The numbers speak for themselves. If today’s minimum wage had kept pace with inflation since 1968, it would be $10.52 instead of $7.25. For many Americans, this difference is the cost of rent or a car payment plus groceries and utilities. Had the minimum wage rose along with worker productivity during that same period, it would be $21.72, almost three times the present minimum.

Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren and her ilk cite this data in their campaign for a $9 federal minimum wage, but they are of course not demanding anything approaching $21.72, or even $10.52. The reason is, as every wage laborer knows, the faster and more efficiently one is able to work, the less that labor is actually worth. And there’s no better example of this than the fast-food industry, where some of the most exploited workers in the country toil away feeding millions each day at a breakneck pace. And they are rewarded with the absolute lowest pay allowable by law.

On Monday, answering a call from a national group called Fast Food Forward (FFF), about 200 fast food workers from all over New York City bravely walked off the job, risking firing, to demand more control over their work and their lives. FFF called a press conference and demonstration in Union Square, demanding a $15-dollar minimum wage and a union for fast food workers.

Franklin, a 24-year-old McDonalds worker, and the only person from his restaurant to walk out Monday, explained to me the intricacies and dynamics of his workplace so elaborately you think he ran the place. He’s certainly smart enough. But he’s making the fries. And earlier this month he suffered a serious burn on his arm from the french fry grease. He showed me the scars.

“My manager just laughed at me, no cream, no hospital” he told me. “I get so disrespected at work, and I can’t stand up for myself.” And what happens when he tries to push back? “They hold back my hours to punish me.”

I asked Franklin what his bottom-line demand was. A union, he said. That way, his manager wouldn’t be able to mess with his hours arbitrarily or laugh at his injuries. He’ll be able to work with self-respect.

Before long, a PR worker subcontracted by FFF for the day (to “put the workers in touch with the press,” as he put it) interrupted Franklin and me, wanting to know who I was. “You’re from VICE?” he exclaimed. “That’s awesome. Hold on, let me find you someone from the Williamsburg McDonalds!”

Thus prompted, Franklin suggested I talk to a press person. “Why do they keep trying to get me to talk to people who don’t actually work in fast food?” I asked. He grinned. I asked him if he thinks the politicians have his back. He laughs. “I’m a Democrat, but... nahhh."

This same thing happened whenever I tried to talk to the actual fast food workers. When I attempted to speak to one group of workers, they directed me to “the organizers.”

The truth is Fast Food Forward is no humble rank and file operation. It is a well-funded, well-oiled, and professionally staffed collaboration of the Service Employees International Union 32BJ (SEIU 32BJ), and New York Communities for Change (NYCC, formerly ACORN), two big time organizations inextricably intertwined with the Democratic Party. Beyond the utopian $15 rhetoric, this alliance is also seeking to build a union for fast food workers under the umbrella of the SEIU, and to provide a vehicle for various Democratic politicians to get out the vote, which I witnessed in no short order at Monday’s rally.

Besides individual acts of retaliation by management, like the case of Gregory Reyonoso, who was fired from a Brooklyn Domino's for bringing his co-workers to a FFF demonstration, there has been no public mobilization against FFF, except perhaps a media offensive.

While workers in New York and six other cities walked out on their jobs Monday, Fox Business Network covered the event by speaking with Richard Berman from the Employment Policies Initiative. He spouted tired anti-minimum wage rhetoric—that at $15 an hour large corporations would replace workers with machines and that the business model “simply does not support such a wage”—without disclosing that he was a corporate lobbyist with ties to the fast food industry.

Such propaganda is nothing compared to the union-busting campaigns of multinationals like Walmart.

In 2000, when meat cutters in Jacksonville, Texas, voted to unionize, Walmart eliminated their entire department. New hires at Walmart are greeted with anti-union propaganda in orientation. This is in keeping with an aggressive union-busting campaign in the public and private sectors of the US, unions like the SEIU are feeling this heat, and this is in part why they have begun to organize workers in the fast food industry.

And to be clear, before I find myself linked up on the Drudge Report, these workers really, really, really need a fucking union. We all do. The problem is, a successful union drive comes from the workers themselves. And there is a gigantic difference between a union drive and a public relations campaign, which is what FFF is corralling these brave workers into.

In a union drive, the bosses shouldn't find out that it's going on, or who is organizing it, until everyone in the shop has their back. That way if there is a move to fire them, everyone strikes. By contrast, Gregory Reyonoso, a spokesman for Fast Food Forward, was fired from his Brooklyn Domino's for being involved. A natural organizer, Reyonoso is now so famous that its very unlikely he'll be anywhere near a kitchen again any time soon. And this is where these union drives need to happen if they are to be successful, not in a press conference. It could be argued that it will only be through publicity that a union campaign ever succeeds in fast food, but the SEIU and NYCC is not telling workers that they're engaging in a PR exercise.

Condola, another McDonald’s employee, told me that since her manager found out she was organizing with Fast Food Forward, her hours have dropped from 40 to 14 hours per week. “I’m paying rent, lights, and cable on $80 a week,” she told me.

When I asked her if she thinks a union could stand up to that kind of retaliation, she said yes. And she’s probably right. But right now only one person in her whole workplace has her back. This is one problem with FFF’s strategy of imposing a union from above: Condola is “on strike,” but she can be easily fired for it, and it’s very possible that nobody in her restaurant will back her up, no matter how inspiring her example may be in the long run.

The entire Union Square demonstration was carefully planned by FFF, stage-crafted by 32BJ marshals in orange vests who lead the chants, directed the marches (following traffic laws and staying on the sidewalks), and worked with the police to keep everyone calm. NYCC workers fan through the crowd, trying to tell the marchers where to go and what to do. One young woman from NYCC interrupted my interview with an older worker who had begun to explain to me how he budgets his week on minimum wage. “You don’t have to talk to them,” she told him peremptorily.

When the march reached a McDonalds and the police attempted to push the crowd away, some in the crowd pushed back, chanting “Shame on you!”  The crowd came alive. Franklin was right up front pointing his finger and yelling at the cops, and others pushed the metal barricade back at the officers. Suddenly a 32BJ marshal, a burly, bearded-white man in near constant contact with the police, gets between the crowd and the cops, physically pushing the crowd back, and announcing “We know the real reason we’re here... you can’t survive on $7.25!” Another burly man with an orange vest guarded the McDonalds door, fists clenched, to make sure nobody went in. 

Thanks to the marshals, the conflict with the cops was diffused to make way for Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal and Assemblyman Brian Kavanagh, two local Democratic politicians who served up reheated Fast Food Forward slogans to the crowd. Afterward the same bearded 32BJ marshal made an announcement: the demonstration is over, and now we’re marching... to the SEIU headquarters, for a meeting with still more Democratic politicians.

“Fuck the Democrats!” John, a retired letter carrier, union member, and general eccentric who came out to support the fast food workers, had told me earlier in Union Square. “I respect the Republicans more, they just come out and say, ‘We hate the working class!’”

John explained to me the downfall of American union in three acts: “The expulsion of the reds [communists and socialists, expelled in the 1920s-30s] which the union bosses lead, the Taft-Hartley Act [of 1947, which limited and institutionalized the unions], and Ronald Reagan’s firing of the air traffic controllers [in 1981].”

“Nowadays unions don’t fight,” he added, “they’re labor lieutenants. They just want to sit down with the bosses.”

John recalled with disgust the turning point in his relationship with his own union, the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC). In 1981 when Ronald Reagan fired the striking air traffic controllers rather than negotiating with them, “AFL leaders said they wouldn’t fly as long as scabs were running the controls. They said they’d take Amtrak to the conventions. This lasted to weeks, and they were flying again. This was the moment for a general strike. But my union, all the unions, did nothing.”

John proclaimed, “Fuck the unions!” and he excitedly explained to me how the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) sold out New York’s school bus drivers earlier this year. But all the while he was wearing a shirt that read, “Stand With the Chicago Teachers Union”, and in his retired life he comes out to every pro-union rally he can. He seemed to know everyone there. When I asked him about the difficult political position for people like himself, who understand the need for worker organizing and celebrate its rich history, but also consider the modern unions to be “labor lieutenants” and “sellouts,” he shrugged.

“Fuck them. I’m out here for the workers.”

At the end of the demonstration, Marcellus, a fast food worker who had nearly lost his voice from chanting all day, told me that 50 percent of his workplace supports him, which is the highest estimate of anyone I spoke with. But he’s confident that when it comes to a vote, they will unionize. I asked him whether he thinks this is just the beginning, and he laughed and noted. “I prefer to think its the middle.”

But if today is any indication, these brave and resourceful workers' fight to set up a union will only be the beginning of their struggle against exploitation. A whole new set of bosses is already waiting in the wings.

@JarrodShanahan

More about organized labor and shitty wages:

The History of Scabby the Rat

I Punched My Boss in the Face

Workers' Rights in Egypt Stalled Two Years After the Revolution

In the buildup to Julian Assange’s run for the Australian senate, VICE was invited to the Ecuadorian embassy in London for a rare in-person interview. Our visit coincided with the conviction of Bradley Manning, the young US Army private whose alleged espionage put WikiLeaks on the map. Assange spoke to us about political payback, his plans for freeing the most famous whistle-blower in history, and why the world needs a WikiLeaks political party.

More about Bradley Manning and Julian Assange:

Bradley Manning Was Convicted of Espionage, and We Protested at the White House

The Torture of Bradley Manning

Julian Assange Isn't WikiLeaks

Mustafa and his family in the doorway of their Cypriot home, a tin hut that was originally built on a British Army Base in Egypt during the Second World War.

Just 12 miles from the vomit slicks of Ayia Napa there is another corner of Cyprus that is forever England. Or Britain, more precisely: a scrubby little patch of sovereign British territory, complete with tatty Union Jack flags flutteringly limply in the weak breeze, a pre-fab bar called The George and Dragon—which is packed out with drinkers on a Tuesday at lunchtime—and bored fat security guards in hi-vis jackets hanging around next to automated barriers.

Oh, and lots of barbed wire fences hung with signs warning you not to take photographs, because this is a military base and you’re liable to be arrested if you do. Welcome to Dhekelia, one of the two Sovereign Base Areas (SBAs) in the Republic of Cyprus, and the place to which British troops retreat for some R&R after their tours on the front line in Afghanistan. However, I can’t help feeling that the Ministry of Defense is kicking the soldiers when they’re down with this particular policy, because Dhekelia is about as relaxing as Guantanamo.

One of the abandoned buildings in Richmond Village.

But what else—apart from flag waving, binge drinking, petty officialdom and even pettier rules—makes Britain Britain? If the Daily Mail, UKIP, and casual racists are to be believed, it’s all those bloody asylum seekers and refugees. And—incredibly—you can find these in Dhekelia, too. A small distance away from the main military compound, tucked into a forgotten corner near the firing range, sits Richmond Village, a depressing little huddle of tin huts that is about as far removed from its London namesake as possible. This is the place that 70 refugees and asylum seekers from various repressive and war-torn parts of the world have called home for the past 15 years.

Mustafa holds up an article published in the Cypriot press in 1998, shortly after he arrived in the Sovereign Base Area.

I met 40-year-old Mustafa, a Syrian Kurd, his Burmese wife Paw Lee, and their two children in their home, number 14 Richmond Village. The well-tended garden outside and the genial clutter within disguises what their house actually is—a military barracks hut made of corrugated iron. It was originally erected on a British army base in Egypt during the Second World War, then dismantled and shipped over to Cyprus when that base was closed. Richmond Village is actually just a single track road fringed by five of these tin huts on either side, arranged in small-town suburban style with privet hedges and road signs next to rolls of barbed wire in a confusing spacial tapestry of The Inbetweeners and M.A.S.H. In a small concession to domesticity the huts have been upgraded with gray tiled roofs.

Mustafa has been in Dhekelia since 1998. Pursued by the Syrian regime because of his cousin’s political affiliations, he fled first to Lebanon and then paid a people smuggler $5,000 to take him to Italy by boat. His plan was to travel onwards to Germany once he was safely inside the European Union; but the smuggler was either inept or a liar, because instead of reaching Italy the boat capsized and its passengers washed up on the shores of Cyprus.

Mustafa's wife and daughters in the street outside their home.

For the people traveling on the boat, that was a big problem. Only EU member states guarantee recognized refugee status for people who have arrived illegally but are fleeing war and torture at home. Back in 1998, the Republic of Cyprus was not an EU member, so from there they could be deported straight back to where they came from, no questions asked.

But after that ill-fated start to his journey, Mustafa lucked out, big time. Because, as it turned out, the bit of Cypriot shore that he had washed up on was not Cypriot at all, but British—part of one of the island’s Sovereign Base Areas.

“At first I thought we’d landed in Turkish Cyprus, because there were soldiers everywhere,” he says. “But when they rounded us up and took us to the army airport they told us that we had crossed the border into UK territory.”

Mustafa has furnished his home entirely from items he has made or found in the trash.

The British authorities, unsure how best to deal with a boatload of bedraggled refugees on their sovereign territory, stuck them in a refugee camp while they tried to decide what to do. “I think the British were trying to use us an example, because they were worried that other people were going to try to do the same thing,” says Mustafa. “We realized that we were going to be held there for a long time.” But finally, in February of 2000, Mustafa was granted recognized refugee status. It meant that he could remain indefinitely on British territory and apply for full asylum and the right to move to the mainland.

Mustafa's travel documents, valid only in the two British Sovereign Base Areas in Cyprus.

It also meant that he could no longer be held in the refugee camp, but the only accommodation available to house the refugees in Dhekalia were the ancient tin huts from Egypt, which were hastily arranged into a village layout and given their very British name. Altogether, around 70 others who had been granted refugee status were moved to Richmond Village. “At that time we were living six to a hut,” says Mustafa.

They were issued with SBA travel documents but were not allowed to enter or work in the Republic of Cyprus—although some, including Mustafa, did. “I worked as a joiner for 20 Cypriot pounds a day,” he remembers. “And if I got caught by the police in Cyprus, I was taken straight back to the SBA.”

Over the border line in Cyprus he met Paw Lee, who came to the country from Burma in 2000 as a migrant worker. They married and had two children. The couple moved into their own house on the base and gradually made it into a home, using furniture they made themselves or that others had thrown out. They built up a life for themselves in Richmond Village alongside their cosmopolitan neighbors—Somalians, Ethopians, and Iraqis among them.

Mustafa's son next to the street sign outside their home.

And still Mustafa waited for the decision on his UK asylum application. In Dhekelia he was granted the right to use the British hospital on the base, and his children were given places at the school there. For six years, the residents of Richmond Village kept faith that they would eventually be resettled in the UK.

A letter Mustafa received in 2007 confirming that he is a recognized refugee in the Sovereign Base Areas and the Republic of Cyprus, but not in the United Kingdom.

But in 2007, everything changed. Mustafa received a letter telling him that his asylum application was being redirected to the Republic of Cyprus—which by now was an EU member—and that, even though he was still living on British territory, he no longer had the right to apply for asylum in the UK, or to use the British hospitals or school. “The UK was trying to push us out,” says Mustafa.

Some of Mustafa’s neighbors no longer had the energy to keep fighting against European bureaucracy. They left Richmond Village and resettled in Cyprus, and the tin huts they used to live in now lie forlorn and neglected. But some, including Mustafa and his family, are refusing to leave. “I don’t want to live in Cyprus,” he says. “I still won’t have the right to work there, and this is my home. I’ve known my neighbors here for 15 years now.” Under Cypriot law, Mustafa would have to reapply for residency every three years—even though he is a recognized refugee. He has also been given no assurance that he will not be immediately deported.

And so Mustafa believes that his best option is to continue living in Richmond Village, in limbo, in a tin hut that was built for a desert campaign, not a family home. This has become his way of life—and, for his children, it is all they’ve ever known. I ask them what country they feel they belong to. “We don’t have a nationality,” they reply.

Follow Hannah on Twitter: @hannahluci

More stories about refugees and asylum seekers:

Australia Is Sending Refugees to Abusive Detention Camps in Papua New Guinea

Fun And Games At El-Buss Refugee Camp

Too Many Tunisians, Not Enough Toilets

Left: Bee Shaffer and Anna Wintour at the Chaos to Couture opening. Right: Springtime for Sid in Paris.

"Pink is punk." Thus spoke Anna Wintour at the benefit gala that marked the opening of the exhibition, Punk: Chaos to Couture, held on May 6 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Wintour, the British-born editor-in-chief of American Vogue and artistic director for Condé Nast, is a member of the board of the Met's Costume Institute (for which she is reported to have raised more than $100 million), and an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. Apparently even the queen of England can appreciate the regal power of ad revenue and corporate expansion spiraling ever heavenward. "This blessed plot, this earth, this realm …" And yet the pronouncement, "Pink is punk," which slipped so assuredly from Wintour's perfectly thin lips, is both vexing and revelatory. While Wintour is not to anyone's knowledge developmentally disabled, her remark is quite possibly the single most retarded thing any public figure has said in recent memory. Even as retardataire as the fashion industry may be, endlessly passing off the old as new, feeding on its history and ours, since vernacular style—how we dress ourselves in the every day—fuels the more vampiric elements of this industry, the remark is cause for concern. She made it, of course, to defend the dress she wore to the gala: Chanel haute couture, floor-length, flowery pink. It would not have been out of place had she strolled onto a manicured lawn for a tea party at Sandringham.

The dress, however tasteful, was worn to a rather different event, the opening of an exhibition that meant to show the influence of punk on fashion. Maybe Anna Wintour was playing against type? A more caustic observer might remind you of Coco Chanel's less than glamorous exploits as a scheming businesswoman in wartime France and her opportune connections to high-ranking Nazi officers, as well as of an infamous image of Sid Vicious in 1976, strolling casually down a Parisian street, wearing a black leather jacket and a T-shirt emblazoned with a swastika. Now there's an intersection of fashion and antisocial realism. "Vicious," as Lou Reed once sang, "I'll hit you with a flower." Punk's flirtation with fascism may have little to do with that of the legendary designer, and yet fashion's very autocracy—to borrow an admission from the show's curator—and its obsession with surface effect, compels us, particularly as we stand beside this newly opened grave, to dig deeper. The fact that Chanel has been dead for more than 40 years has not in any way interrupted the brand and its profits, pointing uneasily to the necrophilia of fashion, to the disposability of its innovators and icons (Coco today would be quite the liability), to the very pragmatism of the industry. Pragmatically speaking, art and ideas are merely a means to an end, and best left to others. If this sounds even remotely similar to the modus operandi of the music industry, it should come as no surprise. Posthumous recordings of Sid Vicious and the Sex Pistols far outnumber those released in their attenuated lifetimes, their earning power exponentially increased in the wake of their demise. Perhaps Anna Wintour's Chanel dress suggests a reversal that accounts for the monetization of the death drive: it's all black on the inside and pink on the outside. As goes the perennial swindle, maybe pink is the new black?  

God Save McQueen

"Pink is punk" reveals that the New York fashion industry and its sometime institutional handmaiden, the Costume Institute at the Met, its curators and the tacit captain of both ships, Anna Wintour, wouldn't know what punk is or was if it bit them on the ass. It was bound to be this way. Too bad it wasn't bound and gagged. As with most mausoleums, there isn't a pair of bondage trousers large enough to contain the Met. (They might have commissioned John Galliano for a spectacular wrap à la Christo had the timing been a tad less… unfortunate. Quite the reminder of Jack Smith's proclamation: "Fashion is an ugly business.")

Left: BCBG. Right: CBGB.

Chaos to Couture arrived on the heels of the Met's blockbuster Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, a critical and box-office success, with its glowing reviews, lines up the block, and extended hours to accommodate the crowds. Both exhibitions were organized by the British-born Andrew Bolton, curator at the Costume Institute, formerly at London's Victoria & Albert Museum, and one show no doubt led to the other. In their intermingled titles we are able to grasp how the taming of an unruly force and the refinement of primal energy is the realm not only of fashion, of museums, and the corporate world, but of all the institutions of social control. In short, everything that subculture stands in opposition to. That is, until it has been expropriated, watered down, and picked clean from the bone. Culture vultures forever circling in an ominous sky. On a recent overcast Saturday afternoon, the only lines in front of the Met were for the hot-dog carts parked at the edge of Fifth Avenue, the sidewalk clogged with tourists and vendors. One young girl wearing a Kurt Cobain/Nirvana T-shirt maneuvered the gauntlet to wend her way up the museum steps, recalling fashion's last plunder of rocky youth culture, grunge, and the brief ascendance of what was designated as "heroin chic." Kate Moss on the cover of Vogue UK in 1993 seems oh so long ago. Nearly as distant as Cobain's raspy voice on "Milk It," where he admits, "I am my own parasite / I don't need a host to live." The line is punk through and through, infected by the kind of nihilism that can either be liberating or self-destructive, and for some it's one and the same. While there are any number of ghosts haunting Chaos to Couture, fashion can't help but distill effects to their essence, and the darkness that often fuels art is reduced to nothing more than a perfumed nightmare. Even the word destroy has been laid to waste, while life and commerce go on. As with the house of Chanel, that of McQueen prevails long after the designer took his own life. For anyone who even half expected Chaos to Couture to create one-tenth the stir roused by Savage Beauty and the staggering achievement of McQueen, they would be sorely disappointed.

A Cheap Holiday In Other People's History

New York may be the city where punk was born, but plenty of veterans of its mid-to-late 70s heyday, and a few fellow travelers, couldn't even be bothered to take the subway uptown for the inevitable letdown. One friend offered the following assessment from afar, and a hilarious take on the "mohawk" sported by Sarah Jessica Parker at the gala [sic]:

"I passed on the Met salute to punk… I find the mannequins there hard to get past in the first place... were those dummies all hoarded from a Halston bankruptcy clearance sale? Debbie Harry was quoted saying there was way too few Sprouse, so natch that dampened my enthusiasm... as did the knowledge that they never consulted with McClaren's estate. Hopefully Iggy gets some due... tho I fear the Met's view might hover closer to a Gwen Stefani view of punk. The opening (usually the must-see of must-go's) looked dreary considering the possibilities with that theme... SJP's 'strap-on' looked way more Super Chicken than Annabella. It seems a sad state of our pop culture when it's Myley Cyrus that had the lone good look of the night... props to her." 1

Another wrote:

"A chimera of a movement within a fleeting moment if ever there was. I know so many people whose versions of that period and what it meant/means are utterly at odds with one another, including my own. To me SoCal hardcore bands in 1982 feel even less punk than Sarah Jessica Parker in a fauxhawk on the red carpet in 2013." 2

Left: Throbbing Gristle in custom camo gear, 1980. Right: Mark E. Smith fronts the Fall, 1977.

This remark raises a significant point: the contentiousness of a supposedly shared history. It's important to grasp how many facets punk had before, during, and after the fact, how far it spread, its delayed reaction and side effects, and how long its afterlife has been. (This last point remains bewildering to many who were there in that blink of an eye, and moved on.) Rather than for its substance, its roots and complexities, for its fucked-up, entangled history and its many contradictions—political/apolitical, inclusive/cliquish, antiauthoritarian/policed from within—the fashion industry sees punk as style—and not only. Haute couture by way of punk undeniably proves that you can make a silk purse from just about anything. At its most opportunistic, fashion reduces punk to a one-dimensional ready-made with which it can avail itself for its own impeccably frayed ends. While those on stage inevitably give an image to the music, either consciously or not, one of punk's central through-lines is the effacement of the space between audience and performer—all but anathema to high fashion.

In the Met's exhibition, what you'll see are only the faintest traces of the many lines that lead into and out of punk, crisscrossing over time and doubling back on themselves. There is protopunk, best exemplified by the Seeds, the Sonics, and the Monks, followed by Iggy and the Stooges, the Velvet Underground, and the MC5. (Black as the new black, leather jackets, tight pants, and sunglasses after dark.) There's the prepunk glam of Alice Cooper, T-Rex, Bowie, Roxy Music, and the New York Dolls. (Possibly the most fashion-conscious scene of all, and ripe for the picking.) The postpunk of Joy Division, Wire, the Birthday Party and the Fall, as well as the industrial soundscapes of Throbbing Gristle, emerged from the early years of punk, yet in their sound and appearance they set themselves apart. (Here the various looks ranged from gray, pleated trousers and white dress shirts to rumpled overcoats and dorky sweaters, from biker boots and cowboy hats to aviator glasses and camouflage gear.)

Left: the Slits. Right: Lora Logic and Poly Styrene with X-Ray Spex.

The mid-to-late 70s also saw punk overlap with black culture, particularly in England, where reggae, ska, dancehall, and social interaction with the West Indian community were influential. Records by Alternative TV, the Pop Group, and the Slits were produced by Dennis Bovell, and one of the best early recordings from the Clash was a cover of Jamaican singer Junior Murvin's "Police and Thieves," while Public Image LTD, led by ex-Pistol John Lydon, was heavily influenced by the deep bass and elasticity of dub. Poly Styrene, the vocalist and lyricist for the band X-Ray Spex, was the most visible mixed-race performer on the London punk scene, with parents who were British and Somali. But while the casual geekiness of her look—dental braces, surplus military helmet, and a leather Hefty trash-bag dress—fit the image of songs like, "Oh Bondage, Up Yours," she would not have made it across the red carpet to the Costume Institute at the Met.

Left: Poison Ivy and Lux Interior of the Cramps. Right: the Ramones at CBGB, 1976. Photo by Roberta Bayley

Stateside, two bands who arrived at their look and sound, one uncannily embodied in the other, deserve particular mention. The Cramps, who came to New York by way of Cleveland, though spiritually they hailed from a backwoods, Southern swamp, were purveyors of a psycho-rockabilly and always dressed the part. When they performed their now-legendary show at a mental hospital in 1978, the "third wall" of the stage was instantly vaporized in a Thorazine-fueled zombie stomp. (As one patient later demanded of the band, "Why are we in here, but you're not?") The Ramones simply wore tight white T-shirts, black leather jackets, and jeans with the knees blown out—a nod to the fact that a punk may also have done time as a hustler. They woefully confessed in one song, "Fifty-third and Third, and I'm tryin' to turn a trick / Fifty-third and Third, you're the one they never pick." Looking back now on period photos from the mid-to-late 70s, the Ramones' uniform, as if they really were brothers, albeit from a Saturday-morning cartoon, was actually what most punks wore at the time: jeans, sneakers, a T-shirt, and a leather jacket. Nothing particularly outrageous in that. Even in this scattershot reminiscence, a bigger picture isn't difficult to form. Because whether specific or nondescript, all these various looks would intersect in something called punk, which we can clearly see as much more the embodiment of a pervasive attitude than a particular style. And so if there are multiple and contradictory versions of what punk was and what it meant, it's simply because just about everything that starts from the ground up, self-invented by those who are living through transformative periods themselves—in equal parts fact and fiction, and which is mostly comprehensible in retrospect—is sure to be endlessly contested. And it defies being neatly crammed into someone else's time capsule, or a museum, which often serves the same function. If the appropriation of punk—what Marc Bolan would call a "rip off"—turns out to be a cheap holiday in other people's history, no one should pretend to be surprised. 

Out of the Blue and into the Black

The 1980 film Out of the Blue, directed by and starring Dennis Hopper, takes its title from the Neil Young song "My My, Hey Hey." The lyrics, referred to in Kurt Cobain's suicide note many years later, insist: "Rock and roll is here to stay / It's better to burn out / Than to fade away." And Young, the ultimate 60s hippie grappling with his relevance in the change of the times, sets punk and Elvis Presley in symbiotic opposition to one another: "The king is gone but he's not forgotten / This is the story of Johnny Rotten." Hopper's daughter in the film, portrayed by Linda Manz in possibly her greatest performance, is equally obsessed with Elvis and punk, as she struggles with a father in prison, teen confusion, and the reality of feeling stranded in the Canadian woods. In its opening scene she's cocooned in the overgrown cab of Hopper's rig at night, working the CB radio with lonely truckers out on the road.

Linda Manz in Out of the Blue.

“Hello, this is Gorgeous. Anybody out there read me?”

“10-4, I read ya.”

“My handle's Gorgeous. Pretty Vacant, eh? My dad's handle's Flash. Subvert normality. You know what that makes us together?”

“Yeah, fuckin' nuts.”

“Fuuuuck you. Together that makes us Flash Gorgeous.”

“Flash Gorgeous?”

“Punk is not sexual. It's just aggression. 10-4 old buddies. Deee-stroy. Kill all hippies. I'm not talkin' at you, I'm talkin' to you.” 

“That's 10-4.”

“An-arky. Disco sucks. I don't wanna hear about you, I wanna hear from you. This is Gorgeous. Does anybody out there read me?”

“10-4 Gorgeous, we read ya. Let's go dancing. How 'bout disco? Over.”

“Disco sucks. Kill all hippies. Pretty Vacant, eh. Subvert normality.”

“Sub- what normalities, Gorgeous? You're just a crazy little kid. Tell me, what's this Pretty Vacant? Over.”

In the beginning of the film, the Manz character wears blue jeans and a denim jacket, the back of which has been customized with Elvis's name and a guitar. It's the kind of thing that no punk would be caught dead wearing. But what Hopper seems to be saying—Hopper, who came out of the same turbulent 60s as Neil Young, and was just as much of a hippie cowboy—is that rebellion passes from one generation to the next, just as each is compelled, symbolically at least, to lay waste to what came before. "Kill all hippies, disco sucks." For Hopper, and perhaps for Young as well, the words of Alexander McQueen may be brought to bear: "Demolish the rules but keep the tradition." By film's end, Manz's character has slicked back her hair and fully embraced the look and attitude of Elvis, who was as feared by adults in the mid-50s as his Rotten and Vicious spawn would be in 20 years' time. Out of the Blue (Suede Shoes) and Into the Black (Flag).

Trash & Vaudeville

In the Fall song, "Head Wrangler," Mark E. Smith asks, "Why did you take that corny stuff I loved so much / and make it hip?" Punk bands and their fans had their own particular ways of dressing up, none of which were at first sold to them, but were made by them, often with limited means, or simply plucked off the dollar rack at Good Will. Thrift stores in the States and jumble sales in the UK defined the economy of punk, its initial self-style. Fashion wouldn't advance without it, without the street and the vernacular looks that it might borrow or steal. There's no revelation in that. But it's important to remember that fashion wouldn't enrich itself if everyone gets it "for free." Admittedly simplified, the equation is brilliant: if you invent it, we can sell it back to you at X times the price. Further refined and elevated to haute couture, the sky, and not the gutter, is the limit. Is it any wonder that each room in the Met's Chaos To Couture feels less like a gallery in a museum and much more like a store? In the words of Malcolm McClaren, the former manager of the Sex Pistols, the ultimate goal was to produce "Cash from Chaos," a formulation that sadly represents the corporate alchemy of our time, and that of the military/industrial state.

Left: Anya Phillips. Right: Arto Lindsay, Ikue Mori and Tim Wright of DNA.

What you find thrifting, at least what you encountered once upon a time, can transport you back to bygone eras. In San Francisco in the mid-60s, for example, members of the Cockettes, the preglam theater/performance group, would head over to the Salvation Army and come away with all sorts of finery, with boas, beaded dresses and tuxedos from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. (One former member recalled that you could fill a bag on "dollar day," but they would stroll out the door without so much as a passing glance at the register.) Against a gender-bent psychedelia, the Cockettes were able to camp out as refugees from the Jazz Age, dissolve the stereotypical image of "hippie" in a Victorian acid bath, and anticipate the time-travel glamfest that was Roxy—the Deco of decay. In New York in the 70s, thrifting meant that you could fill a closet with clothes that might last have been worn in a 60s Sam Fuller movie such as Underworld USA, the 50s TV series The Naked City, or Weegee's photos from the Bowery in the 40s, all of which zero in on the cool, noirish sources for the now-classic style associated with no wave. How the past becomes a skin for the present is an inverse form of molting, and suggests that those who inhabit these clothes were themselves castoff—from society but not from one another—and invented parts for themselves to play.

Paul Simon meets Television at CBGB, 1977. Photo by Lisa J. Kristal

Reinvention inevitably follows the rejection of a former life and its values, its shame and dreariness. Once painfully reborn, people dressing themselves are willing to "do the wrong thing," even remaining blissfully unconscious of the fact of any supposed transgression. "Doing the wrong thing" relates directly to the shambolic noise of punk, to its democracy, where it was simply not a requirement that anyone actually knew how to play an instrument. (And why, when someone really could, as with guitarists Tom Verlaine in Television and Robert Quine in the Void-Oids, you were thrillingly blown away.) In fashion, where everything is sold not once but twice, to the stores and to the public, intentionally throwing a wrench into the formula risks double jeopardy. And then of course there are the critics along the runway, who may be ready to pounce on any false move. People in the street who subvert the norms of fashion, even the most exhibitionistic who seek an audience, have no one to please but themselves. They are their own harshest critics. They perform for and compete with one another. This happens in fashion as well, though always under the sign of commerce and critical scrutiny. Free to do as they please, people in the street who make any sort of spectacle of themselves can be seen at the intersection of situationism and dandyism. One would think that a punk and a dandy are mutually exclusive antagonists, and yet situationism, essential to both, is the fulcrum by which they turn as they exert their power, whether seen or unseen, to subvert normality. The dandy, often passing in plain sight, possesses a greater mobility for covert operations—reconnaissance primarily—and is thus less frequently molested by law enforcement, though not perhaps by the passerby.

John Lydon mid-70s.

Left: Johnny Rotten as a Teddy Boy. Right: Rotten Johnny.

Playing against type was part and parcel of punk, yet in its lack of an overtly libidinal kick-it would have been unappealing to designers, specifically as it undermined the stereotypical image: ripped shirts pinned together, studded collar, spiky hair, ad nauseum. Imagine that the two poles of punk style in the mid-70s were: being more outrageous than your friends and, 180 degrees away, seeming to fit in, quietly unnoticed. This accounts in some measure for the opposing and overlapping looks from that time: tattered street urchin, well-scrubbed nerd, bored hustler, insurance adjuster, bug-eyed escapee from a psychiatric ward. Keep in mind that these descriptions tend to suggest a male persona. The continued strictures of male attire remind us that back in the punk era, among those who ventured beyond convention it was very often the men who stood out—and suffered the consequences. (Though let's not forget the cowardly attack on Ari Up, the dreadlocked singer from the Slits, who was jabbed in the back on a London street by a knife-wielding man who mockingly shouted, "Here's a slit for you!") A London punk who went to a rockabilly concert in '76 would likely take a beating. Thus the indelible image of Johnny Rotten smartly dressed as a Teddy Boy so that he might enter that world without abuse, and surely one of his greatest looks. But in Chaos To Couture, beyond the very first gallery and the archival footage that provides backdrop, there is very little on display that relates to the impact of how men dared to dress. This of course is a clear reflection of the industry's bottom line, which is women's wear, mapping the contours of the female body, particularly when brought to its highest elevation. Haute Chaos is a term that might have been applied to the Met's exhibition by Charles Frederick Worth, an Englishman who came to fame in Paris scarcely a half century after "the great terror," and is considered the father of haute couture. Worth famously dressed the Countess of Castiglione, who had been the mistress of Emperor Napoleon III (the last monarch of France), the Empress Eugénie, his wife, and the actress Sarah Bernhardt, as well as many notable women of their time who are all but forgotten in our own. Perhaps finer and more powdery, but dust just the same.

Left: The Countess of Castiglione. Right: Charles Frederick Worth.

Rectal Anarchy in the UK

At the risk of alienating American designers, and appearing to disregard punk's deep New York roots, the ascendance of what was an improvised style to full-fledged phenomenon occurred in London, where fads and scandal alleviate the boredom of tea and toast on yet another gray day, where anything even remotely enlivened is deemed "brilliant." The Met's show rightly accounts for the key positions and contributions of Malcolm McClaren and Vivienne Westood, with their succession of clothing shops that led to and helped articulate—and forever brand—the punk aesthetic: Let It Rock, Sex, Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die, and Seditionaries. As bestowed upon its final incarnation in the winter of 1976, their choice underscored the political climate in England at the time, with a chill that would linger and presage what lay ahead. In less than three years, Margaret Thatcher would become prime minister, the country's Iron Lady, or Reagan in drag. Although a grudge can be held and passed on from one century to the next, 1776 was ever so remote, and an all-too cozy moment would be shared by America and its former colonial masters. No wonder sedition, even as the name of a clothing shop, was in the air. Defined as conduct or language inciting rebellion against the authority of a state, sedition also stands for insurrection, and it would be reanimated once again. Jamie Reid, who designed or co-created many of the most infamous and lasting images associated with punk, had come out of Situationism. He had eagerly joined other pranksters on nighttime excursions to paste signs on store windows, declaring, "Shoplifters Welcome," and who placed stickers over ads, "Save Petrol—Burn Cars." Some of the record sleeves Reid created for the Sex Pistols, such as the Queen with a safety pin stuck through her nose, were banned. The cover for the album, Never Mind the Bollocks, landed them in court, where they were prosecuted with antiobscenity laws dating all the way back to the Napoleonic wars. 3 As they soon discovered, although the sedition laws in England have their source in an Act of Parliament from 1661, some of their provisions were still intact in the mid-1970s, and the Treason Act in the US Constitution, which derives in part from them, is very much with us today.

Vivienne Westwood.

This past May 6 on the red carpet leading to the Met's gala, Vivienne Westwood arrived, one of the only persons in attendance directly linked to the history of punk, a charter and still misfit member of the club. Rather than identify what dress she was wearing when prompted by Billy Norwich for Vogue.com's livestream, Westwood insisted on speaking about the badge that was prominently pinned to her chest.

“The most important thing is my jewelry, which is a picture of Bradley Manning. And I’m here to promote Bradley, and he needs public support for what’s going on with secret trials and trying to lock him away, and he’s the bravest of the brave and that’s what I really want to say more than anything. Because punk, when I did punk all those years ago, my motive was the same: justice and to try to have a better world. It really was about that. I’ve got different methods nowadays.”

Westwood's unexpected remarks in defense of the American Army private who was then being court-martialed for leaking the "Collateral Murder" video to WikiLeaks, along with hundreds of thousands of State Department cables—threatened to upend Wintour's well-scripted event. Within seconds, the camera abruptly swung from Westwood to Norwich's co-host, Hilary Rhoda, who segued to a video on the Met's curator, Andrew Bolton. It was Vogue's version of the bum's rush, an inelegant handling of an awkward moment. Now that the trial has concluded, Westwood can at least take solace in the fact that Manning was acquitted of the government's most serious charge, "aiding the enemy."

Westwood's prospects for appearing anytime soon in any of Vogue's publications seem slender at best, and she could probably care less. At 72 she is far more punk than people half her age, and half her mind. Just look at the silly, conservative frocks most of them wore that night. Only two of Westwood's dresses were to be seen on the red carpet, worn by actresses Christina Ricci and Lily Cole, who both looked fantastic. They were among the very few exceptions to an event that brought a wonderfully gruesome image to mind. For many of those in attendance at the Met's gala opening, had punk been the French revolution, their eyes would be staring up from a severed head in a wicker basket.

---

Notes.

1. In an email from Alan Belcher.

2. Email from Steve Lafreniere.

3. Interview with Jamie Reid, first published in Index, Jan./Feb. 1998, and reprinted in Bob Nickas, Theft Is Vision, JRP/Ringier, 2008.

Previously by Bob Nickas - Nic Refn and Ryan Gosling Driven... to Distraction

KENYA. Hell's Gate, 2013. A worker takes a break in the new geothermal pool at the geothermal plant near Nairobi.

Magnum is probably the most famous photo agency in the world. Even if you haven't heard of it, chances are you're familiar with its images, be they Robert Capa's coverage of the Spanish Civil War or Martin Parr's very British holiday-scapes. Unlike most agencies, Magnum's members are selected by the other photographers on the agency, so becoming a member is a gruelling process. As part of an ongoing partnership with Magnum, we've been profiling some of their photographers.

For this round of VICE Loves Magnum we spoke to Dominic Nahr, who—unlike previous interviewees—is still running the gauntlet of selection before becoming a full Magnum member. We discussed Africa's endless potential for stories, the eeriness of post-tsunami Japan, and how a feeling of homelessness can be conducive to taking amazing photos.

VICE: As you’re one of the younger photographers we’ve spoken to for the series, could you give me a rundown on how you got to where you are, how you got into photography and your relationship with Magnum to date?
Dominic Nahr: I got into photography when my mom gave me a camera. I have a memory so bad that I don’t remember any of my holidays with my parents, which is not good at all. So she told me to photograph things so I wouldn’t forget. I went to university and started to study film, but I didn’t like working with a bunch of people at that time. I wanted to figure out my vision and style on my own. I quit and went into photography.

My first assignment was for GQ magazine, France—they called me while I was on my bicycle in Toronto, where I studied, and I almost fell off. Arnaud, the photo editor, was like, "You want to do an assignment in New York?" I said, "I don’t understand—what do you want me to do?" and he’s like, "Do whatever you do." That was the first assignment that I got and a key moment where I was like, OK, cool, this job really exists.

So I started taking more pictures and right after university, in 2008, I got picked up by an agency called L'Oeil Public, who were amazing. The agency closed down in 2009; I joined them in their last year of existence. They were supportive and suggested I go to eastern Congo. I'd never been to Africa before, and I covered the war there. My pictures really moved and many magazines picked them up. I even got an exhibition during Visa pour l’image in Perpignan, which really helped a lot. I think that kind of opened people's eyes to my work and led me finally to Magnum. I'm entering my fourth year with them now.

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO. North Kivu, Kibumba, October 2008. Over 25,000 people carry their belongings as they flee one of the main refugee camps due to fighting near Kibumba in eastern Congo. Government soldiers were forced to retreat as they were being pushed closer to Goma by rebels of renegade general Laurent Nkunda.

Wow. I guess that makes Magnum what it is—the fact that’s it’s so hard to get into and you have to convince lots of other photographers to let you in.
This is probably the longest relationship that I’ve ever had with anything.

I wanted to know how you felt about book projects, like your ongoing Africa one, in contrast to other projects you’ve done, which seem more kind of self-contained, one-off reportage stories. I got the feeling you preferred working on more open-ended projects, but maybe I was wrong?
No, I think it’s a mix—like, the book projects, they come out of smaller projects. I'm not going into this like, I’m a photographer, I have this concept and I'm going to photograph it for six months or a year. Africa isn’t that place—there are so many stories out there. I’ll do small stories and then out of those small stories I pull pictures into my book project. They are all for my book, but my list of all the cool things I want to photograph is super long. It doesn’t end. I live in Nairobi, Kenya, and I can’t leave, because, really, if you're feeling complacent or just bored, sitting in your house, that’s just wrong—there’s a lot of stuff to do. Even if people don’t pay you, it will somehow come back around.

So when you first went to Congo that was your first time in Africa, and obviously it was kind of an eye-opener for you. You’ve spent a huge amount of time working there since then. Is it purely the quantity of stories there, or do you like working there in a practical sense?
No, it’s a larger thing than that. I grew up in Hong Kong; I’m not Swiss, German, Canadian, or even Chinese—obviously—I’m an expat. So I don’t have this problem with "going home." I'm always searching for my home, but it doesn’t exist. And when I landed for the first time in Africa in 2008, I got out of the plane, my feet touched the ground, and something happened to me. There was a voice in my head that said, "You’re home." And of course this had happened before—in East Timor, all over the place—because I’m searching for my home. But it was never as nuanced as when I arrived in Kigali that first time. 

And the other thing that my little voice in my head said was, "Whatever happens, don’t take things too seriously," which I really appreciated once I got to the Congo.

PALESTINE. The Gaza Strip, 2007. The funeral of a Fatah member after clashes erupted between Hamas and Fatah fighters in Jabalia Refugee Camp.

So how did that trip compare to your previous work in the Middle East, Gaza and so on? You've covered very different conflict zones in very different countries.
Before Gaza I did East Timor, which was quite relaxed, then I did Gaza and then Congo. I don’t know—I’ve been to Egypt, covered the uprising and all that, but somehow working in Africa as a whole versus the Middle East, it’s just more touching for me. A lot of times I find myself in the middle of nowhere alone or with just a small group of other journalists covering a news story. That’s sort of the opposite of, say, the uprising in Egypt, where there were what seemed like hundreds of journalists. That said, I don’t think of my work as just working in conflict zones, and I really enjoy also working on features set in normal settings without the pressure of a conflict situation.

When you were doing your work in Sudan, were you embedded there or were you working in a kind of free role?
We weren’t "embedded," but the only way to get a ride was to go with the military. So my Sudan pictures are of when I entered the country "illegally." The only way to do that is by going with the advancing army or by going in with rebels. The picture that won me the World Press photo award... for that we had to go with advancing South Sudanese soldiers into the North. We couldn’t take our own car, they would have shot at us. We needed to look like we were cleared by head command, which is what we did.

They then sent us with soldiers. The enemy was dropping bombs on our way into Sudan and toward the front lines, so having a camouflaged truck is slightly more ideal. Although on our way back the little string that held down the hood of the car came loose and it lifted and crashed into the windshield with a huge bang and little pieces of glass flying everywhere. Luckily, the young driver kept his shit together and calmly slowed down without hitting anything.

Talking of sneaking into places, you were telling me another time about having to dress up as a nuclear worker or something to get access in Japan after the tsunami. Risks like that—or the risk of being on the front line with planes above your head—how do you weigh all of those? Do you worry about them much or are you clinical in evaluating what you’re going to do?
Well, I’m worried all the time. I’m always paranoid about everything. But that helps me, I think, to identify the problem and look at the situation quite clearly. I’m not blasé about it—I don’t walk in and go, like, "This is what you need to do to get there," and, like, "OK, cool." I really think about it—I assess the danger and probability of detainment or physical harm, and you assess whether that’s going to happen or not happen, and you look at what you’re going to get in pictures and make a decision.

JAPAN. Namie, 2012. Dead cows inside the exclusion zone around the Fukushima nuclear power plant belonging to a farmer who stayed behind after the evacuation to protect and keep the rest of his cows alive.

What struck me as strange about the Japan work was that it was so devoid of people—empty and eerie. It's quite a contrast to most of your work, which is so full of people and human activity. Was it an unusual piece of work for you to do, in that respect?
Yeah, the work that you saw was very unique in that sense. I really got connected to the Japanese spirit while I was there. It was right after my father died. I had only been home for a few weeks in Hong Kong when the massive tsunami hit the coast of Japan. As per normal, I was on my way to the airport after seeing the first waves hit and take out all the houses. I travelled with my Japanese friend, covering the situation for Time, and at one point we found a temple in the middle of a devastated area.

Everything was destroyed except this temple. It was the only place to sleep and many refugees were there as well, so we slept there. It was a wooden temple and it was in winter. It was freezing. People had recently lost loved ones. I had as well, under different circumstances, but at that point it didn’t matter. It was a very spiritual experience and I respected the Japanese process of grieving quietly and defiantly. I think that’s why it was so surprising when I went into the nuclear zone. Suddenly you’re in a place where human life is non-existent and that struck me. It was very powerful.

It sounds incredibly eerie and strange. I think it would have freaked me out too much.
They have this bell that rings at 5 o’clock to signal the end of the work day, and it’s like a lullaby—it rings out across all the towns and you stop working. It’s this beautiful lullaby, just ringing out across the streets, and you can hear the birds chirping, but there were no cars, no humans, and when it ended there was just silence. I remember that moment so well.

Can you tell me again how you got into the exclusion zone—because you weren’t meant to go into the zone at all, were you? Or you had to do it in the company of minders.
Yeah, initially—in the early days—you could just drive in. There were no stops, no blocks, nothing, because they hadn’t figured it all out yet. You could just drive in, do your thing, and come back out, which was cool, but—of course—totally crazy. And then they started putting the roadblocks up and you had to either get passes, which were very hard to get, or just sneak in. You’d sneak in through gates, or sneak in dressed up as a nuclear worker, or on a truck. I hid under a tarp, driving in on a truck one time; you had to do whatever you could do to get in.

JAPAN. Minami Sanriku, 2011. Survivors go to sleep inside a cold room before a mass funeral at a Daiou temple.

So is your Africa book project the main work on the horizon? Or are there others on the go?
I think this year's a lot to do with Africa. I am not going to cover news events outside of the continent, unless something really catches my eye and interest. I haven’t been able to go to real hotspots because family is more important right now. It's good, because it actually makes you focus on the place you know. Which for me at this moment is eastern Africa. I mean, I wish it was west Africa because the music is great and the food is fantastic, but for now it's mostly in the east.

I want to spend more time in Somalia and do more work in Kenya, where I live. I want to work more on energy issues and look at what’s going on in this "new Africa", which is changing very fast. It’s very exciting—super exciting. Then there are events like Mandela’s age and what it would mean for South Africa if he were to die; Zimbabwe and Mugabe; Somalia just got a new government; South Sudan just came into existence; Kenya’s younger generation's identity crisis. It’s all moving at a very high speed.

Kind of an intimidating project to have taken on, maybe?
Yeah, it’s like you’re trying to leave, but if there’s a place that keeps moving, it's Africa. Even energy—anything to do with that is really exciting. The biggest wind farm in the world is in Morocco, and Kenya has said now that they’re going to build a bigger one. On tribal land. That’s not going to be good. They’ve just dug for oil in that same region and there were huge problems and that was a small rig. Just imagine 350 wind turbines—that’s not going to go down too well.

Click through to see more photography by Dominic Nahr.

PALESTINE. The Gaza Strip, Beit Lahia, 2007. A Palestinian man finds his only escape from the Gaza Strip and the rising inter-factional violence by swimming in the Mediterranean Sea, about a mile from the northern Israeli border fence and under the watchful eye of an Israeli destroyer vessel in Beit Lahia.

SUDAN. Unity, 2012. An oil worker and SPLA soldiers stand near a crater after a Sudan Armed Forces Antonov bombing raid during fighting between North and South Sudan.

JAPAN. Misawa, 2011. A woman walks among muddy trees during a community clean up around the Misawa port after a tsunami hit the coast of eastern Japan.

SUDAN. Heglig, 2012. A Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) soldier lies dead, covered in oil next to a leaking oil facility. His death came during heavy fighting between the SAF and South Sudanese SPLA troops after they entered the Sudan oil town of Heglig.

JAPAN. Namie, 2011. A television runs in an abandoned house inside the exclusion zone less then six miles from the damaged nuclear plant. Residents left in a hurry as radiation reached dangerous levels.

EGYPT. Cairo, January 29, 2011. A protester holding empty glass bottles takes cover behind a wall during protests against the government of Hosni Mubarak.

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO. North Kivu, Kibati, 2008. Four Congolese government soldiers shelter from the rain on the front line, about three miles north of Kibati. CNDP rebels and government soldiers are separated by less then half a mile and fighting flares up regularly.

Previously: Bruce Gilden Takes Street Photos Like You've Never Seen Before

More VICE Loves Magnum:

Chris Steele-Perkins Can't Let Go of England

There's More to Stuart Franklin than the Most Famous Photo of the 20th Century

Jonas Bendiksen Takes Photos in Countries That Don't Exist

Peter Van Agtmael Won't Deny the Strange Allure of War

Image by Courtney Nicholas

The 1986 classic Stand By Me is one of three celebrated films—The Shawshank Redemption and Apt Pupil are the other two—adapted from Stephen King’s short-story collection Different Seasons. The book was published in 1982, well after King had proved his popular appeal and commercial dominance in the horror genre. This book, however, included four novellas that didn’t fit squarely within the confines of ghosts and goblins. Stand By Me was adopted from the Different Seasons story “The Body,” and was directed by Rob Reiner. The cast included River Phoenix, Will Wheaton, Corey Feldman following his performance as Mouth in Goonies, a pudgy Jerry O’Connell, and a switchblade-wielding Kiefer Sutherland, whose unflappable maleficence was perfected with his rock star vampire in Lost Boys.

What’s so great about Stand By Me? Everything. The kids are shown in their full splendor through camera positions, close-ups, timing, and most importantly, Richard Dreyfuss’s voice-over. Dreyfuss's voice perfectly conveys an older man looking back on his younger days, giving the film’s childish feelings, worries, and adventures a gravity of adulthood. (Two years later The Wonder Years would use the same device to great success.) With Stand By Me, the childhood genre is a lens through which it can delve into universal issues of mortality, identity, loyalty, and morality—the same issues explored by adult films. The film is also bolstered by the additional benefit of having young protagonists, who can be rawer than mature characters. The film capitalizes on the fact that kids can say and do anything, because they’re still experiencing everything for the first time.

Stephen King often uses characters who are writers. He includes tidbits of their stories in the text, similar to the plays within plays that you find in theater. In “The Body” there is the mise en abyme of Lardass and the pie-eating contest. It is expertly depicted in the film. There is also a whole 12-page story in the novella called “Stud City,” about sex and death. It is ostensibly written by Gordy years after the events depicted in “The Body.” I haven’t researched if this is an old story published by a young King, but it makes sense if it was. In his book It, King uses another writer character to espouse a kind of Ars Poetica about King’s own kind of writing. He says that he believes story writing should be about telling stories, rather than consciously instilling politics or sociological critiques, because those things always change, but stories never do. He probably set this story in the 50s, because it is a time that we all are familiar with in which mores are cemented, so it can be played with and manipulated. The 50s are also a time when King was a young boy and witnessed a friend get hit by a train. The boys in the story don’t see the eponymous body get hit by the train, but “The Body” is indeed killed by one.

River Phoenix. What a stud. How does he make even a young boy with young boy problems seem wise and good. In some ways it seems as if casting him as Chris Chambers was against type. River doesn’t strike me as a macho, leader of a gang. But possibly this is what makes it work. River makes Chris becomes a deep sensitive character caught in life circumstances that have forced him to erect a rough exterior. We see that he is really a misunderstood youth. And more than anything, this is what so many of King’s early books seem to be about: children facing hostile worlds, forced to be tougher than they want to be. Some of them find a way out through writing, and some of them succumb to the darkness. That is what all the horror is about: fantastical symbols for all the very real darkness of everyday life. In “The Body,” the horror is not fantastical, it is just death, and violence, and adult misunderstanding.

At the end of the story Gordy as the narrator reveals that all three of his companions died prematurely: Vern by fire, Teddy in an accident, and Chris Chambers by an incidental stabbing. The characters in the film are spared such fates, changing the emphasis of the film. In “The Body,” death and abuse are crucial themes. All four of the boys have either mentally or physically abusive families and all but one will die early, and the survivor, Gordy, lost his brother at a young age. The emphasis on death makes the trip to see the dead body a meditation on death and small-town strangulation of imagination. The body is a touchstone for all of them, before it they are equal. After seeing the dead, they will all go on their respective paths—as King says in the book and not the movie, some will have to drown.

In the film only River Phoenix’s character dies, and his death is the occasion for the narrator to reflect on the trip to see the body. Once the boys see the body, they forgo their plans of claiming it in order to get famous on the radio and call it in anonymously. If the Gordy character didn’t recount the tale then the act trip would have died in the characters’ memories, but because the story exists, they still get the fame they once sought while still renouncing the immediate attention. The story is an enshrining of the act and the characters. The movie emphasizes friendship, the pure friendship of 12-year-olds. And because River is the only one who died prematurely, the movie has become a shrine to his preternatural greatness. 

Photos by Ed Templeton

For a skateboarder growing up on the East Coast in the 80s and 90s, Huntington Beach seemed like ground zero. Christian Hosoi, the most stylish skater of all time lived there; Jason Lee, one of the biggest early innovators in street skating was there; even my favorite skater of all time, New Jersey’s Mike Vallely moved there and teamed up with fellow street legend Ed Templeton. And when the Flip team flew over from England with Geoff Rowley and Tom Penny, who would quickly take their places in the vanguard of new street rippers, I couldn’t help but believe that Huntington Beach was the greatest place on Earth.

Then I visited when I turned 18 and it was like Hitler won the war. Blonde and blue-eyed was the norm. Not one person of color to be seen anywhere. Nazi regalia was sold in Army/Navy stores alongside Dickies and bayonets. Then I started hearing stories of teenage skinheads lynching black people like it was Alabama in the 50s. One of skateboarding’s kindest, gentlest souls and my childhood idol, Ray Barbee, was chased by a rabid pack of skinheads and barely escaped with his life. Not trying to sound racist, but I hate white people. In the immortal words of Huntington Beach’s local pro skater Jason Dill, “I don’t want to be white as much as you don’t want to be white.” I vowed that day never to return to Huntington Beach.

This past weekend, nearly 20 years to the day, I found myself in Huntington for the US Open of Surf, which played host to the Van Doren Invitational Bowl contest, the preeminent skateboard bowl contest of our time. The neo-Nazi sentiment was still there, just a bit more subdued (I saw one yoked out, shirtless skinhead in the stands with a 10-inch snowflake on his chest, a poor attempt to cover up the Swazi over his heart). Of the daily 100,000 contest visitors I saw, all but two were blonde and blue-eyed, and neither of them were black. The only real noticeable change was that the scantily-clad girls I recall from two decades before hadn’t aged. In fact, they’d regressed to pre-pubescence and their bikinis had regressed with them. A man’s natural reaction is, “Hey! Wow! Tits! All right!” but once I realized very few kids were of age I began to get sick to my stomach.

I was working on a video project while in Huntington Beach, and when I began to search for boys and girls who were over the age of 18 I found it nearly impossible. Even the ones with very adult messages written on their bodies like “US Open your legs,” “free blow jobs,” “stick it here” (pointing to their ass), “rape me,” “free rim jobs,” etc., etc. told me they were only 15 or 16 (and I’m quite certain they were lying about their age). For the next four days I kept my head down and looked at the sand as if they were all Medusas. I’ve felt less creepy while on gang bang sets.

Naturally nine days of whipping children into a sexual frenzy could only end one way: a good old-fashion riot.

Luckily, I was long gone before the cops showed up. But Ed Templeton, skateboarding’s most prolific artist and Huntington Beach’s hometown hero/advocate was there capturing the entire week’s festivities. I rang him up to get his take on the HB scene.

VICE: What was Huntington Beach like when you were growing up?
Ed: Downtown was surf shops, bars, and food. Quaint one- or two-story buildings. The locals ruled the place, and there were fights all the time. Skinheads hung out on one corner and said racist shit to everyone. Religious zealots would preach that we are all sinners. In many ways not much has changed.

How has it changed over the years?
Now it’s Starbucks and Jamba Juice, microbreweries, and ice cream shops. There are still surf shops, but they are bigger and more corporate. The skeleton of the past is still there, but Main Street is bigger, louder, and more geared towards tourists. The skinheads have stopped hanging out on the corner—they are all grown up and breeding families. A few racist kids still hang out down there, but they’re more stealth about it. Fights happen at night now when the meatheads who all think they are MMA fighters get their liquid courage to the right level.

You mentioned that racist element—I remember Clyde Singleton getting chased by skinheads with bottles, and Ray Barbee being as well on a seperate occassion. More recently, I saw a lot of Swazi tattoos this weekend. Why has that sentiment been so big in HB?
Orange County has the highest concentration of Nazi skinheads outside of Cologne, Germany. I’m not sure how old that fun fact is. But the gangs were here; there are remnants of it. Just today Deanna shot a photo of a guy with a white power tattoo on his chest walking shirtless down Main Street. It’s out there. The Ray Barbee story is the worst. I remember Jamie Hart and his friends beating up skinheads when I was younger. I see the Swazi tats, but those fucktards and their way of thinking is on the way out. Or so I like to think.

You and Deanna are both born and raised in Huntington, but I always felt you outgrew it. Why stay?
Deanna was born here in HB; I was born in Garden Grove—still the OC. I started skating in HB, and that’s where my life began. At the moment when I would have normally said, "Lets get the fuck outta here!” I was doing Toy Machine, and it was before the internet got so fast. I still had to Fed-Ex zip drives down to the magazines with Toy ads, and drive down often to arrange graphic stuff. I felt tied to being at least within driving distance from where Toy Machine was being made, which is San Diego. So the company kept me from moving. Now with the speed of the interwebs I could live anywhere, but again, when you get older you gain more perspective. And after traveling the world, which I continue to do, I realize that everyone in the world would kill to live where I do. It’s paradise. Yeah there are douchbags, but there are douchebags everywhere. The weather is perfect, the beach is close, LA is a short drive away with all of its culture and art, but I’m not in the middle of that. I’m here in a quiet suburbia where I can drop out and get work done.

What is Huntington Beach to you?
HB is what you make of it. Some people come and say, “Look at all these sluts and surfer bro jock meatheads, this place sucks!” And others come and say, “Beautiful women in bikinis everywhere, epic waves, perfect weather, this place rules!” You get what you look for. I look for good weather, skaters, music, art, punk kids, I look for the extremes of Beach Culture because I want to make photographs of it. You can’t judge a place by the people on Main Street; one block away you can have a deserted beach to yourself. And in the suburbs amongst the perfect families and their perfect houses are people like me, printing photos, making art—and not only me, there are teenagers making music in garages, and printing zines at Kinko’s.

When did you start documenting the Huntington suburban sprawl and the Huntington Beach pier on a daily basis?
I had always shot down there, but as far as starting to go quite frequently just to shoot, that was probably in 2004 or 2005. In 2010 we started making it our daily walk, just to get out of the house. We go down and get something to drink and cruise the pier like some old couple, but with cameras. Almost every day now.

How do you regard the time capsule of photos you've taken of Huntington Beach over the years?
I think it will be an important document of this time period. Well “important” may be a stretch. Hopefully it will be embraced by lovers of photography. Deanna and I want to do a book of our HB work. We shoot the same area and people, but very differently. Sort of a “his and hers” perspective book.

I've never experienced anything like the scene at the US Open, and I’ve been on porn sets, to spring break, Sturgis motorcycle rally, and other questionable locales. Describe the US Open scene, and was it always like that?
Yes and no. Yes there have always been girls in bikinis, drunk people looking for fights, skateboarding and surfing. There have even always been girls who want to show off their bodies. But now those girls are teenagers. The bikini styles have changed and in most of them you are virtually naked.

Being an older fellow do you feel like a creep documenting the madness? I felt like one just being there.
Not really. It’s such a cluster-fuck of humanity that everyone is documenting on their cell phones anyway, stupid me with my film camera means nothing. Plus, compared to the roving groups of long-lens cameramen who just blatantly shoot the boobies and butts of any girl in a bikini what I shoot is like Sesame Street. The creep factor of those guys is off the chart. I’m just documenting what’s going on in public for all to see, on a crowded beach with thousands of people, there’s nothing creepy about it.

What’s the most tweaked stuff you saw this year or in past years?
I felt like the last two years were worse, as far as body messaging went. My wife Deanna had a book published of her work documenting the body-messaging trend. Girls and boys let companies stencil their logos on their half-naked bodies, people write messages on their skin, girls let people hand print their butts and cleavage, people slap stickers on girls and they stay there all day… This year was not as bad in that department. Last year girls were writing—or letting people write—vile or racist messages. Swastikas, “I give head, no teeth,” “jailbait,” “free hugs, whites only,” jungle fever,” “I like big black dick in my ass.” I have seen young men and girls walking around with those messages festooned on their bikini bods. Fights happen every year. Those suck to see. This year was pretty tame; a few boob flashes, some twerking/grope fests with young bikini girls dancing in the middle of a crowd of touchy testosterone-filled boys. The worst new development this year was just rampant ass slapping, with or without a sign that allowed it. It’s like the 60s all over again. I saw only one girl get angry the entire time I was there. Other than that it was just a butt slap, ass grope fest. Then there was the riot.

Yeah… what happened with that, and how do you think things will change in Huntington Beach, if at all?
Nothing will change. There will be more cops. But there will also be more kids armed with riot tools showing up in hopes of another one. Maybe Vans will change some things in hopes of reducing the crowds. I saw the whole thing go down. There was a fight on Main and PCH in front of Jack’s. The cops showed up and tried to clear people. Meanwhile there were NO cops on Main Street one block up. And another fight broke out. No Cops. Another fight. No Cops. This kept going on for 30 minutes and the cops never came. Fighting, dancing, general lawlessness. The crowd got whooped up and when the cops finally came with riot gear, all shit broke loose. Kids took the opportunity to start breaking shit. Why? Because it’s fun to break shit. They acted like the place was Disneyland and that committing crimes was somehow OK. Damaging property and documenting it to share on their instagram. “Hey look I’m rioting!” Stupid idiots just ID’ing themselves committing real crimes. I heard a kid on one YouTube video yelling, “They shot me in the head with a bean bag? Why? Fuck the Cops!” Why? You were part of an unruly crowd who was supposed to disperse, that’s why. He acted like he was just walking his dog and got brutalized by the police out of nowhere. You were taking part in a riot, asshole. That’s why you got hit. So the kids flipped the script and tried to justify it as a riot over police brutality, but it was a riot by wannabe thug suburban kids who watch too much TV.

You were laid up with a broken leg for a while recently; did it make shooting the daily pier shots tough? And how are you feeling these days?
I was OK. I got out just as the people started running and the cops started shooting. I should have stayed to shoot photos, but it was my birthday and I was over it all and wanted to eat. My leg is feeling pretty good. Still doing physical therapy, some days are better than others. It’s a temperamental leg.

What were you working on while injured? What projects do you have coming up?
I was just making Toy Machine graphics and working on paintings for upcoming shows. My next exhibition is in Milan, Italy on September 19 at Jerome Zodo Gallery.

Follow Ed on Instagram @tempster_returns for more photos of Huntington Beach or go here.

Previously - My Favorite Street Photographer Is a Firefighter from Camden

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

For more from Gary and Tracey, click through to the next page. (WARNING: The final image of this selection is very NSFW.)

Click through to the next page. (WARNING: The following image is very NSFW.)

More photo stuff from VICE:

The ‘LBM Dispatch’ Brings the Good News

Prayers, Pilgrims, and Parties

Interfearance 

Dreams give us hope that in the future we can achieve what only exists in our minds. Sometimes I get pulled out of my own world and I realize my dreams are so small. When so many opportunities exist, it’s easy to take what’s in front of you and never reach further.  Humans tend to get bogged down in the petty and pointless and fail to enact larger scale transformations for fear of failure. However, when things get so bad that it seems almost unbearable to continue, that’s when the real dreaming can occur. In 2006, filmmaker Diego Quemada-Díez visited a rural school in the biggest slum in East Africa, Nairobi’s Kibera. There he interviewed some 50 children, who were orphaned by AIDS and struggling with extreme poverty. Inspired by these stories, Quemada-Díez wrote a poem that served as a catalyst to express their fears and dreams through the eyes of one boy.

I Want to Be a Pilot is the story of Omondi, a 12-year-old boy orphaned by AIDS who dreams of taking flight. To him, being a pilot represents freedom. A person who can fly is someone who is able to escape the horrors that engulf those on the ground. Omondi recites his dream of flying to where he can be reunited with his parents, touch the ground with bare feet, and drink clean water. His wishes are simple, but profound. Shot on location in 16 mm, this short evokes the same wistfulness and grittiness of the poem. 

Diego Quemada-Diez made this short film back in 2006 and after playing dozens of festivals including Sundance, Hamptons Int’l, Edinburgh, Lorcano, and Telluride, and winning two dozen awards everywhere from Silverdocs, Cleveland, and Los Angeles Film Festival he’s finally made his first feature.  La Jaula De Oro or The Golden Cage played in this year’s Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard section. It follows three teenagers as they attempt to illegally cross from Guatemala into the United States.

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  -  Never Like the First Time!

It's time to laugh at some overreacting, entitled wimps again!

Cry-Baby #1: Dola Indidis

The incident: Jesus Christ was crucified 2000ish years ago (allegedly).

The appropriate response: Nothing. Let it go, man. 

The actual response: A Kenyan lawyer is petitioning the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to declare that the trial of Jesus was an unfair trial. 

Dola Indidis, a lawyer in Kenya who formerly served as the spokesperson of the country's judiciary, is attempting to sue Italy, Palestine, Israel, Tiberius (who was the emperor of Rome from 42BC - 37AD), Pontius Pilate (the judge at Jesus' trial), King Herod, and a bunch of Jewish elders.  

In an interview with The Nairobian, Dola said, “I filed the case because it’s my duty to uphold the dignity of Jesus and I have gone to the ICJ to seek justice for the man from Nazareth. His selective and malicious prosecution violated his human rights through judicial misconduct, abuse of office bias and prejudice.” Adding, "I want a declaratory judgment that the trial and sentence entered were badly done and therefore null and void.”

Dola also believes that the method by which Jesus was executed was unlawful as, under Galilean law 2000 years ago, the sentence for blasphemy was being stoned to death, rather than crucifixion. 

Dola first attempted to file his case in 2007 in the High Court of Nairobi, but, shockingly, it was rejected. He then applied to have it heard at the ICJ at the Hague, who, Dola claims, have constituted a pre-trial panel to consider whether or not to take the case. 

A website called Legal Cheek contacted the International Court of Justice, who denied that they were considering the case. A spokesperson told them, "The ICJ has no jurisdiction for such a case. The ICJ settles disputes between states. It is not even theoretically possible for us to consider this case."

The incident: An 11-year-old girl ate some chocolate on a school trip, despite it being against school rules.

The appropriate response: Pretending you hadn't noticed if you're nice, taking the chocolate off the kid if you're an asshole. 

The actual response: The girl's mother was forced to make a 160-mile round trip to take her home. 

Holli McCann, 11, from Watford, England, was on a school trip to the Isle of White, an island just off the coast of England. 

On the first night of the week-long break, Holli and two other girls she was sharing her room with ate some chocolate that Holli had sneaked along with her. She did this despite having signed a "behavior charter" before the trip that explicitly stated that chocolate was off-limits. 

Holli wrote about the secret chocolate session in a letter back home to her mom, which, despite being sealed in an envelope, was read by her teachers. 

Holli's teachers then searched her room to see if she had more chocolate. They removed the lining of her suitcase and tipped out her toiletry bag, in a manner that her mother describes as being consistent with Holli “running an international drug smuggling operation from [her] hotel room."

A message was sent to Holli's mom, Kerri, saying she needed to urgently contact school officials. 

Yvonne Graves, the headmistress of the school, explained to her what had happened and told her she needed to come and collect her daughter immediately, despite the fact that she was on a totally different land mass. 

So Kerri had to drive overnight to collect Holli and take her home. A 160-mile round trip that included two ferry journeys. 

To make the story even more depressing, The Telegraph reports that Kerri is unable to work as she is the sole carer for her autistic son, and had to save for six months to get together the £300 for Holly's trip. She then had to borrow an additional £130 from friends and family in order to be able to go and collect her. 

Kerri has formally complained to the school and its governors. 

Which of these guys is the bigger cry-baby? Let us know right here:

It’s an old cliché to bemoan what is compared to what used to be. But as the morning sun rises over the fluoro debris and thousands of empty plastic cups from the night before, it's hard for me to do much else.  

I’m standing on a crowded Haad Rin beach on Thailand’s idyllic Koh Phangan, home to the original and now infamous Full Moon Party. Hours before, 20,000 bodies writhed together in motion to pulsating house music, fuelled by cheap alcohol and magic mushroom milkshakes. Now, among the rapidly sobering hardcore who continue to dance, a smattering of those bodies dot the beach, their semi-conscious, half-naked torsos slowly roasting in the Thai sun. They lie surrounded by beer bottles, shattered glass, and plastic buckets.

It's all a bit depressing, but of course there's nothing particularly original about any of this. The descent of the Full Moon Party from fabled hippy love-in to an 18-30-club-rave-on-sea has been in motion for years. Once arcane events attended by 30 or so loved up psytrancers who, for all their faults, at least seemed to be striving for some kind of spiritual experience, now the Full Moon Parties seem to be yet another hedonistic playpen for actuarial science students whose idea of a spiritual experience is getting a henna tattoo.

Annabelle, 21, from Leighton Buzzard, told me, "We are going to get very drunk," and that any concerns for safety that she and her group might have were likely to "go out the window after a few drinks." She wore multiple bandages on her legs and arm—the result of a fall from a stage at a party earlier in the week.

I spent much of the night itself alongside the Royal Thai Police. For the first time in the event's history, uniformed officers were present on the beach itself, surveying the situation from a makeshift security center in an effort to create a more visible police presence. They were there on recommendation of the British embassy, whose representatives told me they had "an active interest" in the party and in keeping the revelers safe.

It was a slow start, but as the evening progressed a steady stream of people meandered into the police tent. Some just wanted their photo taken with the police—who were always happy to oblige—but most had either lost their friends, had possessions stolen, or needed directions to the nearby medical tent.

In one incident, a young man stumbled toward the tent, blood pouring down his front after apparently stabbing himself with a pen. The officers, somewhat bemused, watched, as he stumbled away. The medics in the tent had yet to arrive so he was left to his own devices. 

Next up was a couple who had been dancing on a stage when a group of five Westerners snatched the woman's phone and knocked her to the ground. The police nodded and wrote down their details, but nobody appeared under any illusions that anything would or could be done in response.

Later, a team of plainclothes police officers appeared with a young man hauling a heavy diners barrel. The officer in charge told me that the man—who, he was quick to point out, was not Thai, but Burmese—had been arrested after one of the bars was found to be serving drinks containing mushrooms. It was never explained to me why another bar farther down the beach that was openly serving similar drinks was free to stay open.

Elsewhere on the beach, for those brave enough or drunk enough, there were burning ropes to jump over, rings of fire to dive through, and flaming bars to limbo under. The young Thais in charge of turning the ropes and holding up the rings appeared to be as drunk as the tourists and, for the most part, seemed oblivious to what was happening around them. One unfortunate daredevil went up in flames, his body entangled by a burning rope. He managed to run into the sea before he was seriously injured.

The rest of the night was basically just a parade of increasingly drunk people walking up and down the beach, each clinging to their own buckets of whisky and Red Bull. But as drunk as everyone was, it wasn't quite the "carnage" that I'd been told to expect by the owner of a local Irish bar. "Have you seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest? That's what it's like," he had told me.

Perhaps the increased police presence had helped tame things a little. Dr. Worawut, a senior doctor at the local hospital, told me that it was much worse ten years ago, when harder drugs were readily available. Nowadays it seems that most of the people selling pills on the beach are undercover police—in fact, I saw one guy fall into their trap before being led away in handcuffs.

But not every Full Moon Party is so tame. A previous visitor to the island, Becki Beckmann—a 44-year-old German traveler who first attended in 1992 and was shot in Koh Phangan—told me simply that while it used to be a genuine experience, it was now just an obnoxiously messy affair, a night you could have at any superclub anywhere in the world, just with sand and buckets of booze instead of dry ice and $9 beers.

"I think it changed slowly over the years," he told me. "In 1992 it was still sort of secret, but by 2000 it was a worldwide known event." And with its fame, Beckman told me, more and more people started to arrive, including those looking to exploit the growing crowds: "Those sorts of criminals looking for the easy money during the party; the robbers, the thieves, the guys trying to sell aspirin as ecstasy, spiking drinks, raping girls—all these sorts."

The list of serious incidents to occur at full moon parties is a grim one. In March of 2008, a British tourist was stabbed to death as he tried to break up a fight. In January 2009, a female German tourist was found dead, floating in shallow water off the beach. In September 2009, a French tourist was found hung in a police cell. And in January this year another British tourist, Stephen Ashton, 22, was killed—an accidental victim of a gun fight between two rival Thai gangs. Of course, there are many more casualties than those.

I asked Beckmann if he thought anything would change. "There are millions of tourists flooding in each year to Thailand," he answered. "Who cares about those few cases of people being raped, shot, killed, murdered, drugged, or dying in an accident?" For the island, he added, "It's just a steady flow of income—it has made them rich."

It seems even the current batch of tourists couldn't care less about the darker side. One police officer told me that he had been there the night that Stephen Ashton was killed; when I asked him whether the party had been canceled, he said, "nobody cared," adding, "they just kept on dancing." Indeed, a few hours prior to the party I went to, Alex—an 18-year-old student from Manchester—had told me bluntly, "People die, but we're just here to have fun."

Follow George on Twitter: @georgehenton. See more of his work here.

Some more parties we've been to:

We Went to a Foam Party in Magaluf

Never Party with the Brick Squad

Making Friends at Thatcher's Brixton Death Party

A porn set. Image via Wikimedia Commons

I was talking to this reporter recently about pubic hair. My favorite interviews are the ones that feel like a conversation with a stranger at a coffee shop or a friend at a quiet neighborhood bar. Tangents get explored and they frequently veer off into territory that has nothing to do with the article being written. Sometimes those digressions circle back into a great quote about the initial topic that probably wouldn’t have been said if the format was Q&A. One of the tangents I went on during this interview involved exploitation in the porn industry. 

My first contract with an adult production studio was skewed heavily in the company’s favor. You could say I got “screwed” on it. I’ve heard plenty of unverified mythology about musical artists and television actors who had terrible initial contracts. I’ve also heard a few stories directly from talent in the mainstream end of the entertainment industry. You might know some of these anecdotes: Prince’s name change to avoid a trademark ownership issue, the reasons behind Johnny Depp’s rumored antics on the 21 Jump Street set, Billy Joel and his 15-year Family Productions contract. 

From what I gather, the ways that I was screwed on that first contract are very similar to the ways that a lot of young artists get screwed on their first deal with a large company. I see no reason to go into details. I do feel a need to reiterate that this sort of skewed contract happens in other sectors of the entertainment industry. I also feel a need to point out that contracted performers in the adult industry are not the norm and that most contracts with adult production studios are more balanced than mine was. 

A big chunk of the responsibility for the whole thing lies with me for being naive enough to sign their stock agreement without having a lawyer look at it. You don’t show up to a gunfight with a dull fork, and I shouldn’t have dealt with capitalism in that capacity without professional advice and some knowledge of standard industry practices. Once I realized how one-sided our relationship was I talked to lawyers and eventually sorted it out. Sure, the experience meant I couldn’t work in my chosen profession or remotely similar ones for over a year without potentially putting myself in default of the contract. Yes, it was messy, stressful, and expensive but I learned a lot and the legal bills weren’t any worse than a year at college would have been. 

The main lesson that I took away from my early dealings with the founders and former owners of that company is that a fair deal means making sure that the exploitation is mutual and balanced. Thanks to my stubborn streak and a contract extension that someone luckily forgot to send, I’ve been on a much more equal footing for the past three years. My career is doing fine. The new owners have no right to stop me from doing live performances or photo shoots. I can now write under whatever name I please, including the pseudonym I’ve been building since before I’d ever considered working in hardcore porn. Any exploitation I personally experienced during the first few years of my career in adult films is a heightened version of some kid taking the first, extremely low offer for a salaried position straight out of school. A company that tries to get as much work from a person as they can while paying them as little as possible just looks like capitalism at work. It isn’t exactly ethical but it isn’t any more exploitative than the majority of jobs.

Some people argue that pornography is, by definition, exploitative. Anti-porn activists sometimes paint this picture of a porn starlet with huge bedroom eyes, brand new DD breasts, a nubile 19-year old body, and a complete lack of both independent thought and personal agency. While this girl certainly does make an effective poster child for the argument that all sex work is toxic and bad, she is a straw man. She is a heavily distorted caricature of a very few people who are no more representative of female porn performers than any one person is representative of a group. This straw porn starlet is also a bit of a red herring when it comes to ethics and exploitation in pornography.

And then there’s “Big Porn.” Forbes debunked the idea of pornography as a $14-billion-dollar-a-year industry back in 2001, but reporters were still asking about it when I started talking to members of the press in 2008. Until a few years ago this pornographic version of Exxon or Walmart did not exist. Production companies were, for the most part, mom-and-pop style places operating with little bureaucracy and usually with a certain amount of concern for the welfare of the people they employed. Many of those companies still exist, but now Big Porn does too. 


Drawing by Stoya

Big Porn, funded by free online tube sites, has acquired such a large portion of the pornographic industry that it has begun to effectively corner the market. The more time I spend observing this one company, the more it seems to exist as a glaring example of capitalism gone awry. Aside from all of the involvement with piracy and the arrest of the apparent owner on allegations of tax evasion, they’ve begun taking on unpaid interns to replace the steady stream of workers who have been driven away by poor treatment. Their corporate structure is opaque. Executive level employees issue instructions and then reprimand lower level workers for following them. The lack of respect with which they treat their crew and staff has begun to show in the lowered product quality, and Big Porn fails to see that the common denominator is, well, them.

If you’re thinking about or discussing ethics in porn please remember that the adult industry isn’t just the girls you see on box covers and the front pages of websites. It also includes the directors, a large amount of people who work as crew on set, and a slew of office workers who handle the post production and sale of product. I know a middle-aged dude who is built like a tank from moving lights and cameras all day might not pull on your heartstrings the way that a pretty young woman does, but he’s the one who struggles to make rent and car payments when month after month of shoots are cancelled last minute. He’s the one being replaced by people who have been conned into working for lower rates or for free because he finally had the audacity to take other work. The people you don’t see in the videos are the ones bearing the initial brunt of this new power imbalance. 

In contrast to Hollywood, neither the crew nor performers are protected by a union. Unlike the performers, the crew and office staff are not protected by agents or the kind of market value that allows people like me to refuse to work until safe working conditions are provided. When Big Porn is done squeezing everything they can out of those workers behind the scenes there is no reason to believe they won’t start squeezing the performers harder too.

While people attack the entire porn industry for giving employment to the women who want to work in it, there are a number of unseen workers being treated in ways that look pretty unethical to me. It is just as inaccurate to hold up a few high profile female performers as evidence that the whole industry is ethical and provides fair treatment across the board as it is to paint all of porn as an exploitative pox on modern society. The reality is many different people being treated in a variety of ways that fall somewhere in between the two ends of the spectrum. In order to fix a lot of the problems in various parts of the adult entertainment industry, they need to be addressed as what they are: workers’ rights issues.

I took a big risk a few years ago and successfully corrected the imbalance in my contractual obligations. At 23, I railed against what I perceived as The Man like I thought I was punk as fuck. Again, a lot of that success was because I got lucky. It cost me a lot of money and an unquantifiable amount of career momentum and all I managed to do was make my personal situation reasonably fair. If I hadn’t saved every possible dollar those first couple of years and already established myself as profitable I wouldn’t even have been able to do that much. I might have ended up like those musicians who aren’t Billy Joel or Prince who are still waiting out the second decade of their bad deal. The people whose names we don’t know because they didn’t have the leverage to successfully fight the system or the visibility to make the unfairness of their experiences known. In the interim, my raised middle finger has been replaced with phrases like, “I strongly disagree with your business practices and they may have a negative effect on the continuation of our professional relationship.” The thing that needs to be stood against now is the MAN, and those business forces don't listen to polite phrases or rude gestures. But pointing out that ethical issues do exist, and they're more complicated than you might originally suspect, is a start.

@Stoya

Previously - In Praise of the Posterior, AKA the Butt

The VICE London office just sent us this weird little video about five women professing their love for the same man. They love his face, his scent, and the way he walks, and would happily do anything to please him. Who is this ladykiller? If you've seen Galaxy Quest or Quigley Down Under, you already know.

More about Alan Rickman:

Losing It on Alan Rickman’s Roof

Visions of L. Ron

Photo via Flickr user Katjusa Cisar

After a brief honeymoon period during which it looked like he might actually win his dream job, Anthony Weiner is tanking in the polls and has almost no chance of getting elected mayor of New York City. (When the latest news stories about you involve your staffer calling a former intern a “slutbag” and a porn being made of your life, it’s safe to say your political career is in trouble.) Plenty of people will be happy to see him go, mostly because of his habit of sending wiener pics and sexts to women who are not his wife, then lying about it until he gets exposed in every sense of the word. But if he loses the election (or his long-lost sense of dignity spurs him into withdrawing from the race) over the headline-friendly penis photography habit, he’ll have been cast out for the wrong reasons. Weiner has done many terrible things in his storied political career, and the sexting—and the torrent of lies that has gone with it—doesn’t even scratch the surface. Here are three of the most glaring reasons we should be glad he (probably) won’t get the chance to reach higher office:

He Won His First Election by Exploiting Racial Tensions

Way back in 1991, Anthony David Weiner (as his name read on campaign literature) was running for his first elected position, a city council seat in a conservative, heavily Jewish district in Brooklyn. At the time, the city was still dealing with the aftermath of the Crown Heights riot, during which long-simmering tensions between Orthodox Jews and blacks rose to the surface and basically destroyed a neighborhood. Weiner took advantage of this by sending an anonymously penned flyer out that claimed one of his opponents, Adele Cohen, was an ally of the city’s deeply unpopular black political leadership and then–presidential candidate Jesse Jackson, even though Cohen had never met Jackson. It was a nasty, cynical strategy, and he likely wouldn’t have won the close race without it. Lately, MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki has been bringing up that flyer again—but Weiner has responded to criticism of his tactics in ‘91 with lies.

At a meeting of local Democrats in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in June, I saw Weiner get asked about the incident. True to form, he massaged the truth. “One of the candidates in the race accepted an endorsement that was unpopular, and I wrote a flier about it,” he said dismissively. “This other candidate had accepted the endorsement of two unpopular people, a presidential candidate and the mayor. In retrospect, given the time that it was, Crown Heights was going on, I should not have done it. And ever since then I think I’ve had a remarkable record.”

Weiner was asked about the fliers again at a debate in Staten Island later that week, and responded by saying essentially the same thing—the blatant race-baiting was just “quoting the New York Times,” according to him. He lied yet again when I asked him about the fliers after he announced plans to take up the “food-stamp diet” the next day. Politics—and New York politics in particular—can be a dirty game, and maybe we shouldn’t hold Weiner accountable for mistakes he made when he was 27 years old. But as long as he keeps denying his past misdeeds, it’s worthwhile to keep calling him on them.

He Spent His Time in Congress Preening for the Cameras
Weiner engaging in his favorite pastime: talking to an audience. Photo via the Center for American Progress's Flickr account

Weiner came to national prominence during the health care debate a few years ago by appearing on talk shows and on the floor of Congress to give fiery, impassioned speeches that endeared him to liberals who thought mainstream Democrats were pussies afraid to go after their GOP opponents. But as a brutal New York Times investigation in June showed, many of his colleagues and staff hated him. He was obnoxious and rude—when he got angry, he’d throw salad against the wall, or break his cell phone—and seemed only to care about attracting media attention. He failed to produce any legislation during 12 years in Washington with the exception of a single bill that benefited a major campaign donor.

It got a little lost in the wake of his juicier scandals, but the Times story, by that paper’s staid standards, doesn’t fuck around:

The more lasting impression left by Mr. Weiner, according to more than three dozen people interviewed, was of a go-it-alone politician whose legislative record was thin and whose restlessness could spill into recklessness.

[...]

To his detractors, Mr. Weiner’s showy style was not just annoying. It revealed a willingness to risk upsetting a delicate consensus to elevate his own profile.

In July 2010, members of the New York City delegation were working quietly to line up some Republican support for a bill to pay for the treatment of Sept. 11 rescue workers. In a moment that became famous on cable TV, Mr. Weiner blew up at Representative Peter T. King, a Republican from Long Island, on the floor over Republican opposition to the bill, though other Democrats saw Mr. King as still on their team.

Mr. King said the explosion antagonized other Republicans, impeding the bill. “That was really his first and last venture into it,” he said. “He really never seemed to comprehend the nuances and complexities of it.”

Weiner’s had a history of not being able to rein in his anger—another story has him yelling at current NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg about “tearing out [his] fucking bike lanes” once he was running the city. Looks like he won’t get the chance, to everyone’s benefit.

Despite His Liberalism, He’s a Hardcore Israel Hawk
Weiner sticking to his guns and denying the occupation of the West Bank in 2013.

Many of the progressives who lionized Weiner for his attacks on Republicans probably disagree with his views on Israel, to put it mildly. Just as you’d expect from a pandering politician whose base consists in part of Orthodox Jews, his stance on Israel and Palestine is outrageous. Essentially, he claims that the West Bank is unoccupied, something it’s hard to picture even Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu saying with a straight face. Weiner’s anger isn’t just reserved for GOP politicians and bike lanes—he’s spent his career accusing everyone from the Times to a professor at Columbia (whom he tried to get fired) of being anti-Israel.

Presumably his batshit crazy views on the subject wouldn’t matter much if he somehow won the election, as the mayor of New York doesn’t tend to take part in negotiations on a two-state solution. But his ideas, particularly his tarring of all Palestinians as terrorists, have troubling implications when you consider that the NYPD has been systematically spying on Muslim communities for years now. Weiner, by the way, opposes both of the police oversight bills recently vetoed by Bloomberg. (Among the people running for mayor, only “hipster” candidate Bill De Blasio favors both.)

Weiner is the twisted byproduct of our cable news-driven media universe, a partisan who doesn’t actually do anything and instead rouses, in more ways than one, his fans with sound-bite-ready pieces of empty rhetoric. Sydney Leathers, the sexting partner that revealed his latest crop of seediness, told Howard Stern that his health care speeches were a “huge turn-on,” which is probably exactly what he wanted to hear. There's a lot of evidence that indicates Weiner cares more about the sexy parts of politics—the speechifying, the crucifying of others, the cameras that follow him everywhere—than actually getting stuff done. His naked ambition, coupled with his substance-free zealotry, is a far better reason to despise him than anything to do with actual nudity. So it's nice that Weiner's apparently on his way out for good, at last, but I wish it were for his politics and not his penis.

Matt Taylor is a Brooklyn-based writer whose reporting about politics has appeared in Slate, Salon, the Daily Beast, the Atlantic, the New Republic, and New York. You can follow him on Twitter: @matthewt_ny

More on New York City:

Homophobic Killings Wont' Dampen New York's Gay Pride

Getting Busted in New York

VICE Endorses Jipson Talmadge 

Abu Mahjin.

Al Qaeda has a bit of an image problem. Their reputation as the world’s most feared terrorist network can be traced back to precisely 8:46 AM EST on September 11, 2001. And it’s a reputation that they’ve since cemented by kidnapping and executing foreign journalists and aid workers, bombing public transport systems in Europe and involving themselves in several particularly nasty African civil wars. So, when I had the opportunity to interview one of their members in Syria recently, I was—needless to say—a little nervous.

Al Qaeda are fighting in Syria's civil war under a handful of banners. The most well known is the homegrown Jabhat al-Nusra, the first jihadist group to emerge in the conflict and the one that the US Government made infamous (and, incidentally, rather popular with many young Syrian fighters) when they stuck it on their list of forbidden terrorist networks back in December 2012.

But in recent months Jabhat al-Nusra has tried to distance itself from al Qaeda, and increasingly it is being overshadowed by the new kids on the block—the Iraqi, al Qaeda-backed Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), a group that is both led by and almost exclusively made up of foreign Mujahideen fighters. ISIS established itself in Syria in April after a People’s Front of Judea-style spat between one Jabhat al-Nusra leader, who wanted to formally link the group to al Qaeda in Iraq, and another Jabhat al-Nusra leader, who didn’t.

ISIS make Jabhat al-Nusra look like moderates; in recent months a number of videos have surfaced on the internet that apparently show members of the group beheading suspected regime collaborators and executing a Catholic priest. And whereas Jabhat al-Nusra have occasionally granted interviews and frontline access to foreign journalists, ISIS have always refused outright to talk to the media or explain their presence in Syria, as well as doing absolutely nothing to deny the validity of those videos. Everybody hates them and they don’t care.

But someone, somewhere in an al Qaeda strategy room, has decided that it’s time for a rethink. In the past few weeks the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham has orchestrated a number of bizarre publicity stunts, all of which seem to have been designed to prove to the people of Syria (many of whom are becoming rather nervous about the presence of jihadists who want to set up a hardline Islamic state in their country) that they have a cuddly, likeable side. There was the children’s ice-cream eating contest in Aleppo, and my personal favorite, the ISIS versus Jabhat al-Nusra rope pulling contest.

It was in this context that I received a call from one of my contacts to say that a fighter from the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham was willing to give me—a Western, female journalist—an interview. There were conditions: we would do the interview on neutral territory in a secret location, I would wear an abaya and headscarf and he would keep his face covered throughout. I have a problem with men in face coverings that stems back to the time I was mugged as a teenager by a man in a balaclava, but I’m also a believer in shock therapy. And I was not going to pass up the opportunity to have a chat with a member of the shadowy group that I see everywhere in Syria but have never come close to interviewing.

And so, on a humid night in late July, I found myself in the back of a 4x4 on the way to an apartment in a small town in northern Syria, where an Islamist with a Kalashnikov was waiting for me. The car pulled up in a deserted back street, and after climbing up two flights of pitch black stairs I entered the room where I came face to face, for the first time, with a member of al Qaeda. He introduced himself as Abu Mahjin and I was pleased to see that he looked like the archetypal jihadist: dressed in the Taliban style with three-quarter length trousers and a tunic, and his eyes—the only bit of his face that I could see—ringed in black kohl. It suited him, and it definitely made the whole face covering thing a lot less sinister. Maybe the setting helped, too: Islamic extremists seem more approachable when they’re sitting in a family living room surrounded by soft furnishing and children’s toys.

I started by asking him where he was from, but the answer I got back was obtuse. “I come from far away,” he said, which didn’t really narrow it down at all. I persisted. “Are you Syrian or foreign?” I asked. “There’s no difference if you’re Syrian or non-Syrian,” he replied. “I don’t want to create divisions. We’re all Mujahideen in the name of Islam.” Sensing that I was getting nowhere with that line of questioning I left it, but later on the translator told me that he thought he was from Iraq. It was going to be a difficult interview.

Abu Mahjin told me—predictably—that he had come to Syria to “perform jihad and raise the banner of Islam”. He was reluctant to talk about his former life, but said that this is his first experience of fighting as a jihadist and that he sees it as a massive privilege. “Everyone dreams of doing jihad,” he said. “And any Muslim that has never performed jihad or thought about doing it will die as a hypocrite.”

As would happen repeatedly throughout the interview, he then began talking about the Prophet Muhammad. “There is a prophetic tradition,” he told me. “The Prophet said that we should follow jihad in Syria because that is where the angels will bestow their wings on Islam.”

And Abu Mahjin is not the only foreign fighter who is paying attention to this particular prophetic tradition—he told me that jihadists have come from Somalia and Mali, both countries that are currently engaged in significant Islamist battles of their own, to fight in Syria. I asked him how they communicate. “It’s not easy on a practical level,” he replied. “All the Mujahideen fighters here have to learn Arabic, even the ones who come from places like Chechnya, Turkey or Belgium. But we also rely on rare languages to communicate securely and disrupt the enemy’s espionage. Sometimes we use the Chechen language, or Ukrainian when we’re speaking on the radios.”

The global Mujahideen would, he said, “heed the call of any Muslim who wants aid or calls for assistance.” But he also made it clear that the aim of the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham is not to fight for the kind of freedom that Syrians started demonstrating for in March, 2011—quite the opposite, in fact. “Our aim is to implement Sharia law in Syria and uphold the principles of the Islamic State,” he said. “If that was not the aim then we wouldn’t have come from far afield to fight here; we would have left the Syrians to fight by themselves. The Syrian people don’t decide on this—it is the Prophet Muhammad who decided it.”

“In that case,” I asked, “are you not simply aiming to establish another kind of dictatorship in Syria?”

“We are not a dictatorship because we will not be unjust toward anyone,” replied Abu Mahjin. “Sharia is the law of Allah and it’s written in the Koran and the Hadith. But if people feel that injustice has been done by an individual then they can demonstrate against that in accordance with Sharia law.” I pressed him further. “But will you accept people opposing your Sharia system?” I asked. “I support demonstrations that call for the imposition of Sharia,” he said. I couldn't envision him changing his mind on this.

What he said next clarified his position on what will happen to people who try to undermine a future Islamic State. “We will uproot those who are trying to cause sedition in this land,” he said. “Those who try to cause sedition are more dangerous than the Syrian regime and uprooting them will be even more difficult. And all those who try to cause sedition will be dealt with very severely.”

And so I started to quiz Abu Mahjin about the details of what it would be like to live in an Islamic State—and specifically what it would be like for women. “The woman has rights according to Islamic Sharia,” he said. “She has her rights, but within the confines of what pleases Allah.” Pressing on, I asked him about the rights of women to wear what they like—predictable, perhaps, but foremost in my mind given the fact that I was, by that stage, sweating profusely beneath my abaya. “In time, when the Islamic State is properly launched, we will focus on these details,” he said. “If a woman is unsuitably dressed we will not punish her to begin with; we will advise her on her wrongdoing. But if she insists on carrying on doing what she is doing then we will punish her.”

“What will the punishment be?” I asked.

“The Sharia courts will decide on this,” he replied. “Either she will be put in prison or she will be whipped.”

“Would you kill a woman for dressing inappropriately?” I asked.

The translator stepped in. “Move on from this one,” he said. “The whole 'women’s rights thing' makes them a bit touchy.”

At that point our host’s wife came in with a tray of ice cream, and that put us both in a difficult position. Abu Mahjin wasn’t prepared to remove his face covering to eat his, and so he had to leave it to melt in front of him—much to the dismay of the host’s wife. I was torn between offending a very nice lady who’d agreed to let me interview a jihadist in her front room by also leaving mine to melt, or eating it and rubbing it in the face of a man with a gun and some pretty extreme views about women, the West and sedition. My love of desserts won out: I ate mine while he looked at his with hungry eyes. I’m not sure if that annoyed him more than my insistence on asking about the Islamic women’s dress code.

As a public relations exercise, I’m not sure what Abu Mahjin hoped to achieve by agreeing to an interview. He said nothing to make me believe that ISIS's presence in Syria will improve the lives of ordinary people there. If anything, the state that they hope to establish will be even more repressive than that of Bashar al-Assad, and I can’t believe that many Syrians will tolerate their presence in the long term. But in my hour with an al Qaeda jihadist, I learned three things. Firstly, he spends a lot of time thinking about what the Prophet would do in his situation. Secondly, we don’t see eye to eye on women’s rights, and we probably never will. And finally, when it comes to ice cream, he has a lot more willpower than me.

Follow Hannah on Twitter: @hannahluci

More stories about al Qaeda:

Al Qaeda Wants Africa

Al Qaeda Plants Its Flag in Libya

WATCH – Waiting for al Qaeda

For almost a decade now Action Books has been filling a gap in American publishing by translating works that are considered avant-garde masterpieces in other parts of the world into English. They’ve introduced Americans to writers from Sweden, Japan, Korea, Argentina, Chile… and the list goes on. They also published Tao Lin in the US before you knew who he was and had some dumb opinion about him, alongside a variety of other singular, shape-defying voices including big guns like Aase Berg, Kim Hyesoon, Don Mee Choi, Raúl  Zurita, Hiromi Ito, and countless others.

Their website’s manifesto reads:

“Action Books is transnational.

Action Books is interlingual.

Action Books is Futurist.

Action Books is No Future.

Action Books is feminist.

Action Books is political.

Action Books is for noisies.

Action Books believes in historical avant-gardes.

& unknowable dys-contemporary discontinuous occultly continuous anachronistic avant-gardes.”

Run by power-couple Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Göransson, who are each incredible writers in their own right, you can always expect something you did not expect to be the next thing. I buy everything Action Books puts out, each time knowing that what I’m getting is unlike whatever else surrounds it. 

This summer, Actions Books released five new titles all at the same time: The Warmth of the Taxidermied Animal, by Tytti Heikkinen; Pop Corpse, by Lara Glenum; In the Moremarrow, by Oliverio Girondo; Mouth of Hell, by Maria Negroni; and The Parapornographic Manifesto, by Carl-Michel Edenborg. Below are a look at two of them, though let it be known that you should own everything they’ve brought forward.

The Warmth of the Taxidermied Animal by Tytti Heikkinen [Translated by Niina Pollari]

Tytti Heikkinen is a Finnish poet who assembles monologue-like poems from text she digs up out of the continually growing corpse of the internet. Stealing language is nothing new, but the manner in which it is constructed here feels much larger than just found text. Heikkinen has an incredible ability to couple different logics together in a way that creates a kind of tunnel, into a hole. The book is split up into three sections, each derived from Heikkinen’s first two books, both bizarre and innovative in their own ways, and even more so when complied together into one.

Through the book’s first section we follow a nameless narrator through strange rooms with dead rabbits, TV snow, oily bathwater, dark images floating in mirrors, and parties full of wives of cops. Then we are suddenly passed into the hands of a female teen narrator, who goes by the name Fatty XXL. She opens her section by saying, “Gonna say one thing just as soon as this vomiting stops… Went shopping today for cute shoes. !! Everybody is gross but me and my friends.” Through Fatty XXL, in language stolen from girls online, we are pushed down even deeper into the opening landscapes, into places that at once seem funny and disgusting. She berates herself, calls herself names, is emotionally molested, all in language that sounds familiar and disoriented, close and insane. “I Want my bones to showI’m / a faaaaaaaaaaattttttttttttttttyyyyyyyyyyyy / yyyyyy I’m furious about my fat!” she screams.

The final third of the book is also perhaps the most brutal, switching out from the first two sections’ modes into strange descriptions of calamities and sex acts, rendered from a variety of different perspectives. The transition jars the narrative before it into something even bigger, like we have come out of a tube into a world that looks like the darkest parts of ours. After recounting the story of “An 18-year old Thai man [who] confessed to having sliced open one person’s throat every night with a broken lamp,” the hidden narrator concludes: “When I heard about the case, I thought about the human mind: a weird baby, a placenta in unknown places.” The book then ends, leaving you exposed and open in a totally different territory than you ever expected, right under your nose.

The result is somehow like taking part in a crime both as the victim and the perpetrator, strange like a fake snuff film found on YouYube starring some foreign teens who are only sort of kidding. 

Pop Corpse by Lara Glenum

There is a very different kind of internet-speak at work in Pop Corpse, the third book by American poet Lara Glenum. Glenum has always been one to do damage against her own language; she likes to bang words together, rape their syllables, use words that somehow smell as weird as they sound. The text at work in this book is even more demolished than usual, borrowing all sorts of instant message language and over-the-top techno-age potty-mouth talk, coupled together with a perverse take on Disney icons and child-dream babble. The cover of the book depicts what appears to be the Little Mermaid tatted-up and with running make-up looking like she’s about to take a shit inside her fish-bottom costume. The gaudy neon pink and sea-foam green horizon seem to both want to charm and warn the reader with its cartoon mutant gaudiness.

And gaudiness is all over the place in here. Very early on in the construction, which reads less like poems and more like a stage-play porn set, Glenum uses a whole page to insist: “YR COCK BELONGS UP THE ASS OF THIS BOOK.” Is this shocking or just ridiculous? Are the emoticons that look like a pair of tits next to some scissors making fun of me, or of itself, or both? Whatever we’re in the midst of, it won’t stop changing: characters appear and have text-message-like conversations amid plastic landscapes and all-caps proclamations, always seeming to change gears before we can ever start to get anywhere. “Look at the fantastic hole in your torso,” says a character named XXX, as an aside directed to the reader. “The historical light of misery flooding through.” Other characters, named such things as THE SMEAR, OCTOWARDEN, JIZZLER, PURSED & PUCKERED, collide and pose and talk of nothing turn by turn, divided up by more emoticons and mandates, instructions forced onto the reader: “{Dip the puppet bodies into wax} {to make a thick casing.} {Dig into the wax skin} {& pull the meat stuffing out.} {I’m fingers deep} {in their ground chuck faces} {when I cum}. The theater keeps bending, eating at itself, wanting you to eat it, wanting more than that, while all these voices continue on, jumbled in their hyper-awareness and over-sexed online-brain.

I’ve never quite seen a mess of such proportion, but the mess itself is what’s alive. It continues to defy you, almost spitting on itself as much as it seems to want to spit on you. It also wants to charm you, to make you feel insane or something, to gross you out the way a child does—a confused and insane fashion-destroyed child who is too young to be this drunk on media.

Previously - I Hate Myself and Want to Die: A Review of the New Wendy's Pretzel Burger

@blakebutler

When the Taliban regime fell in December of 2001, I rushed down from northern Afghanistan into Kabul with a handful of other journalists to report its demise. We hadn't expected the fighting to end so soon.

We scurried across the capital, gathering stories about the Taliban’s defeat and retreat while witnessing a return to normalcy. We saw women outside their homes. We heard music on street corners. And we listened to tales of repression, oppression, and executions. These stories filled our notepads, microphones, and videocassettes.

But the story that captured the imagination of my American audience had little to do with all of that. It was a story about an enduring lion in the Kabul Zoo.

It started like this:

Though his roar is more of a yawn these days, it was not so long ago when this lion, Marjan, used to be the king of Kabul’s urban jungle. A mujahedeen fighter who had survived combat with the Soviet Red Army was not so lucky when he jumped into the lion’s den to tease the beast. Marjan promptly ate him.

“The next day,” says zookeeper Sheraq Omar, “The man’s angry brother threw a hand grenade into the cage. When Marjan pounced on it, thinking it was food, he lost one eye and 95 percent of his sight in the other.”

The tale of Marjan the lion became an entry point for many Americans in understanding the larger story of Afghanistan. It was a narrative of war, hardship, and survival presented through a battle-scarred symbol of the Afghan people, their outlast-them-all, last-cat-standing, grenade munching, mujahideen-eating Marjan.

Marjan had been a gift from Germany in the late 60s during the more peaceful era of the Afghan monarchy. Prince Nader was in charge of the zoo back then. Its creation was a rung on the national climb to modernity.

But the onslaught of war brought hardships for Marjan and many of the other animals. While they survived the Soviet invasion, the zoo ended up on the front lines of Afghanistan’s civil war in 1992. The animals that didn’t die of starvation ended up on the dinner plates of hungry fighters. A sadistic mujahideen reportedly killed an elephant with an RPG.

When the Taliban came to power, they initially shored up the zoo, rebuilding its outer walls, but as time passed and money became scarce for the regime, there were calls to shut it down.

Sheraq Omar, the tenacious zookeeper at the time, fought back. He told me then that he went to the faculty of Islamic studies at the University of Kabul and had them write down every animal reference in the Koran connected to the Prophet Mohammed.

“I collected them all and presented them to the Ministry of Justice,” said Omar back in 2001.

Faced with evidence that the Prophet himself may have kept pets, the Taliban allowed Omar to keep the zoo open. But when the regime finally fell, the zoo also teetered on collapse. The buildings had been bombed, the staff had not been paid for months, the animals' food was running out, and their cages were not prepared for the winter. The 450 species of mammals, reptiles, and fish once housed here had dwindled to only about a dozen. But the zoo's most famous occupant still survived—Marjan.

The Zoo's current director, Aziz Gul Saqib.

Inspired by the indomitable spirits of both the man and the lion, the North Carolina Zoo came to the rescue. Initially hoping to put together $30,000 to help the Kabul Zoo, they eventually raised more than ten times that amount with the help of donations from around the world. The Americans also helped the Afghans care for the animals, educate the staff, and craft a business plan.

It was a lifeline that has allowed the Kabul Zoo to survive and even thrive in the years since. While the institution is still modest by the standards of most big-city zoos, Aziz Gul Saqib, the zoo’s director for the last nine years claims they are back up to 100 species of animals and had more than 650,000 visitors last year, making the zoo not just one of the most popular attractions in Kabul, but also profitable.

According to Saqib, the zoo took in 15 million Afghanis in revenue last year ($268,576 ) against 7.5 million in costs. Though those numbers have not been independently verified, if they're correct, it would seem that the zoo is one of the more efficient government-run entities in Afghanistan.

Saqib has also guided the zoo into professional organizations that should help in its evolution, like the South Asian Zoo Association, which provides vital certifications for worldwide standards of professionalism. With the help of outside donors, he’s installed a zoo-wide security system with dozens of cameras and audio speakers directed at the enclosures with recorded messages reminding guests not to feed or tease the animals (a problem in the past here). He’s also instituted an education program that reached 30,000 students last year, teaching them about endangered species and conservation with multimedia presentations in a renovated zoo auditorium.

But beyond the education and exhibits, the Kabul Zoo provides a peaceful escape for many Afghans, from the fears and worries of the war that still play out so close to it’s walls. Here families can enjoy picnics and young sweethearts can walk and talk together, free momentarily from prying eyes and wagging tongues.

Things seem to be going so well, in fact, that the Mayor of Kabul, Mohammed Younas Nawandish, a man on a perpetual, city-wide building spree, wants to expand the zoo five times larger and fill it with more exotic animals. 

All video, text, and photos by Kevin Sites.

Kevin Sites is a rare breed of journalist who thrives in the throes of war. As Yahoo! News’s first war correspondent between 2005 and 2006, he gained notoriety for covering every major conflict across the globe in one year’s time and fostering a technology-driven, one-man-band approach to reporting that helped usher in the “backpack movement.” Kevin is currently traveling through Afghanistan covering the tumultuous country during "fighting season" as international forces like the US pullout. Keep coming back to VICE.com for more dispatches from Kevin.

More on VICE from Kevin Sites: Afghanistan's Game of Drones

Follow Kevin on Twitter: @kevinsites

And visit his personal website: KevinSitesReports.com