Saturday, September 30, 2017
Friday, September 29, 2017
You Need to Check Out 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' and 'Lucky' This Weekend
Looking for some stuff to catch up on this weekend? Whether it's TV, movies, books, or anything in between—VICE has you covered. Read on for our staff recommendations on what to take in during your downtime:
Curb Your Enthusiasm Season 9
Everything sucks, and we need Curb Your Enthusiasm more than ever. Praise Jeebus, then, that Larry David's better-than-Seinfeld-yes-I-said-it comedy returns to HBO this Sunday for what is sure to be a virtuosic and peerless ninth season. Everyone loves to go on and on about how Curb defines cringe and awkward and what have you, but you know what? I'm going to go full heel here and say that, at least 75% of the time, I find David's world outlook extremely relatable. His actions aren't always sound, but what hero doesn't have their flaws? — Larry Fitzmaurice, Senior Culture Editor, Digital
Dirty Looks's Sesión Continua NYC: a 24-Hour Porn Theatre
Anyone who knows a thing or two about movies will tell you that queer cinema has long been regarded as one of the film form's most important genres. When it comes to porn, anyone with any taste whatsoever will agree. The biggest problem, though, is that it's often hard to find the good stuff when it comes to both. Not so this weekend: starting at 11:59 PM tonight in Brooklyn's Crown Heights neighborhood, Dirty Looks, a bi-coastal queer film and video curatorial platform, is hosting a 24-hour porn theater as part of the Theirs/ours/yours: Queer Art & Film Fest. The festival itself boasts a shorts program called "Bodies In Context," an opening reception featuring works from ten different artists as well as the Toledo LGBT Archives, and a "VR Speaker Series" (which kicked off yesterday). Sesión Continua, running concurrently, will fill the 25-seat Video Revival theater with films that "recall the queer porn storefronts and picture palaces that proliferated the city before the advent of home video and the rise in LGBTQ visibility in popular cinema." Sans schedules and set attendance times, $12 will take you on a full-day trip back to the pre-VHS, pre-Giuliani days of queer sex cinema. Learn more here. —Emerson Rosenthal
Lucky
Longtime character actor John Carroll Lynch's directorial debut is beautiful and patient, a rumination on belief and finality dotted with lovely conversations from perfectly drawn characters played by a coterie of reliable suspects: David Lynch, Ron Livingston, Ed Begley, Jr., and the late, insurmountably great Harry Dean Stanton. Lucky was Stanton's last film before he passed earlier this month, and there's definitely something perfectly eerie in watching his titular aging atheist protagonist look into life's void and wonder what's beyond. Come for the fitting sendoff, and stay for his beautiful singing voice (really). — Larry Fitzmaurice, Senior Culture Editor, Digital
The Monty Python Museum
There are few true altruists on the internet, but one of them runs the Monty Python Museum YouTube channel. If you've scraped no deeper than Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Life of Brian, and a few of the more-popular episodes of Flying Circus, the timeless absurdism preserved within this museum's digital walls is must-watch viewing. The channel stores dozens of rare sketches, behind-the-scenes footage, interviews, outtakes, and specials. Yesterday, it posted the "1971 Montreux Special," which includes the classic Ministry of Silly Walks sketch as well as ever-relevant jokes about clowns and incompetent government workers. This weekend, take a load off and soak in some vintage giggles. — Beckett Mufson
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Colleges Are Finally Taking Student Hunger Seriously
We don't know when exactly so many American college students started going hungry. But according to Ruben Canedo, a research and mobilization coordinator at UC Berkeley, by the time colleges and universities started to seriously study student food insecurity, it was already a much bigger problem than anyone had realized. In 2014, when Canedo was hired to help tackle hunger on UC college campuses, the first thing he did was look for national data on the problem. He said he found "very little." What was out there was sporadic, and metrics used varied from study to study.
So the UC system began to poll its students about food insecurity, and the results lined up with other reports on academic institutions, both in California and around the country, that have all cropped up in the last three years. Namely, that according to USDA guidelines, at least 20 percent and possibly over 40 percent of students are affected by food insecurity.
Some administrators have been shocked at the numbers, but they didn't surprise Rachel Sumekh, who has been working to alleviate student hunger since she was an undergraduate at UCLA in 2009. While there, she started an organization called Swipes for the Homeless, a program that collected students' unused meal plan points for both hungry UCLA students and the nearby homeless community. When students began giving away their meals, she realized that that demand among her fellow students was more than enough to absorb all those extra points. She renamed the organization Swipe Out Hunger, and has grown it into a nonprofit serving campuses all over the country.
Watch VICE on HBO explain the ramifications of soaring student debt:
While the prevalence of student hunger has been old news for Sumekh as new research has emerged, interest in the problem among administrators, in her experience, has been new. "The difference that the research made was that it was being shared at an academic level. That was really valuable," she said. For example, Sarah Goldrick-Rab, who researches food insecurity for the Wisconsin Hope Lab, which studies ways to make college more accessible, now includes resources for students experiencing food or housing insecurity directly on her class syllabi. A blog post she wrote has inspired other professors to do the same. Moves like that highlight the prevalence of student homelessness and hunger in a way that's harder for campus administrators to ignore.
Sumekh said that, in the past, it was mostly students themselves who reached out to Swipe Out Hunger to get involved. Now about half of those who get in touch are university administrators.
Tim Miller, the associate dean of students at George Washington University, said that once the university realized the seriousness of student hunger, they wanted to address the problem right away. After GWU administrators read research released last October by College and University Food Bank alliance, "we conducted research to better understand food insecurity within our own community," Miller said. As a result, GWU began a number of on-campus initiatives, including a food pantry and a swipe-donation program similar to Swipe Out Hunger. In the past few years, growing administrative acknowledgement of student hunger has also been reflected in student food pantries that are cropping up all over the country.
But Canedo said that many old difficulties in addressing campus hunger remain. For one, many still see some level of struggle among students as normal. "When we think about college, so many folks think about a starving student, an overworked student, an overburdened student," he told me. "When [campus administrators] engage with our work, they respond with a victim blaming approach. They say, 'look, I worked my way through college. Sure, I was hungry. You don't see me complaining. These students are so coddled they're not working hard enough.'"
He said that he begins negotiating with them by apologizing: "I say I'm really sorry that you had such a hard college experience and I really wish that you hadn't," he said, because otherwise "this conversation would be landing very differently for you." And then he points out that in the current economy, tuition and cost of living expenses are simply harder for students to cover than in the past, even for those who have jobs.
While it was once the "poorest of the poor" who dealt with student food insecurity on campus, "in this economy, it's the independent, the low income, the working class and the middle class [students] that are struggling, and you also have wealthy students that are being disenfranchised from their family because they are LGBT, because they choose a romantic partner that the family doesn't agree on," Canedo said. He noted that those students usually don't qualify for aid, either, meaning that hunger is impacting people across the socioeconomic spectrum.
Clare Cady, a director and co-founder of the College and University Food Bank Alliance, which helps launch and lobby for food banks at hundreds of campuses nationwide, was adamant that more intervention is necessary. "We can't food bank our way out of this crisis," she said.
Canedo said he wants the UC system to mobilize faster than it already has, too—but he's been able to launch several initiatives within the UC system, including a pantry and programs to help students budget and cook for themselves. After years spent advocating for food security, he was recently able to get the UC system's Office of the President involved in his initiatives. And this year, student-wide surveys at UC schools will include detailed questions about basic needs; the result, Canedo said, will be the largest and most specific study on the problem ever done.
In California, data about student food insecurity has already influenced the state legislature to make it easier for students to access government food assistance. And individual colleges around the country are starting initiatives to better understand and address student hunger, and help students get assistance both on and off campus.
For one UC Berkeley student, a combination of government and campus intervention is working. Esteban Vasquez entered his freshman year at Berkeley in 2014; he had struggled with food insecurity his whole life. But he connected with Canedo right away, and in this way became involved with the student pantry that had just opened, and learned how to apply for CalFresh, a California state program that helps low-income residents access food. The combination of these resources, and tips from student organizations on how to budget and cook for himself, were enough that now, "I pretty much say I'm food secure," Vasquez said. But it took a variety of solutions to help just one student, at what, thanks to Canedo, is now probably one of the best equipped universities out there. At other campuses across the country, there's plenty of work left to be done.
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Tom Price Deplanes from the Trump Administration
Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price is resigning, effective at midnight on Friday, according to the White House. Price came under fire this week for his expensive air travel, which spent taxpayer money for trips that often involved personal business —like taking his son to lunch in Nashville, for example.
President Donald Trump has now tapped Virginian Don J. Wright, the Deputy Assistant Health Secretary for Health at the Department of Health and Human Services, to serve as the acting health secretary.
By taking expensive private jets on the government's dime, Price argued that he was moving "power out of Washington and returning it to the American people." But that didn't fly with Trump, who said earlier this week that he was "not happy" about Price's use of private planes and would consider firing him.
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Spike Jonze’s Favorite Cameras
For over 30 years, Spike Jonze has been in the biz of making images. From his street-level skate photography to award-winning music videos from the genre's gilded era and his critically acclaimed feature films, Spike's first job has always been to pick up a camera and provide us with the best look his uncharacteristic vision can find.
And through those trades, Spike's come to love the tools associated with them: "Cameras are something that any of us can talk about for hours, whether it's a director or photographer, we love talking about cameras and I think that, in what I've done, cameras are always part of creating the feeling of what I'm doing."
And so, in honor of Spike's Epicly Later'd episode on VICELAND (also shot with cameras), we chatted with this icon of our current renaissance to get a baker's-dozen rundown of his favorite soul-stealing devices.
Watch Epicly Later'd on VICELAND Wednesdays at 10 PM.
Olympus OM1
My mom had a camera, an Olympus OM1, and I hope I still have that somewhere. When I moved to California to work as an editor at Freestylin' magazine, she let me take it with me. I started shooting photos when I got there, and everybody, all the photographers—Windy Osborn, O, Tod Swank, and the photographers who I knew—shot Nikon with 16mm fisheye lenses, which I couldn't afford. I bought this one from a mail order company that was pretty nice, but it was a generic version called a Sigma.
That's what all the amazing skate and BMX photos were shot with. I was like, "Oh, that's how they did that." You could be down under a trick and see how much air they were getting and still see the ramp or the set of stairs, and you could see where they took off from or where they landed. But yeah, that was the lens that I really started getting into photography with… and with my mom's camera body.
Nikon FM2 / Nikon F3
Windy always had two cameras: a Nikon FM2 and a Nikon F3 with a MD-12 motor drive that shot six frames a second. Eventually, as I got more into photography and was shooting more for the magazine, Wizard Publications' owner, Bob Osborn, gave me Windy's old set of cameras. They bought her a new set so I got the hand-me-downs—two bodies and a full set of lenses. It was the most insane Christmas gift/employee perk. It was crazy.
Windy had made these leather straps so that if the camera got knocked out of your hand, it would just hang from your wrist. They were very cool. They looked like they were made by a Topanga Canyon hippie in the 70s. I shot all of my skate and BMX photos with those cameras.
When I was 19, I started working at TransWorld for Grant [Brittain]. I had sent him a bunch of photos and became a contributing photographer. I got a bunch of covers at TransWorld and a bunch of Pro Spotlight interviews: Ray Barbee, Ed Templeton, Jason Lee, Jeremy Kline. And, obviously, loads of photos of Mark Gonzalez.
Getting those cameras definitely opened up so many possibilities. Suddenly I had a telephoto lens, I had an 80 to 200, I could get further away and find different frames and compositions, and I could take daylight flash photos with the FM2 and sync the flash with the shutter at 250th of a second. Oh, I had a motor drive; I could do sequences. I definitely learned a lot from having those cameras, but mostly I learned from being around other photographers I loved and asking them a lot of questions. Especially Grant, at that time, who was very generous as a teacher.
Fisher-Price PXL-2000
I wish I still had that camera—the Fisher-Price PXL-2000. Yeah, me and Lew, I think we went in on it together. We wanted a video camera but they were expensive so we got this toy video camera that they sold at Toys-R-Us for $100. It shot really crappy black-and-white and recorded it on an audio cassette tape.
That was our video camera and we would shoot skating and riding and make dumb little short films. Somehow we put a fisheye lens on there that somebody had. I don't know what we actually did with it other than just fool around and try to make funny shit.
Even before that, I was really into video and had used VHS camcorders in high school, but I mean, we were always just making goofy skits. If anyone ever had a video camera, I would ask to use it or ask a lot of questions about it. I mean, it wasn't like I ever knew I was going to go into doing anything with video. I didn't know what I was going to do, but I liked cameras.
Panasonic Super-VHS / Sony Hi8
When [Steve] Rocco started World Industries, I shot their first ad with my Nikon motor drive. At the time, we wanted all the World ads to be sequences, as opposed to still photos, because skateboarding was becoming so much more technical, and with a sequence, you could really see how the trick worked.
The company was about a year old, and one day we were out skating and I asked Rocco if he was going to do a video. He said he wanted to but he didn't have time and then asked if I wanted to do it. I was like, "Yeah, sure." And right there at the skate spot, he gave me the company credit card and told me to go buy a camera. I went and researched video cameras and bought a Panasonic consumer camcorder—I'm pretty sure it was a Super-VHS—and made my first skate video on it for World, Rubbish Heap. That was the real gateway into making video stuff.
Then when we did the Blind video [ Video Days], we got a second camera—a Sony Hi8. I liked the Hi8 camera because it was so little. When we did the Blind video, we'd carry it around in a little bag that was the size of a shoebox. You would just throw it over your shoulder, cruise around the city, and pull it out when there was something to shoot. That was probably the first time in history that video cameras were that small and that cheap, and it allowed us to make skate videos that way.
I remember Mark and I would get in arguments about stupid shit, and one time we were driving down the street, got in an argument, and he threw the video camera out the car window. I was like, "What the fuck! What the fuck, Mark? You fucking dick!" I pulled over, got the camera and turned it on, and it still worked. It was Rocco's camera, but I was still really pissed off because that's the camera we were trying to make the video with. I didn't want to film anymore that day, so I went home. I just left him there and took the camera.
Canon Scoopic / Arri SR 2
Mark Gonzales had gone to see Sonic Youth play, and as he was leaving, he saw the band getting into their bus. He said, "Hey, you guys. We made a skate video. You want a copy?" And they were like, "Sure." And he gave them Video Days.
Then one day I got a call from Kim Gordon on my answering machine asking if I wanted to shoot some skateboarding for a music video for their song "100%." I was thrilled. It was surreal to get a call from Kim Gordon. Kim Gordon was a real person calling me on a real phone. She introduced me to Tamra Davis, the director of the video, and I got to shoot all the skateboarding for their video and just hang out next to Tamra and learn from her.
That was the first time I shot motion-picture film. We shot 16mm film cameras—two of them. The camera we shot a lot of the skateboarding on, which was smaller, was a Canon Scoopic. I think it was made in the 60s or 70s as a consumer 16mm camera. Super simple to use, and it was really fun. We also used an Arri SR2, which was the workhorse 16mm music-video camera at the time. But I had never shot film before, so Tamra and her DP Mike Spiller basically gave me a crash course lesson in loading and shooting 16mm cameras. Every one of these things was like a new class in film school for me.
I ended up shooting all of my early music videos—like the Breeders video for "Cannonball" and the Beastie Boys "Sabotage" video—with those two cameras.
In the Beastie Boys video, we ended up breaking two cameras because we were just doing stuff ourselves. On the first day, I wanted to get an underwater shot, so I put the Canon Scoopic in a Ziploc bag, put the camera underwater at Mike D's pool, and Adam Horovitz tackled [Adam] Yauch into the water. I mean, it's a terrible underwater shot because it's all blurry and wavy from looking through the Ziploc bag, but I didn't care. I was like, "I got the shot!" But water got into the bag and fried the electronics. The assistant cameraman took the air blower, blew out all the water, sent it back the to camera house, and said, "Hey, this just stopped working; can you guys send us a new one?" And by the end of the day, we had a new one.
The next day, we had the bigger camera—the Arri SR2—bolted to the front of the hood, and we were jumping the car. The mag that holds the film flew off and unspooled down the street. So we trashed that one, too.
I always looked at cameras as a means to an end and not something to be precious about. I guess, looking back, it's the same way you treat a skateboard: I would love getting a new board and putting it together, but I would never be careful with it. You use it for what it's made for—same with a camera. I would bomb a hill with it, bolt it to the top of a car, and do whatever I needed to do with it to get a shot I was excited about.
Steadicam
As I got more into music videos, I started getting to use 35mm motion picture cameras. And depending on the idea for the video, sometimes I would want to move the camera, and the best way to get the shot was with a Steadicam. I can't operate those so you get a great Steadicam operator to help. The good ones are super strong but also have a nice touch of framing and composition.
We used Steadicam on that Pharcyde "Drop" video and the Weezer video "Undone – The Sweater Song." So yeah I got into it and that's when I started to use cranes, too. For the last shot in Bjork's "It's Oh So Quiet" video, we used this truck that had a crane on it that she and the Steadicam operator could both step onto as the truck pulled back and the giant crane boomed up. You can just get the most amazing, fluid shots—come right into a close-up and come out to a wide shot and go upstairs and go through hallways and things that you can't normally do without that equipment.
Sometimes you see something technical, a piece of equipment or a visual spec, and it would trigger ideas, but other times you would have a shot in mind and you would have to come up with a way to do it.
Sony DCR-PC5
In the 90s—in the music-video world—there was this real sort of snobbery toward video: You shoot things on film, but video is just for consumers. But because I started by doing skate videos with video cameras, I always loved it.
I had this one Sony MiniDV camera—the silver rectangular one—and I plugged a $150 consumer microphone into it and used that camera for loads of things. We did the FatBoy Slim "Praise You" video where we're dancing in front of the movie theater. By using that camera, nobody in the crowd thought anything about it. The cameramen just looked like tourists. I also used it for this Fatlip video, "What's Up Fatlip?" The idea of that video was I would just go to his house every day with my camera, and no crew, come up with what we were going to shoot, and drive around town and shoot it. And because it was on video, as we were making it, I started asking him a lot of questions and ended up making a spontaneous documentary, also called "What's Up Fatlip?"
I used that camera for the whole first season of Jackass too. It's so unassuming and unobtrusive and natural because that's the camera we would have had out, just fucking around, anyway.
The same summer that we were making the first season of Jackass, I was also making this documentary on Al Gore for his 2000 Presidential Election Campaign, and I was using the same camera. With that camera, I would be a one-man crew. I've always floated back and forth between bigger productions with bigger cameras and bigger crews to no crew and just me and a camera depending on what the idea was.
Alexa / DCR-VX1000 / Ikonoskop
The other camera I've been using lately is the Alexa. it's the first digital cinema camera that I really like the look of. We shot Her on that; we've shot a bunch of things on it now.
This summer, I helped produce and design Frank Ocean's tour. The idea of the tour was to make huge festival shows intimate and handmade. We built this tiny little stage in the middle of the audience, and this giant screen that filled the main stage. Another cameraman and I would have a handful of different cameras laid out on the stage and we'd make the live concert film that you saw on the screen. One of our rules was that there could be no prerecorded images on the screen, so if we wanted a graphic, we had to have it drawn on the stage and film it. Or if we wanted him to be silhouetted in front of an all-orange screen, I would zoom into a piece of orange tape on the stage and make it out of focus, so you couldn't see the texture.
We wanted to have an evolution of looks throughout the course of the thing, so we had four cameras each. We had a black-and-white security camera with an infrared light on it. We had the Sony VX-1000—the classic 90s skate video camera—we had this very weird digital camera called an Ikonoskop, which has a very specific, dense color look. And we also had the Alexa Miniwith anamorphic lenses that had a very cinematic look.
It's always about that feeling, and the camera is a means to that feeling. And for that tour, we wanted the music and visuals to feel like they were being handmade by people right in front of you.
iPhone
I can't even think of all the things I've done on iPhone, but it's the camera in your pocket. I made a video for Kanye West on my iPhone a couple of years ago that I really loved. The song was called "Only You" and it was written from the point of view of his mom singing down to him. He had played me that song in the studio while he was working on it, and I'd always loved it. But he made a video for it that ended up being a little too slick for such an intimate song. He showed me the video they made on a Thursday, and we decided to make another video for it on that Saturday. I went over to his house with my iPhone and we shot in the park behind his house. It was kind of a gray, rainy day, and we shot it in like 45 minutes. It has an incredible look, and it's just all off the iPhone. It was just a crew of me and my friend holding the boombox, playing the music back. It was so simple. It just felt right, and Kanye is down for anything if it feels right. It doesn't matter if it's big or small; as long as it feels right and you're getting that excitement, that buzz, then you're going in the right direction.
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Watch a Cop Lose His Shit Trying to Catch a Snake with a Trash Can
Snakes are fucking scary. They have fangs. They do that spooky thing with their tongues. And some literally produce poison. It doesn't matter who you are, what kind of terrifying things you've seen in your life, or how dangerous your job is—when you find yourself face to angular face with one of those slithering bastards, fear is the only reasonable response.
So it's no surprise that when a campus police officer showed up to save a few poor souls from one of the wriggling beasts at the University of Central Florida (UCF) last week, he completely lost his shit—a scary, albeit entertaining sight that thousands of people have now seen thanks to the wonders of the internet.
In footage the UCF Police Department uploaded to Facebook last Friday, we get a captivating look at the age-old battle of man vs. snake. You have to give the officer props for having the courage to go up against the hellspawn, since this is really animal control's area of expertise.
Armed with a trash can, as well as his nightstick, the cop attempts to corner the snake, but the situation quickly becomes too frightening for him to handle. The video opens with what sounds like an "oh shit!" followed shortly by a "holy shit," a "goddamn it," and a profusion of other expletives rattled off too quickly to decipher. The cop reels in terror as the serpent darts from one side of the room to the other, taking refuge behind a different trash can before finally weaving its way outside—likely, scared itself from all the noise one grown man was making.
It was a close call, but all told, things could've gone worse for the cop. At least he didn't stumble across a dead alligator some students dragged to their dorm room.
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Trump's Tax Fight Could Look a Lot Like the War Over Healthcare
On Wednesday, President Trump finally released his long-promised tax plan, laying the groundwork for what is likely to be the last major legislative fight of 2017. If the White House and Congress can't push something they can plausibly call "tax reform" into law by year's end, it could doom the GOP in the midterms and leave Trump with nothing substantial to show for his first year in office. But this should be an easy lift, because Republicans unanimously love the sort of sweeping tax cuts Trump's proposed, and literally any issue is less controversial than health care, right?
Actually, no. What Trump revealed Wednesday somehow still isn't a fullly fleshed out plan. It offers key goals, but leaves the details murky, shunting it to Congress to fill in the blanks. And there is plenty of room for that process to get derailed—so much that we probably won't see actual legislation this year, and may never see a law that actually matches the real estate scion's framework.
The document, crafted by key members of the administration and Republican Congressional leaders, calls for reducing the number of income tax brackets from seven to three, set at 12, 25, and 35 percent versus the 10 to 39.6 percent range today. It nearly doubles the standard deduction while eliminating most personal exemptions, potentially simplifying the tax return process. It proposes increasing the child tax credit and creating a new $500 credit for non-child dependents, like the elderly. It cuts the corporate tax rate from 35 to 20 percent, while lowering the tax rate for partnerships and sole proprietorships—i.e. most small businesses—to 25 percent. It also calls for changes that would lower taxes on money companies generate abroad and incentivize the repatriation of offshore profits. And it calls for the elimination of the alternative minimum and estate taxes, which are mostly irksome to very rich people and affect Trump personally.
But that's about all we know. The plan is nine pages long, and as Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker pointed out, much of that is large typefaces and empty spaces.
For starters, it's stil decidedly unclear what income ranges—that is, which Americans—will fall into each of the new tax brackets. Also: What individual or corporate deductions will survive this purge? (The plan does call for the preservation of write-offs for charitable giving, education spending, mortgage interest, and retirement savings, among other categories, but does not specify how to preserve them or what else could be saved.) How much will the child tax credit increase? How can Congress stop wealthy people from posing as partnerships or sole proprietorships to game these new, lower tax rates? What would be the rates and mechanisms to reduce taxation on foreign profits without encouraging American companies to move most of their operations offshore? And won't lowering the top tax bracket and eliminating two key taxes on the wealthy help them at the expense of the general public?
Although each one of these decisions could devolve into a fight within the Republican Party, tax policy and legislative experts tend to agree that perhaps the most contentious issue is how costly the eventual tax cut package will be. There are indications that prominent members of the Party are willing to eat a projected initial increase in the deficit on the (probably misguided) faith that these tax cuts will spur enough economic growth to make up for it. Even so, initial estimates suggest this framework could lead to legislation blowing up the deficit more than many self-styled fiscal hawks would be comfortable with.
"They described all of these tax cuts but said essentially nothing about how they're going to pay for them," opined Howard Gleckman, senior fellow at the liberal-leaning Urban Institute. "That question is going to take up most of [Republicans'] time and energy over the next several months."
There'll also be particularly hard fought battles over every deduction or loophole eliminated. "A lot of these are very important to specific Congressmen because they have specific industries in their districts that benefit from it," said Mike Tanner, a senior fellow at the libertarian think tank Cato Institute. "This is going to be a close vote, particularly in the Senate. So… that's going to be a down and dirty fight that's not going to get a lot of attention because it's going to happen at such a granular level, but it's really going to matter."
And if it becomes clear to the public that the wealthy will benefit from whatever is brewing on Capitol Hill, that'll make it hard for the president and other self-styled populists to advocate for it. The White House is reportedly especially sensitive to this; it's not a particularly good sign that the administration seems to be hedging on just how generous the cuts will be to the middle class versus the rich.
Possibly recognizing how messy this process could become, Trump has already made overtures to Democrats to get onboard with this evolving tax plan. He could just be using the threat of leaning on the opposition to whip Republicans into obedient shape. But padding a controversial tax bill's margins with Democratic votes is not implausible. Plenty of Democrats voted for George W. Bush's massive tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, and the party's caucus is not as unified in opposition to Trump's tax plan as they were to his healthcare agenda. However, attracting Democrats to make up for lost Republicans could come at the cost of further tweaks that might alienate the Freedom Caucus and other ideologically sensitive factions in Congress.
"The tax code is huge and affects so many people and so many industries and special interests, that's why we've only had one real reform," said Tanner, referring to Ronald Reagan's sweeping 80s overhaul. "This is not easy to do. If it was, we would have already done it."
The going theory is that this framework is purposefully vague because Republicans wanted something they could show unity and progress on, and because they know getting into the nitty-gritty will be a nightmare. That, to the mind of Marc Goldewein of the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, makes this situation similar to the one Republicans found themsleves in over actually repealing Obamacare: what seemed like an easy fight on a unifying issue became an ugly squabble.
Still, taxes should be easier to sort out than healthcare, as there are so many chips to bargain with to win votes. It helps that lives are not literally at stake, and, as Frank Clemente of Americans for Tax Fairness of Republicans put it of Republicans, "This is the Holy Grail for them, and if they can't deliver, basically, it's game over."
However, Clemente warns against underestimating the ability of lobbyist groups to throw wrenches in legislation they believe would hurt their causes. And then there's Trump. Major legislation like this usually requires strong leadership from the White House to sell it and help cover for members of Congress casting votes their constituents might not like. It barely needs to be said at this point that Trump does not exhibit that kind of leadership, nor would he ever take a political bullet for anyone not named Trump.
It already looks like the president will be more hindrance than help in this fight. His promises earlier this week about not reducing taxes on the rich forced Republicans to amend the already-finished plan at the last minute to include the option of adding a fourth high-income bracket. And his own history of exploiting tax loopholes and refusal to disclose his tax returns, which we'd need to see to understand if and how these cuts would benefit him and his family, doesn't make him the most credible populist messenger on these issues.
The consensus on Wall Street seems to be that this is such a messy topic that we may not see a vote on any final legislation until next year. And the experts I've spoken to suspect any actual law will only broadly resemble the framework, and that said framework could be abandoned for more modest changes. "I would expect to see bets hedged before too long," as Tanner put it.
All of which is to say that rather than a slam-dunk that provides a boost for Republicans heading into the midterms, taxes are likely be another humbling slog for Trump and his party. Debate should heat up in mid-October, after Congress passes a budget resolution for 2018, triggering the reconciliation mechanism that will allow them to pass a tax bill with a simple majority in the Senate.
So get ready for yet another endless, agonizing fight over a far-reaching policy in the name of a president who doesn't care very much about the pesky details of governing.
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Nick Kroll Tells Us His Most Embarrassing Story
Puberty is a nightmare—a chaotic, destructive, empowering, horny nightmare. I remember the first time I got my period; I cried for three hours straight because I knew, I just KNEW that shit was about to get weird. And it absolutely did. I felt truly and honestly possessed by a demon during those fraught years, where I raged and screamed and picked at zits and found my only solace in anthemic anti-heroes like Courtney Love and PJ Harvey.
In adulthood, I've chosen to mercifully forget my tweenage years but watching Nick Kroll's new Netflix show Big Mouth I was immediately transported back to the dark ages. And while there were some definite full-body cringes as I relived some familiar moments, the show is such a funny and honest portrayal of puberty, that it was actually strangely comforting to go back to that moment in time.
One of the worst things about that stage of life is the isolation you feel. It often feels like you're the only one in the world going through whatever you're going through. But Big Mouth, co-written by Kroll's childhood friend Andrew Goldberg, reminds you that we all go through it and most of us even survive. The animated series tackles everything from boners to bullying and does so with ease, clarity, and a healthy dose of raunch. The show also stars some of Kroll's frequent collaborators like Jenny Slate, John Mulaney, Jason Mantzoukas, and Fred Armisen.
I chatted with Kroll about why he decided to revisit puberty as an adult and even touched on one of his most embarrassing teenage moments.
VICE: Most of us try and forget puberty forever. Just straight erase it from our mind. Why did you want to revisit it for a series?
Nick Kroll: I think simply because people seem to want to be like, "OK, I went through that. Don't want to think about that ever again." It seemed like the thing you should be trying to talk about and remember. Everything felt pretty high drama, so that's first and foremost when you're making a show. The stakes are very, very high when you're going through puberty. I think, partly for me, it was a lot of the stuff that I'm still dealing with as an adult. In therapy, things that I've talked about are directly related to what happened to me when I was going through puberty, or in my case, not going through puberty. I was a very late bloomer. Some kids are like, "Oh my God, puberty is this nightmare." I was like "When do I get uncontrollable boners and when do I get to scream at my parents?" That, for me, didn't happen until high school but these emotions of not going through it for me were just as tough. Everybody is going through their own version of this and the only unifying factor is that you feel alone going through it. I think this show tries to directly or indirectly say, "You're not alone." You're not alone if you're going through it now and you weren't alone when you were going through it even though that's the way it felt.
Totally, as an adult, you can relate to it and you have these moments where you're like, "Oh, fuck. I remember that." But if I'm watching this as a young person, I would be like, "Oh, my God. So, this is what's happening to my body."
I mean, it's pretty dirty and graphic but I also think it's all based on the emotions and feelings and things that we're going through and I think there is some utility to it. If I had been a kid when this show came on, I would have been so—I mean I'm not trying to brag but, I'd be so fucking psyched if this show came out and gave me some tools and reference points of the things that were happening to me and my friends.
Oh, absolutely. I mean we had Degrassi but it wasn't quite as real.
Yeah, you have Degrassi, it was honest but so humorless. You know what I mean? Are you Canadian or are you American?
I'm Canadian.
Right, so we did a bit on Kroll Show called "Wheels Ontario" which parodies Degrassi.
Oh I know it, it's painfully accurate.
So here [on Big Mouth] we took out all the earnestness of Degrassi and Canadian programming. But interestingly, how Degrassi was a topics-based show, dealing with an issue each episode, on our show each episode really deals with a specific issue of puberty and adolescence. So in the first episode, I see Andrew's penis and I haven't hit puberty yet, so I feel different and inadequate. The second episode is Jessie getting her period. The third episode is Andrew questioning whether he might be gay or not. The fourth episode is about the emotional brutality of sleepovers. Each episode is kind of built around an issue or a major temple of puberty. From there, it becomes about the emotion of our characters going through their specific lens of a particular moment in puberty and adolescence.
Did writing the show unearth memories that you forgot you had about puberty?
I mean it unearthed them somewhat. I created the show with my friend, Andrew Goldberg who I've known since first grade and it's based on us. We were best friends through all of middle school and had stayed close and he went on to become a writer and producer for Family Guy. There is definitely stuff that we talk about now where I was like, "Hey, you know, when we were that age, this is how I felt." And he was like, "This is how I felt." It's fascinating that 30 years later we're talking about stuff and realizing like, "Oh, wow, we were so close" but we couldn't talk about this and there are things that have just stuck with us for the rest of our lives. It's also a time in your life where you're beginning to separate yourself from your parents to create your own identity and that stuff is really formative. Those events and emotions really, really change or form the person you become.
Puberty is definitely a universal experience but you know for me, it was like 20 years ago. You didn't have to live it out in front of all of your peers on Instagram and on Twitter. So, did you have to talk to recent teens to get the new lay of the land?
It's an interesting thing. It is a different mechanism now and we struggled with that. We didn't quite know how to play how much kids are in their phones now and to be honest; it seemed like it would be kind of boring just to show kids looking at a smartphone.
Right.
I think it's crazy that kids have to deal with social media and all that stuff now but the truth is all of that stuff comes back to going through and feeling the same things that we were feeling. It's just the platform that they have to deal with now is different and possibly heightened but it's still the same things: feeling unattractive, feeling not included, feeling awkward but also trying to create your own new identity and figure out who exactly you are and how you want to come across. So, I think the social media element of it all is a crazy added element of it but it still goes back to the same root.
Do you have a moment that sticks out from puberty that's just the most embarrassing thing that happened to you back then?
Yeah. We were all hanging out in someone's basement. Boys and girls, we were like in the seventh and eighth grade—a girl pantsed me, which I guess really should be de-pantsed, but a girl pantsed me and pulled my underwear down. And the girl who I had had a crush on throughout my entire elementary and middle school saw my little penis because I had not hit puberty. I was a late-bloomer. So, I was exposed to my middle school crush very openly—I'm still talking about it in therapy now. [laughs]
Oh shit. That would fuck you up for sure.
Yeah.
Did they laugh?
No. I remember like a look of shock and then I remember like, my mom was delayed to pick me up. So, I was basically alone with the girl who pantsed me and I think I cried. It was not my coolest moment.
I'm sorry.
Oh, it's fine. I created a TV show out of it. So, at least I got something out of the whole thing.
That's true. Most of us don't get much. We get therapy.
Big Mouth premieres on Netflix on September 29.
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'Super Dark Times' Is Fall's Most Beautiful Teen Thriller
Super Dark Times, the debut feature film from New Jersey–born director Kevin Phillips, tells the story of hapless teens Zach and Josh, and what happens when suburban ennui and pubescent white male angst collide with an accidental manslaughter by katana. Cut from the same cloth as Donnie Darko, Paranoid Park, and River's Edge, Super Dark Times is anything but what you'd expect from a teen thriller in 2017: It's calculating, quiet, and, most of all, beautiful.
In anticipation of the film's September 29th theatrical release (October 3 for digital and on demand), VICE spoke with director Kevin Phillips about inspirations, atmosphere, and why, like the part of night that comes between sunset and moonrise, growing up is just so super fucking dark.
VICE: You made the short film Too Cool for School before Super Dark Times.
Kevin Phillips: We made it in winter 2014 as a vehicle to get potential financiers interested in Super Dark Times. We were already on our fifth draft of the feature, and I already had an extensive director's treatment in place. We brought on Richard Pete and Jett Steiger to produce—both colleagues from SCAD where I graduated—and Richard thought it was in our best interests to make something narrative in the same stylistic tone that was also unique unto itself. Amazingly, we got into Critics' Week at Cannes, and we got things rolling from there.
The atmosphere of this movie is, indeed, super dark.
When Ben Collins approached me with the movie's general conceit six years ago, he had [seen] it in a dream. He had these images and wanted to develop a narrative around it, and he wrote the first draft within five or six days. Things changed over the years, but the desire to approach the story in a reserved, formal, yet expressive style was always there. We drew inspiration from our own artistic influences while making this movie—the Japanese film Eureka, Lynne Ramsay, David Fincher, Ingmar Bergman, and Jonathan Demme. I'm very craft obsessed—I work as a cinematographer as well—and I wanted to make a beautiful movie that brought a light to the nuance, subtlety, and melancholy of being a teenager.
What were some of the first images in your head?
There's one scene in particular where Zach just got done running as part of gym class, and then he's in class, and there's this kid behind him asking if he heard about another kid who fell off the bridge trying to get some weed. There's something about Ben and Luke's writing that really appeals to me—their sense of rhythm and how they place that within the narratives they write. There's a very keen understanding of cinema and detail, and for me that translated well in the sense that I was able to pre-visualize the movie right off the bat.
Tell me about the role the 90s plays in the film.
It was really important for us to set it in that time period, because those years were very formative for all of the key players making this film. This was the time of our lives. It was important to set it pre-Columbine as well, to give a sense of what suburbia looked like for teenagers—particularly young white males—before that one incident reshaped our cultural perspective and replanted our fears. We wanted to give the sense that there was an undercurrent of violence before that—to see it in a landscape that had a certain openness, with liberties that explored that myth of innocence before the whole dynamic shifted.
How does masculinity factor into the film?
We wanted to see how fragile masculinity can really be, particularly within the confines of being a teenager—how easily distorted and toxic it can get when harboring guilt and shame on top of puberty, growing up, and trying to find a sense of identity.
The whole time I was wondering, "Why don't they just go straight to the cops?"
It's a really good question! There's a fear that was very much the fear of a lot of kids at the time—of getting into trouble with authority and being sent off to juvenile hall. These are kids in the moment of a tragedy that they're not emotionally equipped to handle. Their reaction to it is a bit daft, but it's more just inexperienced and based in a fear of getting in trouble.
Super Dark Times is in theaters today, and available October 3rd for digital and on demand.
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Mad Patriots Fans Burned a Bunch of Gear at a Memorabilia BBQ
Following in some Trump supporters' footsteps, a bunch of angry Patriots fans got together on Thursday to torch the shit out of their team's gear, outraged that some players from their Super Bowl-winning franchise have been kneeling during the National Anthem, local ABC affiliate WCVB reports.
More than 100 mad New Englanders reportedly showed up at Mark Shane's house in Swansea, Massachusetts, this week, where he'd set up a fire pit in his front yard for a memorabilia BBQ. Apparently burning anything other than wood in Massachusetts is illegal without a permit, so Shane and his compatriots decided just to put in a handful of hats and shirts into the ceremonial flame, saving the rest of the sacrifices for donation, NECN reports.
Before tossing a few articles in the hellfire, attendees decided to give their gear a send off by singing (and, of course, standing for) a rendition of the National Anthem, waving around a few American flags for good measure. They also ate hot dogs and strung up balloons while patriotic anthems like "America the Beautiful" played on a loop from a pair of speakers.
"I think it was a great success," Shane told CBS Boston. "I think people were united, I think people love our country, and I think it sends a great message to the NFL and any divisive type actions will not be tolerated during sports."
Shane and co. are just the latest batch of ticked-off sports fans to burn a bunch of NFL gear they paid for or got for Christmas after players, coaches, and owners throughout the league began protesting the National Anthem in the wake of President Trump's comments. The movement has even inspired it's own weird YouTube genre—Angry Man Burns Sports thing:
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'The Deuce' Gets Right What 'Vinyl' Got Wrong
The first thing we see in HBO's now-cancelled series Vinyl is white music mogul Richie Finestra (Bobby Cannavale), upset and morosely snorting coke in his luxury car on a gritty street in 1973 New York. Suddenly he's yanked from his stupor by a stampede of screaming teens (a set piece that seems solely to exist in rock nostalgia films) and follows the din to the Mercer Arts Center. There, surrounded by nubile young things and coked out of his mind, Richie 'discovers' glam rock—in the form of a band implied to be the New York Dolls. At the end of the episode, the Mercer Arts Center collapses. Richie escapes unscathed.
This sequence, like much of Vinyl, tries thinly to cash in on a fever-pitch moment: 1970s NYC in its socially disordered glory, post-white flight and on the cusp of a devastating drug epidemic and cleanup. But mostly what Vinyl captures is Richie: Richie's coke-fueled, money-drenched implosion. Richie's struggle to stay powerful. Richie's attempt to cash in on several major movements—including punk and hip-hop—that showrunners Martin Scorsese and Terence Winter manage to reduce largely to Richie-centric storylines. And while Vinyl had all the stylish trappings of a win (the billions-of-dollars-in-licensing-fees soundtrack! The slick cast! Baby Mick Jagger!), the hotly-anticipated series made one grave mistake. It decided its most exciting asset was the narrative of a privileged white guy with an excess of power and a deficit of gratitude. Vinyl, the culturally-rich NYC period piece, turned out to contain almost nothing about its culture, its setting, or its era.
After the cancellation (a telling move for a network that rarely cancels freshman shows), it would have been understandable had HBO opted out of continued focus on New York disco-era subculture. But instead they dove right back in: The Deuce, a dazzling take on the 1970s Times Square porn industry, debuted quietly in September. And this time, in the capable hands of The Wire creator David Simon, HBO finally does 1970s NYC—and viewers—justice.
Above all The Deuce has diversity, not just in casting but also in content. In a genre where complexity's been long-reserved for Richie Finestra types, The Deuce allows non-white male characters a chance to be developed and seen. Simon's stretch of 42nd street boasts no central Scorsese hero, but it does take the purview of those formerly relegated to scenery by Vinyl and its ilk: the overwhelmingly black, female, and lower-class characters who occupy the sex trade. There is the brilliantly explosive pimp CC (Gary Carr), an up-and-comer type who culls fresh-faced girls from the city bus terminal. There's the shrewdly independent white prostitute Candy (Maggie Gyllenhaal) who will not work for a pimp, and the vulnerable Doreen (Dominique Fishback) who's conflictingly enmeshed with hers. There's James Franco in two equally compelling iterations: both as broke-but-honorable barkeep Vince and as his less-scrupulous twin brother, who convinces Vince to cash in on the burgeoning porn trade.
What's most compelling about The Deuce—and what elevates it from shows like Vinyl where select characters are often imbued with absolute authority while others have none—is its willingness to show what happens when people are given a taste of power in one moment, only to have it ripped away in the next. It's a true ensemble piece, where everyone takes a turn being both a beggar and a boss. There are also repeat reminders that institutionalized sexist and racist power hierarchies persist savagely at the bottom. Many of the The Deuce's best moments lie in its nuanced examination of how race, gender, and class inform control, in a disordered setting where power is ostensibly up for grabs. This transience of power, so familiar to anyone who has ever been non-white or non-male, feels much more authentic to what may have been the landscape of 70s New York.
This isn't to say The Deuce succeeds on diversity alone. It's also, quite objectively, damn good TV. But as its rise in the wake of Vinyl shows, gone are the days when mediocre TV can expect to get by without acknowledging narratives outside being exclusively white, male, and privileged. Would The Deuce have even been plausible decades ago? Unlikely. Would Vinyl have fared better had it aired years ago, in a less sophisticated landscape? Quite possibly. But in the age of peak TV, where standards are high and the appetite for authentically diverse stories is at a roar, nobody can afford to be both mediocre and unoriginally homogenous. HBO's move suggests the future of television rests in a willingness to venture beyond one type of character expected to resonate with all viewers. And in this respect, The Deuce feels like a win. It shows a willingness to give the people—all of the people—what they want to see.
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This 500-Year-Old Sketch Could Be a Nude 'Mona Lisa'
Scientists and researchers are constantly reexamining classic artworks to find clues about how they were made and details on the artists behind them. Now, a team at the Lourve in Paris believes they may have their hands on a nude drawing linked to the Mona Lisa and created in part by Leonardo da Vinci, the Washington Post reports.
Experts have always believed that the master artist drew or even painted a nude version before creating the Mona Lisa, the Post reports. The 500-year-old sketch, Monna Vanna, certainly looks like it could be linked to the Mona Lisa, with the subject's similarly crossed arms and tilted head, down to the shape of her fingers.
"The drawing has a quality in the way the face and hands are rendered that is truly remarkable," Conde Museum curator Mathieu Deldicque, told the Guardian. "It is not a pale copy."
One Redditor was even compelled to make a composite of the two.
The charcoal sketch is part of a collection that came out of da Vinci's studio and has been kept at Deldicque's Conde Museum since 1862. Originally, experts believed it belonged to one of the painter's students, but new evidence points to Monna Vanna being a collaborative effort between two different artists. Although the style of the drawing is close to da Vinci's, experts believe part of the work was done by a right-handed artist, whereas da Vinci was left-handed. Still, the team has been able date the piece back to having been produced right before the artist died in 1519.
"We are looking at something which was worked on in parallel with the Mona Lisa at the end of Leonardo's life," Deldicque said. "It is almost certainly a preparatory work for an oil painting."
Despite the findings, the verdict is far from out. According to the Guardian, Conde Museum chief heritage curator Bruno Mottin hopes to identify the artist in the next two years, just in time to celebrate 500 years following da Vinci's death.
"There are two mysteries," Deldicque told the Post. "The author, and the meaning of this nude Mona Lisa."
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Pay It All Back, Binch
Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price has cost taxpayers over $1 million, thanks to his penchant for taking private and military jets on the public dime. The man who criticized House Democrats in 2009 for trying to purchase a handful of planes as "another example of fiscal irresponsibility run amok in Congress" used a government jet to visit his son in Nashville for a leisurely lunch in June in-between a tour of a local medication dispensary and a 20-minute speech. He also took a trip from Washington, DC, to Philadelphia that somehow cost $25,000, plus some two-dozen other domestic excursions, as Politico revealed.
On those flights, the Georgia conservative spent over $400,000, plus his trips to Europe, Africa and Asia on military aircraft cost upwards of $500,000 more.
"The taxpayers won't pay a dime for my seat on those planes," an increasingly embattled Price said Thursday, having earned the public disapproval of Donald Trump. But an HHS spokesperson clarified that Price will only reimburse the government $51,887.31, a little more than 5 percent of the costs he's incurred, the idea being to cover the price of his own seat and nothing more.
"I have spent 40 years both as a doctor and in public service putting people first," Price also said in his statement Thursday. "It has been my personal honor to serve the American people, and I look forward to continuing that service." But that seems doubtful.
Price is a Republican who has presented himself as a fierce opponent of wasteful spending and has (pretty poorly) advocated for the elimination of government funding for your healthcare. He wants to slash Medicaid for the poor, and proposed an 18 percent budget cut the National Institutes of Health. Oh, and he once tweeted, "Congress doesn't need to have private jets."
Price is estimated to have a net worth of $13.6 million, and has a history of trading stocks in businesses affected by his own work in Congress.
Secretary Price, you greedy little binch, pay the government back. For of the total cost of all your flights. Now.
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A Family Got Beat Up at Six Flags After Asking Some Teens Not to Swear
Teens these days may be waiting longer than ever to have sex and get wasted, but some aren't holding off on being assholes, apparently.
Last weekend, a group of teenagers brutally assaulted a 12-year-old boy and his parents while in line at a Chicago-area Six Flags—all because the kid's mom asked the teens to stop cursing in front of her kid, Chicago Sun Times reports.
The family was there on Saturday night to check out Fright Fest—a seasonal event promising a "truly frightening evening of fun" and usually brings out "an increased number of knuckleheads who come to stir things up," according to Brian Smith, deputy police chief in Gurnee, Illinois, where the Six Flags is located.
The teens allegedly cut in front of the family, who were waiting in line near the Raging Bull coaster, and reportedly started talking loudly and swearing. The mom asked the teens to cool it with the bad language and—instead of moving somewhere else or, you know, just avoiding saying "fuck" for a few minutes—they reportedly turned around and "sucker-punched" the 12-year-old, Smith told the Sun Times.
The boy's parents immediately jumped in to protect their kid, but the mob of at least nine teens surrounded the family and beat them to the ground.
The family was repeatedly kicked and stomped until Six Flags security could step in to break up the attack. Gurnee police soon arrived at the scene and arrested nine teens for a handful of charges, including aggravated battery and mob action.
The 12-year-old and his parents were hospitalized for "significant" injuries following the attack, but all three were released earlier this week.
Smith told the Sun Times that, while the annual Fright Fest does tend to bring some rowdy crowds, last weekend's brutal attack was "rare" and "on a different spectrum."
"This family is lucky they got out with just the injuries that they did," Smith said.
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I Love ‘Rick and Morty,’ and I Hate Its Fans
There was a great Tweet a few days ago about Rick and Morty fans, and how obnoxious they can be. Here, I'll show it to you:
Everyone hates when jokes are explained to them, but I'm going to explain this one out anyway: The gist of this quip (aided by Twitter's new and beta-tested 280-character-count—see, it's not all bad!) is that Rick and Morty fans are constantly high on their own supply when it comes to their love for and understanding of Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland's hilarious, brilliantly inventive, and frequently emotionally devastating Adult Swim cartoon. If you don't understand its brilliance? Well, you might as well be a numbskull—this is a show for people who, if not exactly are Albert Einstein, at the very least consider themselves comparable.
This, of course, is nonsense—nonsense that we've consulted with experts on, even. But you don't need to be an expert to recognize when fandom is toxic; sometimes, all you need to do is take a walk down the street. That's what I did a few months ago, when there was a Rick and Morty pop-up merch installation outside of bar-chain Barcade's Williamsburg outpost. My fiancé and I had only half an intention of buying something (an intention quickly dashed when we saw the merch line, wrapping several times around the block), but mostly we wanted to see the giant Rick head set up in front of the pop-up. Can you blame us? We love the show! (I want to reiterate this, for any Rick and Morty fan who reads on and is angered by the contents going forward: I love the show. Got it? Good.)
We lingered near the pop-up for a few minutes, essentially people-watching at some of the more creative costumes and gear that fans were decked out in for the occasion. One middle-aged man walked along the sidewalk, trying to find where the line began while wearing a cape of sorts and brandishing an extremely real-looking and expensive-seeming lightsaber replica.
"Is that a real lightsaber, bro?" A backwards-hatted male—in his mid-twenties probably—asked with derision as his friends chuckled. "Excuse me?" The man with the lightsaber stopped for a second, not quite understanding that he was quickly becoming the butt of a joke.
"Cool lightsaber—is that a real one, bro?" The hatted-male reiterated, the sarcastic meanness of his comment barely hidden. "Yes, it's a replica," the man replied, with a level of sweet sincerity that broke my heart a little bit. "COOOOOOOOOOOL," the hat man let out of his maw, the chuckles from his friends now apparent in the open air. The man with the lightsaber picked up the pace and exited the scene quickly, and so did we.
The following is obvious, but I feel compelled to state it anyway: This is not a way to treat people! It's a mean-spirited way to live your life, and recent events online (of course) have shown that mean-spiritedness runs through a certain sect of Rick and Morty fans' veins. Last week, Harmon was compelled to give a statement to Entertainment Weekly about recent efforts to doxx and harass the show's female writers under the assumption that women have been given writing credits on Rick and Morty's recent season instead of the male writers that certain fans believe are more essential to the show's strengths. (You can catch up on this whole mess on this Reddit thread.)
"Part of it is a testosterone-based subculture patting themselves on the back for trolling these women," Harmon told EW. "Because to the extent that you get can get a girl to shriek about a frog you've proven girls are girly and there's no crime in assaulting her with a frog because it's all in the name of proving something. I think it's all disgusting...I've made no bones about the fact that I loathe these people. It fucking sucks."
I'm not exactly rushing to anoint Harmon as Our Savior Male Feminist Ally (Lord knows he's got his own issues with women), but he's right—it does suck! It's this kind of behavior that projects an image of fandom—both of Rick and Morty and in general—as an exclusionary (and often overwhelmingly male) communal exercise that prioritizes snobbery and pretentiousness over genuine appreciation.
It also makes you appreciate the cultural obsession in question less: As of this writing, I'm currently three episodes behind on the current season of Rick and Morty, a show I used to once consider appointment viewing. I wonder why.
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Red Tape Is Keeping Aid from Desperate Puerto Ricans
Like a lot of Puerto Ricans living in the mainland US, Gabriela Durán felt helpless as she watched Hurricane Maria ravage her homeland last week. So she and hundreds living in Los Angeles started coordinating with other local Puerto Ricans through social media and in 24 hours had raised $10,000 for food, water, hygiene products, and survival gear.
Durán then put the package on a JetBlue flight to San Juan addressed to a local volunteer group that planned to drive the goods to Loiza, a poor community one hour outside of San Juan. But the driver who was sent to the airport to get the supplies was turned away after waiting there for several hours.
It's unclear what exactly happened to the goods Durán sent, but for the past seven days Puerto Rican government officials have been manually inspecting incoming shipments for any taxes owed, local officials told El Nuevo Día and El Vocero. "These people must know there are people dying, and you're checking for a sales tax? Really?" said Xiomara Caro, an organizer for the group that was supposed to receive the shipment.
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Assholes on TV Are the Only Thing Keeping Me Sane in 2017
I can't believe it took me so long to find Curb Your Enthusiasm—but alas, years after the show first premiered, I decided to take a chance on it. In doing so, I discovered that one of television's greatest jerks, Larry David, was probably the only person who would keep me sane and keep my anxiety at bay in this hellish year of 2017.
After a day of being angered about something incredibly narrow and shitty Trump had said (a common and consistent feeling that has stuck to me these days), I thought about what I could possibly watch to unwind. A vague review I'd once read popped into my head about how David plays a version of himself—and that he's the quintessential grump. Good, I needed grumpy. "Bring on the curmudgeons," I thought. "Give me the harridans, the dolts, the selfish, and the jerks—especially the jerks. I to watch someone who acts the way I want to feel."
The need to get out my pent-up frustration and anger at events I felt I had little-to-no control over by watching something on TV is not uncommon for me. I find it cathartic and consider it a form of self-preservation. Find the show that echoes your mental headspace and indulge in it. That's been the best way for me to explore my own feelings and feel like I'm acting on them without, well, actually acting on them. That emotional catharsis, that ability to feel seen and to connect with strangers in a somewhat intimate way, is deeply important to my own process for curbing my anxiety. In times like this, when it feels like the shit-heap of political and social events regularly aggravates that anxiety simmering within me, watching a show like Curb feels weirdly good.
Watching Larry bicker with a woman in a movie theater because he doesn't want to move his legs so she can pass by, or using the death of his mother to get out of talking to people, felt good because it was so against expectation. Look at this grump! Calling out dumb intricacies of societal norms, scoffing at the pleasantries that diffuse the nonsense, and generally being immune to the crap of daily existence (which he deals with because that's life).
Sure, I myself observe common courtesy and remember to say "please" and "thank you" IRL, but watching Larry rail against bullshit societal norms was like (and still is) being able to constantly exhale in relief for 30 minutes. Even watching Larry try to do something good, like warn his friends about a possible terrorist attack, and watch it go hilariously wrong made it feel like my own annoyances at the faux-niceties bred by social media or that coming with having to be a pleasant person allowed to move through the world were validated.
It's not just Curb that has this healing effect. Discovering and subsequently plunging headlong into Difficult People for the first time this year had a similarly beneficial effect. The feeling that watching fictional characters be self-serving jerks felt more cathartic because of it's evergreen quality (Curb premiered in 2000, Difficult People in 2015), that a relief to the building anxieties of life will always be present in watching new characters act out your own jerk-tendencies without you having to do the heavy lifting.
In Difficult People, we watch Julie and Billy give a middle finger to societal norms and expect the world to reward them—they frequently misinterpret blind selfishness as bravely suffering to achieve their own goals—while they flounder under the weight of the expectations of adulthood. Julie notably loves her nonexistent career more than her stable boyfriend and eschews kindness or altruism in favor of doing something that only benefits her. Billy is just as self-serving, if not a tad more in touch with reality, and enables Julie's bad behavior. Together, they're smarmy, selfish souls and yes, you may be wondering why the hell any of this is worth watching.
Because you can. Because it's indulgent. Because on top of getting to live inside of another world for half an hour, you get to unburden yourself from the weight of expectation, from the weight of playing too nice or too politically-correct in your daily life by living vicariously through Larry, Julie, and Billy. It's the best form of self-preservation during these trying times that I can think of if only because it capitalizes on one of TV's great effects (holding up a mirror to society and confronting the viewer) while also allowing you the indulgent pleasure of participating in jerkdom.
You can still be nice and pleasant when you leave your home. You still get through the days, swallowing bitter news pill after bitter news pill with the calm you have slowly trained yourself to feel even though alarm bells are going off in your head. But if there's a way to relieve that pressure, even if it's living vicariously through someone else, then I highly recommend you do it.
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Air Force Academy Boss Tells Racist Students to 'Get Out'
After five black cadet candidates at the US Air Force Academy (USAFA) prep school discovered the words "get out n****r" written on their dorm room message boards Tuesday, the school's top administrator vowed to weed out discrimination within his ranks and track down whoever penned the racist messages, the Colorado Spring Gazette reports.
USAFA Superintendent Lt. Gen. Jay Silveria rounded up 4,000 cadets and 1,500 support staff for a lecture on what went down this week, telling the crowd they "should be outraged" by what happened.
"No one can write on a board and question our values," Silveria said. "If you can't treat someone with dignity and respect, then you need to get out. If you can't treat someone from another gender, whether that's a man or a woman, with dignity and respect, then you need to get out. If you demean someone in any way, then you need to get out."
The school is still trying to figure out who was behind the racist missives at USAFA, but sources told the Gazette it was likely the work of one person, since the handwriting on all five looked similar. Whoever was behind the stunt could face a court martial and find themselves booted from the program—in the military, unlike in civilian society, hate speech is not protected.
Silveria's words come at a time when various other military programs have had to crack down on discriminatory behavior within their ranks. The Marine Corps cut ties with a recruit last year after a video revealed he'd verbally abused a black woman at a Trump rally. The year before, The Citadel military college suspended more than a dozen students caught dressing up in what looked like KKK costumes.
"Reach for your phones," Silveria said during his speech. "I want you to videotape this so that you have it, so that you can use it. So that we all have the moral courage together."
Follow Drew Schwartz on Twitter.
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The Rise and Fall of Heidi Fleiss, Hollywood's Most Notorious Madam
When it comes to society's attitudes towards sexual expression, the 1990s were a formative time in American culture. David Friend's fantastic and wonderfully exhaustive new book The Naughty Nineties takes a deep, deep dive into everything sex when it comes to 90s American culture—fromBaywatch and Bill Clinton toSex and the City and the proliferation of digital smut. Today, we're sharing an excerpt from Friend's book—specifically focusing on notorious Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss and her fascinating rise (and fall) in the public eye.
"Lookit—my life," she says. "I've had tremendous highs. I spent one evening with Princess Diana. I've had dinner with Nancy Reagan. I also spent [part of] 1997 in solitary confinement in the penitentiary in Dublin, California."
I am at the desert hacienda of Heidi Fleiss. My host gained national notoriety after her high-profile arrest in 1993 on charges connected with running L.A.'s toniest prostitution ring. She would become widely known as "the Hollywood Madam." People magazine would refer to her as the "sex broker to the stars." Kid Rock would sing about her ("Start an escort service... find Heidi Fleiss."). Indeed, her operation had been such a sine qua non in the sin cycles of many of the world's power brokers that on any given night she would have "Heidi girls" on at least three continents and not infrequently aboard a private or corporate jet.
Chez Fleiss—surrounded by cacti, brush, and desolation—is located in a frontier town named Pahrump, Nevada. It consists of two trailers, which have been converted into a spacious ranch house. To get here, I have driven an hour along the parched perimeter of Death Valley without spying a human soul. And then, like some portent out of Castaneda, I see a vision. A titty bar. And its adjoining billboard announces her: "Ex–Hollywood Madam Heidi Fleiss book 'Pandering' autographed and sold at the Kingdom, All Nude Gentlemen's Club." Tempting, yes; but I decide to drive on to my destination.
Fleiss's property, on the barren outskirts of Pahrump, finally appears, up a winding dirt road. New signs await me: "Do Not Enter," "Keep Out." I park and Heidi Fleiss emerges with a macaw on her shoulder. "It's my Robinson Crusoe house," she says playfully as she greets me. She ushers me inside for Perrier. I notice macaws and exotic birds of every color—I count twenty—on perches and ledges. I also spot splotches on the floor.
Fleiss shows little hint of her sleek former glory. She looks wan, her facial features sunken. She has recently gotten off crystal meth—"the white trash drug," she tells me. She has completed a stint on TV's Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew. (The public humiliation, she claims, was actually therapeutic.)
Indeed, she has reality TV in her blood. Mike Fleiss, a cousin, is one of the giants of the genre, having produced the breakout successes Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?, The Bachelor, and The Bachelorette. Heidi, too, has appeared on a string of such programs ( Celebrity Big Brother, Sober House, even Animal Planet's Heidi Fleiss: Prostitutes to Parrots). She is a woman straddling two cognitively dissonant lives: one tethered to the here and now, one pure façade; one steeped in addiction and criminality, one in sexual fantasy.
Then again, she is funny and whip-smart. Her opinions spew out in burbles. She is cocky and coquettish, though painfully self-conscious. She is also darkly transfixing, with an almost lupine spirit. "Charles Manson was captured a half hour from here," she says, as if to spook me.
Today, Heidi Fleiss is wearing gray Superbad sweatpants, house slippers lined in fluffy pink, and a blue sweatshirt speckled with macaw caca. Her two housekeepers, she explains, have "up and quit" two days before. She acknowledges her current state with a bright pop of self-deprecation: "I'm in my sweats cleaning up bird shit." But she is sanguine nonetheless. "My life [is] finally balanced out right now. Sure, it is a very unconventional and dysfunctional lifestyle I have, living with these birds. But, somehow, I make it work."
Initially, Fleiss had moved to Nevada (where prostitution is licensed and legal in certain counties) hoping to open an all-male brothel catering to women. But "Heidi's Stud Farm" went off the rails when she came up against local resistance, some legal issues, and, oddly, a new preoccupation. Fleiss, it turns out, had befriended Marianne Erikson, a neighbor who was elderly and bedridden. An ex-madam, Erikson used to run the exotic bird department at the Tropicana Hotel in Vegas, and upon retiring maintained a menagerie in her home trailer. "I would go and visit her," Fleiss recalls. "She had all her birds in cages with these big Frankenstein bolts, and the birds would be
screaming and rattling the bolts."
In 2006, as Erikson lay dying, Fleiss called the paramedics. "Her last words were, 'You take care of my birds.' I told her, 'No.' But this is where I am. I fell in love with these birds and I lost interest in the sex business. ...I'll never turn my back on them." Most nights, she says, she is alone in this place on the edge of the desert. "In the evenings, they fly around here. I don't clip their wings....I don't keep them in cages."
I am introduced to Paulina, Paul, Rodin, Freddie, and Simon. Golly used to work in a furniture store and likes to declare, "Half-off!" Suzy speaks Spanish; two others speak Mandarin. Reggie, Heidi insists, is gay. She describes his habit of pecking at another male, occasionally finding him in dirty-bird flagrante: "He turns him upside-down, sixty-nines him." Now and again, her feathered friends break into conversation, their calls suggesting a sort of cacophonous Greek chorus.
__________
Between 1991 and 1993, Heidi Fleiss ran a ring of high-end call girls, some five hundred at one time or another. They charged upwards of $1,500 a night. (Fleiss says she pocketed 40 percent.) Clients ranged from Fortune 500 execs to dissolute young heirs and royals, from rock icons to the free-spending studs at the studios. The typical Heidi "type," she explains, "look[ed] clean-cut and perfect....I want[ed] a guy to know that she was born and raised in Beverly Hills, stepped off the cover of Seventeen magazine, but she's going to fuck like Jenna Jameson in the bedroom. She's going to be the nastiest girl on the planet. She's going to bring in other girls—do this, do that, do things you never even heard of. That's the girl."
Even so, Fleiss maintains, the sex itself was never hyper-kinky. "At the levels and money I'm dealing with," she says, "there is no time for anything like that—where people are going to [try] asphyxiation and die. There was nothing so abusive or so degrading that someone was going to, the next day, feel shameful or hurt....If drugs and drinking [are] involved, there's, like, people you don't expect, all of a sudden, will want to suck a dick or whatever....That kind of thing wasn't as weird as you thought. [Or] all of a sudden you want anal sex—a tennis racquet, but which end? Stuff like that... Okay, yeah, you'd never understand that this billionaire wants to wear lingerie. But so what?"
Her heyday, like the mayfly's, was brief. In her early twenties, she started turning tricks for the legendary Madam Alex. "I wish I was a better hooker," she laughs. "I couldn't compete with the other girls." She soon realized that her aptitude was not in servicing clients but in the service business. Before long she was running the show, then setting off on her own, and for two or
three heady years, she had cornered L.A.'s top-tier sex trade.
Her original objective, she says, had been to make enough capital to switch careers (possibly to real estate), a dream of many a young entrepreneur. But she got hooked on the glamour, the octane, and the power. She fell in, she says, with "people who are 1 percent of the wealthiest in the world....I remember when one client paid me $10,000 in $500 bills. A palette of silver bars showed up at the house [one day] that weighed like seven pounds each. I used to use them as doorstops.... I had one girl on the cover of Seventeen magazine, Harper's Bazaar—all working for me."
She recalls dispatching her troops to the Clinton inaugural in 1993; to Argentina, for polo season; to yachts in Acapulco and Monte Carlo. She had four phone lines at her house in Benedict Canyon; lovelies lounging by the pool; drugs aplenty. At her trial, a real estate grandee described shuttling
Fleiss's damsels on his private plane. Even heads of state, she bragged, would phone her directly. "If I really came out and talked," she told Lynn Hirschberg in Vanity Fair, "I could have stopped NAFTA."
Today, Fleiss speaks with astonished wonderment. "It seems like another world ago. I was living in a world that was really not realistic. I mean, not too many twenty-five-year-olds go and buy a [multi]million-dollar house up in Beverly Hills like that and just live that lifestyle....My neighbors were Bruce Springsteen, Bernie Brillstein, Jay Leno, and Jack Lemmon."
She shifts from past to present tense, as if reliving the rush. "It just keeps getting better and better, like the wave is never going to crash. I remember some days—I hate to put it [in] financial [terms]—I'd be, like, 'Okay, let's see if I can make $200,000 by the end of this week.' And I'd be, 'Oh my God, I made $300,000.'...Like you get in a zone....Everything was fun. I mean, girls are getting paid to fuck Charlie Sheen."
And the parties. "They didn't have sex for money at my house, but they would come hang out. It was social....You've got people like Jack Nicholson and Mick Jagger partying at your house"—not to imply that any of these guests partook of her stable's services. "I remember coming home and Prince was dancing in my living room."
Surely there had been flesh-peddlers who catered to the elite. But Fleiss was a new, '90s breed. She was in her twenties. She was hardly inconspicuous, driving around town in a '92 Corvette or a '67 Mustang. And she personified call-girl chic at a time when hookers were in sudden favor—in films like Pretty Woman, in fashion, in rap. Just months after making bail, she started a casual clothing line—Heidi Ware. She entertained offers for movies-of-the-week. She granted interviews. She posed in her Vette (in black boots and her signature shades) for Annie Leibovitz. She wore Norma Kamali and Dolce & Gabbana to the courthouse, and her state trial drew the likes of columnist Dominick Dunne and Sydney Biddle Barrows (the Mayflower Madam, dressed in Chanel).
She stood out in another way too. In her insular sisterhood, discretion had always been the watchword. But Fleiss was a slave to her addictions—and her ego. And she would eventually see it all implode because she was, at twenty-seven, a woman of her times: a chatterbox in an era of braggadocio.
In December 1992, she crowed to the Los Angeles Times, "Look, I know Madam Alex was great at what she did, but it's like this: What took her years to build, I built in one. The high end is the high end, and no one has a higher end than me....In this business, no one steals clients. There's just
better service." Her gloating immediately put the LAPD on her tail. (She would eventually be jailed on federal charges of evading taxes and laundering money.)
"I sunk my ship—I did," she now allows, blaming no one but herself. "I was an idiot. And I have to take responsibility....We all knew what we were doing. The girls knew it was illegal. The guys knew it was illegal. I knew it was illegal. I didn't think I'd end up in...a federal prison. For sex? But [that's what happened]. They can say it was [for tax charges by] the IRS. There's nothing else to it but sex."
Fleiss went down fighting. She struck back when her black book was fought over by the law and the press. (The "black book," she tells me, consisted of a few red-bound Gucci day planners.) She lashed out when former lovers or members of her aviary tried to feather their nests by dangling secrets (interviews, audiotaped phone calls, incriminating videos) in front of the tabs and tabloid TV.
The main reason for her overnight celebrity? Her flock serviced celebrities. And if anyone personified flagrant sexual indulgence in the '90s it was her client Charlie Sheen. In video testimony at Fleiss's trial, the actor admitted that in a year's time he'd spent $53,000—two dozen occasions' worth—for Heidi-caliber companionship. (Though Sheen had ridden an '80s wave to stardom in movies like Platoon and Wall Street, he became a '90s caricature of self-destructive behavior.
Known, as he once put it, for "banging seven-gram rocks," Sheen told Maxim that by the year 2000 he'd bedded some five thousand partners. Fifteen years later, he would announce he was HIV-positive.) "He's the most well-known client [of mine]," Fleiss says, "because his traveler's checks were in my purse...when I was arrested. [Otherwise] there was no reason to give him up....I had people who spent a lot-lot more money with me."
Comparable offenders might have managed to get off lightly. But Heidi Fleiss had no such luck. She would serve three years, hard-core. And she survived it, she concedes, by adapting to her environment. Of prison, she reports, "It's lesbian hell. I had a girlfriend"—an airplane mechanic, she says, who was in on drug charges. "[Now] she has a huge company that's worth a few million dollars." Her second lover "looked like J-Lo. Men are my preference, but you're there, and you just do what you're going to do."
Her takeaway from the decade, she says—as a woman running her own business, as a sexual creature, and as a strong-willed individual—is that the era gave females new command over sex and power. "The world has changed with women and independence and money. [During] the '90s, I was living with Victoria Sellers in my house in Beverly Hills and [we'd] say stuff like this: 'Do you want a blonde or a brunette tonight?' A blond or a brunet guy. I'd go, 'I don't care, as long as they don't call me back. I have work to do in the morning.' It just became a thing, I think, where women didn't feel so pressured that they have to marry the first guy that they have sex with. I don't know if [the attitude was more] casual—or realistic."
Men, she contends, cannot not sleep around. "Men will fuck mud," as she puts it. But in the '80s and '90s, she says, women became more pragmatic about the interpersonal hypocrisy that had previously been a largely male preserve. "Women [became more] confident. A woman felt, 'I can act on my impulse.' " She attributes much of this brave new sense of authority and self-possession to a single role model. "Madonna has a lot to do with everything. From 'Like a Virgin,' all her songs—I think Madonna is a catalyst, an incredible force of nature, [teaching] women, 'Be yourself' and 'Do what you want to do' and 'Express yourself.' "
Fleiss turns reflective. "I have very low self-esteem....I listen to everyone. But [in the end] I'm going to make my own decision, no matter what....My image is: I'm associated with something bad—illegal, prison. So I have a different kind of stigma attached. I'm aware of it and it doesn't bother me. Look, I don't care what people think. If you care what people think or say—you're a prisoner. Your life is over."
Now that the dazzle and the crime and the punishment are behind her, I ask, what lasting mark did she make, in the end, on the decade and the culture?
She says she managed to relieve some pressure on the American conscience—on millions who were struggling with their angst and qualms surrounding infidelity. "Everyone has something," she figures, "a little bit of scandal. Everyone really does. It's just whether you find out about it or not. It's human nature. You cannot help yourself. In the '90s, when people found out about what I was doing with my operation, it made everyone breathe a little bit easier: 'Phew, it's not only me.' They didn't feel they had a dirty little secret. All men will cheat. Women too."
Moreover, her own scandal, she believes, helped create and define a market for exposing the dirtiest secrets of public personalities—for better and for worse. "It was the time that Hard Copy, Inside Edition, and A Current Affair were exploding. They were so hardcore gossip. And so I was plastered on all of that. Everyone wants to be famous. So anyone could make an accusation about me. And many people did—and got paid for it. Some were true and some weren't true. I don't really care now—I can only laugh about it." But, looking back, she says, she sees herself as something of a tabloid trial balloon. "It was a weird celebrity time. My situation was on the cusp of that tabloid explosion. I went to prison from 1997 to the millennium. And that's when the Internet came. Paris Hilton. The Bachelor—which my cousin owned....A lot of this reality stuff is based on whatever went down with my arrest—and the tabloid culture of the era, which I'm not too proud of. I [helped] spawn this brain-dead television thing."
"Movie star," Gina, a scarlet macaw, cries out, as if listening in.
"I love Gina," Heidi says, shaking her head. "I just don't know how I wound up here. In Death Valley. With twenty macaws. I just don't know."
From the book THE NAUGHTY NINETIES. Copyright (c) 2017 by David Friend. Reprinted by permission of Twelve/Hachette Book Group, New York, NY. All rights reserved.
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