The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Photo via Wikicommons

Every world has its own rock stars. There are rock-star journalists. There are rock-star CEOs. Rock-star surgeons. There are probably even rock-star plumbers if you know where to look. But there are definitely rock-star architects. We know this because they created their own word to describe the state of being a rock star in the architecture industry: "starchitect."

This itself tells you all you need to know about the craven insecurity of their industry. No other profession has its own word to describe a state of stardom. No one is talking about "starliticians" or "startists." Why? Because in those worlds who's cool and who sucks is self-evident. If you need to tell people you are a star, well, perhaps you have already failed at the first hurdle of stardom.

Architects don’t get this, and they don’t think you should either. They rail against the idea that they should just get on with building nice buildings and collecting fat checks. They want their own version of the caste system. They want their own version of sticking pieces of shark into a groupie’s vagina. They wanna be adored, baby. Not merely "validated for a positive contribution to society." Screw that. Fuck the people. They want the fans. Hence why, over the last 30 years, the top tier of architects have given us the building equivalents of concept double albums about journeys to the center of the earth. Because they are fucking rock stars. They are, they are, they are, and they don't care what you have to say about it.

We have all aided and abetted them in this. Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim building iced that cake. The hulking black sail set in a depressed part of a depressed Spanish town forged the idea that a place could be reinvented and regenerated single-handedly by a building with enough modernistic baubles on it. They even coined a phrase to describe that theory: the Bilbao Effect.

And so we’ve all become obsessed with the idea of making weird buildings simply to impress ourselves. Every city needs a Gherkin, a Burj Dubai, a La Défense.

Our cities have become big birdbaths, designed to trap tourists into liking us for being so very cutting-edge—to make us forget about the fact that we owe China $1.3 trillion. Our culture isn’t in decline, they say, with that sense of tedious self-awareness that marks cultures in decline. The sort of insecurity that makes former imperial powers bid for the Olympics. Yes. "They still like us," these buildings say. "They actually like us."

Face it: Starchitects are a symptom of decline, not a symptom of success. They are people you should beat with a stick if you get close enough. Here's who they are:

RICHARD ROGERS

The Lloyd's building, right. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

In 1986, when in one swift move he became the grandaddy of the fetish for starchitects, Richard Rogers already knew where pipes were supposed to go. It wasn’t like he was unaware. They’d covered that one in his basic training. But Rogers wanted to take a new approach to pipes—pipes on the outside. So he made the Centre Pompidou art space in Paris. Everyone was wildly excited about seeing their own air-conditioning vents and shitpipes. No one had had much contact with pipes until that point, and they found the idea of all their breathed gases and flushed turds swishing up and down in plain sight utterly enchanting. Rogers was applauded, widely and wildly, for his designs. That was everyone’s first mistake.

He was like the guy who shows up to the party and ices someone and everyone loves it, but then he does it every subsequent time to diminishing applause. Rogers did it again. But this time, in Britain, with the Lloyd's building.

But the die was already being cast. Rogers and his bloomin’ pipes pretty much invented the idea of the starchitect. Which is why, when it came time to design the Welsh Parliament, Rogers was once again at the top of the list.

The Welsh administration wanted a building to stand for all time. This was the natural end point of devolution: Welsh decisions made for Welsh people in a Welsh structure that would last until the Kingdom of the Dragons tumbled into the sea. In 200 years time, the authorities will be raising funds for the restoration of Rogers’s creation. They will be sandblasting it clean in 2430—a vital link in the eternal braid of people and place that makes Wales.

National Assembly for Wales. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

THIS. IS. IT.

One day, a future Hitler, or a future Napoleon, may want to run his flag up the pole over here. Exactly how low will he have to stoop to conquer? What a pathetic piece of crap is Wales, he will think as his flagship runs in through Cardiff harbor. What a fucking depressingly self-conscious little monument to their own petit bourgeois good taste these people have constructed to rule over them. Changed my mind. Turn the gunboats around. Let’s see what’s over the Irish Sea.

RENZO PIANO

The Shard's inauguration. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

According to legend, Renzo Piano first sketched London's Shard on the back of a napkin in a restaurant. No wonder it took him over a decade to get the thing off the ground. He’d designed a shard. “You see, it’s a big shard,” he’d say, “for the rich,” as he was gently but firmly escorted towards the elevator. It took the Qataris—a nation with the sort of tenuous relationship with reality that allows them to imagine air-conditioning entire stadiums in 100-plus-degree heat, to take him seriously.

The Shard and Tower Bridge. Photo via Flickr user George Rex

Skip forward several years of money wrangles and you have an utterly ahistorical monument to the power of global capital formation and Middle Eastern national gas reserves that could have been built in any city on the globe at any time since 1990 and it would’ve blended in exactly the same—i.e., not at all. Look at this photo. Now sub in the Statue of Liberty for Tower Bridge, or the Eiffel Tower, the Colosseum, perhaps a Gaudi or two. Same difference.

SANTIAGO CALATRAVA

Turning Torso. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Making buildings look like they might fall over has long been "a thing" in architecture. So the makers of Malmö, Sweden's Turning Torso, the tallest building in Scandinavia, probably thought it would really get people excited if they made the building equivalent of a rollercoaster. After all, you’d like to go to sleep on a rollercoaster, wouldn’t you? You’d like to nurse your new baby on a rollercoaster? Secretly, they imagined, everyone wants to live somewhere that looks like it might do an auto-9/11 on you unexpectedly one morning at 2:15 AM. That’s the reason humans seek out dwelling spaces, isn’t it? To challenge their sense of fear.

Somewhere, Spanish starchitect Santiago Calatrava seems to have missed the basic fact that skyscrapers are all unnatural acts that our caveman instincts have had to make an uneasy compromise with. Living up in the sky is not God’s plan unless your granddad was a bald eagle. So why overcomplicate things?

Sadly, Calatrava exhibits the same backward logic that drives human beings to make passive exercise beds, electric toilet seats, and heated cup holders. But while you can always throw your turbo juicer out when it inevitably breaks, the Turning Torso is going to be around forever.

This despite the public seeming to have given their own verdict on the project already: The apartments have remained unsold, and so most are rented instead.

Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia. Photo via Wikimedia Commons 

If you’re one of the lucky renters living on the 23rd floor of the Turning Torso, you’d probably just want some basic reassurance that the man’s buildings don’t fall apart entirely at random. You’d want it. But you can’t have it, because his Valencia opera house is doing exactly that right now.

Turns out the whole thing is being slowly destroyed by high winds, has been closed to the public for several years, and Calatrava’s home city is now suing him for a refund on his poxy designs. Remember: Rent, don’t buy, and always wear your parachute when vacuuming.

ZAHA HADID

“Well I guess we just want something sympathetic. This is quite an old square. In Budapest, venerable capital of several empires and all that. Think Mozart. Think Hussars. Think Hapsburg. So we’re open-minded, obviously, but let’s at least try to rule out things that look like gigantic glowing mesh colostomy bags?”

“No… colostomy… bag… mesh… glowing. Got it. OK, how’s this?”

Szervita Square Tower, Budapest. Photo via Zaha Hadid

“Well, it’s not ideal…”

Zaha Hadid seems to design all her stuff via the melting method. She probably sculpts models of perfectly normal buildings in butter, then points a hair dryer at them for a few minutes. Which is exactly why she has become a go-to for big public commissions: because she simply looks futuristic. In the modern world, you could never convince an Olympic bid committee that you should be allowed to host the 2022 Summer games if you can’t make a stadium look like George Lucas would be interested in staging a pod-race around it one day. The starchitects always win out, because organizing committees need to have some reason for distinguishing the stadium-is-a-stadium-is-a-stadium nature of their job.

Starchitects are often accused of making buildings that are effectively 600-foot plaster casts of their penises, so it’s great to see Hadid winning one back for the laydeez via this fetching bit of anatomy which doubles as a future soccer stadium in Qatar.

Yes, thanks to this Iraqitecht, it seems that the secret of what’s under all those niqabs is finally out in the kingdom of Qatar. Pretty soon, apartments with minge-facing views will be in hot demand. Single men, in the absence of secure VPNs, will turn their predatory male gaze toward the stadium to secretly whack one out. “Ooh, stadium,” they will moan at the moment of release. And that is surely every starchitect’s Ballard-style dark techno-sex thrill. You jizzing on their own personal jerk fantasies.

Follow Gavin Haynes on Twitter.

Kickstarter genius Lawrence Shepherd and an unnamed woman. Photo courtesy of Lawrence Shepherd

Did you recently waste money on an ironic Kickstarter campaign to make potato salad? Well, first, Paypal used the money you apparently can't wait to get rid of. Secondly, fuck irony. There are people out there with actual, worthwhile goals that need help funding. 

For instance, a Van Nuys–based producer's bold project to make a Breaking Bad sequel series starring Val Kilmer and Slash as the cops who recovered Walter White's body. No, he doesn't have the rights to Breaking Bad, nor has he received a commitment from Kilmer or Slash. But when Lawrence Shepherd saw the series finale, in which two cops drag Walter White's body away, he knew that he was the guy to tell those cops' story. All the other pieces will fall into place.

It's a pipe dream, sure. (Not least because only $143 of the $500,000 goal has been raised.) But, still! What's the value of life without dreams? Who gives a shit about the second season of True Detective when there's the (remote) possibility of Val Kilmer and Slash tracking down a not-dead Walter White?

We called up first-time producer Lawrence Shepherd to learn more about his Breaking Bad spinoff, which he's calling Anastasia. 

VICE: The show has an intriguing premise, to say the least. Where'd the idea come from?
Lawrence Shepherd: For the last six years or so, I was getting very critical of the writing on shows. Then I saw one of the last episodes of Breaking Bad—remember when Jesse came into Walter White's house with the gasoline can and he was going to burn it down?

Yeah.
There was a sequence when Jesse looks down the hallway, and the two doors were closed. I thought, Junior's in there. Junior's in there with the baby, he's going to come out, wrestle with Jesse, and something's going to happen. Junior's the only one who hasn't broke bad in the whole show. It didn't happen, and I was a little disappointed.

I like the way Breaking Bad ended, but I think they could have done better. That's when I just started writing.

Seems like you'd have to worry about copyright issues...
Of course. You have to watch the uniqueness. Remember the last episode, the machine gun rotating back and forth in the Cadillac? Very unique. I can't use it. The dead guy in the recliner chair going up and down? Very unique, couldn't use it.

But other than that, nothing there is copyright or trademark available. A guy dead on the floor? My God, that's been done a bazillion times. Police responding to an issue? It's been done a bazillion times.

We're not going to be confrontative with Sony and Vince Gilligan if they say no. We are filming the pilot independent of Breaking Bad, so if they do say no, we're ready to go with our own show.

It would be the same show? Or different?
Anastasia's gonna be stand-alone. If they say yes, the first season is going to be very Breaking Bad–dependent. But the second season and forward—I'm trying to go 12 seasons and break Frasier's record—we may only have a two-and-a-half minute teaser that will go along with the Walter White thread. 

If we have to do it independent from Breaking Bad, then instead of dragging out their Walter White, we'll drag out our Walter White.

How realistic is it that you're going to get Val Kilmer?
From what people tell me about Val Kilmer, you don't have to pay him a million dollars. If there's some money there, he'll typically do it. Slash is who I'm more worried about. He plays guitar—that's his love, and he makes a good living off of it. And I've heard from a few people he's busy with his new album release, so Slash probably won't be in every episode, but we could do it either way.

Slash is going to be undercover—that's why he dresses the way he does and his hair is the way it is, right? He's the undercover part of the cop partnership.

I asked Laura San Giacomo to star, but I just got a very nice letter back from her manager that she's already doing a pilot. We have to look for somebody else.

Photo courtesy of Lawrence Shepherd

Do you have backups for Val Kilmer and Slash, then?
Nathan Lane was my first choice. I thought he'd be perfect in Kilmer's role. But because we're going to be so tight on money—I'd have to pay for transportation and lodging for Lane, because he lives in New York City—we did the flip to Val Kilmer. I think Kilmer and Lane have equal acting ability. 

As far as Slash, I'm hearing that he will definitely be in the pilot. That's what I'm hearing. I don't have a letter of intent yet, and we have to work around his tour. He tours a lot.

When you say you hear from Slash, does that mean you've talked to Slash?
Not hearing from Slash, no. Him and Myles Kennedy just put out a new album, and he didn't have time for anything. So I'm hearing from people that know Slash.

So you have contacted them or sent letters to their management?
Oh, absolutely. Nobody's come back and said no, except for Laura San Giacomo, and only because she was too busy. Steven Tyler's already been sent the video and everything—he'd be in the second episode.

I also talked to John Westphal; he's the main head guy at Sony. He said they'd have to be involved with it if they went forward, and we said of course. That's where we left it.

Can you go through the side plot with the 12-step program?
Val Kilmer's role will be a recovering alcoholic. He will go to 12-step meetings throughout the season. He does the on-scene sharing, if you want to call it that, in the first episode. Steven Tyler, if he signs on, will be sharing in the second episode's meeting.

We're going to invite anybody in the entertainment industry that's been through substance abuse or addiction to do that. And it won't be scripted. It will be whatever they want. If they want to do it funny, if they want to do it real, if they want to do it sad, that's fine. We're only going to do it two or three times per season, because it might get old and not be as magical.

I went down to Big Lots and bought about 20 red-and-white checkered tablecloths that we're going to use for the meetings. Therefore, let's say it's Robert Downey Jr.'s turn for a 12-step meeting scene, but he's in Brazil filming some Iron Man thing—no problem. I can put the tablecloth in an envelope, mail it down to him, and he can film it right there. I think that's going got work real well.

You're nearly half-a-million dollars away from reaching your Kickstarter goal. What's the plan if you don't get?
My timeline got blown with finding a director for the Kickstarter video. My initial plan was to find the director before the Kickstarter went off. I find one didn't until two weeks after the Kickstarter started, so we didn't get the video done until three days ago. That timeline got completely blown.

We're going to restart on Kickstarter on the first of the month if we don't get funded. By then we'll already have the director and video, so we should do much, much better.

Good luck.

Although pro-Russia separatists have been largely driven out of Donetsk and Luhansk, they still control significant parts of eastern Ukraine.

In this part, VICE News correspondent Simon Ostrovsky goes hunting for separatists with Oleh Lyaskov, a Ukrainian politician who placed third in the most recent presidential election. Ostrovsky embeds with Lyaskov's personal security forces as they successfully track down Viktor Rybalko, a pro-Russia separatist who organized the referendum in Luhansk calling for independence and allegiance with Russia.

What Lyaskov does is technically illegal, but he believes that the police are not doing their job and has taken it upon himself to bring order back to eastern Ukraine.

All photos courtesy of Jowita Bydlowska

Drunk Mom is a rarity in this age of constant overshares—a work that had me questioning, "Does she want us to know this? Should I know this?" as I read it. The book chronicles its narrator and author’s 11-month-long relapse into alcohol addiction, which coincides and clashes with her first year of motherhood. Author Jowita Bydlowska is unsentimental and unflinching about this period of her life: pumping breastmilk into the sink because it’s tainted with cocaine, hiding wine in the stroller, and waking up next to her son “soaked in piss and milk” after she had blacked out next to his crib or without underwear and without memory of the previous night’s events. Her descriptions are not florid or excessive, but induce a kind of claustrophobia in the reader by virtue of their recurrence: her son in the stroller while she buys wine and light beer. Her son watching her pour sparkling wine into Sprite bottles in the bathroom at a cafe. Her son asleep in his crib beside her when she wakes up passed out on his floor. 

The book as a whole is exhausting to read, unyielding in its cycle of binges and blackouts, guilt and redemptive lies. There is cheating, lying to her sister and family, a break up, and the nasty, cruel words of an addict lashing out at those closest to them, those just nearby. Jowita the addict can get mean. She mocks members of her 12 Step Program, other mothers, and her partner. But her endless attempts to hide her drinking are countered by her endless attempts to be a good mother to her son. To go a few days without booze so she can breastfeed, to eventually leave the baby with her partner to attend a rehab facility. The book is dedicated to her son, in the hopes that he can "forgive me for this transgression," and portrays with immediacy the destructive solitude of addiction, but also the isolation of new motherhood and postpartum depression. At times, it's also a shockingly amusing read, sprinkled with wry, dark humour. I couldn’t put it down. 

I met up with Jowita, now almost four years sober, on a sunny day in Toronto. She fidgeted with a coffee cup on my front porch and told me about the public’s reaction to her book, the process of writing about such a messy time in her life, and the politics of sharing it.

VICE: How has it been for you since the book came out?
Jowita Bydlowska: It’s been OK. We’ve been managing it. The reaction in Canada was much more intense. The day before the book was released here, there was a profile in the Globe and Mail, and it was kind of… I didn’t expect it to be the way it was. I don’t know if it was negative, per se, but I read it and was like “What the fuck did I just do?” I went home and we called a lot of our friends and had this spontaneous support party, which was nice. A lot of guests got pretty drunk at that party, which is kind of ironic. That weekend my face was on the front page of the Arts section looking kind of forlorn, which was a bit off-putting. The main thing for me has been to keep a distance between the book and myself and the person I write about in the book and myself. The reason I was able to write it and talk about it and still am able to talk about it is because I did treat it as someone else’s story, I distanced myself from it. I had to.

How do you delineate between self, narrator, and writer when they’re all you, or some version of you? Where did that distance come from?
I wrote it in present tense, first of all. I imagined speaking to someone directly while I wrote it. I also wanted to do this thing where I had to put myself back into the mind of an addict, so that was, I think, a form of literary device. I don’t necessarily think that way anymore, but I remember how that felt, how that was, and that’s what I wanted to represent. It’s not stretching the truth, but I am in a way playing my past self—there was a wall that existed between myself and the character of myself.

Did you have a ritual or a place that got you in that headspace? Where did you write the book?
Dark closets. [Laughter.] A lot of it I wrote when I was still active in my addiction—it was supposed to be notes for a work of fiction that I thought I could base around that time in my life. To be honest I don’t remember a lot of that work. Then once it was becoming a memoir I’d just write at my desk—I had a full time job at that time and I was taking care of my kid and my family. So I wrote after 9 PM. I used to drink after 9 PM, and I’d drink and write. Then when I got sober I would just would write and write.

How has your family received the book? You say a lot of very personal things about yourself, but also the people in your life, and not all of it flattering.
My partner was very supportive. He’s also a writer, so we have this rule where we don’t try to influence each other’s writing. He only read it when it was finished and ready to go into copy editing. His reaction… He needed time to think about it, because he didn’t want to react right away. So he took some time off… Actually, we haven’t really talked about it a lot. I’m not even sure if my parents read it. I’m hoping not. My sister read it and was very compassionate and empathetic. She had lots of questions afterwards. Difficult questions. One thing I was worried about was that I was going to lose a lot of friends, that people would tell me what a terrible person I was. In the end I just had some angry feedback from friends who were upset that I didn’t reach out for help.

Your son is five now, and a lot of concerns in reviews of the book seem to center around his reaction when he inevitably reads it. Do you want him to read it? Are you worried about that?

I don’t think i’m going to encourage him to, but I’m sure he’s going to read it, and I’m going to have to answer all his questions, if he has them. He was of course taken into consideration before I published the book, but I can’t speculate about his future reaction. It would be OK if he had questions, and I’d be happy to answer them.

What made you want to publish something that made you so nervous about the reaction? What about writing this book was something you felt you had to do?
I think you should never not write because you’re afraid of offending someone. In the book it looks like I’m not worried about anyone’s feelings, but that’s certainly not true. I just needed to be true to myself as a writer, otherwise what’s the point?

You’ve written other memoir pieces now about very personal issues. Why do you think we’re so hungry for personal stories, and especially about people’s low points?
I think personal disaster stories are the most interesting for people to read. There’s the scandal element—Oh boy, I’m not as bad as this person. And with the internet too, there’s been a shift towards more focus on the individual and the individual experience. The individual is as important as the collective experience used to be. I don’t know if that’s a good thing. I’ve indulged in that but am hoping to move away from it.

What’s your relationship with alcohol like now?
It’s OK. I don’t think about it everyday. I talk about it a lot, especially with the book, but I can go to a bar or be at a dinner party no problem. I think addiction is less about having access to whatever your substance of choice—or lack of choice—is; it’s more about an internal compulsion. It’s also easier because the peer pressure “we’re all getting shitfaced” culture of people in their 20s is not something I’m around as much anymore. I think in your 30s that stuff looks a little sad.

Yeah, my friends in their 30s are dropping things—alcohol, smoking, drugs, gluten—like crazy. There’s a mass giving-up of stuff.
It’s true. You hit 30 and you start buying organic mattresses.

How has sobriety changed you? Anything you didn't expect?
It’s great! I have more time; I don’t have to nurse hangovers; I know what happened the night before—I was a blackout drinker. I’m present now; I pay attention to things. It’s only been positive. What is baffling to me is that that’s what it was like before I relapsed. I got sober for the first time at 27, and I was a senior editor at a magazine, my relationship was going great, and I had a nice place to live… Everything was going well, so I don’t know why I thought, Well, I’m going to fuck this up by getting drunk all the time. I think maybe I appreciate it more this time, because I see how fragile it is.

Does it still feel very fragile?
To stay sober? Yeah. I have more respect for it now. Before I relapsed I was still very nostalgic about those party days. I thought, I’m still too young to be sober, I want to be out at all night shows. And I’ve done those sober now—and it’s hard to stay out until 4 AM without substances of some kind, but it is possible. You just have to drink a lot of coffee.

When I publish personal things online I get this crazy annotative urge to guide people’s reading experiences and tell them what I was thinking at the time, to justify why I chose those words. Do you get that post-publishing anxiety?
People don’t seem to understand Canadian maternity leave, so I’m getting a lot of comments about being a rich bitch pushing a stroller around, getting drunk because I had nothing better to do, and I want to respond like, “You have no idea!” When you read people’s assumptions about you or your intentions, that’s hard, but other’s interpretations are also interesting. I don’t think I thought of the book as a feminist book particularly, but after it came out some of the reviews were suggesting that it was, simply because it was a true, a flawed woman’s story that challenges our expectations of parenthood and motherhood.

I would definitely consider it feminist as an endeavour. A lot of the reviews seem concerned with your likability, and I think it’s great that you weren’t, particularly in your writing about yourself.
Yeah, likability is such a bitch. It’s like, why does that matter? A story is a story. I didn’t want to likable; I wanted to be truthful. I find addiction memoirs often end up the same—I call them “misery lit.” There’s this narrative like, “Things were bad, I tried to get better, and now things are really really good, and I’m married." People in interviews are always asking me if I married my partner finally, like that would be the real ending to the story.

Did it feel cathartic when the book was out? Was that a kind of ending?
I was just happy to have a book out. There wasn’t much catharsis to me. I find the book hard to read. When I do public readings I’m a bit like, “What the fuck did I say?” Which is stupid, because I wrote it, but sometimes I’m surprised by what I wrote.

Would you ever write a follow up? 

Sober Mom? [Laughter.] God, no. I don’t think that would interest anyone. I’m interested in fiction exclusively from now on, I think.

Follow Monica Heisey on Twitter.

I was sold on J. G. Ballard’s High Rise (1975) after the first ten words: “Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog…”

I didn’t care what the second half of that sentence would turn out to be; I was already there, sitting on the balcony. It’s not that I don’t like dogs, really, but more that here was a book that clearly had no qualms about its world, had the confidence to disarm probably half of its possible readers with the bleak and unnerving image of a human casually eating a dog on a balcony. If this is where Ballard began, I knew there would be hell to pay in what came after.

High Rise, as the title portends, concerns the lives of people living in a 40-floor high-rise apartment building and sharing common areas such as a gym, grocery store, liquor store, pool, etc. The book follows several different protagonists through the landscape of the building during a time in which something is wrong and getting worse by the minute, though no one seems to know precisely what. When the book begins, the sound of cocktail parties and jubilation fills the building’s halls; men and women conduct their lives under the throes of daily work and casual sex; people come and go from the apartment into the larger world for work and return at night alongside their neighbors. Ballard is very good at establishing an ambience of life among people with an almost Victorian sense of exposition—each character has their daily manners and conversations, amid which small interruptions begin to bleed in. 

First, an unknown man gets into an altercation at the pool with a group of children. It is a strange and restrained scene that lets the reader know there is something wrong with some of the people here. The next night the electricity goes out on several floors for no apparent reason. In Ballard’s world, that bit of darkness is all humanity needs to be pushed over the edge. Increasingly thereafter fights break out on various floors throughout the apartments. Things are thrown from balconies onto the world below. Some elevators fail and others are taken over, blocking access for the families on lower floors to the more expensive and exclusive ones above. Tribes begin banding together to protect their territory, food, and valuables. By page 40, violence and rape abound within the building, establishing in its confined territories a kind of survival-of-the-fittest world of living hell.

Most gripping about Ballard’s portrayal of his isolated arenas is how even-handedly his characters report the mania that surrounds them. No matter how high the boiling waters rise, the narrators remain logical, within their means, progressing from one psychopathic act to the next, as if this dystopia were a fact of life, as if there were no other choice but to continue. As the terrain gets darker, the stakes of life change, as do the manners of survival and social norms.

It’s rare to witness such a balanced report within an environment where almost anything can happen, and Ballard makes it seem natural, matter of fact. A swimming pool of skeletons feels comfortable alongside men screening videos of their brutality in a theater covered in blood. The prose is bright and steady, like an IV drip through which the reader continues feeding right alongside each character, delving deeper and deeper into a world as it is ripped.

So, besides the violence, how does Ballard manage to make this book so unnerving? I've read a lot of novels full of brutal descriptions of grotesque arenas, but there was something else to High Rise beyond its circus of slow degradation. The book’s most central power seems to come not from how its world unravels but how clearly and steadily the narration holds the reader as he descends. From the start, the conceptual framework of the book (citizens within a communal living space gradually become unhinged unto total chaos) provides the reader with a feeling of a laboratory experiment, less a narrative where we are supposed to change or care, and more like a documentary through which we are made witness to a condition of the world amidst us all. This isn’t a parable or even a nightmare; it’s a possible future. The narrators could be our children, their children, or ourselves.

Equally unnerving is Ballard’s use of media to provide a kind of normalizing effect within the book’s world. In a state of total chaos, people wander the trashed floors and hallways recording videos of people being attacked, of women being made slaves by men hungry for power, of pets running rampant in the corridors. One character records himself hiccuping and barfing as a woman moans for the sole purpose of playing it back and filling the air with sound. Even though they have descended into complete perversion, the building’s residents are desperate to continue documenting themselves. In the era of the selfie and Facebook and Twitter, this dementia feels all too real.

Meanwhile, the world beyond the high rise goes on as if the terror inside did not exist. The narrators make little effort to reach out for help, as if they love the new power structure. On the flip side, when cops show up outside the building, they just park and do not enter. The contained hell is symbiotic with the peace that walls it in. Perhaps the most compelling thing is how, in the face of all the awful shit that happens, the narrators continue, searching abandoned rooms for liquor, television, sex. Even on the roof, where countless birds wait for the bodies to become food, there is not a yearning for a return to normalcy or even survival as much as to uncover what lies at the end of this one hall, what that person locked in his or her room alone might be doing, how his or her shriveling body might soon feel. The inaction of humans is as unnerving as any action.

Follow Blake on Twitter.

Muslim women whose relatives were killed in the massacre outside the Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial in Srebrenica, Bosnia. All photos by the author

In mid July 1995, more than 8,000 “Bosniaks” (Bosnian Muslims) were systematically killed by Bosnian Serb soldiers in what is sometimes called the lone act of European genocide since World War II. It was the culmination of three years of Muslim ethnic cleansing.

From July 11 onwards, a force led by Serbian General Ratko Mladić, commander of the Army of the Republika Srpska (VRS) and the elite, deadly unit known as the Scorpions, inflicted nothing short of hell on the Muslim population in and around Srebrenica.

The Srebrenica memorial, officially known as the Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial and Cemetery for the VIctims of the 1995 Genocide

It all began after the fall of Tito’s communist regime in the late 1980s. At that point in time, the multi-ethnic Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina was inhabited by Bosniaks (44 percent), Orthodox Serbs (31 percent), and Catholic Croats (17 percent).

After a declaration of national sovereignty on October 15, 1991, as the former Yugoslavia began to disintegrate, a referendum for independence was held the following February. The result in favor of independence was rejected by the political representatives of the Bosnian Serbs (who had boycotted the vote). Nonetheless, the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina was formally recognized by the European Community on April 6, 1992, and by the United States the next day.

Immediately following the declaration of independence, Bosnian Serb forces, supported by the Serbian government of Slobodan Milosevic and the Yugoslav's People's Army (JNA), attacked the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina in an effort to unify and secure Serb territory. A brutal struggle for regional control ensued, accompanied by the ethnic cleansing of the non-Serb population from areas under Serbian influence; in particular, the Bosniak population of Eastern Bosnia, near the border with Serbia was targeted. This is where Srebrenica lies.

A goat farmer stands in a field next to the Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial and Cemetery for the Victims of the 1995 Genocide.

From 1992 to 1995, the Bosnian Institute of the United Kingdom counted some 296 villages that were wiped off the map in this area around Srebrenica, though not all were Muslim (in fact, some Serbian villages were destroyed by Bosnian army forces in response to the invasion, and Bosnians committed some atrocities of their own, which helped keep the cycle of ethnic conflict going for years to come). Some 70,000 people were displaced from their homes in this region, with many thousands of Muslims killed. The chaos was largely ignored by much of the rest of the world. This inaction has now come back to haunt the United Nations, who had even set up the first-ever UN “Safe Zone” in the area but failed to prevent the massacre during the weeks after July 11, 1995.

When General Mladić drove into Srebrenica, he began rounding up and killing all the Muslim men he could find. Soon 25,000 local residents took refuge in the Dutch-run “Safe Zone” but were turned over after a few days, with Dutch-Serbian negotiations ensuring the safety of women and children only. The Dutch commander of the "Dutchbat" UNPROFOR (United Nations Protection Force), Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Karremans, was largely powerless, and his calls for airstrikes on Serbian forces were ignored in those critical first hours.

Dutch graffiti on the walls of the former UN peacekeeping headquarters

Much has been said about these UN troops and how they let this happen, but the lack of aid for vulnerable civilians originally stems from those who placed the under-resourced peacekeepers in Bosnia in the first place. UN leadership hesitated and allowed the massacre to happen.

The Dutchbat forces eventually handed over the last 3,000 people, mostly men of military age and a handful of younger boys, all of whom were executed. A large majority of the children were spared and shipped off to Tuzla. Less publicized was the fact that Serb soldiers picked up a number of young Muslim women in the vicinity of the powerless Dutch soldiers and gang-raped them nearby, their screams apparently audible from the UN base. The peacekeepers had arrived in 1993 and left two years later, having failed quite miserably. (On Wednesday, the Hague found the Dutch state liable for more than 300 deaths.)

Many of those transported to Muslim safe zones more than 60 miles away were women and children who got picked up by Serbs in coaches, their gas paid for by the UN. The 10,000-plus men left behind were not so lucky. Many were rounded up and shot over the next days and weeks.

One of the many factories on the outskirts of Srebrenica where Muslim men were rounded-up and detained before being driven to the hills for execution by Serbian forces

The men were instructed to dig their own shallow graves. After being shot, their bodies were thrown into these graves in locations so heavily mined that identification methods are still extremely perilous, adding to the on-going trauma some 19 years later.

Reflecting a year after the massacre, Jean-Rene Rues, the chief war-crimes investigator for the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague, said, “What we’re talking about here was a crime against humanity and a crime against humanity is a crime against all of us.”

Yet, like Rwanda the year before, the UN and world governments all stood by as these atrocities took place.

There are 8,372 names engraved into stone at Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial and Cemetery for the Victims of the 1995 Genocide.

As of July 2012, 6,838 genocide victims have been identified through DNA analysis of body parts recovered from mass graves; as of July 2013, 6,066 victims have been buried at the Memorial Centre of Potočari. Serbian President Tomislav Nikolić officially apologized for the massacre, although he stopped short of calling it genocide.

On October 4, 2005, the Special Bosnian Serb Government Working Group said that 25,083 people were involved in the broader Srebrenica operation, including 19,473 members of various Bosnian Serb armed forces; the number of direct participants in the slaughter is thought to be lower, however—perhaps 1,000 people. Of the individuals involved in the military operation, 17,074 have been identified by name. It has also been reported that some 892 of those suspects still hold positions at or are employed by the government of Republika Srpska, the Serbian state tucked into Bosnia and Herzegovina. Their names remain an official secret.

Ratko Mladić is finally in prison at the Hague after being on the run for 16 years. But the world is still waiting for the outcome of the trial.

A former car-battery factory where the Dutch peacekeepers were based. The words mean: "Comrade Tito, We Pledge Our Allegiance."

Emir Suljagic, a former UN translator and Muslim Srebrenica resident, talks to me about his life on the run during the days of the massacre. He later went on to become the minister of education in Sarajevo, Bosnia. He’s been a continual campaigner for the fair treatment of the Muslim population in Bosnia.

Outside the former car battery factory. On the slopes in the background lies the Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial.

Mothers, wives, and children’s statues outside the former Dutch UN peacekeeping headquarters in Srebrenica

Inside the former building of the Dutch UN peacekeeping headquarters. Some 25,000 Muslim refugees sought shelter in and around these buildings during the massacres, but eventually were evicted after the UN forces pulled out in late July 1995. 

"Ratko is a hero," reads the graffiti. Ratko Mladić, the general of the Serbian forces at the time of the massacres, is still sadly revered by some in the area today.

In central Srebrenica, a new minaret from a mosque sprouts up behind a ruin from the war.

A lone podium stands in one of the factories that the Serbians used to round up Bosnian Muslims. Every year, thousands of relatives gather to pay respects to those killed in the July 1995 massacre. 

Zach Braff’s new movie, Wish I Was Here, ends with the milquetoast, whiny protagonist (played by Braff, because who else could play this role?) proclaiming that it’s OK to abandon your dreams and just be a normal person. That might be the most controversial part of the most annoying movie of the summer. Whereas Braff’s last film, the equally irritating navel-gaze-athon, Garden State, famously encouraged its audience to “Let Go” as the credits rolled, this new weenie roast of a movie implores you to give up. Of course, there’s one guy out there who stubbornly continues to push his monotonous artistic agenda on a culture that has long since moved on: Zach Braff. Kickstarter and online donations will allow Zach Braff to keep making movies, even if most of us don’t want him to.

Photos via Merie Weismiller Wallace, SMPSP / Focus Features

Wish I Was Here became infamous last year for being partially funded through 46,520 donations to his Kickstarter page that promised Braff-aholics across the country that they would get the unvarnished vision of their hero. At last, the Hollywood fat cats will get out of Zach Braff’s way to make the movie he wants! We’ve waited too long to get the Real McCoy!

The problem with that is those Hollywood fat cats get paid millions of dollars to make the movies lots of people want to see. This is why no one will give me $2 million to make a sci-fi romantic comedy set in the 25th century that features me falling in love with a talking salmon. OK, actually, it’s very possible that this movie could get made if certain directives were put in place:

• My character is to be played by Robert Downey Jr. or hot up-and-coming African American actor Michael B. Jordan.
• The talking salmon will be voiced by Cameron Diaz or Melissa McCarthy.
• Instead of being set in the distant future, all the action takes place in a hot-shot San Francisco tech start-up.
• James Cameron or Christopher Nolan has to direct.

What do all of these elements have in common? They are people, places, or things the general public has already made clear that they enjoy. It’s been a long time since Zach Braff did anything that the general public enjoyed. Did you see The Ex? Were you enthralled by The Last Kiss? Did you obsessively blog about the last few tedious seasons of Scrubs? Do you sometimes punch yourself in the face just to feel something real? Of course no one who gave a shit about the bottom line would give Zach Braff more than a pat on the back to make a passion project. Braff was hot shit on a gold-plated serving dish after Garden State, but I am here to offer a rather startling, potentially earth-shattering revelation: It is not 2004.

A bevy of online commentators has made much of the 2000s Bush era as some kind of safe haven for macho white men to swing their dicks around with impunity. Trucker hats! Cheap domestic beer! Two foreign wars fought under false pretenses! Pro wrestling! Dick Cheney! Reality TV! Tucker Max! And yet, in 2004, a modest, cloying film about love conquering all influenced a sizeable portion of the country that was still coming of age. It shamelessly aped sad bastard classics like The Graduate, Harold & Maude, and Annie Hall like the principal’s kid in your history class who brazenly cheats on every exam because he can get away with it.

For you youngsters, Garden State was kind of like The Fault in Our Stars, but with way fewer Anne Frank references. It was the perfect young adult romance for the time in which it came out. If you were in college back then, like I was, it was an ideal outlet for the kind of introspection and malaise that most of us go through when your parents are no longer around to fold your laundry and prevent you from binge-drinking yourself into depression. Also, you're welcome to infer any post-9/11 trauma connections you want. That's probably there too. It sure was a bummer back then, eh!

Sometimes, all it takes is kissing a cute girl, going on whimsical adventures, walking in slow-motion, and listening to meaningful music to help you deal with a dead parent. Or, at least that’s true in the world of Garden State. I didn’t just eat that stuff up, I unhinged my jaw and let Zach Braff feed it to me like a little baby bird, then begged for seconds when it was all over. Dude, I was sad.

In the ten years since Braff first unleashed a hoard of horny, chronically mopey Shins fans upon an unsuspecting nation, he apparently has not changed much. Yes, Wish I Was Here features the same musical equivalent of tepid green tea as its soundtrack, though I doubt this one is winning a Grammy. Yes, the movie also has a lot of slow-motion shots. Yes, there are sunsets. There are many sunsets. The dad’s a dick. Zach Braff’s character is yet again a failed actor from Los Angeles, but this time, ol’ Zachie’s an aimless married father instead of an aimless single 20-something. A parent’s death is a key plot point, and through the magical power of self-actualization and positive thinking, all problems can be solved. This isn't like the Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment to Garden State's Police Academy, but it’s pretty close.

As Wish I Was Here spilled out onto my eyeballs, I pondered why a movie that was so clearly just more of the fucking same would get made. Well, 46,520 of you demanded it. The 46,520 of you that demanded Zach Braff remake Garden State for adults instead of college students got your wish. I guess that would be just fine and dandy if in the last ten years, the critical and public perception of Garden State hadn’t suffered so much. Just like in his new work, Garden State has on-the-nose, obnoxious greeting card dialogue, a simplistic view of how the world works, and characters so thin that Kate Moss is currently asking Andrew Largeman for diet tips. 

As with the Veronica Mars movie, nostalgia—the current drug of choice in America—convinced a very, very small subsection of the country to fund a movie that had very little chance of being financially successful, just because it reminded them of something they used to really like. Perhaps this is the future of Zach Braff’s career. No one will see his films, but he’ll have enough artistic patrons to allow him to continue working as a director. Fellow former hot-shot wunderkinds Henry Jaglom and Eric Schaeffer (he of the abominable 1990s Sarah Jessica Parker suicide-themed indie rom-com If Lucy Fell) have refused to stop making the same movie over and over again, for an increasingly miniature audience. Maybe that’s what he wants, because even if his protagonist in Wish I Was Here is willing to quit on his career aspirations, Zach Braff doesn’t seem willing to afford himself the same opportunity. Because why the fuck should he?

Follow Dave Schilling on Twitter.

Photo via Instagram.

There’s something admirably misanthropic about getting a face tattoo. You really need to be fully committed to having a somewhat shitty life to let a stranger draw something on your face. Whether it’s a teardrop or the name of the softest rapper in the game, having a face tattoo screams: “You may never trust me with your child or gainful employment, but I’ll be damned if I care!”

Of course, there’s the rare occurrence when people with face tattoos have not just succeeded despite their regretful life choices but they have excelled as a result of their facial ink. Would Gucci Mane’s rep as “the coolest rapper in jail” be secure if his face didn’t have a triple-scoop ice cream cone on it? Would Miami rapper Stitches’ video for “Brick in Yo Face” be as insanely popular if his mug didn’t look like it was decorated by a tween with an unhealthy obsession for Tim Burton and assault rifles? Could Zombie Boy have parlayed his association with Lady Gaga into his own brand of overpriced bath towels, condoms, and energy drinks if he had just been some random non-skeletally decorated Montreal skid living on the streets? The answer is a resounding: “Hell-to-the-no!”

Enter Canadian model Vin Los, the latest in the honorable lineage of people who have done stupid things to their face because, who gives a fuck? According to his YouTube video—a budget version of that Zombie Boy video that includes the very Quebecois directive to “BE ADDICT”—the 24-year-old’s goal is pretty straightforward: to become the most famous man on Earth. His face and arms already look like a buzzword checklist written by an art student with things like  “FAME,” “LICK,” and “BAISE MOI” (fuck me) tattooed in handwritten font all over his toned body—which is hairless unless you count all the tiny fake follicles he got tattooed on his chest.

Objectively, without the tattoos, the man is a total babe. In fact, I admit that—even with the words “ICONIC FACE” scrawled on his cheek—one look into his deep brown eyes gave me a ladyboner. After spending hours caressing his Apollo’s belt on my HD screen, dreaming of the day where my name finally finds itself on his inner right thigh, I decided I needed to see his “iconic face” in person and find out why a man with such a beautifully chiseled jawline would want to permanently walk around with the words “SEX BOMB” on his neck. Here’s how it went.

Photo via Instagram.

VICE: How old were you when you got your first tattoo?
Vin Los: I was about 16 or 17 years old. I got the Le Coq Sportif logo. Then I got words tattooed on my arms, and that’s when I decided I would never get another image or drawing tattooed. Drawings don’t mean anything to me. It may sound like I have bad values or something, but my tattoos aren’t just for me. I want to be an image for people to look at, something that has an impact. Everybody who sees me is bound to ask questions: “Why fame? What’s his life like?”

So you like it when people look at you that way?
Yes. A puzzled stare is one that’s gonna last. I want to create a myth, a mystery. A lot of people ask me if I’m scared I might regret it one day. If I was indecisive, I don’t think I would write on my face.

How do you pick the words or expressions that go on your body?
It’s very superficial. I’ll go on YouTube and listen to all the big hits, and I’ll just take words from these songs. For example, “Top of the World” is from the song by the Cataracs, but it’s also what I want. I want to rule the world. As for the city names, it’s to show that we are all on the same level. Borders still exist, but not to the same extent. Whether you’re, like, in Zurich or Sydney, I personify all of that. I want to embody pop culture. You could look at me in a hundred years from now and really get the idea of what pop culture was like in the early 2010s.

You say you want to be the most famous man on Earth. Why are you so fascinated by celebrity culture?
I’m still trying to figure out why I’m so passionate about it. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always been fascinated by Marilyn Monroe. And not just people but also fame that applies to products, like Starbucks, for example. It’s all around the world. The marketing aspect really fascinates me.

So you’re more interested in the process behind creating celebrities than celebrities themselves?
Yes. I would like to create celebrities one day. I’m only 24. I’ve done a bunch of press in the past few weeks, but I still haven’t gotten a single modeling contract out of it. I don’t think I am the problem; it only means that there is no industry here. I could go to New York and say, “Fuck Quebec,” or I could be more of an entrepreneur and create my own market here. It takes more time, but I think that’s what I feel more strongly about. It’s a shame that considering the number of people living in Montreal, we don’t have an actual star system. I don’t ever see celebrities being chased by paparazzi.

You’d like to see more of a TMZ thing happening in Montreal?
Yes. I want to create that. I could be the founder of this sort of culture and perhaps become a millionaire at 45 after launching a bunch of magazines, TV channels, or whatever.

Do you have a plan to make that happen?
I want to create a mainstream media outlet meant to get a lot of shares and likes, something super American, nothing “quétaine” (kitsch).

Would it be about American celebrities, or would you try to keep it local?
It would be local. For those people who want to break into show business but can’t because it’s too hard. If you’re an unsigned model and you write me, I may not be able to pay you at first, but eventually I will. We can do a photo shoot and I’ll write a short piece about you—"Montreal’s hottest new model,” etc. It would be a way for people to break through. My job is to make people famous. The power is currently in the hands of the same people, and those people are boring and stupid.

Photo courtesy of Maxime Girard-Tremblay.

Do you consider yourself superficial?
No, not at all. Show business is the path I chose for myself. That’s what I’m interested in. I work at a supermarket right now and I want to die. I drink a thousand coffees a day just to get a little kick. I need something that’s more stimulating. I want to wake up in the morning and have meetings with people, take pictures, and make your dreams come true. It’s the job I chose, but I’m not superficial. Like my parents, for example—they don’t want me talking about them.

Why?
It’s a weird feeling. I always thought my parents were very open-minded. But turns out they care a lot about appearances. I may look like I base my every decision on looks, but it’s a job. If my friend were to get into an accident tomorrow and end up completely disfigured, I would not give a fuck what he would look like. I would take care of him. I’m not gonna judge people. I always tell myself that people do things for a reason. But that’s what my parents did. They judged me based on my tattoos, and we haven’t seen each other in two years. I talk to my mom once a week, but my dad has stopped all communication.

Did you ever try to have a conversation with them about your career path?
No. There were two months at the beginning where we didn’t speak at all. The reason my mom doesn’t want to see me in person is that I think it would be too hard for her. I went through a voluntary transformation. If I got disfigured in an accident, would they have stopped talking to me? No, because it’s involuntary. I don’t want to keep going in life with people like that. You live your life, and who cares what other people are doing? I’m not here to judge. Things only go wrong when you start judging others. 

Follow Stephanie on Twitter.

In a scientific discovery at Dartmouth recently hailed as "highly shareable" by the internet, cat poop is being mentioned in connection with a newly discovered potential cancer treatment.

Toxoplasma gondii, a single-celled parasite found in the guts of cats, has been used in a lab to treat cancer. It might, after enough testing, turn out to be a viable cancer therapy. However, toxoplasma is a strange, shape-shifting organism, and the kind cats poop out won't shrink your tumors one bit. Still, Dartmouth recently publicized the very promising discovery: A modified version of toxoplasma, when injected into mice with certain kinds of cancer, switched on an immune response that the cancer had deactivated, which then allowed the body to fight the disease itself.

David J. Bzik, PhD, of Dartmouth's Geisel Medical School, has been experimenting with toxoplasma for at least a decade. He says the discovery that an altered form of the parasite might cure cancer is a big deal, but that toxoplasma is weird and wonderful microbe that still has surprises in store for humanity, none of which involved ingesting cat poop by any stretch of the imagination. 

He also schooled me on some interesting trivia I thought I knew about toxoplasma. What follows is an edited version of my conversation with him.

Via Flickr user Yale Rosen

I'm reading a lot of headlines about cat poop curing cancer.
Oh, of course. They're sensationalist. 

What should they be reporting?
We developed this strain of toxoplasma that doesn't replicate. 

Could you remind us what toxoplasma is?
It's a protozoan. Its closest relative is malaria; it's in the same phylum. 

And what happens when it can't reproduce?
It doesn't cause disease in mice. It's a great vaccine for toxoplasmosis, [which], in AIDS patients, is a really big disease. Also in cancer patients—when their immune systems are suppressed, they're vulnerable to natural infections by toxoplasma. So having a vaccine is a good idea. This has not been tested as a vaccine yet in humans or cats, and we also haven't tested the anti-cancer effects in humans either. This has all been mouse work. 

If you've seen Trainspotting, you might remeber what happens when someone with AIDS gets toxoplasmosis (spoiler warning).

But in doing that work, we've realized that there were a lot of immune signatures that were anti-cancer in nature. So we did some trial studies in cancer models in mice. We've now looked at three cancer models, and we find very potent anti-cancer responses. In one, our ovarian cancer model, we showed that we observed 100 percent survival.

You injected the parasite into the tumors, and it treated cancer?
In melanoma cells we injected the parasite right into the tumor in the skin, and in the ovarian we injected it into the peritoneum—into the gut—where the ovarian cancer is growing. If we can understand what the fundamental mechanisms are, that will create new strategies for cancer therapeutics that attack the cancer biology. So you can imagine pharmarmacologically, you may not even need this parasite down the road. 

Could these cell responses mean it could do things other than treat cancer?
As a scientist, I'm much more excited about the biology, because what this parasite is telling these innate immune cells is a remarkable piece of biology. So by understanding the network, the signaling pathway and the communication, that the parasite is doing inside of the cell, we'll actually get at more fundamental mechanisms that we don't understand about how to manipulate these cell types to make them do the types of immune responses that we need. Not just for vaccines, but even potentially for other types of diseases that we don't have appropriate treatments for yet. 

But as for it being a cancer treatment, should we really be getting that excited?
I'm really excited about it from a practical perspective. And this is based in part on the history of vaccine development. The FDA just approved the first cancer vaccine, just two years ago. That treatment's exact strategy provides one potential mechanism for delivering the cancer vaccine to patients. So we do see that with appropriate safety testing, and phase I, II, III clinical trials showing efficacy in some form of human cancer, that there is some promise for that strategy. 

But to be clear, the form that cats poop out, that won't treat your cancer, right?

That's correct. That will give you toxoplasmosis, unless you have it already. What we're using in the laboratory is called the asexual form. 

Via Flickr user Goodiesfirst

What does the form that's in cat poop do, if not cure cancer?
When cats are on farms, it gets into the farm mud, into the field, into the rainwater runoff, and it's a very stable form. If it's in a field and it rains, it will float, it'll stick to a blade of grass, and then a grazing animal, like a sheep, will eat it, and then be infected, and if that sheep is infected, then it can cause abortion in sheep. That's an agricultural cost, and that's why we need a vaccine to protect sheep, so we don't lose baby sheep. Humans though, are a dead-end host, because we're not eaten by cats.

No. Not often.
So when that cat poops in a field, and a rodent eats something that's coated in cat poop, it gets reinfected. And then it just goes around and around. 

Right. There is that factoid that gets passed around online that says that cats actually benefit from having in their gut. 
I know. There are a lot of evolutionary theories out there, and that is indeed one of them. You know, there are other theories also, asking the question as to whether this latent infection with toxoplasma affects the behavior of the infected animal, including humans. I mean there's almost a cult of scientists who are looking into some of these issues. 

Does that hold water, in your opinion?
I think some of the science is solid. But if you look at it from a practical point of view, the penetrance, meaning the fraction of that disease—like say for example schizophrenia. Some of the behavioral phenotypes are commonly caused by other things, so teasing out when toxoplasma is causing it, and how much, and why, is going to be challenging. 

Thanks, Dr. Bzik!

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Mexico's narcocorrido music genre and subculture openly celebrates the most extreme aspects of the country's drug war. The songs are filled with catchy, detailed narrations of beheadings, executions, coked-out nights, and a strangely consistent obsession with Buchanan's whiskey.

With lyrics like "We're bloddy and a little twisted / We love killing / Mass kidnappings are the way they should be done / All my crew with gold-plated AKs / Shooting up their bodies until they fall to pieces / A sharpened knife on hand for beheadings," the movimiento alterado—literally the "altered movement"—is more of a "we're-fucking-crazy-and-we-will-cut-you-up" movement.

The music scene originated in the old cartel citadel of Mexico's western Sinaloa state, and it's an open secret that most of the artists identified with the genre are tied to the local cartel.

VICE went to Mexico to talk to some of the genre's major producers and see whether they're as hard as their songs suggest.

Photo courtesy of the author

Like the narrator in Juliet Escoria’s story “The Other Kind Of Magic” flirts with her boss and then ends up in a hotel room with him despite having a boyfriend, I, after a brief flirtation with Black Cloud, went back to the much-lauded novel by a famous established author I'd been reading, but then about ten minutes later somewhat guiltily found myself back with Black Cloud (which I’d laid to the side, face down on my bed), which I read exclusively until finishing it. I should say that Black Cloud had been sent to me through the mail. I didn’t order it and had no idea if I’d like it. The novel I’d been reading before was engaging enough but my critical apparatus never quite turned off as I was reading it, and unlike Black Cloud when I held it I didn’t have the feeling of holding something that bled. Because Black Cloud is at the same time gritty and dream-like and involves drug addiction, Denis Jonson immediately came to mind. But this book is very female. It is about hard, dark things, but these are enveloped by a softness—which you could maybe call the tenderness that comes from having learned to forgive one’s self and other people, from coming to know the opposite of tenderness in a very direct, personal way—and by the clear light of the author’s voice. Here is Escoria writing through a character having a dream on DMT, in “Heroin Story”:

I had a dream, and in the dream I was a lot older. I knew I had aged because my skin felt light like paper but the inside of me was solid and dark. The sun was low in the sky and thick yellow like tree sap, that gorgeous time of day right before the sun begins to set. I was with the boy and he was older too—a man now—and we were married; there were vines growing up the fence and the leaves were buzzing with new growth and his skin was warm under my fingers as I kissed him. I looked in his eyes, the man in the dream, and couldn’t believe that I had known, and hated, and loved this person for so long. In him I could see who I was, who I had been.

As I read, the dream felt like my own, in the way of something uncovered—in the way of one part of the self explaining to the other what being a human attached to another human was.

Black Cloud has that rare quality of feeling almost as if you are reading a diary that someone wrote with the intention of it one day being found, for both her and your benefit. In other words, it is intimate. I read most of it in one sitting because I was in one of those strange moods in which I both didn’t know how to talk to anyone and longed for some unforgettable conversation.

Juliet Escoria and I communicated through email.

VICE: The first thing I noticed that’s unusual about Black Cloud is that the names of feelings and emotions appear in larger and bolder font above the titles of the stories—for example, “RESENTMENT” appears before “Fuck California” and “CONFUSION” before “The Other Kind Of Magic”—and that a photo (some but not all featuring you) appears before each story, on a separate page, with the name of the feeling or emotion above it. 

For example, beneath RESENTMENT, there is a photo of you in profile, the light sky (what looks to be a California sky) illuminating the outline of your figure entirely in shadow, and beneath CONFUSION there is a photo of you wearing fishnet tights, a black demi bra, and a necklace with a long, elaborate pendant. You are sitting cross-legged on the floor in a white-walled room that seems empty. Your hair is up. Your hands reach behind you and appear to be in the process of unclasping the bra. Then before APATHY there’s another skyline at dusk but by now, because from the other two images I’m used to seeing the figure of you, you seem absent from it.

Will you tell me more about this arrangement of the book as an art object—how you came up with it, and why you chose to do it in this unusual way?
Juliet Escoria: When I make things—whether it is writing or more visual types of art—I do things for stupid, shallow reasons first. Usually the stupid, shallow reasons can be reduced to “Because I felt like it.” To elaborate on the stupid reasons behind the pictures… I like taking photos, I like books with pictures, and it’s my fucking book and I want there to be fucking pictures in it.

Later, I question the stupid, shallow reasons, and oftentimes they’re not that stupid or shallow after all. Oftentimes they’re much more intelligent and complex than anything I could have come up with were I trying to construct some sort of effect or convey some sort of philosophy.

When I was in high school, I read a lot of rock star biographies—Syd Barrett, Jim Morrison, Grace Slick—and I always liked the books better if there were pictures in them. I liked reading about the rock star and then looking at the photos and trying to find the actions I’d read about inside the looks on their faces. The thing about rock stars like that—you can read about them, you can study them, but there’s an element that will remain forever mysterious. And a lot of that mystery has to do with the fact that they are still just people. People who poop and call their moms and get embarrassed and bicker with their girlfriend or boyfriend and brush their teeth. The unknowable things aren’t the sexy or exotic or cool things about them. Those are present in the music and the interviews and the concerts. The mystery is in the ordinary, uncool things.

I wanted people to look at my book and wonder what was real and what wasn’t, what was vulnerable and what was bravado, in the same way I did with the rock stars. I wanted the pictures to play into that.

Part of this is certainly egotism, but there’s all sorts of more complicated, less ego-based implications in that… things about reputation, the impossibility of ever really and truly knowing another person, outer appearances versus internal feelings… these are aspects of life that have really fucked with me in the past, and they’re things that the writing covers, although if I’m doing it right, it’s doing this at least somewhat indirectly.

And the emotions paired with the pictures—I liked how it seems to provide guidance in some ways, or a directive on how to read the book, but in a lot of ways it just gives the reader more questions. For example, one could be: Why does this book have so many fucking gimmicks?

By saying you want people to wonder what was vulnerability and what was bravado, do you mean that it’s sometimes impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins? I think of the difference between being nude and being naked, and I apply it to writing. I feel like it is hard to tell which is which sometimes. Though the bodily response (what is happening chemically) in writing naked is different from writing nude, I think. Writing nude is about ego, and writing naked is about moving towards connection, making connection possible. Yet without the former the latter wouldn’t be possible. What do you think?
It makes me think of what goes on at 12-step programs, rehabs, mental hospitals, etc. In these environments, you have people telling each other horrible, ugly, ridiculous stories about things they did or things that happened to them. Maybe they've never told these stories before because maybe they're ashamed about their role in things. Sometimes the only way to tell these embarrassing, messy stories is to dress them up with a little bit of swagger and humor. Part of this is protective—humor as a defense mechanism—but part of it has to do with being completely honest. A true story, a whole experience—they are never only one thing. Addiction and mental illness are tragic and sad and devastating, but they are also funny and ridiculous. You need to have one in order to stay true to the other. You can't be naked without being nude. If there's no bravado in your vulnerability, then all you are is a gaping wound.

The stories have a sort of seamless hypnotic quality. I’m curious about your process. Would you describe the process of creating “CONFUSION; The Other Kind Of Magic” and “POWERLESSNESS; I Do Not Question It,” for example.
“The Other Kind of Magic” was based on a bad breakup I went through. The process was atypical because it was a really easy story to write. I think the only things I changed about it were little things, like punctuation and phrasing. It was the kind of story that writers write in hopes of—the effortless story that almost writes itself. It was less than a month between me starting it and it being published on Vol. 1 Brooklyn.

“I Do Not Question It” was a lot more typical in that it gave me trouble. I originally wrote it in January of 2013 as a journal entry. I was still pretty manic and thought it was amazing, but it was just sort of OK. It sat on my computer for several months. I’d open it every few weeks and add a paragraph or take one away or something. Eventually I was able to turn the reality into a fiction that worked: Two characters were condensed into one, a name was changed, I made some stuff up in terms of the history between my friend and I. That blue ball was some crazy shit, though.

What’s it like having another writer as your significant other? I read that Fitzgerald used to complain that it messed him up when Zelda used a shared experience as a basis for her fiction. Like, that it altered the experience in his mind and he couldn’t use it in the way he would’ve. It irritated me that he seemed to think he should get first dibs, as I understood it, and I also found it amusing. Is there a sense of competition in the household?  Do you write at the same time or at different times and to do it do you need to be in separate rooms?
I don’t really know yet but I will soon because Scott [McClanahan] and I are marrying in four days, and then I’m moving across the country to live with him. It’s been long distance so far, which is very different than actually living with a person. I’ll let you know how it goes.

So far it’s been supportive. So far it’s been a good thing, because we can talk shit about the same people and tell each other when our work is good or not.

The thing that makes me uncomfortable is that Scott is a man and I am a woman and Scott is so much more well-known than me. I don’t want to be a Zelda. I don’t want to be a Rita Marley.

Who do you want to be?
Juliet Escoria