Thursday, December 31, 2015

Will California Actually Force Legislators to Wear Sponsor Patches Like Nascar Drivers?

There's an old joke out there about forcing politicians to wear Nascar uniforms that tell us who their corporate sponsors are. I can't seem to trace it back to its origin, but I assume it was an email forward from someone's uncle. Now, it's looking conceivable that that joke could soon be a non-humorous, actual thing, legally required in the State of California.

"I wish I could claim that this was original to me, but it's not," businessman John Cox told VICE in an interview. Cox is behind a proposed 2016 California ballot initiative pushing to make the sticker plan a reality. "Some people told me that it was either Bill Maher or Robin Williams who suggested it in a standup routine. So it's been out there as an idea, and we're adopting it."

While the idea is still nothing more than an idea, California just might be the right place to try it out. As one of the top three states in terms of number of ballot measures created to produce new laws (The other two are Colorado and Oregon), the 2016 California ballot is expected to be freakishly overstuffed this November. Steve Maviglio, a campaign strategist, told the LA Times in November of 2015 that the California ballot is going to "look like the Encyclopedia Brittanica."

A mockup of California Governor Jerry Brown

If you can get get 365,000 valid signatures your issue goes on the ballot. It's not as though getting one percent of the entire population of California to endorse your idea is easy or anything, but if you've got some money burning a hole in your pocket, and the desire to change something politically, it's doable.

Cox seems to fit the bill. He's an investment manager and a self-identified "Jack Kemp Republican." He hasn't held political office, but he was once president of the Cook County, Illinois Republican Party. "I've run for office in Illinois unsuccessfully several times," he said, before becoming disillusioned and seeking change by other means.

But precisely what is the change he has in mind?

"This initiative will require every state legislator to wear on his coat, stickers, or some kind of logo representing their top ten contributors," Cox explained. Even if not an actual sports coat, the logos must be worn on the legislator's person. "It can't be a sign that they hold up."


John Cox

Cox says he aims to do something about politics and money, even if the sticker plan fails, because he sees it as the bipartisan political issue du jour. "Trump, Sanders—everybody Identifies the problem. The issue is, what is the best solution?"

The issue of money in politics has been front-and-center during this recent presidential election. On one hand, funding—like poll numbers—gets covered horse race-style: We all know Jeb Bush is the best-funded Republican, Trump is theoretically self-funded, and Sanders and Clinton show that Democrats can have impressively-stuffed campaign coffers too. Meanwhile, even candidates other than Sanders and Trump, including Hillary Clinton have at least paid lip service to the idea of limiting campaign funds.

Cox and his "California is Not for Sale" campaign began holding press events back in November of 2015. At each event all 120 members of the California Legislature were rendered as life-size cardboard cutouts, standing around plastered with the logos of corporations, as well as interest groups and unions.

"It's funny and it's inventive, but it really is a serious proposal," Cox insisted. However, it's expressly a way to ridicule America's broken campaign finance system, and is not meant to be a quick, at-a-glance method for telling what a politician's interests are.

"I'd like to tell you that we're doing this so that people can make good judgments about is this a good guy or a bad guy?" he said, "but that's really not part of our motivation."

"To us, the whole system is the bad guy," he added.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.



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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Fuckboys

Image via the author's Instagram/Tinder

Like most of pop culture, "fuckboy" is a term largely appropriated from black culture. You can find an early version the term used on the hook of Cam'ron's "Boy Boy" ("Oh this cat over frontin'? Fuck boy, boy!") back in 2002. In 2003, Petey Pablo rapped, "I don't blame you, I blame yo mammy bitch / She shouldn't've fucked yo daddy, she should've sucked his dick / You a punk boy, a fuckboy" on "U Don't Want Dat." The implication here is that the fuckboy is a man who is weak, or lame—a worthless poser of sorts, who might not even deserve to exist. However, in the last few years, a new definition of fuckboy has emerged, thanks to the internet's habit of recontextualizing everything. Today, the fuckboy has come to mean a promiscuous man, the kind of promiscuous man who is manipulative and cocky while still being a worthless poser. He is the perfect combination of a "basic bitch" and a "slut," two insults that are rarely levied against men.

Before fuckboy assumed its current form, there wasn't really a term for this special snowflake of a man. Sure, there are words like "manwhore" and "asshole," but the latter lacks the sting of "basic bitch," and the former is still unnecessarily rooted in the idea that there's such a thing as "too much sex" for a women. Men with active sex lives tend to be congratulated more than degraded. (Although, that's not to say promiscuity is the problem. In a perfect world, we would all be able to have equally active sex lives as long as we weren't hurting anybody else in the process.) But the fuckboy is not interested in the feelings of others, and that is why he is a fuckboy.

Fuckboys are men who date to serve their egos. They are entitled, predictable, uninteresting, and hollow. They attempt to make conversations about things only they know about. They tell horrible jokes, and are offended if you don't laugh. They complain that you are clingy and say things like, "you need to chill" when you ask why they haven't texted you in five days. They are easily intimidated by women who are smarter or more successful than them. Heterosexual women needed a word like this in our lives, a word that could serve as both an insult and a warning as we try to date in the age of swiping right only to receive a deluge of unasked for dick pics (it's different if I ask for them, which I usually do). It's a sign that we are no longer willing to tolerate the bullshit. Not only do we know what you're up to, but we can finally call you out on it.

Image via the author's Instagram

The biggest lesson this fuckboy phenomenon has taught me is that they're not going anywhere. In fact, they're increasing in numbers. Some fuckboy behavior I have encountered includes: being texted by a man who claimed to "miss me" a year after we had only been on one date, only to hang out with me one more time and then tell me he couldn't see me again because he had met someone new; a guy telling me he wanted to see me (but only in the context of me going to see his shitty band play some shitty show); a guy sending me furious text messages until four in the morning because I didn't want to have sex with him on our first date; and a guy who refused to believe that I had gotten food poisoning on a date and instead insisted that I was just drunk and didn't realize it.

This past year has not been so great for me romantically. I've attempted being in an open relationship, which failed miserably. I got back together with two different men from my past, which failed miserably. I attempted to use self-help books to find love, which (you guessed it!) also failed miserably. I've been ghosted, both in the "guy stops texting me" sense and the "guy leaves the country for good" sense. It has been exhausting to try to encounter deep, romantic love, to the point that I have often considered giving up on the whole endeavor completely.

But what am I going to do, not date at all? Sincerely sit around and wait for the right guy to come along? Fuck that. I'm too impatient and too horny to wait, and too broke to not accept free drinks.

This is where fuckboys re-enter the picture.

I shouldn't have to distance myself from casual sex, dating, and everything in-between, all because I fear it might hurt me. That's letting the fuckboys win. And when the fuckboys win, none of us win. In this new year, rather than quitting fuckboys for good, I'm going to tackle them head on.

The biggest mistake I've made with these men in the past was let their desires have priority over mine. I let them dictate to me what my feelings were, without questioning their fuckboy logic. But if this past year has taught me anything, it's that I no longer have a problem standing up for myself. It's possible, empowering even, for a woman to engage in fuckboy-esque behavior as a method of genuinely expressing what she wants. Something tells me they really won't mind my non-committal attitude, to the point that I will be able to use their fuckboydom to my advantage.

It can be fun to have a fuckboy in your life, as long as you know he's only that—a boy to fuck, and nothing more. A boy whose lectures about craft beer and half-written screenplays you can drown out with your own lectures about whatever you want. A boy whose invitations to see his bad band play at some bad bar you can wholeheartedly ignore. A boy you can force to watch reruns of Wahlburgers with you. A boy you can deal with strictly on your own terms, because he's so interchangeable there's a whole word for him.

Although maybe in 2016 we should work on calling them something else, seeing that fuckboy was never meant to be what it is now. I'm going to propose "whateverman." As in: "Why are you with that guy?"

"Whatever, man."

Follow Alison on Twitter.



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Rahm Emanuel and Chicago's Policing Nightmare

If American race relations in 2015 seemed like one enormous déjà vu, revisiting Margaret Walker Alexander's 1942 poem "For My People" helps drive that point home. She expansively captured the highs and lows of black society, championing the certain joys of family, church and community, pointing an accusing finger at duplicitous elements:

"For my people ... distressed and disturbed and deceived and devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches, preyed on by facile force of state and fad and novelty, false prophet and holy believer ..."

Residents of Chicago, a character in "For My People" and the city where Alexander once lived, certainly know a thing or two about facile forces of state in the person of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, currently in the hot seat for his actions—or lack thereof—after the grotesque police shooting death of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald.

It doesn't help that police shot and killed two more residents on Saturday after the father of one victim, 19-year-old engineering student Quintonio LeGrier, had called 9-1-1 seeking help for his distraught son, who was at home wielding a baseball bat during a mental breakdown. LeGrier's neighbor, 55-year-old Bettie Jones, perished in the pursuit, guilty only of answering the door so police could get in to minister to LeGrier's needs, according to his father.

The McDonald case and others like it have put Chicago and its mayor in the national spotlight just as the neo-civil rights movement in the guise of Black Lives Matter is leveraging pressure and awareness of police brutality in black communities. If Emanuel flew under the radar of #sayhername activists who uplifted the name of Rekia Boyd, an unarmed Chicago woman shot and killed by off-duty police officer Dante Servin, he certainly isn't now.

Protesters like those from the Black Youth Project 100, one of the leading activist groups challenging Emanuel, have been unrelenting in pressing the need for safety from police in a city where residents in poor black and brown communities need to be protected from criminals, too. The city has seen days and weeks of protests in front of posh retail establishments, City Hall, police headquarters and even the mayor's own house.

Let's not forget that Chicago was in the grip of an epidemic of youth murders before Emanuel came to office and before 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was killed in Florida by a wannabe cop who got off. And before another cop mistook 18-year-old Michael Brown for a monster and felt perfectly sane in saying so because he knows so many others don't regard black men has fully human anyway. Residents have sought answers to community-based gun violence since before the 2013 death of fresh-faced 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton, which drew the attention of the White House where Emanuel's friends, the Obamas, live.

Believe it or not, African Americans want to call the police, too.

And yet a sense of rote operation—tone-deaf, automatic and without empathy— has been infused in the response to a judge's order to release the McDonald video and Emanuel's actions since then, such as the Wednesday announcement of new policies to change way police use excessive force.

The mayor's apology for McDonald's death was punctuated by uncharacteristic and frankly incredible near-tears. That his ill-fated listening tour was followed by a holiday vacation to Cuba paints a picture of a man perfectly comfortable working from a well-worn crisis communications handbook—not someone attuned to his constituents.

It is this refusal to address the racial component baked in to American policing that chips away at blacks' enfranchisement as citizens.

While some, including Chicago's own brand of "glory craving leeches" who crowd into the shot every time local TV news cameras roll around, have called for Emanuel's resignation, he's not legally compelled to leave an office for which he was duly elected, even if he had to work for it this last time. But just because he isn't going anywhere doesn't mean Emanuel shouldn't act swiftly and offer real answers to the race and culture question no one in authority in Chicago or beyond wants to address. While Chicago police move to inject "more humanity" into policing and train all officers to use stun guns, it shouldn't have taken additional deaths at the hands of cops to get to this point.

It is this rote, workaday approach that treats cases like McDonald's, Boyd's and even Sandra Bland's as isolated incidents that is the real problem with the American way of policing in black communities. This ethos spends more time protecting a culture of authority and excessive force than residents—and even has some black officers believing in its efficacy. It is this refusal to address the racial component baked in to American policing that chips away at blacks' enfranchisement as citizens.

For example, how is it that the cases of Tamir Rice in Cleveland or Brown in Ferguson or Eric Garner in New York or Freddie Gray in Baltimore could be evaluated outside of a context that considers police culture? These tragedies have provided plenty of opportunities to address broader systemic problems such as how race and history intersect—with often-tragic results for people of color. Yet there's a resistance to rebuilding a centuries-old justice system never meant to protect protect them, regarding their spaces as places to occupy and control rather than serve. From Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow to mounds of other research, we know the problem—and the answers. The fact is Chicago police apparently showed up to the LeGrier home more ready to shoot to kill than to help.

It's notable that Emanuel, whose first run for Chicago mayor got a lift from the blessing of President Obama, benefited from a sort of shorthand for black and brown voters affected by violence. Many apparently felt no need to do due any further due diligence on a candidate with a lengthy record of championing causes antithetical to their plight, such as being anti-union.

If more Chicagoans spend as much time marching to the polls next year as they have downtown blocking retail traffic that, too, will be progress.

If Emanuel is comfortable allowing time to usher in forgetfulness and the same brand of complacency that kept so many voters from the polls when they had a choice, he, too, is poetic in understanding what Alexander described as "walking blindly spreading joy, losing time, being lazy, sleeping when hungry, shouting when burdened, drinking when hopeless ..."

Through this bleakness, however, there are signs of progress: In Chicago, Emanuel was forced to fire Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy, and the cop seen shooting Laquan McDonald 16 times in that notorious video, Jason VanDyke, has been indicted. (He pleaded not guilty Tuesday.) As racial patterns go, the all-white Oklahoma jury that drew skepticism among those seeking justice for 13 marginalized black women sexually assaulted by former officer Daniel Holtzclaw deposited a little more faith in the justice system.

If more Chicagoans spend as much time marching to the polls next year as they have downtown blocking retail traffic that, too, will be progress. If every 18-year-old high school senior registers to vote for everything from judges and the state's attorney to president—and actually follows through to show critical mass—people like Emanuel who keep wishing it all would go away will know better.

But then again, Alexander knew that, too:

"Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second generation full of courage issue forth; let a people loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now rise and take control."

Deborah Douglas is a Chicago-based journalist and adjunct lecturer at Northwestern University.



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Yeah Baby: When Babies Squad Up

The author with his baby's squad

You gotta bring the baby around other people of its same altitude. Let the babies all squad up, that's how they trade baby info and compare baby notes and kick all of their baby activities up a notch. Babies learn quicker around other babies, they see other babies do or say this or that thing and they're like, "Oh, tight. That's what all the other babies are on, OK, lemme level up."

Teach the baby how to organize all the other babies and run up into the mall like 40 deep, grab ten tiny Polo jackets a piece and jet, sell them on the black market. Let the baby shoot dice with all the other neighborhood babies and then let the baby buy you dinner for a change.

The baby will be hella bored of its own toys but then see another baby come around who's super juiced off the toys and the first baby will be like, "Huh, maybe there's something to these things after all," and fuck with the toys some more with a renewed vigor and zest for life.

Let the baby shoot dice with all the other neighborhood babies and then let the baby buy you dinner for a change.

From what I can tell, babies all have hella advanced jokes, too. Like a baby will just raise its eyebrows at another baby and they'll both start cracking up. Babies are wavy as fuck.

Babies are down to just kind of stare at each other and not even say much. They don't feel some constant urge to fill the void of silence with small talk. The baby has no concept of what's awkward. They'll straight up just reach out and touch each other's faces like "I wonder what your nose feels like. Oh, it feels like that. Word, word."

That being said, they can be moody as fuck and burst into tears off the weirdest shit. Like one baby might insist that the other one take a sip off they lil juice bottle or whatever and then cry like a baby when the other one is like "Naw, I'm good." There's gonna be some grabbing and pushing, yelling, maybe even some mild scraps. You gotta basically be a boxing ref—separate them, move them to different corners and let them lumber back toward each other for a few more rounds. It's a learning process.

If there aren't any available babies, older kids will do fine. A baby will pick up a lot from an older kid and the older kid will usually find the baby an interesting enough novelty to pay attention to for a while. As the kids grow up, the age gap becomes less of a thing and then when they're all adults they'll be like "Oh yeah we been folks since we was babies," and that seems like a positive thing, I guess? I don't know, man. I can't believe I get paid to write a parenting column.

The babies will be running things soon enough. Already are, to be quite frank with you.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, get your baby to squad up with other babies, mane. Get their lampage levels up, baby lamping is important. Get the babies really working all the baby rooms, get them babies shmoozing early, furl me? You got to get them active, whip the babies into a little frenzy, get them hyped, get the babies to form rival dance crews and have dance battles, get 'em poppin' and lockin', my dude. Get these babies into fraternal orders with advanced step routines and complex multi-part secret handshakes. Let the babies organize, let the babies get the jump on you, put some fire under your ass, hit the ball back into your court. The babies will be running things soon enough. Already are, to be quite frank with you. We're part of a feedback loop of consciousness that's cosmic in proportion. Get these babies to march on Washington, to rock over London, to rock on Chicago, to swag on these ducks, to sit in, to drop out, and tune in to the universal consciousness, to dig love and peace, to destroy police property in protest of police brutality, to serve and protect without the copper badge, to dissolve the wills of gun manufacturers with their mere social attitudes, to universalize love as the primary motive, to move toward a collective agreement on the infinite concept of love, etc., etc. Just put all these babies in the world together with each other and see what they do.

Follow KOOL A.D. on Twitter.



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The VICE Guide to Right Now: Watch President Obama Hang Out with Jerry Seinfeld


Screenshot via 'Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee'

Read: Listen to Marc Maron Interview President Obama on His 'WTF' Podcast

The seventh season of Jerry Seinfeld's web series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee kicked off Wednesday night by ditching its comedy-centric format in favor of an interview with President Barack Obama.

The outgoing US leader has spent the last several months having on-the-record chats with everyone from Bill Simmons to Marc Maron to Marilynne Robinson, so an interview with one of the most famous stand-ups of all time isn't exactly shocking, but it's still an enjoyably low-key affair; the pair strolls the White House grounds talking about cursing, to the president's underwear drawer, power-crazed world leaders, and the perils of notoriety.

"I would love to just be taking a walk, and then I run into you, you're sitting on a bench," Obama says to Seinfeld. "Anonymity's not something you think about as being valuable."

"With all due respect," Seinfeld responds, "I remember very well not being famous. It wasn't that great."

You can watch the entire episode on the show's website and stay tuned for new episodes every Wednesday at 11:30 PM EST.



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The VICE Reader: ​2015 Was the Year the Literary Versus Genre War Ended

Kazuo Ishiguro. Photo by Jeff Cottenden/Courtesy of Knopf

The first big literary dust-up of 2015 occurred when Kazuo Ishiguro expressed worry that some of his fans would be put off by his new novel: "Will they be prejudiced against the surface elements? Are they going to say this is fantasy?" This seeming slight against genre fiction by an acclaimed literary author was taken as another campaign in the decades-long genre wars. Partisans on both sides took up arms in interviews and essays, with no less than Ursula K. Le Guin arguing the book was clearly fantasy and that Ishiguro's snobbery had made it a failure: "It was like watching a man falling from a high wire while he shouts to the audience, 'Are they going say I'm a tight-rope walker?'"

But what soon became apparent is that the debate was less a grand debate about genre and literary fiction than a small debate over semantics. Was The Buried Giant in the same genre as 20th-century fantasy classics like Lord of the Rings, or was it better categorized as a modern take on medieval Romances and Arthurian legends? And does it even matter? Pretty soon Ishiguro, whose previous book was a sci-fi novel about clones and considers Westerns and samurai films to be major influences, clarified that he was "on the side of the pixies and the dragons."

The whole thing was quickly forgotten, as well it should have been because it's time for us to declare an end to the genre wars. We are in an age when superhero and Harry Potter films dominate audiences and highbrow magazines cover Game of Thrones and Sherlock while literary writers employ zombies and apocalypses in their novels. The artificial boundaries between literary fiction and genre fiction have never been thinner. Last year many of the most acclaimed and bestselling books where from so-called genre authors publishing on literary presses, such as Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy on FSG, and so-called literary authors publishing genre-infused books, such as Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven. This peace is seen not only in sales, but in the increasing way books contend for both genre and literary awards. Station Eleven was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke award. David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks was long-listed for the Man Booker, and won the 2015 World Fantasy Award. At last year's National Book Awards, the lifetime achievement was given to Ursula K. Le Guin with an introduction from Neil Gaiman.

So let's say goodbye to the genre wars with a look at 11 great books from 2015 that showed how much those walls have collapsed.

'The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy,' edited by John Joseph Adams and Joe Hill

The Best American Short Stories anthology has been running for 100 years, and in the last century the Best American series has expanded to Essays, Comics, Travel Writing, and more. But 2015 was the first time the series has been expanded to Science Fiction and Fantasy. Sure, one could argue that if the genre walls were completely finished, there would be no need for a separate anthology. Still, a look at the table of contents shows a mix of genre and literary stalwarts, from Neil Gaiman and Jo Walton to Karen Russell and T. C. Boyle. The stories are also drawn from publications in both worlds, with stories first appearing in the New Yorker and McSweeney's alongside those from Tor.com and Asimov's Science Fiction.

'The Buried Giant,' by Kazuo Ishiguro

Controversy aside, Ishiguro's novel was an impressive melding of fantasy and philosophy, weaving an Arthurian quest with deep musings on memory, loss, and war. The New York Times called The Buried Giant "the weirdest, riskiest and most ambitious thing he's published in his celebrated 33-year career." Luckily for readers, he pulled it off.

'Get in Trouble,' by Kelly Link

Link has been smashing down genre walls for decades with her brilliant story collections that mix fantasy, horror, sci-fi, and YA with beautiful sentences and unforgettable characters. Get in Trouble, her fourth collection, was published in hardcover this year and quickly became one of the most talked about collections in both the genre and literary worlds.

'A Planet for Rent,' by Yoss

This hilarious and imaginative novel by Cuba's premiere science-fiction writer gets my vote for most overlooked novel of the year. Yoss's book imagines a world where Earth is run as a tourist destination by capitalist aliens who have little regard for the planet or its inhabitants. A Planet for Rent is a perfect SF satire for our era of massive inequality and seemingly unchecked environmental destruction.

'The Fifth Season,' by N. K. Jemisin

Jemisin's works have long been acclaimed in the SF/F communities, and it's high time she broke out with literary audiences. The Fifth Season, the first book of her new series about oppressed sorcerers that is partly inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, might just do that. It received great reviews in literary outlets and has been deservedly making many year-end lists, including the New York Times' 100 Notable Books of 2015 . Jemisin was also hired this year to write Otherworldly, the new science fiction and fantasy column in the New York Times Sunday Book Review.

'Haints Stay,' by Colin Winnette

In my review of Winnette's surreal Western I wrote, "Great genre fiction takes its tropes and twists them into new shapes. In that way, Haints Stay recalls another novel of murdering brothers: Patrick deWitt's fantastic 2011 novel The Sisters Brothers . But where deWitt's novel puts an existential spin on the Western, Winnette's ventures into myth and unreality. This is a land where you must bury the teeth of your enemies or be haunted by their ghosts. If you aren't careful, you may wake to find a cannibal eating your limb."

'Undermajordomo Minor,' by Patrick deWitt

Speaking of deWitt, his latest hilariously inventive novel is another spin on a classic genre. But instead of Westerns as in his last novel, The Sisters Brothers, he takes on fables and fairy tales. Lucien (A.K.A. Lucy) Minor leaves his small village for a life of (mis)adventure as the assistant to the Majordomo at the dark Castle Von Aux. Fans of fairy tales and black comedy should be sure to put Undermajordomo Minor on their list.

'You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine,' by Alexandra Kleeman

One of the most highly praised debuts this year, Kleeman's novel is a hilarious yet philosophical satire on our weird obsessions about food and bodies. It exists alongside the works of George Saunders in that nebulous overlap zone of satire, near-future SF, and postmodernism. No matter what label you put on it, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine was one of 2015's great reads.

'The Heart Goes Last,' by Margaret Atwood

Atwood has been doing the literary/genre crossover thing since long before it was cool. Her works of speculative fiction—the label she prefers—are frequently piercing satires of our society through the lens of near-future or alternative realities. Her latest, The Heart Goes Last, is yet another entry, crafting a dystopia of economic collapse and control that is too close to present realities for comfort.

'Aurora,' by Kim Stanley Robinson

Several of the books on this list offer grim dystopian visions of our present and future, but Kim Stanley Robinson's latest epic, Aurora, is a nice antidote to the pessimism. Called "a rousing tribute to the human spirit" by the San Francisco Chronicle, Aurora envisions humanity's first trip to another solar system.

'Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe,' by Thomas Ligotti

Ligotti has long been a cult horror writer with a small but dedicated following. However, his nihilistic cosmic horror (think Lovecraft with less adventure and monsters and more existential dread) broke into the public consciousness when the first season of True Detective used his writings as the basis for much of Rust Cohle's dialogue. This year, Ligotti became one of only a handful of living authors to have a Penguin Classics edition of his work when they reprinted his first two books as a single volume.

Lincoln Michel is the co-editor of Gigantic and the online editor of Electric Literature. His debut collection Upright Beasts was published this October by Coffee House Press. You can find him online at lincolnmichel.com and on Twitter.



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​The Restaurant at the Center of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Serves Great Hummus

Mike al-Mufreh in front of his restaurant, Ikermawi, in Jerusalem. All photos by the author

Since 1952, a small hummus restaurant called Ikermawihas stood in the most contested area of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, serving the same delicately flavored garbanzo bean spread through multiple wars, intifadas, and decades of sporadic violence. The restaurant sits directly adjacent to Damascus Gate, the entrance to the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City—a bottleneck for both Muslims and Jews seeking to access the city's holy sites that has historically been a center for bloodshed between Palestinians and Israeli Jews.

In recent months, the area has once again become a flashpoint for violence, amid growing tensions over the important religious site known to Jews as the Temple Mount, and to Muslims as Haram al Sharif, or the Noble Sanctuary. Palestinians contend that the Israeli government is attempting to change the "status quo," which presently prevents Jews from praying on the site. The Israeli government has repeatedly denied such claims, but there is a growing right-wing movement that seeks to assert the rights of Jews to worship at the site.

At the center of it all—geographically speaking, at least—is Ikermawi. "You learn to never make any sudden movements," Mike al-Mufreh, the restaurant's chef and manager, told me. I asked him how many Palestinians have died near Ikermawi in the recent conflict and he struggles to count. "Seven, I think?"

In fact, there have been nine stabbing attacks within a few of minutes of the hummus joint, four of them within a couple hundred feet, resulting in ten deaths—eight Palestinians, two Jewish Israelis. The restaurant is inevitably intertwined with the ongoing conflict. One of al-Mufreh's coworkers is the cousin of Muhammad Nimr, a 37-year-old Palestinian who died last month after being shot by Israeli guards near Ikermawi. Al-Mufreh and his coworker claim that Nimr was drunk and attempted to scare the Israeli security officers as they walked by him, but that he had no knife. Israeli police reports, however, state that Nimrran at the officers wielding a knife, and video footage from security cameras shows Nimr appearing to run at two Israelis with a knife in hand.

Mike al-Mufreh in Ikermawi

Besides the horror of the violence, al-Mufreh said that the recent conflict has taken a toll on business. "Every time something happens we have to close immediately," he explained. Riots have taken place right outside the restaurant, and al-Mufreh said he's had to shelter the wounded, usually those hit with rubber bullets.

On a Friday afternoon this month, business was slow atIkermawi. Most customers took their hummus to-go while a few stayed and ate. Israeli police stood across the street, watching over the area. Al-Mufreh served dishes of hummus methodically, seeming to tune out the tensions around him: a scoop of hummus, a scoop of garbanzo beans, a glob of olive oil on top. Repeat.


On MUNCHIES: Hummus Is a Metaphor for Israeli-Palestinian Tensions

The secret to good hummus, according to al-Mufreh, is using exceptionally good garbanzo beans. "There shouldn't be any blemishes on them, they must be healthy" he told me, while picking up a bean and holding it up to the light for examination. The process of making hummus is not easy: Al-Mufreh's recipe takes a total of three days. First he soaks the beans for an entire day; then he slowly cooks them; on the third day, he blends the garbanzo beans with high-quality tahina (sesame paste), lemon juice, parsley, and water.

The result is an intensely delicious combination of flavorful garbanzo beans, creamy tahina, counterbalanced with the acidity and lightness of the lemon and parsley. Al-Mufreh says his customers keep coming back because of his hummus's special, robust flavor.


Mike al-Mufreh prepares a batch of hummus

Prior to the flare up, Ikermawi had a substantial Jewish Israeli customer base. "On Saturdays the place would be filled with Israelis," said al-Mufreh. "You couldn't even walk through the restaurant." Many secular Israelis used to cross into Palestinian areas on Saturdays to eat and shop, as Jewish-owned stores typically close for the Sabbath.

A Hebrew newspaper clipping still hangs in Ikermawi's window, praising the food. The article calls back to another time when Israelis ventured into Palestinian areas of Jerusalem more frequently for food and pleasure, when people simply came for the hummus.

Empty tables outside Ikermawi

Secular Jews have left the area gradually over the past decade, leaving mostly ultra-orthodox Haredim, who keep a strict kosher diet and do not eat at non-kosher restaurants like Ikermawi. Dressed in all black with long beards, the Haredim hurriedly walked by the restaurant on their way to prayer, constantly glancing over their shoulder.

Two young Palestinian construction workers sitting outside the restaurant said that Ikermawi is "one of best." We spoke as they hunched over their bowls, shoveling hummus into their mouths, and while they seemed more intent on eating than talking to me, they were quick to state that they would not allow the Israeli government to "take the Haram al Sharif from Muslims."

As for al-Mufreh, he's never considered moving until recently. He hopes that tensions will ease, business will return, and life will reach a relative calm but he is not optimistic. "I don't think things are going to get better," he told me. "There's just a bad feeling."

Follow Eliyahu Kamisher on Twitter.



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We Asked a Lawyer How Bill Cosby Is Going to Fight His Sexual Assault Charges

Bill Cosby arriving at court in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania on Wednesday. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

Bill Cosby was formally charged on Wednesday for a decade-old sexual assault case in Pennsylvania that started the controversy consuming his career. The alleged victim is a former Temple University employee named Andrea Constand, who has long claimed that the world-famous comedian molested her in 2004 after handing her some blue pills and instructing her to take them with wine.

This past July, a long deposition from Constand's civil suit against Cosby was unsealed, and in it, he admitted to using Quaaludes to get women to become more amenable to his sexual advances. Dozens of women have come forward to say they had similar experiences, and Constand's outstanding accusation—the first officially levied against Cosby—became a hot-button political issue in suburban Philadelphia, and across the country. The charges were finally filed just days before the statute of limitations was set to expire in the Constand case. (Many of the other allegations against Cosby concern incidents where the statue of limitations have run out.)

That such a high-profile alleged serial rapist is finally facing criminal charges seems like a positive development. But does Cosby looking at the possibility of jail time mean anything for the 50-plus other women who have accused him of assault? And what are the chances he actually winds up behind bars? We spoke to Stuart Slotnick, a New York defense attorney, about what might happen next in the Cosby saga, and how his criminal case is likely to play out in court.

VICE: So what do these charges in Pennsylvania mean for the dozens of other women who have made similar accusations against Bill Cosby? Will there be more criminal charges forthcoming, and will this force other prosecutors to reexamine old cases?
Stuart Slotnick: I don't think that these charges have anything to do with what could happen with other cases where the plaintiffs made allegations against Bill Cosby. The reason is because in many of the cases, the statute of limitations has run out. That means the prosecutor cannot bring a case even if they want to bring a case. This particular case was looked at about ten years ago and the prosecutor could affect sentencing. If he's convicted of this case, then the prosecution will argue that it's not an one-off incident, and he's a sexual predator, and you should consider this while sentencing him.

Bill Cosby should be concerned, because the prosecution might try to bring in other complainants. And even though he's not charged with sexually assaulting the other complainants, there is a body of law that allows prosecutors to bring in uncharged alleged crimes to show that it's a common scheme or plan—or a modus operandi, an MO. So I can guarantee they will try to bring in other people to testify and say, "He called me up under the guise of an audition, he gave me alcohol and pills, my vision went blurry, and the next thing I knew I was naked and it was hours later."

If they can get that evidence in, it's very damning.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.



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The Time I Celebrated New Year's Over and Over Again with Right-Wing Communists on the Trans-Siberian Railway


The Trans-Siberian Railway. Photo via Flickr user Andrew and Annemarie

My last New Year's was a unique trip. I had recently graduated from a Canadian university, where I'd been doing research on contemporary Russian politics. After spending the past years exploring Russia theoretically, I had decided to use my newly found free time to travel from Russia's far eastern outpost of Vladivostok, across seven time zones, to Moscow. It was exciting to finally get to experience the full length of world's largest and weirdest country by train. Third-class, Soviet-style.

That I was going to be spending New Year's on the train, which would be somewhere between Lake Baikal and the Urals, just seemed like an odd bonus. There is something appealing about being in a non-place at the right time. What I didn't imagine was that I'd be celebrating the proverbial ball drop with fanatical activists who would make the political condition I'd written my thesis on come to life in all its amazing absurdity.

By New Year's Eve, I'd been on the train for almost a week, and smelled accordingly. Unsurprisingly, there are no showers in third class, and not much privacy either. Rather than having discrete compartments, each car is divided into a dozen or so open segments. During the afternoon the train had nearly emptied, and I was starting to worry I'd end up with no one to clink glasses with.

I started the night by pre-partying in the restaurant car, which was deserted, save for the staff. In proper Russian fashion, the attendants asked me to join them for traditional appetizers and vodka shots. Thus began a Groundhog Day–style approach to the celebration, fueled of course by copious amounts of booze.

The thing about New Year's on the Trans-Siberian is that time is ambiguous. While all Russian trains run on Moscow time, the passing villages will be on theirs. Meanwhile, passengers and staff will generally go by their home time zones for the magic hour. So by the time I returned to my car, after one round of drinks and the first of many rounds of the ubiquitous New Year countdown with the restaurant staff (Pacific Time), my night had only just begun.



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The Artist: The Artist Creates a Terrible New Series in Today's Comic from Anna Haifisch

Look at Anna Haifisch's art and comics on her website and Twitter.



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The VICE Morning Bulletin

Photo via AP

US News


Mom of 'Affluenza Teen' Deported

Carrot Top impersonator and world's worst mom Tonya Couch, who helped her son Ethan flee to Mexico, has been deported and brought through Los Angeles International Airport in handcuffs. Ethan will likely remain in Mexico for several weeks, after hiring a lawyer in the country to help fight extradition. - USA Today

Bill Cosby's Legal Woes Begin

The comedian has been freed on a $1 million bond after being charged with sexually assaulting Andrea Constand. The case will center on pills Cosby gave Constand, which he claims were herbal. The charges carry the threat of five to 10 years in prison. - The Washington Post

Utah Fails to Block Planned Parenthood Funds

The Court of Appeals has granted Planned Parenthood an injunction to stop Utah's state government from defunding the organization. Planned Parenthood in Utah will now appeal an attempt by Governor Gary Herbert to block federal funds going to the organization. - Fox 13 Salt Lake City

Almost 100,000 Weed Edibles Recalled

Denver issued its biggest-ever recall of marijuana products, involving 99,574 packages of weed-laced edibles. Mountain High Suckers recalled packages of its suckers, lozenges, and candy over concerns about potentially dangerous pesticide. - The Denver Channel

International News


Suicide Bombers Attack Kurds

Twin suicide bombings hit two restaurants in the Kurdish-controlled city of Qamishli in Syria, killing or wounding dozens of people. The Kurdish YPG militia said they were most likely carried out by the Islamic State, which the YPG is fighting in northeast Syria. - Reuters

Nigeria Ready to Talk to Boko Haram

President Muhammadu Buhari has said his government is prepared to negotiate over 200 kidnapped girls, but only if the militant group can identify "credible leadership." Boko Haram snatched the girls from dormitories in the town of Chibok in 2014. - BBC News

Iraq Threatens Turkey

Iraq's foreign minister says that if Turkey does not withdraw troops from Iraq's northern region, military action could be used. Ibrahim al-Jaafari said his government was committed to diplomacy, but added: "If we are forced to fight... we are forced to fight." - Al Jazeera

Brussels Cancels New Year Fireworks

The Belgian capital's New Year's Eve fireworks display has been cancelled by authorities, who fear a terrorist attack in the city. Authorities in Paris are shortening a light show at the Arc de Triomphe and cancelling a firework display to keep down crowds. - The Guardian

Everything Else


Belgian Cops Investigated for Alleged Fuckfest

Officials are trying to figure out whether or not eight soldiers had crazy wild sex with two police officers in the aftermath of the Paris terror attacks. Alcohol is believed to have been involved at the alleged police dorm romp. - VICE

Obama Meets Seinfeld, Disses World Leaders

The latest Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee sees Jerry Seinfeld riding around with POTUS in the president's limo. When asked how many world leaders are out of their minds, Obama said "a pretty sizeable percentage." - The Independent

So These Annoying Phrases Got Banned

Michigan's Lake Superior State University has released a list of words and phrases now banished from campus. They include "walk it back," "break the internet," and starting a sentence with "so" for no good reason. - The Detroit News

Motherfucking Rat on a Motherfucking Plane

An Air India flight from Mumbai to London was forced to turn back after a rat was spotted in the passenger cabin. The aircraft was fumigated but the rodent wasn't found. - The Times of India

You're Most Likely to Die on New Year's Day

A major buzzkill ahead of a holiday, but research shows January 1 is the day you're most likely to die of natural causes. Car crash fatalities increase, but so do less predictable things like cardiac diseases and cancer death. - VICE

The 11 Sci-Fi Films That Defined 2015

The big themes that bubbled up in the bumper crop of sci-fi movies—artificial intelligence, transgender rights, income inequality—tell us a lot about our immediate future. - Motherboard



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Most Canadians Disapprove of Donald Trump and His Anti-Muslim Policy, Poll Finds

Shockingly, many Canadians don't like this dude. Photo via Facebook

To get a quick glimpse of what Canadians think of Donald Trump, one needn't look much further than the movements in Toronto and Vancouver to remove his name from Trump-owned buildings. But it seems that negative sentiment runs a little deeper: According to a new poll, a majority of Canadians disagree with the contentious US presidential contender, though a majority wouldn't bar him from entering the country.

A Forum Poll of 1,395 Canadian adults found that more than two-thirds (68 percent) disagree with the business mogul, who since launching his campaign for the GOP nomination in June has made an effort to be as racist, Islamophobic, sexist, and generally offensive as possible.

When it comes to specifics, 67 percent of Canadians are against Trump's plan to stop all Muslims from entering the US, but in true Canadian fashion, more than half (54 percent) were uncomfortable with barring Trump from Canada (although a third were fine with him never being allowed into the Great White North again). The largest opposition to Trump came from people who had voted Liberal or Green in previous federal elections (84 percent) with NDP voters coming in a close second (82 percent).

Not that Trump doesn't have his supporters, though. Just under one-fifth of Canadians (19 percent) actually approve of him, while 12 percent didn't have an opinion. Twenty-two percent are also cool with his idea of barring Muslims from entering America.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Trump got the most support in Alberta and Ontario (34 percent and 23 percent approval, respectively) and among people who voted Conservative in the latest federal election (41 percent). Approval was also more common in the youngest age group, males, and people in mid-income groups, although in each case people across all age groups, provinces and political preferences were largely against Trump in general and his call to ban Muslims.

"Trump has his adherents and defenders in Canada; they just aren't as numerous as they are in the US," Forum Research president Lorne Bozinoff said in a news release. "Canadians aren't as quick to adopt extreme positions as some Americans are, and Donald Trump's positions are certainly extreme."

Trump hasn't found much popularity among Canadian politicians either.

"I don't think anybody in Canada or around the world thinks I have anything supportive to say, or anything but condemnation, for Donald Trump," Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said during an interview with CTV Sunday.

Opposition leaders also weighed in when Trump first made remarks about banning Muslims from entering the US.

"They're ridiculous comments... I'm sure that by and large, even people in his party will think his comments are ridiculous," interim Conservative Party leader Rona Ambrose said.

NDP leader Tom Mulcair also condemned the idea. "I say that we should limit access to Canada for people that are spouting hatred and we should make sure that Donald Trump stays out of Canada," he said.

Follow Jackie Hong on Twitter.



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The Best 2015 Short Films You Can Watch Online

Every year I share as many great short films with my audience as I can, but every year, I miss some. This is good news, in a way: There's too much bizarre, touching, and hilarious stuff out there, and not enough space to cover them. To make up, I've rounded up some great films that I didn't get around to covering in I'm Short, Not Stupid in 2015. The resulting compilation is chock full of festival winners, Oscar-nominated shorts, and viral videos, the perfect way to spend the last couple days of the holidays.

'A Reasonable Request,' by Andrew Laurich

This near-perfect short made the badass decision to premiere online before making its premiere next month at the Sundance Film Festival. It will tickle you in all the right—or wrong?—places.

'Subconscious Password,' by Chris Landreth

Writers are always told to write what they know, but when Canadian animator Chris Landreth set out to create his latest film he chose to write about what he forgets. The result was the Oscar-nominated Subconscious Password. The film takes you deep inside the mind through a warped game-show extravaganza. It utilizes a wide variety of animation styles, and the result is as vibrant and odd as the inside of a dream, but as realistic and reminiscent as everyday life. Landreth has made a number of short films, but is probably best known for his 2004 Oscar-winning Ryan.

'Yearbook,' by Bernardo Britto

If the world was coming to an end, what would you try and save? Brazilian filmmaker Bernardo Britto tries to answer that question with his five-minute animated Sundance award-winning short. He's definitely a filmmaker to watch as he returns to Sundance in 2016 with his first feature, Jacqueline (Argentine), for which he'll be ditching the sketchbook and going live-action with Wyatt Cenac, as well as premiering his latest animated short, Glove, which is described as "the true story of a glove that's been floating in space since 1968."

'Coda,' by Alan Holly

I know the world ending is a big deal, but what about your life? That's a bigger deal for many people. Coda, the SXSW award-winning animated short, beautifully captures the confusion that I assume accompanies death. Despite being drawn, the film feels devastatingly real.

'Weird Simpsons VHS' by Yoann Hervo

Everything the title implies, but more, and better.

'One-Year Lease,' by Brian Bolster

There's something thrilling about seeing how other people live, but something equally disconcerting about seeing them grow lonely. This Tribeca Film Festival winner combines both in a peculiar little slice-of-life documentary about a couple living one year in a NYC apartment slowly falling into disrepair at the hands of their overattentive landlady.

'Stop,' by Reinaldo Marcus Green

Probably one of the most important and timely shorts for America this year. Reinaldo Marcus Green's film addresses the upsetting aspects of New York City's stop-and-frisk policies with sensitivity and insight.

'Grandpa and Me and a Helicopter to Heaven,' by Johan Palmgren and Åsa Blanck

A touching film for everyone out there with grandpas (which is everyone). This short perfectly encapsulates why family is so important and always interesting.

'Funnel,' by Andre Hyland



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Wednesday, December 30, 2015

How Scared Should I Be?: How Scared Should I Be of Drinking Myself to Death on New Year's Eve?

In the column "How Scared Should I Be?" VICE staff writer and generalized anxiety disorder sufferer Mike Pearl seeks to quantify the scariness of the world he lives in. We hope it helps you to more wisely allocate that most precious of natural resources: your fear.

As I've previously mentioned, I've accidentally reduced my alcohol consumption to a point you might refer to as "moderation." I do, however, like to get kinda shitfaced on New Year's Eve, which is, generally, the wildest night of my year.

And not to sound like the last 30 seconds of one of those safety videos they show before prom, but I won't be driving any cars while drunk. For added safety, I'll be careful around the roads in general, because cars sometimes eat drunk pedestrians. But any night spent binging on alcohol comes with a risk factor that no brilliant transportation plan can circumvent—the alcohol.

"On New Year's it's probably a time when everybody feels like they can let go a little bit," Dr. George F. Koob, director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse (NIAA) and Alcoholism told me. But while that sounds like it's not a big deal, he pointed out that people like me, a 31-year-old who is still planning to get wasted, are part of a trend toward greater overall national drunkenness. "There's an increase in intensity of drinking, particularly in young people, but also extending into middle age," Koob said.

On college campuses, the stated intention of "drinking to blackout," is a relatively new phenomenon, but the NIAA has taken notice. "What we pick up in some of the surveys is people are doing more binge drinking of the extreme kind—I would call it 'extreme binge drinking'—where you're doing 10 to 15 drinks in an evening."

That amount of booze over a long evening would send most people past "shitfaced" and into "unconscious." If, on the other hand, you put away all 15 of those drinks over the course of two hours or less, it could kill you.

But does New Year's put me at risk for that kind of frat house-level drinking?

Let's say like many sophisticated, career-minded adults, I began my night with a little Dom Pérignon (more likely it'll be André, but hey, they're both booze). Champagne has a much higher alcohol percentage than most beer, and carbonated drinks get you drunk faster than flat ones. "The bubbles interact with the lining of your stomach and intestine, and help facilitate some of the absorption," Koob told me, adding, "Someone who comes in and drinks three glasses of champagne on an empty stomach to load up is probably already asking for trouble."

In other words the champagne you drink early in the evening might set you on the path toward sloshed, without you fully realizing it.

The idea with alcohol is that it's a drug that makes stuff more fun. "When you do so much of a drug, like alcohol, that releases all of those good things, they also trigger your stress axis," Koob told me in an interview for a different article last year. When you start to feel shitty—typically when your blood alcohol percentage gets past .08, you might unwisely try to medicate that feeling of shittiness with more alcohol. That's the cycle that can potentially result in unexpectedly intense drinking.

These kinds of nights have become more common recently, according to the NIH's data-gathering efforts. Koob quoted to me from some in-house statistics he had at hand. "Alcohol poisoning deaths in general increased sevenfold from 1999 to 2013," he said. The rate increased from "337 in 1999 to 2,303 in 2013. A big increase in the last 15 years."

Check out our documentary about the animator behind Star Wars and 'Jurassic Park'

According to the aptly-named Bob Brewer, MD, who leads the Alcohol Program at the Centers for Disease Control, that upward trend exists both on and off of college campuses. "Binge drinking is a major public health problem across the lifespan," he told me in an email interview. "There were an average of 2,200 alcohol poisoning deaths —or about six deaths per day—in the US from 2010 to 2012," he pointed out. And far from being related to the rise of butt chugging as a hazing method, he told me that "about three in four of these deaths involved adults aged 35-64."

Right when I was feeling glad I was younger than the group he quoted, he horrified me with another statistic: "1 in 10 total deaths among working-age adults aged 20-64 years are due to excessive alcohol consumption, including deaths due to alcohol poisoning," he told me, adding that "about 70 percent of the approximately 1.5 billion self-reported binge drinking episodes among adults aged 18 and older in the US are reported by adults aged 26 or older."

As for the NIH's number of deaths from binge drinking, Koob had more bad news: "We think they're probably an underestimation because alcohol is often overlooked as a cause of death." Alcohol, he explained, doesn't necessarily get blamed when someone dies by mixing it with other drugs like opiates and benzodiazepines. Since alcohol poisoning deaths typically take the form of respiratory arrest—the same thing as prescription opiates. "About 15 percent of prescription opioid deaths also involve alcohol," he said.

"I hate to be a real downer," Koob said before transitioning to another terrifying topic: liver damage. Young people in the UK are coming down with cirrhosis in record numbers recently, and given our increased drinking, Koob suspects the US might not be far behind. But can one New Year's Eve binge do irreversible damage to your liver? Maybe, he told me.

A major binge could conceivably wreak permanent havoc on your liver, "if an individual already has a compromised liver, or they have some other disease that can compromise their liver like hepatitis C, or even HIV, or they were just born that way," according to Koob.

Still, Koob knows damn well I'm going to be drinking on New Year's Eve, and he didn't try to talk me out of it. "Having three to four drinks on New Year's Eve is not a big deal if you pace it and have some food, and drink a good bit of water in between. You can enjoy it, and have a good time." He even went as far as to concede that "you're not gonna fry your brain with one binge of five drinks."

I didn't tell him this, but I might have six drinks on New Year's. In all honesty though, that's probably when I'll call it a night.


Final Verdict: How Scared Should I Be of Drinking Myself to Death on New Year's Eve?

3/5: Sweating it



    Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

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    Remembering My Day with Lemmy Kilmister

    Lemmy Kilmister, Bea Dunmore, and friends. Photo from the collection of Keli Raven, Bea Dunmore's brother

    "Hey, let's go hang out with Lemmy!"

    "Lemmy?" I said. " The Lemmy?"

    It was 1990 or '91. I was on one of my semi-regular visits to Hollywood from my home in New York City, and for six years now, ever since the drunken summer night we'd first met at the Sunset Strip's notorious Rainbow Bar and Grill, my friend Bea Dunmore had been exhorting me in her glorious, throaty voice to join her in "hanging out" with various louche locals. Among them were karate black-belted rock stars, wizened nightclub owners, "hair-metal" drummers, 70s-era record producers, Jewish drug dealers with bona fide pharmacy degrees, bachelor-party strippers, music-video vixens—"That's my ass you see in the close-ups in Billy Idol's 'Eyes Without a Face,'" a saucy brunette told me—and bikini-clad mud wrestlers.

    Bea—or "Little Black Bea," as she more than once referred to herself—was quite persuasive with her suggestions. A talented actress, she'd worked at certain times as a video vixen, a stripper, and a mud wrestler herself, and she was a true queen of the Hollywood scene. Outrageous yet accessible; my own age yet way more worldly; petite yet buxom; whip-smart yet insouciant; African-American yet totally accepted in the white world of heavy metal, Bea was quite simply one of the most unabashedly alive people I'd ever met.

    What we most shared, I think, was an unfettered love of rock 'n' roll; she loved the music as much as any musician did. And whenever Bea urged me to join her in "hanging out" with someone, I found it hard to refuse.

    "Lemmy?" I said. " The Lemmy? Lemmy Kilmister, from Motörhead?"

    "Sure," said Bea. We were sitting in her crash pad, contemplating how to spend the day. "He's one of my best friends. Fantastic guy—I love him. You will, too. The king of the headbangers! Plus, you can discuss history with Lemmy, he's a history buff. A scholar. He's always reading history books. In fact, he's got a new song he played me called '1916.' It's about World War One or something."

    "Doesn't he live in, like, England? London?"

    Bea shook her wild-haired (or wildly hair-sprayed) head. "Nope, he just moved here. He lives a few blocks down the hill from the Rainbow. That's his favorite place in town. He said we can come and visit!"

    "Hang out with Lemmy?" I muttered. Finally, the invitation sank in, and I sat bolt upright on Bea's sofa. "Fuck yes!"

    Not only did Lemmy's badass mustache, black gunslinger attire, rolled-up shirtsleeves, and—most importantly—prodigious facial warts mark him as the most essential rock 'n' roller in the inhabited Milky Way, he by all accounts walked his talk 24/7. "The Keith Richards's Keith Richards," you might call him. Just the way the Lemmster sang onstage—with the microphone not level with his face but pointed down at him, as if he were howling at the moon, or at the gods, in a fierce lightning-storm—told you all you needed to know.

    Then there was Lemmy's music, which was its own thing of wonder. Aside from Led Zeppelin, whose deep cuts, especially on Physical Graffiti and Presence, constituted their own glorious genre, an exotically seasoned and crunchy loud funk, I couldn't stand metal—Sabbath, Slayer, Priest, Metallica—it was too much redundant thudding and too many teenage boy concerns. But I always had time for Motörhead. Their sound was irresistible—a mercilessly headlong rush that sounded like the MC5 on speed (and the 5 already sounded as though they were on speed, so this was an overdose of speed). With that rush, you could never forget Lemmy's close association with the best of the British punks.

    As for Lemmy's lyrics, they were as great or greater than the music. Like the man's interviews in rock magazines, where the worldview he expressed was half 60s hedonism, half no-nonsense street-wisdom, and 100-percent hilarious, the Motörhead lyrics were sui generis—"beyond category," as Duke Ellington would say. Somehow they managed to mock the typical metal subjects even while serving them up with all the élan, and then some. Think of the song "Killed by Death"—those three simple words render completely foolish the blacker side of metal's Reaper fetishizing. How fun to sing that chorus loud, though! Or listen (again, loudly) to "Eat the Rich," in which the class struggle suggested by the title gets subsumed by blowjob innuendoes—or does it? Just how should one begin to unpack a couplet like, "Sitting here in my hired tuxedo, / You want to see my bacon torpedo"?

    I couldn't listen to a lot of Motörhead, since it all began to sound alike after half-a-dozen songs. Nevertheless, as Bea readily agreed with me, nothing could knock you down the way those half-a-dozen songs did. The only music that comes close in this effect is Ween's perfect Motörhead parody, "It's Gonna Be a Long Night."

    Off to Lemmy's house we went. I don't remember, 25 years later, precisely how we got there. I probably drove us—but I didn't always have a rental car in LA, so we might have taken a cab or taken a bus or hitchhiked or even walked (all of which we did together when I was visiting). I also don't remember much of what we spoke about with Lemmy once we found him by the pool at his modest apartment complex, though I did ask him about the book he'd been reading, a paperback biography of Hitler. Not at all "scholarly" though certainly historical, the book looked as if it had been purchased via an ad in the back of, say, Soldier of Fortune magazine.

    I do remember a few things from that afternoon: how surprised I was by what Lemmy was wearing (a Speedo or some similarly small-sized bathing suit); how slightly disappointed by my presence he seemed at first (perhaps when Bea told him she was bringing "a friend," he assumed it was a lady friend); and how polite and quietly amiable he was once he'd warmed up with me conversationally. Hardly the raging rock beast of reputation, he was a perfect English gent.

    I also remember that Bea kept peppering Lemmy with questions about his latest music. She likewise kept wanting to dance. (As I've said, her love for rock 'n' roll was deep, wide, and nonstop.) Eventually the three of us walked to the Rainbow together, where the staff gladly greeted Lemmy and Bea, valued customers, and me, their "guess-he-can't-be-too-bad" companion. By then, of course, Lemmy had ditched his bathing suit and put on his proper rocker uniform, and we left him at the bar when he got started on his second glass of Jack Daniels.

    Lemmy in 2009. Portrait by Chris Shonting for VICE

    Since that afternoon, I've "dined out" with fellow Motörhead fans on the story of my hang with Lemmy. Unfortunately, I couldn't share the fond memory for very long with Bea, because we fell out of touch. This was mostly accidental: In those pre-cellphone, pre-internet days, it wasn't so easy to keep up with someone when they kept changing their address and therefore their phone number. But I've always felt particularly responsible for losing contact with Bea, because the last time I saw her (about a year after I met Lemmy), she got in a strange mood with me when I stopped by to see her, and this annoyed me, and I decided not to see her again during that LA visit.

    Back in New York a few months later, however, I started to miss Bea and tried to call her, but her number had been disconnected. She'd often mentioned her mother and brother to me, but I had no way of reaching them either. And whenever I returned to Hollywood, I made a point of visiting the Rainbow and asking the bouncers there if they'd encountered Bea.

    "Not in a long time," they always said.

    Meanwhile, my enjoyment of Lemmy's music continued. I went to Lemmy's 50th birthday concert at the Whiskey on the Strip, and laughed along with everyone else at the opening act, Metallica, who all dressed up like Lemmy and played Motörhead songs.

    While waiting to get into the venue that night, I felt sorry for a drugged-out patron who'd been kicked out of the place. Because he was too drugged out to notice that some prankster had set his pant leg on fire with a lighter, I started stamping on his leg to put the fire out, and not understanding why I was doing this, he turned all his fury on me, thereby proving true the adage, "No good deed goes unpunished."

    In the late 90s, I began dating a lovely Norwegian woman in Paris. We didn't stay a couple, but we had a child together, becoming dear friends as well as co-parents in the process. Ingunn too was a Motörhead fan, and her brother Ols was an even greater Motörhead-head. Whenever I found an article about Lemmy in a magazine, I clipped it and sent it to him. Then, as soon as my son with Ingunn was old enough, we started playing Motörhead music for him, and Gabriel came to dig Lemmy as much as we did. At nine or ten I brought Gabriel to one of his first rock concerts, Motörhead at the Zenith in Paris, and one of my sweetest memories of my son's childhood is our dancing like lunatics together to "The Ace of Spades."

    From time to time while in LA, I ran into Lemmy again at the Rainbow—he was usually alone, usually at the video-poker game—and I would remind him of how we'd met. I figured he might know where Bea was, but he didn't. Or maybe he did know but said he didn't in order to protect her privacy from a New York guy he only dimly remembered meeting, if he remembered me at all. From time to time, too, I would look up Bea's name on the internet, but never found out where she was living, much less any way to contact her.

    Her trail was cold—until two years ago.

    Two years ago, checking her name online for the first time in many moons, I saw that a party had just been held in her honor at, where else, the Rainbow. Except the party wasn't in "her honor," exactly—it was in her memory. She'd passed away a few days before, at age 50.

    Despite our not having spoken in 20 years, the news of Bea's young death shook me up terribly. To lose a friend who's your own age reminds you that you're mortal; to lose a friend you'd tried and failed to reunite with teaches you something different: how cruel fate can be. If only I'd tried harder to reconnect with her , I kept telling myself. And now, two years after Bea, Lemmy has left the Hollywood scene, too, dying of cancer just following his 70th birthday.

    I can't say how close Lemmy and Bea remained with each other as friends, or how close they ever were. But I think of Bea now as a sort of yin to Lemmy's yang—the true fan who complements the artist by a boundless love of the art. What Lemmy heard in early rock 'n' roll, Bea heard in Motörhead and the other headbanger music she loved, and in her own fashion, Bea was every bit as colorful, as electrifying, and as archetypal a rock 'n' roll figure as Lemmy was. It took each of them, rocker and rock fan, to make the music pulsate to the nth degree. The two of them, their two kinds, were both needed to complete the aesthetic circuit. So I'll be missing them separately, the Bea I once knew well and the Lemmy I hardly knew at all—but I'll also be missing them as a unit, missing them together.

    Gary Lippman is a journalist, author, and visual artist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Paris Review, VICE, Open City, Sex and Design, and Fodors Travel Guides.



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