On an all new episode of ABANDONED, Rick McCrank explores, skates, and swims in an abandoned nuclear power plant and investigates nuclear paranoia in the Pacific Northwest.
ABANDONED airs Fridays at 9 PM on VICELAND.
Screenshot via YouTube
During a recent conference call, I asked Samantha Bee what has been the most comic moment of the election thus far. The Full Frontal host recalled a scene of slapstick confusion, back in the Republican primaries, when the candidates couldn't figure out how to take the stage when their names were called. Ben Carson loitered behind a curtain for five minutes not knowing what to do, and Trump had to be coaxed out three times. "It hasn't been funny since," Bee sighed wearily.
Funny or not, it's Bee's hard-earned job to turn this lemon of an election into comedy lemonade, and she's racking up the ratings making funny out of not-so-funny material. Full Frontal with Samantha Bee has been competitive with premium cable shows like Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and won a Television Critics Association Awards last month, ousting stalwart shows like CBS Sunday Morning and Real Time with Bill Maher. Like her mentor at the Daily Show, Jon Stewart, she's blended civic outrage while still reveling in the grotesque insanity of it all. Her Wednesday night debate special captured the agony and occasional ecstasy of covering the presidential gladiator contact sport.
The most frustrating part of coverage in this election, Bee continued, is the fact that the media "treats the two candidates as equivalent in any way. They aren't apples and oranges; they are apples and a Frisbee."
Bee's hardball attitude toward mainstream media's attempts at election non-bias has made headlines. Most recently, she garnered the wrath of conservative pundit Ross Douthat over her criticism of fellow late-night host Jimmy Fallon's glad-handing of Trump, during the candidate's Tonight Show appearance earlier this month. That same day, Bee told reporters that she was really taking NBC to task for continually providing a platform for the candidate—from The Apprentice, when he was embroiled in birther conspiracy theories, to hosting SNL shortly after he'd called Mexicans rapists, and finally the disastrous Matt Lauer interview. "I'm tired of enabling them to make it look like this is just a guy who likes to have fun," she said. "We'd just had it."
What comes through on Bee's show and even in her call-out of Fallon and NBC is that she takes the potential devastation of a Trump presidency very seriously. With her trademark knit-together-eyebrows and biting commentary, she can laugh through gritted teeth. But as we inch toward November, outcomes are far from certain, and increasingly farther from funny.
Monday's debate presented a unique moment in the way most Americans consume media—one in which we all had to emerge from our respective ideological hiding holes and consume the same 99 minutes of live television, rather than the usual wind tunnel of our choosing that reinforces our worst fears. And even though Bee operates within what many critics call the "echo chamber" of liberalism, that's not something she's happy about. "I feel sad actually, that you can exist in your own tiny bubble," she said. "Your entire worldview can be customizable and that's a pretty dangerous place to be."
And yet with ratings for the debate setting viewership records, the latest poll numbers between the Apple and the Frisbee are hardly a gaping chasm.
What is a hilarious yet scared shitless late night host to do?
In Wednesday night's debate special, Bee and her Full Frontal team pulled out a dizzying balance of gravitas and cutting humor. Opening with an image of Lady Liberty with a gun to her head, Bee proceeded to refer to the debate as "the 90-minute lull between police shootings of black men." One of the most nationally embarrassing media moments was a supercut Full Frontal assembled of cable news pundits speculating how Hillary could win the debate with a smattering of useful tips: "She can't shout." "She can't cough." "She can't condescend." Or as Bee so succinctly distilled their admonishments: "Save us from fascism, but don't be a bitch about it." And she came with the zingers: "Hillary mopped the floor with Donald Trump like she's an undocumented Honduran housekeeper at Mar-a-Lago."
In an effort toward bridging that highly curated news wind tunnel Bee decried earlier, she sent her field correspondents out to report from bars on the opposite coasts of Manhattan, or as the announcer's voiceover bellowed, "We wanted to know what both Americans were thinking during the debate." The brilliant Ashley Nicole Brown patrolled the historic Stonewall Inn in the West Village and Allana Harkin embedded at the Tonic sports bar in Midtown with the pleated-front khaki Republican contingency. Harkin asked a pallid man in a Make America Great Again cap what he thought Hillary would wear, and he predicted, "A pantsuit, a bulletproof vest, and a catheter," due to her failing health. When Brown asked a Hillary supporter what would be in a Donald Trump cocktail he offered, "Piss." Concern with candidates' urinary tracts unites a divided country.
The show's watershed moment was connecting two supporters from either camp on a split screen to postmortem what they saw. Naturally, each saw wildly distinct victories. The Trump supporter cheered, "He schooled her, no argument!" and the Stonewall patron pressed his crosstown interlocutor to cite a single policy issue his candidate put forth. The exchange unraveled into mutual bewilderment and mockery. But it was a dialogue—in the dictionary definition of two humans speaking to each other, however briefly. In this election cycle, perhaps no more than any before, just a moment of exchange seems to be the tallest order and the most charged. Bee will always give us a laugh, even in the grimmest of times.
Or, as Bee put it, "I don't see comedy as being apolitical. What I do is something different." Forcing us to confront our political adversaries face to face might be her best contribution yet.
Follow Elizabeth Greenwood on Twitter.
On an all new episode of ABANDONED, Rick McCrank explores, skates, and swims in an abandoned nuclear power plant and investigates nuclear paranoia in the Pacific Northwest.
ABANDONED airs Fridays at 9 PM on VICELAND.
With the highest rate of consumption in Europe—and a mortality rate three times higher than the European average—the UK is clearly keen on its drugs. In VICE's new documentary series High Society, we meet the users, dealers, and manufacturers behind these statistics, and look at the impact drugs have on British society as a whole.
Check out the trailer for the new series and watch the first episode on ecstasy Monday, October 3
Illustration by Stephen Maurice Graham
We promised another episode of VICE Gaming's still-untitled new podcast, and here it is! As the weekend approaches, we spent an hour discussing Austin Walker's interview with Mafia III's senior writer where they went in-depth on why race and racism feature prominently in the game. We also discuss the rumors that No Man's Sky has been reported to a European advertising authority for misleading marketing, and introduce our newest feature...The Question Bucket!
VICE Gaming's New Podcast can be streamed above, but you can also subscribe to us on iTunes, Google Play, and Stitcher. If you're using something else, this RSS link should let you add the podcast to whatever platform you'd like. Oh, and please take a moment and review the podcast, especially on iTunes, as it's the best way to help new people stumble across it!
In the future, our hope is to deliver new installments earlier in the day, but technical difficulties proved quite an obstacle this week. Plans are also in the works to have future episodes broadcast live, but that'll take a little bit of time. I mean, heck, we still haven't even figured out a name...any ideas?!
Interaction with you is a big part of this new podcast, so make sure to send any questions you have for us to gaming@vice.com with the subject line: "Questions." (Without the quotes!) We can't guarantee we'll answer all of them, but rest assured, we'll definitely be reading them.
See you on Monday!
Follow Patrick Klepek on Twitter, and if you have a news tip you'd like to share, drop him an email.
Photo via Flickr user Kelly Flanagan
Southern California geologists warn the LA area from time to time that there's real science to back up the local legend known as The Big One: a giant, overpass-snapping earthquake that's supposedly always on the horizon. But the warnings aren't usually as specific as the one they're giving this week: The Big One, they say, is unusually likely to become reality by next Tuesday.
According to a new press release from the United States Geological Survey (USGS), the odds of a huge and potentially damaging earthquake in Southern California could be as high as one in 100 from now until October 4, following a series of small earthquakes on Tuesday along the San Andreas Fault line about 150 miles from Downtown Los Angeles. The odds could also be as low as one in 3,000.
This comes after a claim in May by Thomas Jordan, director of the the Southern California Earthquake Center, that an earthquake on the San Andreas Fault is just, kinda, way past due and likely to happen pretty soon. Or as Jordan put it: the fault is "locked, loaded, and ready to go."
The USGS cites an "earthquake swarm" near the lakeside town of Bombay Beach, California that started on September 26. That spot is "part of a fault network that connect the southernmost end of the San Andreas fault with the Imperial fault," meaning stress along multiple faults might be compounding the earthquake-causing effects.
As of September 26, that swarm had included 142 mini-quakes with richter-scale magnitudes of 1.4 to 4.3—hardly a tremble to the average California earthquake snob.
But, as the seismologist Egill Hauksson told the LA Times on Friday, "maybe one of those small earthquakes that's happening in the neighborhood of the fault is going to trigger it, and set off the big event." USGS says that could mean a magnitude 7.0 or greater earthquake—more powerful than the 1994 Northridge Earthquake, which killed 72 people, injured 9,000, and caused $25 billion in damage.
But that one percent chance doesn't necessarily mean Californians should pile into their earthquake bunkers for the next few days. "Swarm-like activity in this region has occurred in the past, so this week's activity, in and of itself, is not necessarily cause for alarm," the USGS release says.
One more bit of good news: The San Andreas fault is hundreds of miles from the ocean, which substantially reduces the risk of a tsunami, Dr. Lucy Jones, a USGS seismologist, told me last year.
But she also told me that a worst-case-scenario earthquake in Southern California could cause 1,500 buildings to collapse, and might seriously threaten LA's water supply. "If we lose a lot of water pipes, it could make it that much worse to control fires," she added.
Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.
This week, the finale of GAYCATION's second season, "Deep South," aired on VICELAND. Throughout the season, viewers have reached out to co-host Ian Daniel to share their own stories of the struggles and personal triumphs. We've collected some of those powerful stories so highlight the variety of experience in the LGBTQ community worldwide.
Hello Ian, I'm Angel Santiago's mother. You and Ellen interviewed him for your special program about the Orlando shooting, and I was moved to tears as I watched. Listening to my son tell his story was so hard, because I didn't understand him when he was growing up. I guess I felt so much guilt for causing him emotional pain while he was dealing with his identity when he was younger. I'm grateful he's alive, to be with him, and to give him my love and support. I love my son so much. I want him to be happy. God bless. — Gloria Santiago
I know the chances of you seeing this are slim, but I felt an overwhelming need to send you a message to THANK YOU from the bottom of my heart. The fact that you and Ms. Page are bringing to light how hard it is for anyone who is gay, lesbian, transgender, etc. is amazing. I'm the mom to an amazing, beautiful, talented, giving, generous and kind transgender son. He came out to my husband and I a year ago as initially being a lesbian. I grew up with a gay uncle, so was fine with that—but my husband grew up in a Christian household in St. Thomas, USVI, and didn't understand. When our son told us about being transgender, again it didn't bother me—but my husband still has difficulty understanding his choice.
Our son changed his name to Xavier and started living as a male; I can say I honestly knew when he was in 7th or 8th grade that he was transgender. He struggles daily with body dysphoria, body dysmorphia, severe depression, and bipolar disorder, and he struggles everyday with people misgendering him. When making doctor's appointments we have to use his legal name, and even when I ask doctor's offices to refer to him as Xavier, the majority of them don't. We live in Alaska, and while there is a large LGBTQ community, no one really "sees" what all this does to him. I hurt for him, and I worry for his future and the way people will treat him. We're trying to build him and make him stronger, but I just wanted to thank you for bringing to light the lives of the LGBTQ community and the struggles they face daily. — Kelly
I just wanted to thank you so much for the amazing work you've done with GAYCATION. I'm a 27-year-old woman who's finally accepted myself as gay after 8 years of identifying as bisexual. Dating men was admittedly "easier," but what I never admitted to myself was that it was neither fulfilling nor truly made me happy. I'm currently married to a man, had a stint in the public eye from being on reality TV (which leaves me feeling terrified and overwhelmed about coming out), and have had some of those I've trusted most reply, "Maybe it's just a phase."
When I'm awake late at night like I am right now—sitting alone in my living room with only the company of my own thoughts, trying to figure out how to escape the eye of this storm—it's moments like these, sitting and watching your show, that help me know that's it's going to be ok. They allow me to smile, cry, and keep having the strength to follow my heart, be true to myself, and to fathom the idea that I, too, can find that happiness. I thank you for this, truly from the bottom of my heart. — "Arielle" (name has been changed to protect identity)
I am so touched by your kindness and your great professionalism. I came out when I was 50 after being married for many years; I'm now almost 58 and married to the real love of my life, a man, and your stories resonated very strongly. When the Supreme Court finally gave us the right to marry, I cried all day—like a child who could not believe that we were experiencing the beginning of our freedom to be. There's a lot of progress yet to be made, but people like you and Ellen are making a huge difference. Thank you. — Jean-Pierre Delabre
Ian, I truly appreciate the work you and Ellen are doing to bring light to LGBT issues. I am 67, retired, and pretty much still in the closet. I live in a intolerant suburb of Little Rock, AR and think often about what I could do the help my identity, but run into the reality of feeling too insecure and insignificant to step up. Keep up the good work. — Richard Tankersley
I just wanted to say thank you for being a part of GAYCATION. I'm a 20-year-old queer girl living in Southern Illinois—my dad is a pastor of a southern baptist church here and I am not out. It's painful each day to wake up and be so alone. We moved here when I was 12, and I have only since then come out to my younger sister who has been supportive but can't really talk to me about things. I stopped going to church months ago because I was getting panic attacks and hiding in the bathroom till the service was over. My "friends" stopped talking to me because I quit coming to church, but I can't sit through my dad preaching on the damnation of queers. I feel like he is speaking to me when he preaches and I feel shame and hurt.
After the first episode of GAYCATION, I Googled you and read that you grew up in Indiana—it comforted me to know someone from a smaller area has grown to be a light in the LGBTQ community, as well as a successful writer/artist. I just want to say thank you for giving me hope through this show. I I hope to date a girl one day and to be proud and not ashamed. Sending love to you both, a tiny queer girl in southern Illinois. — Scout
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Bill Clinton speaks at the Clinton Global Initiative in September.(Photo by Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)
In January 1999, with the Monica Lewinsky saga nearing its climax (sorry), Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin did the unthinkable. Every single one of his Democratic colleagues had voted to dismiss the pending charges against Bill Clinton, but Feingold dissented, joining with Republicans to allow the impeachment process to move forward. Clinton loyalists were enraged; Feingold's treachery was seen as giving bipartisan credence to a GOP-led witch hunt that had taken the nation into the gutter. But he didn't relent, even going so far as to bemoan in the official Congressional record that "the President's public conduct, not his private conduct, has brought us to this day."
Though he would ultimately vote to acquit Clinton, Feingold—who's running for the Senate in Wisconsin again this year, after having been ousted in 2010—stated that Bill's many deceptions came "perilously close" to warranting conviction and removal from office. Though the impeachment affair is today sometimes remembered as being the product of a "vast right-wing conspiracy" (to quote Hillary Clinton) or a bunch of hypocritical Republican hucksters getting fake-outraged over a blowjob, Clinton wasn't impeached for sexual transgressions as such, and no one forced him to repeatedly lie in public. Perjury and obstruction of justice, the crimes Bill was accused of committing, are both serious felonies that have landed plenty of less-powerful people in prison. Nor was the ensuing furor limited to prurient Republicans: Tim Kaine, Hillary's current running mate, declared in 2002 (when he was lieutenant governor of Virginia) that he believed Bill should have resigned over the matter.
The issue then, as now, was never the sexual indiscretions themselves. Adults are free to indulge in whatever consensual activities they wish. Bill's apparently boundless lust only became a subject of legitimate political concern because he was accused—time and time again, often credibly—of harassing, abusive, and sometimes outright criminal behavior against multiple women. The political dimension became unambiguous when federal government resources were deployed to cover up the misdeeds, an endeavor spearheaded by none other than Hillary, at whose behest Bill's many accusers were regularly tarnished in the media. This sordid process led to an ever-expanding tangle of state-funded scandal, drama, and duplicity, culminating in Bill's December 1998 impeachment by the House of Representatives.
Just is the case with Bill, Hillary's culpability lies in her public actions, not any private romantic matters. As the journalist Gail Sheehy wrote in the 1999 biography Hillary's Choice: "It was Hillary who made the first call, on the morning the [ Washington] Post story [reporting that Bill and others allegedly encouraged Lewinsky to lie to lawyers] broke, to establish the line the White House would use."
The "line" was disseminated by way of Sidney Blumenthal—the White House aide and longtime Clinton fixer who was in charge of disseminating talking points to the media. "The First Lady said that she was distressed that the President was being attacked, in her view, for political motives for his ministry of a troubled person," Blumenthal later relayed in sworn testimony. (According to the Starr Report, Bill told Lewinsky he'd had "hundreds" of extramarital sexual encounters—which is a whole lot of ministering.)
So that was the story: Bill was the real victim here, not the intern repeatedly slimed by executive branch employees as a "stalker" who wore her dresses a little too tight. In a letter written several years later to the late writer Christopher Hitchens, Lewinsky personally thanked him for "being the only journalist to stand up against the Clinton spin machine (mainly Blumenthal) and reveal the genesis of the stalker story." Hitchens had stated in a sworn affidavit that he was present when Blumenthal propagated the "stalker" slur at lunch one day in March 1998.
The Lewinsky imbroglio might be the most infamous of Bill's questionable trysts, but it's nowhere near the most morally objectionable. There was Paula Jones, who in another sworn affidavit said that Bill exposed himself and instructed her to "kiss" his penis, actions for which she never offered consent. Clinton ended up paying Jones $850,000 in a lawsuit settlement, a federal judge found him in contempt of court for making " intentionally false" statements, and his law license was suspended. Perhaps most egregious are the allegations of Juanita Broaddrick, who maintains that Bill raped her when he was attorney general of Arkansas and whose story was recounted last month in excruciating detail by Buzzfeed's Katie Baker.
Bill Clinton has never been charged or convicted of sexual assault. Still, there's a vast body of evidence demonstrating that he frequently pursued women in subordinate or vulnerable positions and made use of massive power disparities to obtain sex, including more than once with individuals who subsequently stated that they did not consent to his advances.
The post hoc rationalizations offered always made things worse. The way the Clintons layered half-truth upon half-truth to cover for Bill's conduct—until things spiraled out of control—eerily mirrors the way Hillary has handled her recent email woes. The initial blameworthy act (using a private email server in violation of State Department protocol) has gradually seeped into additional areas of wrongdoing— covering up questionable conduct, repeatedly misleading the public—and though no criminal charges have resulted, what could have been an easily-fixable mishap morphed into a full-fledged debacle.
For their entire political careers, Hillary and Bill have packaged themselves as a single unit: " Two for the price of one" is how a TV reporter characterized it in 1992. Just as Hillary was delegated many important governing responsibilities in the 1990s, so too would Bill under any forthcoming Clinton administration. Hillary herself said in May that she would put him "in charge" of fixing the economy. Whatever else it would mean, Hillary's election would guarantee the return of a known sleazeball to the White House.
Follow Michael Tracey on Twitter.
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Over the past seven days, America witnessed eight mass shootings that left seven dead and 32 wounded. These attacks bring the US mass shooting body count so far in 2016 to 318 dead and 1,147 injured.
Meanwhile, Europe suffered one mass shooting over the same period. On Sunday, gunmen opened fire on a car after chasing it through the southern neighborhoods of Malmo, Sweden, injuring four people before fleeing. This attack brings the continent's body toll in such attacks so far this year up to 43 dead and 140 injured.
This past week actually witnessed fewer American mass shootings and saw fewer people hurt in such attacks than the previous one. But the past few days still felt more brutal than any span of time in the last few weeks, thanks in large part to a rapid succession of eye-catching attacks that drew sustained national and international media coverage.
Last Friday at about 7 PM, a gunman, currently believed to have been a man named Arcan Cetin, entered the Cascade Mall outside Seattle, Washington and opened fire on a group of people near a Macy's makeup counter, killing five. The shooter then fled the scene, prompting a massive manhunt that lasted almost a full day before authorities located Cetin on foot a few dozen miles away and apprehended him in a reportedly listless state. Then on Sunday at about 12:40 AM, a fight near the University of Illinois campus in Champaign, Illinois, led to a shooting that left one bystander dead, three suffering from gunshot wounds, and another wounded by a car while trying to flee the attack. Finally, on Monday at about 6:30 AM, a possibly mentally unstable lawyer wearing a military getup with a Nazi insignia named Nathan Desai opened fire on cars passing near his condominium building in Houston, Texas. He used a handgun and submachine gun, along with a massive cache of ammunition stashed in his Porsche. Desai wounded nine—six with gunshots and three with glass shrapnel—before being shot dead by responders.
These attacks involved totemic elements for an American audience: The apparent randomness of the shooting victims in each case made them seem as if they could have happened to anyone, imparting the sense of imminent and universal threat posed by mass shootings. Their highly public locations increased their visibility, as did the level of detail and personal intrigue surrounding the shooters in the Cascade Mall and Houston shootings, especially. None of these shootings were quite so archetypal and bloody as an attack like the Newtown, Connecticut, massacre of 2012, but they all involved enough hot-button variables to grab headlines.
The week's remaining mass shootings lacked such visibility-boosting features: On Friday at about 5 PM, a robbery in Houston, Texas, evolved into a shooting when the thief opened fire from his car as he was fleeing, injuring four. On Saturday at about 8:30 PM, three men carried out a coordinated ambush on a street in Baltimore, Maryland, likely in retaliation for a previous shooting, injuring eight individuals before fleeing. On Monday at about 3:30 PM, a drive-by at a house with a history of violent incidents in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, left four people inside injured. About three-and-a-half hours later, a street shooting among a group of teens in Humble, Texas, left four people injured. Finally, on Thursday at about 1 AM, another street shooting in San Francisco, California, left one dead and three injured.
Attacks involving murky assailants and seemingly tied to routine forms of violence—and sometimes in areas the public associates with violence—these mass shootings largely fell by the wayside of America's collective radar. Unfortunately, their perceived banality masked the fact that these attacks were in many ways as terrible as those that drew widespread notice: The Baltimore attack had the greatest number of victims this week, including a three-year-old girl and her father who were mere bystanders to the violence. Meanwhile, the shooting in Humble, Texas, which is not far from Houston, involved mostly juveniles and left two very young boys, who happened to be playing soccer on the street, injured as well.
It's understandable that apparently random rampages stoke more personal concern than other attacks, and that novel settings and lurid details catch audiences' eyes. But focusing the bulk of our attention on such attacks blinds us to the real epicenters and some of the worst incidences of America's mass shooting epidemic. And it magnifies fear of rare—if terrible—incidents, while jading us to the common large-scale gun violence ripping through the country almost daily.
Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.
Photo via Flickr user Bruce Frick
I recently had lunch with my friend Anderson, who was telling me about a sexy, dominant, daddy top he met in San Diego at this year's Gay Pride.
"I always hated when a guy would say something like, 'I want to breed your boy pussy,'" he said. "I don't even like it when they call me 'boy.' I'm not your son, and I don't have daddy issues. But this guy—I've never wanted to drink someone's piss so bad. He fucked me in an alley outside this bar. When I left in the morning, he made me walk naked to my car. None of that is me. But the next weekend I asked if I can see him again. He told me only if I begged him. So I begged."
Anderson works in real estate, and his boyfriend is a corporate lawyer. They're respectable guys: They wear suits and ties to work and belong to a Methodist church. Anderson's not the type you might think would drink a dom daddy's piss.
"He wants me to try sounding," he said. (If you're unaware, this involves sticking something down your urethra.) I tried not to cringe.
"Does Chad know?"
"About San Diego Daddy? No way," Anderson said. "Chad wouldn't understand. You know Chad. He washes his hands after sex. This guy... he made me lick him clean after fucking me in the alley." He looked around the restaurant to see if anyone was listening. "Chad doesn't know the person I am with him. I'm not even sure I know who that person is."
I, too, knew what it's like to have someone draw a different side out of you. A couple of years ago, I met this gorgeous boy from Scruff, a gay dating app. He was 23 years old, and had just graduated from USC.
When we first met, we made out, and it was sweet. When I fucked him, he asked me to choke him.
Afterwards, he asked if I'd ever been anyone's "Sir" before.
I hadn't. It wasn't something I'd ever thought about. I like to consider myself "Los Angeles vanilla": I'll do cum, fucking, light fisting, piss, maybe some spit. I can be a little alpha, but nothing too crazy. This was new for me.
The next time he came over, I made him kneel in my bedroom and wait for me. I left a glass of piss on the bedside table, told him to drink it all, and left. An hour later, I went back in. The glass was empty and he was waiting.
Sometimes, I would fuck him while he washed my dishes. One night I kept him in my closet, taking him out every time I got horny. When I was done with him, I would put him back.
I didn't love him. I don't even know who we would have been if we had gone to the movies together. That wasn't who we were. But we shared something incredibly intimate, something I've only ever shared with him. He brought out a side of me I hadn't known existed.
I am not a Sir to my husband, Alex, or our boyfriend, Jon. Alex and I are adventurous. We like to pick up guys and fuck them and be dirty together. With Jon, I'm different. Jon is less interested in other guys. He likes boyfriend sex. But at the same time, I know he's gotten bathroom blow jobs at parties and pissed on guys—with other men, he becomes another person.
Just like I can. Just like we all can.
And that's what I thought about as I listened to Anderson—how subjective sexuality is. All the ways we get to explore who we are, and how others bring out sides of us we didn't know existed.
One of the reasons I wanted to open up my relationship with Jon and Alex was a desire to see how far I could go. How much love I could experience, who I could become sexually, and what my limits were.
I have worked hard to get to a place in my life where I don't feel guilty or ashamed of my sexuality. I don't want to lie or keep dark, dirty little secrets. I want to celebrate and expand who I am.
I know a couple with three adopted kids. They're great dads and husbands, but every so often, one of them will stay home with the kids while the other goes out for the night, with the aim of being as slutty as possible. Maybe it's at a bathhouse or a sex party, or maybe it's pizza and cuddling at a motel with some guy they met on Scruff. It doesn't matter. It's just a chance to be something different than what the pressures of family and parenthood demand, to escape the limits that society and life try to place on us.
We spend so much time defining and limiting who we are: Top, bottom, polyamorous, monogamous, kinky, vanilla. We define and box others in with words like "slut," words which demean them for being sexual. But I believe that the more we explore and open ourselves up to new experiences, the more those limits and definitions fall away.
I can be the hungriest, most submissive bottom in the world, or the roughest, most alpha top. I can want something with a stranger that I don't want to be with my husband. My only limits are those I place on myself, and the ways I define who I am.
"I was wondering," Anderson said to me that day, "if I could be dom one day—maybe I could be someone's Dom Daddy?"
Why not? Sex is intimate and loving, something you can share with the most important people in your life—but it's also playful, and a way to explore and discover things about yourself. Why limit ourselves? It takes courage to break down the ways we define who we are, because it can threaten our masculinity and our identity, but once we do it, something opens up: a you you never knew existed. A kind of freedom emerges.
"I wonder if Chad would let me tie him up," Anderson said. "That would be fun."
Follow Jeff Leavell on Twitter and Instagram.
The Handmaiden, the latest film from Park Chan-wook, the South Korean auteur who brought Oldboy into the world, is as wild as you might expect. Based very loosely on Sarah Waters's 2002 novel Fingersmith, the film has been relocated from Victorian England to Korea in the 1930s, and it manages to be Park's most lavishly staged production yet. The Handmaiden begins as the story of a young Korean pickpocket (Kim Tae-Ri) who tries to grift a Japanese heiress out of her money. But that barely scratches the surface of a whiplash-inducing series of plot twists, touching on torture, old-school porn, sadism, a mental hospital, and a ton of graphic sex.
Most of that graphic sex is between two women. Kim's pickpocket character, Sook-hee, develops unexpected feelings for the heiress, Lady Hideko, played by Kim Min-hee. The lesbian storyline is tender, and propped up by heartfelt, if sometimes operatic performances by the leads. But there's a troubling needle for Park to thread here: The director unabashedly traffics in lurid material, and in service of a lurid lesbian story, he's putting female flesh on lurid display. Despite the film garnering great reviews, not everyone loves Park's presentation of homosexuality.
But Park has always thrived on subject matter that riles people up. His 2000 film JSA, is about an inadvisable friendship between North and South Korean soldiers working at the border between the two warring countries. The DVD of JSA turned into a black-market favorite inside the Hermit Kingdom.
To get a handle on how Park really feels about churning touchy subject matter into rollicking entertainment, I sat down and talked to him in a hotel suite in Los Angeles earlier this week. Park paced around the room giving expansive answers, which were delivered to me through a translator.
Kim Tae-ri and Kim Min-hee in 'The Handmaiden.' Photo courtesy of Amazon Studios/Magnolia Pictures
VICE: Watching your films—Oldboy in particular—was the first thing that made me want to learn about Korea, and then I later moved there. Do people often tell you that?
Park Chan-wook: I come across people who decided they wanted to learn about filmmaking in Korea and even make their way over to Korea. It's something that I really appreciate. It says something about my films—that they're so loved by an international audience. But if Koreans found out that someone learned about Korea through Oldboy, some Koreans might find that uncomfortable.
Why's that?
Because of the content of the film! There's incest! When I went to the Berlin Film Festival with Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, during the Q&A, all the Korean people in Berlin who were there for the Q&A raised their hands and said, "Why do you portray Korea like this? Can't you make a film where Korea is portrayed beautifully?"
"If you want to be real friends, it is necessary to know what the bad aspects are about the other person, or what pain and suffering the other person is going through."
And what do you tell people when they ask that?
That part of becoming true friends with somebody is in knowing the pains the other person is suffering. If you want to be real friends with Europeans, or Germans—we were in Germany—it is necessary to know what the bad aspects are about the other person, or what pain and suffering the other person is going through.
The Handmaiden had all your trademarks: sadism, masochism, revenge, love in defiance of a taboo, murder, and suicide. But even though these themes are recurring, how do you choose which particular story to tell?
I don't have a list where I pick from those elements, but by and large, I look at the big picture, and see what draws me in—what I feel drawn to. Almost every time, the ethical dilemma is what draws me in the most. Everything else is in service of that subject. This film is a bit different—quite distinctive—because this film, rather than dealing with an ethical dilemma, is about love and greed.
Chan-wook on set. Photo courtesy of Amazon Studios/Magnolia Pictures
Would you agree that of all your films, this one that is the most pro-love, and pro-sex?
There certainly are many sexual elements in this film, but not all of it is in praise of sex. For instance, when you come to the elements of the violent male gaze, it's something disgusting, and only when it comes to the lovemaking between the two women is it pro-sex, or pro-love.
I noticed that. The Handmaiden does seem pretty critical of male sexuality. Was that intentional?
It's a kind of rape in my mind—gang rape. book being read, but when they sit there and look at Lady Hideko, listening to her reading pornographic material, it might as well be as violent as gang rape.
But the sex scenes between the women in the film seemed heartfelt. What was it like shooting them?
When it comes to shooting sex scenes, there's nothing more difficult and stressful. What's quite ironic is that when I'm shooting a fistfight and the camera is rolling, the actors have faces full of hatred as the characters fight. But whenever I call, "Cut," the actors can break into laughter and the set can be lively. But when it comes to scenes of lovemaking, even though the scene is supposed to be about being happy, and being in love, you can't apply the same attitude. It's not the same atmosphere. So I try to be as considerate as I can to the actors doing the love scene, and try to get through it as quickly as possible, so they don't have to be uncomfortable for a long time.
Four of your last five movies have had female protagonists. Are you primarily interested in telling women's stories now? And are you a feminist?
Well, it's something that just kind of ended up happening. There was no intention behind it. I didn't say, "Now my focus will be primarily on female protagonists," or, "Now I make feminist movies." It wasn't something that was born out of intent. I suppose getting old, becoming mature as a human being, also means you become more of a feminist.
Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.
Amazon Studios and Magnolia Pictures will release The Handmaiden in theaters October 21.
The idea of an indestructible man in central Harlem arrives at an auspicious time. As the Black Lives Matter movement marches on, the amount of black men becoming hashtags increases every day. The new Netflix series Luke Cage , about a black superhero with indestructible skin, provides a necessary story about black empowerment. Told in hour-long segments, it blends the comic-book world with both the noir and blaxploitation genres, successfully creating a stylish and compelling season of television. Notorious writer Cheo Hodari Coker has created a the show that centers on the black experience: our humanity, our complex identities, our motivations—and means—for survival.
The original Marvel comic Luke Cage, Hero for Hire made its debut in June 1972 when blaxploitation films were at its peak. The main protagonist—who first went by the name Carl Lucas—was born and raised in Harlem, where he commits petty crimes in a youth gang called the Rivals. As Carl grows up and seeks out a legitimate job, his childhood friend and gangmate Willis Stryker (a.k.a. Diamondback) becomes more invested in violence. Later, while wrongfully imprisoned at Seagate Prison, Carl becomes a part of a cell regeneration experiment that causes him to have superhuman strength and durability, most notably the power to be bulletproof.
More than four decades later, Coker has modernized this noir story and created a striking and "inclusively black" program that dovetails with Marvel's efforts to become more inclusive. The comic publisher has enlisted Roxane Gay as the first black woman to write a Marvel comic book, Ta-Nehisi Coates has taken over the Black Panther comic, and Ryan Coogler is directing the Black Panther movie.
When I met with Coker at Red Rooster, one of the most famous comfort-food restaurants in Harlem, he was dressed in a crisp suit not unlike Mahershala Ali's character Cottonmouth. As we ate cornbread, collard greens, mac and cheese, and fried chicken, he regaled me with his history of being a black nerd, affinity for Luke Cage and hip-hop culture, and his hopes for what the audience will take away from the story.
Cheo Hodari Coker on set. Photo courtesy of Netflix
VICE: So I read in one of your past interviews that you wanted Luke Cage to be more tied to black empowerment than blaxploitation. Can you explain a bit more about that for those who are familiar with those nuances?
Cheo Hodari Coker: It's not that we're not proud of our blaxploitation roots. We embrace it really more musically than anything else because of the way that Adrien Young, Ali, and Shaheed Muhammed kind of like a mix of Marvin Gaye's Trouble Man with little dashes of Bernard Herman or Ennio Morricone. By getting a 30-piece orchestra, we were really able to make very distinct musical choices. The further you get into the series, it becomes much more apparent and deeper.
we became more confident in the show's ability to express itself musically without using other songs and so with the exception of the song that we have coming with Method Man...
Whoa, that's exciting.
Well, the moment with Method Man is interesting. I was kind of apprehensive about using it in the trailer because I wanted to save it. But I'm realizing that you have to reveal little bits to keep things going. When people see Method Man and get deeper into it in terms of the context of the episode, there's a moment that really is just incredible. Without spoiling it, it's one of my favorite moments in the entire series.
"This show is kind of about subverting expectations. This is a show where heroes come in hoodies."
I want to talk about the significance of the hoodie because immediately I thought of Trayvon Martin and its link to black criminality. Yet Luke Cage is the hero—or trying to be—so I'm trying to figure out that middle ground. Was that a distinct choice that you decided to do that with the hoodie?
Luke Cage's whole appeal is that he doesn't wear a mask, he doesn't wear a cape, you can find him at the barber shop. He's not hiding, he's not going anywhere. I wanted to show that black men in hoodies can be anything. I mean, I've been wearing hoodies since Stanford so but I also know that if someone rolls up on me and sees me in a hoodie they're not gonna see Stanford, they're not gonna see Hotchkiss. They're gonna make their own assumptions about who it is I am and what it is I'm about. This show is kind of about subverting expectations. This is a show where heroes come in hoodies. This is a show where the villain is a frustrated musician, where politicians can be completely sincere and also at the same time completely ruthless.
Right. I remember the one part where Cottonmouth and Mariah are sitting in the park and they make mentions of invaders, which sort of reminds me of gentrification. How do you decide who the enemy is?
Mariah actually believes in what she's doing and Cottonmouth is like, "Come on, it's all a front. We are criminals, this is the shit that we do." They are both about power. They are not about the people. It's all about controlling what they have and they can't control the people who's buying what and how it's changing. So it was a way to kind of look at gentrification.
If you look at the history of Harlem, Harlem comes from Haarlem. It was Dutch. It was a different ethnic ghetto before the great migration of black people who came from the south, and all over the place, looking for the promised land. When that influx happened in the Great Migration and this demographic change, it became like black and white flight. But at the same there was always these different sinners. Gangsters have always been there. Gangsters were there during the Jazz Age and the hip-hop age. It's always been a continuation but it all happens in one place. So if you add a bulletproof black man with superpowers into that, no matter where you point the camera, you have an interesting story that both is black but at the same time, simultaneously, deeply Marvel. That's the whole thing was that I wanted to prove: that you could sell a story that was Marvel but then by adding culture as a different kind of special effect, you can enhance the story that is being told so it's automatically different than anything that you've seen.
"My favorite Paul Mooney joke of all time is when he said that he was only black on nights and weekends because otherwise it's too stressful."
I keep thinking about the doubling of identities and how seamlessly they change depending on where they are. It made me think about the psychologies of the heroes and villains especially in a place like Harlem where you know gentrification is happening.
I can't remember if it was W.E.B. Dubois who the notion of black double consciousness, of having to be two people at once is what we call code-switching. My favorite Paul Mooney joke of all time is when he said that he was only black on nights and weekends because otherwise it's too stressful. That's a really subtle joke, but it's something that we've all gone through because of having to subvert elements of your culture to just get through a workplace where you are not the norm. That's what I think white people take for granted; they can fully be themselves in any environment whereas black people that assimilate and move up constantly have to be able to switch. In a way, hip-hop was the first art form that said, "Nah, we're gonna kick down the door to the mainstream and we are not dressing up." It became a cultural evolution and its own paradox. So that's kind of what a show like this represents in being a hip-hop comic-book show, because we are using the attitude of hip-hop to change the way that you tell this kind of story.
Another thing that stuck out to me when I was watching a couple episodes was the intergenerational conflict, which is young black and Latino guys versus the older characters.
One of the most profound rap lyrics ever for me was Notorious B.I.G.'s " Things Done Changed" where he said, "Back in the days our parents used to take care of us / Look at them now they even fuckin' scared of us / Callin' the city for help because they can't maintain / Damn, shit done changed." The disconnect that Shameek and Chico have from their parents is that they try and make their own way and they are not really trying to fit into the system. It's them seeing an opportunity to rob Cottonmouth and that kind of sets the whole engine. Pop, as an ex-hood, is not afraid of these kids. He's somebody that's basically trying to provide them with a different life in a better way. That's what the barbershop represents: safety. These kids are not strong enough to say, "I'm scared, I don't wanna be out here in the streets, I need an alternative." So the barbershop becomes the one place.
Photo by Myles Aronowitz/courtesy of Netflix
The role of black women also stuck out. I really loved Misty's characterization because she understands the life and culture, but she is trying to do her own thing, too. She still has so much autonomy and she has so much strength in ways that diverge from her male counterparts.
You know, I've always grown up around educated, independent black women. My mother was a single mom and dropped out of college to have me. I watched her basically work her way through night school to finish her degree. And then when I was nine years old, she got her law degree. Then I saw her turn that into a master's in social work. Eventually she became the commissioner of the Department of Social Services of Connecticut. As a little kid, she used to take me to the library because she always had to study and that's how I became a reader. That's kind of how I fell in love with books, that and her reading to me.
I wanted women that reflected the realities of the kind of women that I would be around, like my mother or my aunt Valerie that was the executive editor of Essence magazine. I remember my Essence internship. I mean, that was heaven on earth because I was around all of these beautiful, dynamic sisters. All you were around were Mistys and Mariahs: women with power and focus and poise. But you very rarely see that . You can show fully fleshed-out women that have careers and do things but they aren't always pining for men.
Follow Morgan Jerkins on Twitter.
Luke Cage is now streaming on Netflix.
Photo by August Linnman, via Wikimedia Commons
This article originally appeared on VICE Spain
Given the state of the world today, you're pretty lucky to have a job. That's easy to forget though, when you're just returning from your summer vacation and only have grey skies and wet socks to look forward to in the months that lie ahead. Once you're back in that daily work routine, you know the healthy color on your face and butt will quickly fade, that project manager who's always breathing heavily and munching on a bag of raw almonds will be back at your side all day, and everything will be shit again. So yeah, no—not something to look forward to.
It wasn't always like that—remember being eight and dying to get back to school after two excruciatingly long summer months of doing absolutely nothing? That feels like a very, very long time ago. That's why we asked a couple of kids and teenagers about what it's like for them to get back to school after the summer, and for some advice on how to deal with getting back to normal life.
VICE: Grown-up people often fall into a deep, dark pit of despair when they have to return to work after their summer vacations. How do you feel about going back to school?
Carlota: I'm not sad because I get to play with my best friend, Chester.
What's the best thing about going back to school, and what's the worst?
I like being with my friends, but the worst thing is getting up early in the morning. I don't like it when someone wakes me up. Sometimes, I dream about Esquitx—that's my favorite pony at my riding school—and when they wake me up from those dreams I get so angry.
Do you like being away from your parents while you're at school?
Yes, I have a great time without adults. I like painting and playing with Lego and Memory. And when my friends and I are on the playground we play farts.
You play farts?
No, I was joking!
What advice would you give me to make me feel better about having to go back to work?
Arse, arse, arse! Are you happy now?
VICE: What motivates you to go back to school after the summer?
Elvis: I think about being with my friends again. Besides, school isn't very hard at the beginning of the year. It gets harder later as the months go by but by then, I'll be more used to being back in school.
What do you like best about going back to school, and what's the worst thing about it?
Having fun with my friends is the best thing—we usually spend the morning break in the courtyard talking and having a second breakfast, and we play during the longer lunch break. We also have fun when we read in the library, for example. It's good that it's not so hot in school after summer, too. But I don't like homework or my language classes and exams.
What is the best breakfast to fuel up for the return to routine?
I like toast with tomato and ham, or cheese or spicy sausage. And fruit.
Do you like being away from your parents when you're in school?
That's a really difficult question. What I like most is being away from my brother for a while, because during the summer we spend all day together and that's dead boring at the end. But my parents—I don't know, I don't care. They don't bother me. My brother is a bit younger than me, and he bothers me. Sometimes.
What is your advice for adults like me who have to go back to work now?
I always see adults sitting around on sofas, and enjoying just sitting and doing nothing. So take the sofa with you! Or get a job where you can sit on a sofa. If that exists, of course. Does it exist?
VICE: How do you feel about going back to high school now that summer's over?
Carolina: I have some new subjects this year and I'm really curious about who will be in my class. I've always loved learning new things, but I hate waking up early and studying.
Does going back to school feel different now than when you were little?
It may sound stupid but when I was little, I always wanted to go back to school to see my teachers. I adored them—now they're the last thing I want to see.
Who do you think is more excited—you about going back to school or your parents about going back to work?
Well, these days it's a blessing to have a job. I don't think they're looking forward to going back that much—they just don't complain because they're happy to have a job and they need the work.
Do you think grown-ups complain too much about work?
During the school year, yes, I think that you complain too much. You don't have to study, you don't have assignments with absurd deadlines. But I guess you have the right to complain—it's a huge responsibility to bring money home, to depend on your job, and have others depend on it. You get to change the world a little bit with the work you do.
VICE: Are you looking forward to going back to college now that summer's over?
Edu: Yes, and no. This will be my second year studying journalism and I'm excited about going to class because I like my subjects, my classmates, and university life in general. But it's obviously sad that three months of doing absolutely nothing have come to an end.
Don't you find it a drag to go back to your daily routine after all this time?
A little bit, yeah. The truth is that you're very motivated the first few days but then you lose momentum and when the first month comes to a close, you're fucking bored again. But right now, I'm really looking forward to get back to university life, see my friends and get started.
What advice would you give people who have to go back to work now?
The first days will be difficult but once you're back in your routine, time will fly by and before you know it, it will be summer again.
What is fun? Everyone knows what it feels like, but how do you describe it? Start trying and you'll realize you're just talking about the emotions fun gives you. It's completely subjective: one person's idea of raucous fun makes another want to take a power drill to their cornea. Plus, as you get older, your idea of fun changes: it becomes much more "let's play a nice game of Reversi after dinner" and less "let's poison our blood with alcohol and run around naked."
Fun evades definition. And if you can't pin fun down, then how can you have more of it?
I had a lot of questions for Dr. Ben Fincham—the man I've decided to call the "Professor of Fun" because of the time he spent at the University of Sussex, studying how to have fun before writing his book, The Sociology of Fun. If anyone was going to be able to teach me how to have a laugh, it was him. Of course, I wasn't sure exactly how much fun I could have over an entire day and night with a man I'd never met before, but I was willing to find out.
On the way to Brighton to meet the Professor of Fun, he texted me asking if I wanted to go to a soccer match. I hate soccer. I hate hearing people talk about soccer. I hate that echoed roar in the background every time it's on in the pub. But I figured this was probably some kind of initial test, and I wanted Ben to think I was fun, so I said, "Yes, I think we should."
Upon meeting him, I could immediately tell Ben was an interesting character—the opposite of a stuffy lecturer. Which kind of makes sense, considering he literally just wrote a book about having fun. He's got an outrageous and contagious laugh—the type that makes people nearby turn around to see who it belongs to.
"Fun is a subtle way of working out who is with you and who isn't," he explained, walking up the pier. "If someone says they had a fun time at the weekend robbing a tramp and pooing themselves, you instantly know if they're your kind of person—you start discerning everything about them. Importantly, they're saying a lot about the sort of person they want you to think they are. You haven't had to do a lot of the overt identity work to find that out."
At this point, I was pleased I'd said yes to the soccer. I wanted to be "with" him.
Soundtracked by an endless loop of James Brown screaming about how he "feels good," I bought us a card for some fair rides. The card said "fun card" on it—surely this was meant to be.
Ben told me that one facet of fun was experiential, and that hopefully after experiencing rides we'd be giggling, and after that talk about what fun we'd had.
Ben started laughing hysterically at the rust on the ride as we were cranked up the slope. "Look at that rust!" he screamed. "We're going to die!" I started to get extremely anxious. It legitimately did not look safe. Fuck, I thought. This isn't fun. This isn't fun at all. Adrenaline was pumping through me and I started screaming without stopping until we were brought back down again.
"I thought we were going to die!" Ben howled. "Me too!" I screamed. Then I started hysterically laughing and couldn't stop. Was that fun? I realized that it had been.
As we ran to get on more rides, Ben explained that fun is a temporal thing and very clearly defined. You can pinpoint when it starts and finishes. "We get on a ride, we have fun, now we're off the ride and we've stopped having fun," he said. "You only know something is fun after the event. That's important, because to have fun you have to be taken away from analysis. Otherwise you would be in an analytic state, which would preclude you from having fun."
That's where fun is different from pleasure, enjoyment, or happiness. Sometimes you bask in those feelings as you're having them; the ones which last for much longer. But having fun can also induce those feelings: since we had fun on the first ride, I felt happy and couldn't stop smiling.
I asked Ben if there was a limit to how much fun we could have, seeing as I was technically here to work, even if we were just messing around. It turned out work is a heated topic for him. He said it was possible, but only because I was away from my desk. We designate spaces for fun, you see, often subconsciously. The pub: a place for fun. A friend's house: place for fun. The office: absolutely no chance.
"It's extremely difficult to have fun at work," he said passionately. "We're not dopes. We seek out fun in the places we know we can have it, with the few people we know we can have it with. At work, everything is structured. It's an institution and they operate on structural levels, which means it operates normally."
This all goes back to the very origin of the word. Fun emerged in the late 17th century and all it meant was "low-wit" or "stupidity." Around the time of the industrial revolution it was appropriated by the bourgeois class to describe the middle classes as being stupid and feckless. It then got picked up by the working classes in the 19th century to essentially mean "not doing what your boss is telling you to do." The word itself became subversive to the productive process.
"So when companies have 'fun' offices, all that means is they're squeezing production out of people," says Ben. "It's very sly. Say no! Say, 'I'll have fun when I have autonomy and control. Fun is mine!'"
Yeah, VICE—fun is mine!
Strolling around the pier in damp clothes from a stupid log flume, I challenged the Professor of Fun. What about work banter? That could be fun, right?
"Banter is a cultural artifact and it's nothing to do with having fun," he said. "Funny and fun are two different things, but they're often conflated. Humor relies on the imbalance of power. Often we laugh at the expense of others. With fun, it's the opposite. You can only have fun when the power is equalized out. You can't be aware of the differences of hierarchy of power, so if you're drinking with your boss, you won't be able to have fun until the both of you forget they're your boss."
So basically, when your manager takes you all out to the bar on your $20-a-head bonding budget and you're stuck next to wine-breath-Nick as he tries to banter with you, remember: it's not your fault that you're having a miserable time.
I found the dodgems fun because the object of the game is to smash into people. The more I managed to sneak up on Ben and Jake, the photographer, and ram into them, seeing the shock on their faces, the more I reveled in the activity. Which probably says a lot about the sort of person I am.
"Competitiveness is a funny one," said Ben afterwards. "Usually it just makes people angry and kills fun dead."
I thought about my nan, who gets drunk at Christmas and, within five minutes of everyone having a lovely seasonal time playing Articulate, starts swearing and upends the board.
After dodgems we moved onto Dolphin Derby, where Ben illustrated the point he'd just made. I'm one of those people who claims to not be competitive, but then starts honking like a goose as soon as favor starts to swing in my direction. I wasn't winning Dolphin Derby and, because I am a petulant child, Dolphin Derby was not fun.
See, fun isn't supposed to have an aim, like winning. As Ben kept telling me, fun can't involve heavy commitment.
As we walked back down the pier, Ben asked me a simple question that floored me: when was the last time I'd had fun? I had to go back a few weeks. I'd got drunk in my friend Sophie's apartment and we turned up the music very loudly and played a game. She lives next to a bus stop, and every time a bus passed the window we danced really aggressively to catch the attention of the upstairs deck and try to get them to not only stare but start smiling. It was the first time in a long time I'd cried laughing—the kind of fun that makes your face crinkle up and your insides go all warm. Afterwards, lying on her airbed, not helped by the glow of the booze fading, I felt sad, because I couldn't recall the last time I had felt like that.
When you're a kid you can sing to lyrics videos at sleepovers, and as a teen you can run around screaming with laughter after pulling a stupid prank on someone, or texting something awful to the person they fancy. But our lives aren't made to facilitate fun as adults. Ben made me feel better by telling me how difficult his case studies found it to remember a singular time they'd had fun. That was sad. I didn't want to be that person.
At this point we started drinking. It was only about 2:30 PM. A couple of pints in, Ben suggested going in the ocean, which I absolutely didn't want to do. I can't swim and therefore hate the sea as much as soccer. Because we were meeting in Brighton, which is famously next to the sea, I thought he might suggest this, so deliberately didn't bring a bikini—and the last thing I wanted on the internet was pictures of me stomping around the beach in my actual underwear.
But something in me clicked. Ben kept going on about being spontaneous.
"Forget about the camera," he said. "We'll leave it behind on the beach. We're here, the sun is shining, and this could be the last chance you'll get this year. This isn't about the piece—this is us, now."
He started laughing his laugh at a decent volume and I knew it had to be done.
Me, a majestic goddess of the sea
Surprise, surprise: it was fun. I lost my favorite ring getting nailed by waves and I didn't even care. We got out onto the sand, felt the end-of-summer sun on our faces and let the fun dry out into contentment. "You were able to have fun because you lost your inhibitions," said Ben. "That's so important in fun having. You have to forget your responsibilities."
If I wasn't a huge fan of this man already, he then suggested getting really, really drunk. So that's what we did.
Alcohol and drugs get a bad rep for their relationship to fun, according to Ben. The large proportion of his case studies mentioned one or both of the two when talking about having fun.
"Some people would judge others for using booze to have fun, but we don't do it because we're stupid or because we have to in order to have a good time," he said, swigging a tarty cocktail. "It facilitates fun, so what's wrong with that? We have to feel unburdened by responsibilities in order to have it, which is why I think drink and drugs are so heavily mediating lots of people's fun, because they allow you to step outside of those responsibilities. It takes a lot of willpower to convince yourself you're going to be disinhibited. You can't easily go, 'Now, I'm not going to worry about this thing I'm really worried about.' It's no wonder people use artificial ways of achieving that."
After ploughing through more liquid fun, we walked up to the dreaded soccer stadium.
"In essence, football is a carnivalesque or even pantomime experience," Ben said as a cocky little shit of a player walked painfully slowly towards the ball to aggravate the crowd. "The tension, being in a crowd, the faux aggression in the stands, the spectacle and twin possibilities of elation and disappointment, are an intoxicating mix. However, I think that generally being at the football, while involving many positive things, is not fun."
But there were fleeting moments of it—when everything began to rumble, the air in my ears went flat, and in the shared euphoria when a goal was scored, I felt it. Fun in this space was all wrapped up in the feeling of togetherness. Me, Jake, Ben, and hundreds of other people roaring in unison.
And that's the very nature of fun, right at the heart of it. After all his studying, Ben concluded that you need other people to have fun. You just can't have fun alone. Even when you think you're having fun by yourself, it's with reference to an absent other. It's doing something you know you've had fun doing with others in the past, or it's I-can't-wait-until-someone-else-hears-about-this.
We talk about loneliness and happiness when we talk about mental health and wellbeing because those things resonate throughout time and have a lengthy impact. But if you think about a life without fun, it's completely dystopian. If fun is antithetical to loneliness and can make someone happy for such long periods afterwards, then why don't we place more importance on it?
How can we have more of this elusive thing? According to Ben, we should make an effort to be as spontaneous as possible. To be more open to strangers, because those interactions will always be enriching, and openness to them really greases the wheels for fun. Just like I had with Ben that day.
Place yourself in the designated spaces for fun more often. When commitments and restraints meant Ben couldn't be in these spaces as much as he liked, he changed his mindset. "I realized that the spaces in which I allowed myself to have fun were much too restrictive. I'd assume it was going out, in the pub, and with a small group of people," he said. "But I realized it could be much more broad. Because fun is contextual I could think myself into a space where I could have fun. Even being in the car with the kids doing the school run became an area for it. I just had to let go."
I left Ben seriously rethinking the way I spend my time. As pathetic as it sounds, I had joy in my chest for days after our day together. I'm a lone wolf type, which makes my life rich with enjoyment—and I've been so satisfied with that because it's safe. If my mental health is bad, retreating is the default. When it gets better, I'm not good enough at putting myself back into those spaces. I desperately want to prioritize fun now and do everything I can to facilitate it, not forget about it. Life is so difficult most of the time that paradoxically it's easy to stop trying to find escape. But fun is the greatest escape we have as young people, and we can't let our responsibilities and burdens steal that away from us.
Follow Hannah Ewens on Twitter.
Everything you need to know about the world this morning, curated by VICE.
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Families of US Government Personnel Ordered to Leave Congo
The State Department wants family members of US government employees to leave the Democratic Republic of Congo, and is putting a pause on most official travel to the country. Political violence broke out in the country earlier this month, and the State Department has suggested the potential for civil unrest is high in Kinshasa and other cities.—AP
Syrian Regime Forces Clash Again with Rebels in Aleppo
Fierce battles raged north of Aleppo on Friday, with pro-Assad fighters reportedly capturing the Kindi hospital area a few miles from the city. A senior rebel source denied the government was in control there, however, and fighting continues.—Reuters
President Duterte Compares Himself to Hitler
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has compared his war on drugs to the Holocaust: "Hitler massacred three million Jews...there's three million drug addicts. I'd be happy to slaughter them." At least six million Jews are known to have died in the Holocaust. "If Germany had Hitler, the Philippines would have..." he said before pointing to himself.—The Guardian
France Launching New Airstrikes Against ISIS in Iraq
Operating from the Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean, French aircraft are said to be targeting the Islamic State on its home turf again. This is the country's third mission with the US-led coalition in Iraq and Syria since February 2015, when France launched military operations following the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris.—BBC News
Pakistan and India Tussle on Border Over 'Terrorist Units'
The Pakistani army is dismissing the suggestion that India's military conducted "surgical strikes" against "terrorist units" on its side of the border in the Kashmir region. Still, the country acknowledged the loss of two of its soldiers in the exchange of fire at the border that saw nine others wounded on Thursday.—Al Jazeera
World Leaders Attend Shimon Peres Funeral
Leaders from around the world attended the funeral of the former Israeli President and PM at Mount Herzl in Jerusalem Friday morning. "The last of the founding generation is now gone," said President Barack Obama, wearing a kippah and standing next to Peres's coffin.—The New York Times
Lady Gaga Picked for This Year's Super Bowl Halftime Show
Lady Gaga will headline the 2017 NFL championship halftime show in Houston, the league has announced. The singer tweeted: "The rumors are true. This year the SUPER BOWL goes GAGA!"—CNN
US Hands over Internet Address Book
The United States' long-running oversight contract with the nonprofit organization in charge of the world's internet domain names expires Friday. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is now supposed to be a more autonomous entity with international accountability. —USA Today
Original Pepe the Frog Artist Speaks Out
Matt Furie, the comic artist who created the Pepe the Frog character that was designated a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League, said racist memes are "so far removed from what I originally imagined... I'm kind of a hippie at heart."—The Creators Project
YouTube Hires Former Warner Boss as Global Music Guru
Lyor Cohen, the former head at Warner Music Group and the guy who signed Fetty Wap, has become YouTube's first global head of music. Cohen is expected to act as a liaison between YouTube and the big music labels.—VICE News
Rosetta Orbiter Crashes into Comet
The European Space Agency's Rosetta orbiter ended its mission Friday by smashing into the comet it's been chasing for over two years. "The tears will start rolling," Rosetta project scientist Matt Taylor said ahead of the blast.—Motherboard/USA Today
On this episode of Daily VICE, we meet up with 11-world-title-winning surfer Kelly Slater to talk about his new Venice art show, Apolitical Process, and meet the group of friends and artists exploring political issues ahead of the election.
Watch Daily VICE in the VICE channel on go90. Head to go90.com to learn more and download the app.
When Do Not Resist director Craig Atkinson turned his camera toward the Ferguson protests in August 2014, he figured by the time his film was made, the footage would be outdated, and the story dead. How wrong he was. What he filmed in the aftermath of the police shooting of Michael Brown could have been shot last week in Charlotte, North Carolina, or in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Or any number of other cities that have erupted after police shooting deaths of black men.
Images of the military-grade equipment—from body armor and night-vision goggles to armored vehicles and automatic rifles—used to quell these protests are loud, bright, and all over the news. But Do Not Resist also shows something less visible: a growing number of SWAT teams flooding the grounds of modest family homes to conduct drug raids that yield almost nothing except a whole lot of fear, and maybe a gram of weed.
Atkinson's directorial debut, which took home best documentary prize at the Tribeca Film Festival, shows jurisdictions of all sizes jumping at the opportunity to acquire the military-grade equipment from a grab bag of Department of Homeland Security grants, topping $34 billion since 9/11. The Department of Defense has issued billions more through a gifting program. In one scene, a senator grills the DoD about why a city with "one full-time sworn officer" has acquired two MRAPs since 2011 through the giveaway. Senator Rand Paul inquires as to why the DoD are handing out bayonets. The DoD's responses are limp. In another scene, the town of Concord, New Hampshire (where two murders have occurred since 2004), holds a Council meeting on whether it should accept a federal grant to purchase a BEARCAT armored vehicle, a 20-foot, 17,000-pound "Ballistic Engineered Armored Response Counter Attack Truck" that resembles a Hummer crossed with the Batmobile. (The council voted in favor 11–4 on getting the BEARCAT.)
The windfall of military equipment is the perfect accompaniment to the attitude promoted by Dave Grossman, the country's top military and local law enforcement trainer. His books are required reading at FBI and police training academies across the country.
Related: Watch an exclusive clip of Dave Grossman telling trainees that after a gun battle, officers often go home to have their "best sex in months":
Though his influence is clear, Grossman's intensity clashes with the ambivalence and concern seen in the eyes of some on-the-ground officers and officials who don't quite know what to make of it all. While Grossman's views and small towns with BEARCATs clearly come across as absurd, the other issues Atkinson raises are more nuanced, like what to do with the seemingly endless advancement in surveillance technology? In that sense the film presents an almost philosophical question: Must we always bring the full force of what we are capable of? The film's subtle vérité style doesn't provide an answer so much as illustrate a reality.
VICE: What was your first inspiration for this film? Did that evolve over time?
Craig Atkinson: The jump-off point for me was the Boston Marathon bombing. I had never seen the level of weaponry that the police had. They had it because it was a terrorist event, but it wasn't so much that, it was the mentality with which they approached the community. I just felt like it was more of an occupying force. I saw so many different people that were there during that time and said, "Listen the cops came in our house, no search warrant, put us on the ground." I felt like because we were all in a state of fear, we abandoned all of our protections and our freedoms.
Speaking of which: The surveillance issues you touch on in the film present some difficult questions about weighing privacy rights with maximizing our ability to solve crimes and take advantage of advancing policing technology. What's your take on weighing that balance?
Obviously, if this equipment is being used for surveillance then that's the intended usage, to fight terrorism. The problem is it's no different than the SWAT equipment and military hardware, where it was supposed to be used for domestic terrorism and it was being used for low-level drug offenses.
Certainly through the course of the film we see that, well, if $39 billion has been given to domestic law enforcement, we've invested in equipment and we're getting those returns on the use of that equipment. One can see how if you took even a portion of that money and allocated it to de-escalation training, how much more effective that would have been as a way to prepare officers for what they're seeing on a daily basis.
This Dave Grossman character, how did he enter the picture?
We wanted to know how police were being trained so we sought out someone that was revered almost universally in law enforcement. The FBI requires his books to be read by all of their personnel, and we wanted to see what that looked like. We were surprised to hear the philosophy that he was bringing toward the officers. He promotes this idea that "you are men and women of violence" and you use violence to solve your issues. He talks about how you're gonna get a good drunk buzz, you're gonna go home, and have the best sex you've ever had in your life—which may be the case! I just didn't think that you should be incentivizing domestic law enforcement with the thought of going home and having amazing sex. We were just appalled that this is the messaging coming down to domestic law enforcement.
"We do need to hold individual officers accountable without question. People always say, 'Well, it's a few bad apples.' I think there might also be some bad orchards."
But is there pushback against his ideas?
Sheriff Laurie Smith in Santa Clara, California, recently cancelled a Dave Grossman training because she went through the materials and she was like, "You know this might lead to more use of force, just the way that you're communicating to people." It was encouraging to me that there's members within law enforcement that are starting to see that the Dave Grossman philosophy isn't lining up to what the community is asking of our police in this day and age.
Your portrayal of individual officers was pretty empathetic. Some look like people who are just doing their jobs; others seem quite sensitive and genuinely conflicted. How do you reconcile Dave Grossman's super aggressive training with the people on the ground?
I hope that when people look at the film they see that we don't condemn the individual officers. Often times people who are charged with brokering the service—the police officers—are caught in the middle. In Ferguson, where a huge portion of operating revenue from police departments are derived from ticketing citizens, I talked to plenty of officers that were like, "Listen, we don't have to be the tax collectors for a city, we don't want to treat community members like ATMs." But guess what? If they don't, a huge portion of their operating revenue will not be there and they won't have jobs next year. But we do need to hold individual officers accountable without question. People always say, "Well, it's a few bad apples." I think there might also be some bad orchards. I've seen departments, which have top-down leadership that was just totally insensitive to what modern policing actually should be.
I think it's important to define that—what should modern policing look like?
There seems to be a massive disconnect between what we're training officers to do and what they're responding to on a day-to-day basis. When we were doing ride-alongs over the course of three years, everyone kept saying that all the officers are preparing for ISIS. We would go out and, almost ten times out of ten, it was officers responding to people in mental health crisis, or domestic violence situations. Both of those required officers to de-escalate the situation, and I observed them grossly unprepared to do that. However, if the situation got violent they were very prepared to stop a situation that turned violent, by the use of violence.
And the use of military equipment for everyday policing has escalated that...
You have this huge range of what SWAT is being used for. A lot of times the individual officers are in the middle and that's why it's ever more important to train them properly because I think that, if you take a young officer and say, "You are men and women of peace, you are a person that is a guardian, and you're there to protect and serve." In contrast you tell them the Dave Grossman philosophy—you are men and women of violence.
In some additional footage, which I wasn't able to fit into the film, he says he talks to guys all the time that come back from overseas and become law enforcement officers and they say they start to enjoy the killing. Enjoy the killing! I'm just thinking to myself, how is that not crossing a line to becoming what we're fighting against? His philosophy is no, you enjoy the killing, you go back and you train to get ready for more killing and guess what? It's fun. And guess what you're gonna go fuck your wife at the end of the night, too. How far away is that from promising 20 virgins?
What's being done at the highest level to temper this attitude, if anything?
Obama's 21st Century Task Force on Policing, overall in my opinion was very ineffective. For example, you have police commissioner Ramsey, who was a head of the 21st Century Task Force, and on the panel he asks how long it will be until facial recognition is available. We had already filmed the LAPD using facial recognition scanner a year prior! And here are President Obama's best men, if you will, didn't even know that they were using that. How can you create effective change if you aren't even aware of the surveillance technology that police are already using?
I'm surprised talking to you that your views are so clear and impassioned, because I felt that the film was pretty restrained. I came out of it with more philosophical questions than a vivid sense of your opinion...
My dad was a police officer for 29 years outside of Detroit and a SWAT officer for 13 of those years. I had some background information that was causing me to look out into the world of policing and seeing that something had changed. People asked, "Why didn't you put your own story into the film?" That's not really indicative of the whole if one person had some sort of personal story. I don't really care about any of that. I want people to see actual events to give context to many of these headlines that we keep hearing about since Ferguson. I wanted to know what a SWAT raid looks like when you're not shooting it like COPS or Dallas SWAT, which is only to glorify the police. I said instead, "Let's go back the next day and talk to the family and see what it was like."
But you reveal a point of view in how you edit these events...
If the cops had taken me on SWAT raids and pulled an Al Qaeda member out of a sewer, I would have shown that. We went on a half a dozen raids during the course of the film, and we didn't find anything. It was either a bowl of weed, or a gram of weed, or we see someone's computer for child pornography but at three o'clock in the morning when he wasn't even there, they busted in the house and the guy's parents are there, totally shaken.
Find information on screenings of Do Not Resist on the film's website.
Follow Annalies Winny on Twitter.
