if we wanted to join them in a sauna on the banks of the Baltic, only Nick Ruskell from Kerrang!, J Bennett from Revolver, and myself were stupid enough to say yes. We all grabbed as much beer as we could carry and trooped in. I was about to leave my shorts on but was roundly lambasted by the melodic death metal Finns until I got naked. Inside, we poured beer on the coals. It made the sauna smell like a bakery.

“When we were red like man-sized lobsters, the guitarist Roope—who used to be in a band called Spider Kicker—shouted: ‘Now, to the sea!’

“We had these tiny towels, not much bigger than flannels, to cover ourselves as we walked down the wooden pier until the sea was underneath us. The water was churning like five-degree-centigrade Guinness in the night.

“We all dived in and someone started squealing like a piglet on a rollercoaster. It was me.

“The hit was amazing. Like a crossbow bolt of liquid mercury shot straight through my brain. My body felt like it had been struck by lightning and then immediately numbed by a rush of opiates.

“Getting out of the sea I was as giddy as a kipper buzzing off the sudden flood of endorphins. I daintily picked up my little tea towel to protect my modesty as we walked back past the large glass fronted restaurant where all of our colleagues and peers were relaxing and drinking.

“J Bennett motioned to me: ‘Watch this.’ He went over to the glass and started rubbing his nipples on the glass in a circular fashion. Without hesitation I went and joined him. The thing is, though, J Bennett is a good looking man. He’s lithe and muscular, and at the time I weighed 266 pounds. But, high on adrenaline, I joined in, even though I looked like a walrus dipped in Immac. Roaring like an oafish farm hand on payday, I was splayed on the glass and wobbling like a huge death metal blancmange when a gust of wind blew my towel off. I looked round but Bennett had already scarpered, leaving me howling in the wind with a 0 degree retracted cock like GG Allin’s. I was aware that inside the restaurant sipping greyhounds was my entire professional peer group who were laughing at me and my tiny Baltic-blasted penis, which resembled a pink acorn resting on some brown moss. The look of hilarity and sympathy on the face of Louise Brown, then editor of Terrorizer, now editor of Bronze Fist, will haunt me until my dying day.

“’It’s the fucking Baltic! There has been high latitudinal, diurnal, and seasonal shrinkage!’ I howled pathetically to no one before starting the walk of shame back to the restaurant.”

A sauna at sea on the Vulkana. Photo by John Doran.

The hold of the Vulkana was once used to store row upon row of salted whale steaks stacked up to the ceiling but since it was converted to a spa vessel in 2007, it now contains sleeping quarters for the crew and a low-lit lounge decorated with scatter cushions, bonsai trees, and ornamental pebbles. At the stern end is a Turkish hamam, or steam room, complete with plunge pool filled with cold salt water pumped directly in from the surrounding ocean. Upstairs, built into the well where the harpooned whale used to be landed and dumped ready for chopping, there is now a wood-fired Finnish sauna and dining room with kitchen. On the upper deck there is a giant wooden hot tub. Out on the deck there is a well-stocked beer fridge and a little brass Buddha in an alcove. This isn’t the first time I’ve been on this beautiful vessel; in fact, it’s about the sixth.

You know that film Star Trek: Generations where Malcolm McDowell is romping across the galaxy chasing after a thin blue ribbon that travels really quickly through space and accidentally kills William Shatner in the process (clearly a metaphor for the damage caused by crack cocaine addiction)? Well this ship, the Vulkana, and Træna, the volcanic archipelago where it is moored, amount to my thin blue line.

On my first visit to the ship in July 2009, I sat in the same hold with the Swedish singer-songwriter Frida Hyvönen, while the DJ Ewan Pearson entertained us with a brief history of the evolution of the whale, which he told us was probably descended from a small, land-living badger. A few days later, I went back on board for a session in the sauna. In the wood-lined room with a window looking out directly to sea, I was relaxing with Sivert Høyem, the former Madrugada frontman, his backing singer Ingrid and Harry, the former drummer from Turbonegro, while they drank beer and chatted.

Harry told me who the best fishermen were out of the True Norwegian Black Metallers. Emperor are apparently quite good anglers, but no one comes close to Fenriz from Darkthrone. He related a crazy story about him, Fenriz and one of the world’s leading experts on Arctic moss having a jam in his snowbound hut. “You know, I was born to make men cry,” said Ingrid after a while. The other men in the sauna nodded sagely. Out of the window a whale broke the surface in the distance as if to underline just how surreal the experience was.

A thin blue line shooting through space and time, scoring the skies of the northern latitudes like Aurora Borealis.


Blood Command on the Vulkana. Photo by Halvor Hilmersen.

Today in the chill out room a log burns brightly in the wood stove casting an orange glow about the hold, but the atmosphere is a bit chillier. The emo/pop punk/metal band Blood Command are sitting opposite me in a tense, upright huddle. They are here to play the 11th annual Træna Festival, the remotest music festival in the world and, I would say, the most beautiful. I ask them how they came to be playing such a great event but they say they have a booker who takes care of these things. I ask them about what the success of their last album Funeral Beach has brought them and they tell me “new contracts to sign”. They tell me how they like to irritate people by doing things they shouldn’t, like combining “hardcore, rock and roll, and pop”. Their music is extremely catchy; though it is possible to see how some people over the age of 19 could be irritated by it as well. As for the ingredients that go into their rule breaking broth, it’s perhaps easier to discern the pop and the rock and roll than it is to locate the hardcore, but then, as always, this stuff isn’t written and recorded for bad tempered 42-year-olds. We don’t have youthful chest-pounding music in common, me and the band, so I ask them if they have a great sauna story instead.

Yngve Andersen says: “I don’t have any sauna stories.”

Silje Tombre says: “My parents actually have a sauna at home which they use for storage. But one time we actually used the sauna.”

Nikolas Jon says: “No. I have no sauna story.”

Sigurd Haakaas says: “No. Nothing has happened to me in a sauna.”

Simon Oliver whispers simply: “No.”

I decide it is best to leave the hardcore pop rock and rollers to themselves and come back to the Vulkana later. Outside on the quay I stop to pet an albino dog with David Bowie eyes.

Træna may have started as a music festival but over the years the breathtaking setting has come to be considered the headlining act. No mere band could upstage this sprinkling of one thousand islands and stony skerries—nhabited by more sea eagles, seals, otters and whales than actual people—right on top of the world.


The middle-aged man and the sea. Photo of the author leaping from the Vulkana by Maria Jefferis.

Erlend Mogård-Larsen, the owner of the Vulkana and the founder of the Træna festival, has a great sauna story.

In 2003 the Norwegian government decided to open up the transaction of fishing quotas between ships. Before this date any fishing ship that had a license had a set quota attached to it. The new transition of quotas was meant to help boat owners who owned a lot of vessels when some of them caught a lot of fish and others didn’t. The trouble was people cashed in their quotas and sold them on to larger trawlers. Fishing communities like Træna suffered overnight. There was no more money to be made in having a small fishing boat that caught a regular amount of fish to sell locally by going out every day. Now most of the seafood in Norway is caught by large factory trawlers. In 2006 the fisherman who owned the Vulkana sold his quota and left his boat harbored in Tromsø unused and basically ready to be chopped up. (Many of these vessels were scuttled where they were moored cause that was easier and more cost effective than decommissioning them.)

Erlend was out in a bar in Tromsø at 3 AM drinking with his best friend one night early in 2007. He was pushing 40 and wondering what it actually meant to be a man and all that shit that men going into their fifth decade stress out about. He had just discovered absinthe and by all accounts had drunk quite a lot of it. He and his friend hatched a merry plan. They would buy a small boat and put a tiny sauna on it and use it for afternoon fishing excursions. Then as even more absinthe flowed they got talking to a former whaler who was drinking at the next table.

The next morning Erlend said to his wife, Britt: “I had the most horrible dream last night that I met someone in a bar and bought a commercial whaling vessel off him for a quarter of a million without seeing it.”

And of course, he had.

Erlend and Britt by Wyndham Wallace.

Later, back on the Vulkana, after setting sail, I talk to the General Manager of the boat, a handsome, copper haired Josh Homme lookalike, Gottfried Gundersen. He tells me more about his boss: “Erlend is very much into saunas and bathing culture. He likes a hot tub but he is also into hamams. He travels a lot and relaxing in heat is a very fundamental thing in his life. And guys from up North like to buy a boat. It’s part of their culture. You need somewhere to get away from the wife and fix the boat.”

Erlend’s boat sounds like my dad’s shed. Well, with some fundamental differences.

The Vulkana was built in 1957 in Lista – a once thriving ship building community – near to the southernmost tip of Norway. It was constructed from weathered eight-inch oak spans and designed to stay upright in even the fiercest of storms. New regulations were brought in by the Ministry Of Fisheries in 1952, after one very heavy storm sank six boats of a similar size in one night, killing 70 people in the Arctic Sea. The frequency of storms, hurricanes and oceanic whirlpools known as maelstroms in this region no doubt gave birth to the local myth of the kraken – a ship destroying sea creature still widely reported as fact well into the 19th century. The Norwegian Sea once marked the extent of man’s cartographical knowledge: forming the edge of the map – the once genuinely terrifying “here be monsters” zone.

This vessel completed 59 seasons as a whale hunter and killed at least 500 of the large mammals.

Erlend may have felt remorseful after spending 220,000 Norwegian Kroner ($37,000) on the ship but that is nothing compared to the further 6 million NoK ($1,000,000) he poured into it. The beautiful hamam cost 660,000 NoK ($111,000) alone.

Gottfried continues: “Erlend is a very visionary man and when he started to think about this boat he had bought when he was drunk and what he could do with it, he worked with a designer to implement more and more spa facilities. And when he bought it? He didn’t know anything about boats. I mean, he had been fishing with his granddad here at Træna. He was quite a wild child and was kicked out of kindergarten and had to go fishing with his granddad instead for a year before he went to school. That was a very defining year for him and the love for Træna and the love for the ocean.”

Later, after a sauna, I dive into the Arctic waters. Again the hit is electrifying but this time, to the relief of everyone involved, my shorts stay on.

Of course were the Vulkana simply the exquisite by-product of a midlife crisis, I wouldn’t even know about it. I’m here because of the Træna Festival— another of Erlend’s grand, visionary schemes.

It's two o'clock, but two in the afternoon or two in the morning? Festival staff at Træna. Photo by John Doran.

Doubtless the year spent fishing with his grandfather was very important to him but when I speak to Erlend, it is his grandmother he first mentions: “I had the idea for the festival when visiting my grandma at her home on the island. I was 12 years old the first time I thought about setting up a festival at Træna. I had just discovered my brother's record collection and loved the triple album cover from the Woodstock festival. It inspired a young soul. It took another 22 years for me to actually make it reality.”

He is a good example of what the Norwegians would call havfolket, or people of the sea—strong, rugged, brooding—someone of few words. He is a constant presence in the background at the festival—mucking in, helping out. On the Sunday he and his wife wait on guests in the makeshift Fishy Fishy Nam Nam restaurant, staffed by a mixture of volunteer locals and some of Norway’s most celebrated chefs. The next day visiting journalists are desperate to get an interview with him before they leave for home but he frustrates nearly all requests because he is too busy helping take down the main stage and the bar tents.

The perceived inaccessibility of the yearly event is key to its success and he knows it. He started the festival 11 years ago and each year the 2,000 tickets sell out well before any of the line-up is announced. (Previous headline bands have included Damien Rice and Manu Chao. (And I have made it my aim in life to persuade Portishead and SunnO))) to play here.) He states bluntly: “I have never thought about the remoteness in a negative way, just positive.

“I knew I wanted to do a festival where people had to travel to get there. People who travel for 10-12 hours to get to here are focused and completely in tune with their surroundings. You could get from Oslo to Bangkok in the same amount of time. I hate city festivals. You take the bus for 20 minutes and go into an area with nicely dressed people. The travel and the experience on the way here is 50 percent of the festival experience.”

He is right, of course. After you’ve arrived in Norway, it’s another two-hour flight north from Oslo to Bodø, which—despite being the capital "city" of the Nordland municipality—is barely a town by UK standards, and marks the point on the mainland where the rail network stops. And then from there, you have to take a three-to-five-hour boat trip down a fjord and out to sea to reach the volcanic archipelago.

Although weather at this time of year is usually comparable to English summertime, a hurricane has just passed through, so the skies are gray for most of the weekend and our journey out by boat to the festival site was admittedly rough. This was a shame as we didn’t get to see Hestemannen, aka The Horseman, a mountain shaped gloriously like rider and steed, or Norway’s second largest glacier, the Svartisen, which sits way above the mountain tops, like a colossal amount of icing on the world’s biggest wedding cake. The ride didn’t improve radically when we hit open waters. The English press officer for the event, Wyndham Wallace, a Træna veteran of some six years, knew all the tricks and handed out chunks of fresh ginger for everyone to chew on. Out of those who refused, several were seen dashing for the boat’s facilities before we arrived at the harbour. Being in a boat mimicking the flight path of the wood framed roller coaster at Blackpool Pleasure Beach isn’t for everyone and immediately on landing, British pop singer Charlie XCX cancelled her trip on a fishing trawler with me. “Yeah, she’s not really up for getting on another boat at the moment,” her manager said to me, grimacing.

Poor Clara Hill from Berlin performed her exquisite new album Walk The Distance on one of the boats ferrying festival guests from the mainland to the main island of Husøya. It was not entirely dissimilar to booking Annette Peacock to sing from a shopping trolley being pushed through Sheffield by angry crackheads. However she must be commended on the excellence of her performance because for the entirety of her beautiful set, no one on board vomited, which they certainly did before and after.

Once on land I have the pleasant sensation of being at sea, no matter where I am for the next eight days. When you experience Træna, it stays at the forefront of your mind for some time afterwards.


Line Møller (left) and Synne Sofie Reksten. Photo by John Doran.

People are drawn to the island. I hear of a bunch of hippies arriving in a barely sea-worthy tub packed full of herbal refreshment, lucky to actually return to dry land again and not end up the latest arrivals down at Fiddler’s Green. (It’s a spectacularly undruggy festival—the first year I attended I saw someone being taken off the island by police for smoking a joint. People do get drunk though. The combination of 24-hour daylight and an illegal homebrew called hjemmebrent is more than enough for most people to cope with to be honest. The second biggest casualty of the weekend is a punter so drunk by the Sunday morning he isn’t legally allowed to get on any boats and has to be airlifted by helicopter back to the mainland. The biggest casualty, however, was a punter who was unexpectedly and accidentally joined in his one-man tent by a boisterous seagull looking for food which then started panicking in its attempt to get back out. And the seagulls here are fucking massive.)

Perhaps making a better fit for Erlend’s vision thing are the two bikers I meet, Synne Sofie Reksten and Line Møller. They drove up from Oslo over a period of five days, camping in forests, slinging hammocks up in deserted barns, cooking by the roadside, making frequent stops to repair Synne Sofie’s careworn 1973 500cc Honda CB.

Line, who is driving a 2001 790cc Triumph Bonneville, used to work in the Norwegian film industry but jacked it in because of the long hours. She says: “It’s great driving along the roads this far North. Because you get the weather, you can feel the rain, you can smell the flowers and yeah, the cow shit as well, but the views are great: all of your senses are stimulated. The roads are great for motorbikes and terrible for cars so there isn’t much traffic. You can open up and drive really fast.”

Synne Sofie quit her job working with drug addicts a year ago and is now studying toward a master’s degree in biology. She says: “I want to be a mycologist. I’m very interested in the potential of mushrooms. The carbon chains you get in plastics are very hard to break down naturally because of their length but there are certain mushrooms that could do it.” When pressed, she adds: “In theory you could have mushrooms breaking down used plastic—it’s something I’d like to work on because the benefits to the environment could be massive.”

Like Erlend implies, it’s as much a journey of the imagination as it is a physical trip.


Slicing up some smoked whale. Photo by John Doran.

When I first came to this tiny fishing community, I stupidly tried to stick to my vegetarianism and became quite ill in the process after six days of essentially just eating bread and cheese. Now I eat anything the islanders do when I’m here. And I mean anything. I eat a lot of whale on this trip and am disappointed to miss out on trying seal for the first time. I’ve eaten raw whale, whale sushi with wasabi, smoked whale, pan-fried whale, whale burgers, whale stroganoff and grilled whale. All of it is deliciously gamey and rich in flavor. I can see why it’s not a particularly popular thing to do but, being a vegetarian for the other 360 days of the year, I’ll live. In the last ten years Norway has made leaps and bounds forwards in terms of conserving and protecting its marine stock and the number of minke whale hunted now comes in way under the quota. This allows for the 150,000 whale stock in Norwegian waters to keep expanding in size. (Norway can’t or doesn’t export whale produce, so the demand is kept well below a sustainable level.)

As with anything to do with animals, sentimentality rules the day. Whales are giant creatures, relatively social and clever and on top of this we invest them, anthropomorphically, with plenty of human characteristics; perhaps even fairly in some cases. I’m not a sentimental person however, and am not vegetarian because I subscribe to an animal rights-based philosophy; it's mainly for humanist reasons. I don’t eat meat because I can’t afford to buy flesh that has been raised and slaughtered humanely outside of the factory farming system. I don’t care about the life of one whale that much more than I care about the life of one badger or one cow. It is the factory farming system that is wrong; that is inhumane; that causes sickness and obesity in the working classes and the poor the world over.

Recently, after a long period of ill health I had some tests done, and it turns out that I’m allergic and intolerant to about 15 different food stuffs. This is hardly surprising. It seems to be a regular occurrence these days. I have a feeling that we could learn something about the way food is gathered and cooked in communities like this one by people who just take what they need—I don’t have any scientific reasoning or data behind this assumption. Let’s call it a gut feeling.

This isn’t to say that I’m blind to how whales are killed. I’m not. It’s violent and deeply unpleasant. But without wanting to be too glib, luckily for me I’m not a giant tasty minke who lives slap bang where whaling has been a traditional way of life for 1,200 years.
And come on, let’s have it straight: meat doesn’t get much more free range and organic than whale.

A woman emerges from the sea with a slice of salmon on her head. Photo by Maria Jefferis.

The focus of the Træna Festival is as much on food as it is on music. At a pop-up sushi restaurant inside a shipping container by the main harbor, I speak to the chairman of the board for the festival, Sverre Hyttan. He says: “I can understand why people think that humans shouldn’t kill whales. Sometimes when they are shooting it, it can take a while to die. And it’s a huge animal with a big brain and a very large central nervous system. But if you are thinking conservation of the stocks of fish and the whole sea, it is sensible to kill some whales in my opinion. And if you look at the whole picture, it is not just the minke whale but most species of fish here are increasing. I think in time as well there could be a problem with illness between the whales. We have seen it in the Barents Sea and we have seen it outside America, a lot of seals have died because there are too many whales. But also the sea is very big so you never know what will happen. But also… the whale meat? It is very good! My favorite way to eat it is to cook it in various spices and then have it in a fondue. This is very nice.”

There isn’t a consensus on eating whale meat in Norway. Blood Command tell me that it is uncool to eat it. I ask them to elaborate on why this is cruel but eating dangerously depleted forms of cod isn’t but when they don’t—or can’t—I get the sneaking suspicion that they literally mean, eating whale meat “is uncool”, meaning not fashionable, rather than morally indefensible. However, they’re just sticking up for what they believe in and even five years ago I would have agreed with them whole-heartedly, facts or no facts.

Later, in the brilliant restaurant where festival workers and performers eat breakfast and dinner, the Rorbuferie—one of my favorite places on the island and right next door to the herring factory where I am staying—I ask a lot of people how they like to cook whale and my straw poll suggests it is a very versatile meat. My friend Sondre Sommerfelt, who I always seem to run into when in Norway and who is definitely an urban, Southern, middle-class Norwegian, isn’t that keen on it for example, but he says his grandfather who was a whaler used to swear by braising chunks of the flesh in Newcastle Brown Ale. He regales everyone with whale facts: “The blue whale’s penis is three meters long but relatively speaking very thin… it only has 50 centimeter girth. And when it, ah, what is the English? When it spends, it produces a bath tub full of semen.”

I push my potatoes in béchamel sauce to one side of my plate. No one ever laughed at the blue whale after it swam in the Baltic.


Erling Ramskjell. Photo by Wyndham Wallace.

What the future holds for the festival or the local fishing industry or indeed the entire community is unclear. When I talk to the festival manager Anita Overelv she brings up the potential dark clouds on the horizon. Oil reserves were detected in the region a few years back and now corporate scientists are based nearby doing research into potential drilling sites. She says: “The difference between the sushi at Træna and the sushi you’d get in London or Tokyo is here you can just stick your hand into the clean ocean and pull out some great fish. It is bad that they’re going to start drilling for oil here because the ocean is clean now but for how long? The local kids have a saying: "Let the cod fuck in peace." The scientists say they’re just checking but we know that now they have passed the point of no return.

“The thing you learn when you live on Træna is you just take what you have around you. This is an important lesson but I re-learned it when I moved here. You take what you have and you give back what you can. Our neighbors have a farm so my boyfriend takes care of the sheep while they are away. And my boyfriend is a vegetarian—well, he eats fish but you know what I mean. However, I am not a vegetarian so I get a sheep to eat when they get back. It is not about money. It is about friendship and relationships.”

Her boyfriend is Erling Ramskjell, a musician who sometimes goes by the name of 
Ær Ling or even just Æ, who when not creating skewed folk/prog/pop is a part-time fisherman and festival handyman as well as an occasional vegetarian sheep farmer.

I ask him how this works and he says: “I look after the sheep and I think that maybe it’s a bit of an odd thing for a man who doesn’t eat meat to do. But I think the sheep are quite lucky. I would like to just go around eating and fucking, minding my own business and then suddenly [brings down hand like chopper] I am dead.”

I comment that you couldn’t really ask for more from existence, and he agrees: “No. It sounds like a good life to me.”

Like a lot of people who move to the island, Erling isn’t interested in taking the easy route through life. He performs most of his music in an obscure provincial dialect of Norwegian called saltsdakas only spoken by about 5,000 people who live in one Northern agricultural valley. Which hasn’t stopped him from carving out some popularity for himself in Hungary, Russia, and the North of Norway. His latest album—Fraillaments (by Erling And The Armagedonettes)—is a departure for him in that it is sung in English but a very poetic, fractured form of our language full of neologisms, unusual contractions, and fantastical grammatical and linguistic inventions.

Erling, more than anyone else I meet, represents. Erling is living ekphrasis.

Erling Ramskjell. Photo by Wyndham Wallace.

He has made his life his art and he represents the art and life of the island and the islanders. And like the island community he is stoic, charming, slow moving, deep, inscrutable, and occasionally very funny.

When I call round his house, he ushers me in to sit at his kitchen table. “This is the most important place in a Norwegian’s house,” he tells me. “When families sit down to have serious conversations, not just chatting about their day, it is called a kitchen table conversation.”

Our chat, he reassures me though, won’t be a kitchen table conversation, merely held at one.

He stresses out about making me a cup of tea because I am English. He suffers under the false impression that all Englishmen have amazingly sophisticated taste in tea despite my protestations to the contrary. He continually laughs off my suggestion that I will just have a cup of PG Tips as if I am making a ridiculous joke. In the end it takes him nearly ten minutes to select what he considers to be the optimum tea leaves to make me a brew. It is a very good cup of tea. When I nod my approval he punches the air and makes himself a mug of Nescafe instant coffee.

Then he lights himself the first of about 20 cigarettes.

He begins talking at a glacial pace. (It’s probably best to imagine him leaving a lengthy gap after every third word rather than me liberally applying ellipsis to signify his geological pauses while speaking…) “My first experience with this festival was an interesting one. My band Schtimm were asked to play here in 2006 and we didn’t know anything about it before setting off from Bodø on the boat. The sea was like a mirror. Totally, totally flat sea. And totally sunny and warm. You could sit out on the deck of a fast moving vessel in your shirt sleeves.”

He nods out of the window at the rain beating down and the choppy water we can see outside. He says: “The weather was a little bit different from how it is today. And of course, that was the only time the weather was ever like that… so God tricked me into moving here! I have been sent here by dark, dark forces...”

I ask him when he moved to the island, and he replies: “The darkest time of year. It was on the first of February. My birthday.

“We do get some hours of near light during winter. This island is very open, so luckily you get a sense of space. We don’t actually see the sun during this period because of those god damn mountains over there but yeah, it gets lighter for about four hours a day. Then when darkness falls it is pitch black. It is pitch black for 20 hours a day. I am barely even aware at this point. All I am aware of is that I should try and see some of this light. I mean, the further north you go, the darker it is. If you get to the top of Norway there is no light at all. Maybe you get a tiny bit for half an hour. I was up there playing a few weeks ago and there you get a fleeting glimpse of daylight and then in seconds it’s gone again.

“As a child I grew up along the same line of latitude, so I was born into this life. Still, it is very hard to get used to it. Some people, they find it difficult but you have to roll with the punches. When it’s very light and you don’t have any blackness in your bedroom it is also a source of confusion. You can tell it is night time but still your brain doesn’t care when your eyes see the light."

The Træna harbour globe. Photo by John Doran.

I ask how many people stay on the island for the full winter: “There are 500 people here and there are more during the herring season in the autumn but I don’t know how many. It’s not very many. It could be as low as 40. We have a lot of people who move here from places like Poland and Latvia. This is because Norwegians are lazy and they won’t do the very hard work. I think we are going in the wrong direction when it comes to work. I don’t mean we should be all Catholic and punish ourselves to death with work but the truth is we are rich. We are richer than the rest of Europe and pretty much the rest of the world. We can live off that. Coming at this from a personal level, when you have financial security you can commit to something you find important, dig into other non-material questions in life or you can be a miser and complain about immigration and how gasoline has gone up by one Euro cent and don’t settle for owning one car but claim you need two cars. But maybe this is not just a Norwegian thing but a human thing. We’re all like hamsters in that we fill our mouths full of stuff that we have no use for.”

When I ask him about how extreme life for the modern inhabitants is in other ways, he says: “The weather can be extreme. There are so many good stories about the weather and I have seen extreme weather here. The roof of the sports hall blew off in a storm a few years ago. And of course the old timers say, ‘This is nothing compared to the winter of 1856 when the whole island was moved three meters to the right.’ The risk if you’re a fisherman is still there. The second most dangerous job in Norway is offshore worker and then you have fisherman as the most dangerous job. The people working on the factory ships are exposed to a lot of danger. I think the mortality rates among those on the smaller trawlers is something like 20 or 25 times higher than that of the average non-seabound Norwegian. Time changes, technology changes, the world moves forward. You will survive not going out for ten hours every single day even when the weather is really bad so things do improve. But my neighbor, he is a fisherman and he used to go with this other guy and each year they’d go a bit further up together. Well, on one trip the other guy just disappeared. They found his boat but some monster wave had just hit him. It’s very easy to be romantic about the tough old sailing days that give us this idea that we are tougher than the rest of the world but there is actually a big uncertain element in your everyday life if you’re a fisherman.”

He points out of the window at the inlet that leads in from open waters and says: “That little gap out there is called 'Hell' in Norwegian. Helvete. You will understand why it is called this when you see the bad weather. And the weather I am talking about has literally blown people away in the past. Have you been up to the Nato Base [a Cold War intelligence facility built on a mountain ridge] on Sanna?

When I nod, he says: “So when they were building the gondola cable car lift up there, there was a construction guy sheltering in his truck from a hurricane. He was safe even though the vehicle was rocking like hell in the wind. But then he opened the door and was sucked straight out of the vehicle. He was holding on by the door handle. If he hadn’t been holding the door handle he would have been blown away, literally. And of course Nato don’t mess about so they had a gadget measuring the wind force and it was some insane number. Rough winds in the North Atlantic usually measure at 32 knots in speed and this was at recorded at 89 – he was on top of a mountain, out at sea in the middle of a category two hurricane, holding onto his truck door handle. So it is charming to have the possibility to be blown away. Here on Træna your metaphors become reality.”


Photo by John Doran.

On Sunday, everyone at the festival sets off for the second most heavily populated island, Sanna, in a flotilla of fishing vessels, ferries and speedboats. (Forty people live here during summer and only one hardy soul during winter.) This is the most rugged of the Træna islands and the one that provides the distinctive skyline, which, as you approach it, looks like the top one third of the Wu Tang Clan symbol sticking up out of the sea. The weather is still miserable but we’ve been promised blazing sunshine at midnight tonight. In the meantime, entrepreneurial kids line the route up to the foot of the middle of the island’s five distinctive peaks, selling cups of tea and freshly cooked waffles with jam and cream.

There is a unique way to get to the mountain ridge and the huge, golf-ball-shaped NATO base. Built at the height of the Cold War to keep an eye on the Russians, the facility is reached via a tunnel drilled up through the heart of the mountain. The tunnel starts from the road at one side and emerges just below the middle peak on the other side.

In the last ten years I’ve been stabbed during interviews, I’ve been beaten up on tour buses, the job has seen me end up a mentally ill, alcoholic and drug-wracked depression case, but still nothing about my work is as terrible as having to walk through this fucking tunnel. It’s only when your heart is threatening to burst through your rib cage when you’re not even half the way through that you realise that when the locals call it the “tunnel of love” they’re being ironic.

You would think that if you genuinely had the money and technology to drill a tunnel through the heart of a mountain and put atomic bomb proof doors at either end, you would do so at a slightly more gentlemanly incline.

Luckily inside the tunnel I can’t see the look on the faces of Baby In Vain, the band I’ve made accompany me on this fool’s errand. They are an excellent young rock band from Copenhagen who sound like a trainee Boss Hogg meets youthful Sonic Youth meets junior team Melvins. (Their gig later that night suggests that while they’re not quite there yet, when they are, they will be astounding.) When we’re out in the daylight the scowl on guitarist Andrea Johansen’s face says it all. She says: “I feel like I’m on drugs right now. I can’t feel my body or my head.” And it’s obvious from her angry and stunned look and running mascara that she doesn’t mean this in a good way either. It took three planes, two boats and two days for them to get here, their equipment was lost en route, they had a really rough sea crossing, they all have road colds and now some English journalist has made them walk through the middle of a mountain in the pitch black to do an interview which they quite easily could have done back stage or by email. I apologise profusely and we start walking back down through the tunnel immediately. To make matters worse when I listen to the recording later on to transcribe the conversation, the noise of the wind at the summit has made our talk incomprehensible. All I can hear is disorientating condenser mic white noise with the occasional female Scandinavian voice saying things like: “Thurston Moore… Long way to the top if you want to rock and roll… lost my distortion pedals.” I’m thinking of releasing it as a Hair Police CD-R and seeing how many people buy it.

The view from inside Kirkhellaren. Photo by John Doran.

Everyone is on the island to visit the 30-meter tall striated limestone cave, Kirkhellaren, in order to watch Susanne Sundfør. The natural cathedral-like space housed Træna’s first settlers, nearly 10,000 years earlier. Again, the landscape is the star. You could put Mumford & Sons or Reef on in this cave and it would become a beautiful, transcendent experience. (No disrespect to the shoegaze inflected, Julie Cruise-influenced singer-songwriter Susanne, who has everyone in attendance eating out of her hand in what must be the easiest gig of her career to date.)

Back at the festival site when the sun finally shows itself at 7:22 on Saturday night there is rapturous applause. It then carves a lazy lasso shape in the sky above us, like a halo cast over the islands.

This celestial turn around bodes well for local band Maud's oceanic synth gaze, post-rock pop. And they are the best new band I see while I’m up there. They open their set as the synthesizer playing duo of Sara Bjelvin and Kristine Hoff and then toward the end, as they build in intensity, they are augmented by a guitarist and drummer.

They’re as a fresh as anything living in the clear, coastal waters. They only formed four months ago, they don’t have a Facebook page, SoundCloud, Twitter account, or even any YouTube videos. They don’t even know what kind of music they play. They’re hoping to talk to the audience afterwards to ask them what genre they think it is. (Although I’m rather taken with the Norwegian description in the program: “Hard Elektronikk og softe vokalharmonier.”) Kristine is 20 and it is her third time on the island. The first time she was working on one of the smaller stages. The second time she came back as a punter and now she is playing in a band. And this is despite the fact she has a serious fish allergy.

Maud members Kristine Hoff (left) and Sara Bjelvin. Photo by John Doran.

She laughs: “I get an allergic reaction to it. I’m hyper allergic to it. It could actually kill me if I had it. I have an epi pen with me. The first year I came here I could only eat lentil burgers but they had hazelnuts in them and I’m allergic to them as well. Luckily it wasn’t peanuts, though. I am really, really, very allergic to peanuts.”

Sara jokes that she is having to live off bread, chips, and beer only to be corrected by Kristine: “No. I’m allergic to beer as well. I am living on just bread and chips.”

Nature, as always, abhors a vacuum and British duo the Correspondents appear on the main stage to help fill another piece of the void with a Romo, electroclash, big band swing, Barrington Levy, scat, hip-hop, Noel Coward, Camden indie ska, Skrillex, mambo hybrid. The madman’s breakfast of noise is created by a DJ in a comfortable sweater called Chucks and a gyrating, effervescent, cake-eating rake in Harry Potter spectacles, bright white brogues, diamanté encrusted tails, and an extravagant wet suit, called Mr Bruce. They are an aesthetic abomination and insanely enjoyable. During a track bemoaning the lack of opportunities for scoundrels in modern Soho, the electro Gussie Fink-Nottle nips off stage only to return wearing a black and white latex ruff and break into an energetic Charleston. Good show, old boys—don’t expect any coverage in The Wire any time soon, though.

People take advantage of the finally great weather to wander over to the edge of the island to watch the sun skating along the horizon at sea level, casting mile-long shadows behind them. Others dance the night away in the campsites. I take the opportunity to have one last walk round the islands.


Spot the forlorn elk. Photo by John Doran.

Down by the harbor it’s deserted. I look at the large metal globe made from steel girders that greets all ships that dock here. A local artist made it out of scrap, by all accounts. I remember what Anita said about the islanders just taking what they have. Her boyfriend Erling told me about the old man who made it who is now in his mid-70s. He recently created a statue of a stoical elk which stands on a hilltop on the Western side of Husøya, looking forlornly out to sea. But this is no metaphorical elk. This is the statue of a real beast that swam all the way from the mainland —supposedly—in search of a partner in the mid-1980s. Trouble was, when he got to the archipelago, he was the only animal of his kind here. He spent some time trying to befriend local cows but was driven away by a heartless farmer who wasn’t progressive enough to consider interspecies fraternization. The unfortunate elk took to standing on a hilltop (where the statue is now) and looking out to sea pining for the soulmate he never had. And then one day, without warning, he disappeared. Some say he went back into the ocean to carry on his quest on islands further out to sea or further down the coast.

“Still,” said Erling, “this story has hope. Did he find love with a lady, this elk? Did he reach dry land again? There is hope that he did. Either way, I like to think that he went to a better place.”

Now the big statue is framed against the gold and salmon 2 AM sky. An “elk in sunset” is Norwegian shorthand for kitsch. An oil painting of such a scene is the Nordic equivalent of Bruno Amadio’s The Crying Boy or Vladimir Tretchikoff’s Chinese Girl. This old sculptor had a good sense of humour. I love this big brass reindeer standing glumly on the hill, willing to chase his own blue line all the way up north no matter what. Even if it kills him.

Erlend, the festival's founder, was a child when he first fished these waters with his grandfather. He was a child when he first stood in Kirkhelleren and thought, “Imagine how cool it would be to play an electric guitar in here.” He was only 12 when, obsessed with the Woodstock triple LP, he first fantasised about putting on a festival for the island.

Thinking of these three things makes me think of the Albert Camus quote translated into English on the sleeve of Scott Walker’s Scott 4 LP: “A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.”
 
I walk back to the herring factory for one last sleep before heading regretfully down to the harbor to leave.

A photo of the author by Wyndham Wallace.

John Doran writes a regular column for VICE UK called MENK. You can find previous editions of it archived here.

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If a girl talks about her personal style for more than ten minutes, I promise you that she will say, “I dress for other women, not men.” Not dolling up for men is a law we carried down on a tablet from the top of Girl Mountain. Yet many girls believe dressing for other ladies will keep us abstinent for the rest of our lives; we must either choose fashion and celibacy or clothes we hate that will bring the boys to the yard. 

I’ve never believed that wearing a gemstone collar is the equivalent to throwing a garland of tampons around my neck. Miley Cyrus replaced her extensions with a knock-off Robyn haircut and landed on the top spot of the Maxim Hot 100 list, and even Leandra Medine—the Man Repeller blogger who documents her eccentric outfits that are supposedly too kooky to give dudes boners—got married. Even in our sex lives, I thought we could lean in and be the self-empowered bad bitches we were born to be. But at the same time, part of me has always wondered if girl code was right. 

So I signed up for Tinder, the heterosexual equivalent to Grindr, to find out.

For those heteros who have yet to step into the 21st century and use their iPhones to hook-up, Tinder is an app for people looking for an easy lay. The app allows users to upload pictures of themselves and then quickly approve or deny other users based on their profile pictures. Once mutual approval occurs, users can send each other messages. Like a teenager catfishing a classmate to land on MTV, I created two Tinder profiles: one in which my profile picture showed me as a girl dressing for other girls and another that showed me styled as a girl trying to make the bros holler. 

For my girly look, I created an outfit that can best be described as “Pebbles Flintstone if she joined the cast of Gallery Girls.” I threw my hair up into a topknot (the signature style of fashionable women), swiped on dark red lipstick, and accessorized with a polka-dot collar, rhinestone necklace, and earrings made of gold shark teeth. I felt cute and confident, as girls tend to do when they dress for other women.

I approved the first 250 men who popped up and then waited to see who took the bait. 

Slowly, responses trickled in. Although several men liked me, few tried to initiate chat. About 30 responded over a three-day period, and the guys who liked me tended to have foreign and exotic names, which, since I’m a white chick from Boston, made me feel quite sophisticated.

The few who spoke to me were fairly flattering, though.

To engineer my guy-oriented look, I asked guys their preferences on Facebook. Most guys refuted commonly held stereotypes of what men find attractive, saying they hated high heels and makeup. While I found this refreshing, I didn’t believe them. Most men simply fail to notice makeup on a woman unless she’s painted on a Lil Kim death mask. Still, I chose to go fairly subtle with the guy-look: bronzy makeup, a simple tank top, my hair curly, and no accessories that looked like they came from a Mattel jewelry box. I also posed throwing my best duck face, which is taboo in girl world because duck faces scream, “I WANT A MAN TO LIKE THIS.” 

Within 12 hours of posting my second selfie, more men messaged me than had responded to my other selfie in three days. I am not exaggerating when I say that 25 percent of these men were named Pat. 

Their messages went way beyond the pale.

Needless to say these offers did not get me hot and bothered, but I showed the messages to a gay friend and he was delighted. “No one even sends me stuff that lewd on Grindr!” 

It wasn’t that men didn’t voice attraction when I dressed for girls. They were just a lot more responsive when I played into their hands. I guess it’s that simple to get a guy’s attention.

But I’m not sure I want this attention. Maybe we need a separate social media app—an all girl, asexual Tinder where women can approve or deny each others outfits, matching to discuss where they bought their shoes or how they achieve their Heidi braids. That kind of attention sounds more satisfying to me.

@The_Sample_Life

Previously — I Sacrificed a Chicken and Drank Vinegar in the Name of Megan Fox