This Mexican Town Celebrates Its Namesake Saint with Exploding Hammers

In San Juan de la Vega, a small town in south-central Mexico, there's an annual festival that celebrates the town's eponymous saint, San Juanito. The local religious figure is popular even though he's not technically recognized by the Catholic church because of his Robin Hood-like persona, which involved robbing passing mule drivers before giving their money to the poor.

Much like San Juanito himself, the festival in his honor is rather atypical. In addition to celebrating him with prayers, parties, food, and a procession in which mule drivers and thieves reenact a robbery, locals take to the streets every February wielding hammers affixed with homemade packets of chlorate powder and sulfur that explode when the revelers smash them into the concrete. Despite several attempts from local officials and parents to ban the practice and the handful of injuries it regularly causes, the tradition has carried on for 300 years. As one of the hammer-makers said, "It's extreme. We do it for the saint."

Watch along as VICE Mexico travels to San Juan de la Vega to experience this unique ritual firsthand.

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Kanye West’s Quest to Become God

On the first Sunday of 2019, Kanye West unveiled his latest creative passion: Sunday Service. Every Sunday since January 6, the Kardashian-West family, their friends, and associates have gathered in Calabasas for a transcendent, invite-only jam. There are guest performers and musicians, cameos from young North West, and likely the word “vibes” being thrown around a lot.

For three months we got of glimpses into Kanye’s worship experience through Instagram posts, primarily from First Lady Kim Kardashian West. It all culminated Easter morning with West’s personal Sermon on the Mount, live from Indio, CA, during Coachella’s second weekend, complete with premium-priced merch to mark the occasion.

But what is Sunday Service? Some say Kanye is building a church as a tax shelter, not unlike Kris Jenner’s own former church. Despite the rumors, the family stays on message. “It’s really a healing experience,” Kim Kardashian West told Jimmy Kimmel of the Calabasas services. “There’s no sermon. There’s no word. It’s just music, and it’s just a feeling.” Sister Kourtney clarified, “It is Christian,” and Khloe added that people who feel judged in traditional church settings feel free in the space Kanye has created.

But this healing, freeing experience feels an awful lot like a marketing ploy. Is his latest foray into the marriage of the spiritual and secular truly a ministry to bridge barriers and heal humanity, or is his pulpit just a stage like any other he’d perform on?

Worship is sacred, and in Black culture specifically, worship through music is visceral. The lyrics of the song are important, but the feeling the song invokes is paramount. That’s why church-bred artists like Aretha Franklin and Al Green were able to turn any note into the essence of a rousing spiritual.

West is tapping into music ministry with Sunday Service, flipping his hits into gospel-tinged arrangements using samples from greats like Fred Hammond and the Clark Sisters, and turning classic secular songs with inspirational themes up a notch. It’s not a new concept—Kirk Franklin revolutionized the marriage of hip-hop, R&B, and gospel 20 years ago, and Chance the Rapper brought this back into the mainstream with 2016’s Coloring Book—but it’s a refreshed take, and possibly new to many of Kanye’s disciples.

And it’s a dope idea in theory, and right in Kanye’s wheelhouse. Calling on Jesus as the ultimate guest feature is his thing. As a Black man and artist who has brought God into his work for years, this connection between culture and worship is paramount to not only how Kanye views himself but how he wants to be viewed by the world.

2004’s “Jesus Walks” was praised for its boldness and originality. Chuck D. even compared him to Marvin Gaye. The song earned him legitimate gospel credibility—he was nominated for a 2005 Stellar Award, the highest honor in gospel music besides the Grammy. Kanye’s long-time writing and production partner Rhymefest pondered the track’s impact on the rapper’s career in a 2014 interview with Hip Hop DX: “Looking back on it, we would not view Kanye the same way without [“Jesus Walks”]. [He] would not have as many chances with the public as he has had without that critical piece of the puzzle. It touched people in a place where rap music rarely touches people these days, and that’s the heart.”

The music industry christened the young artist rap’s first real rock star. Nas once said “I think Kanye West saved rap,” later changing that assertion during an interview with Complex, saying Kanye is more “on an artistic mission.” Rolling Stone put him on the cover as Christ in 2006. But West has always been the biggest believer of his own hype. The success of “Jesus Walks” only fueled his narcissism, and the track was his divine VIP laminate: “I made ‘Jesus Walks’ / I’m never going to hell.” His own god complex continued to grow, and he started positioning himself as a deity with titles like Yeezus and “I Am A God.” The titles and nicknames could pass as standard rap braggadocio, but it felt like borderline sacrilege.

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Kanye’s reach for divinity is part of his public war with himself, a spectacle we’ve been watching play out for over a decade. He’s a modern example of the scripture Mark 8:36, which asks what it profits a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul. Successful producer and artist, heralded as a creative visionary, married to the woman of his dreams, father to a beautiful family, and head of a coveted fashion line. But with every new accomplishment, Kanye seems to have grown more unhappy, more frustrated. He complained more loudly about not being understood, respected, or given due credit.

Kanye took a break from Twitter and the public eye to focus on his health and stability in 2017, only to return in Spring 2018 rocking a MAGA hat and proclaiming that “slavery for 400 years… sounds like a choice.” Kanye seeks praise, but equates attention of any kind with validation, and he was being championed by powerful people, receiving effusive outpourings of support from conservatives, and was in the newscycle. Herein lies the biggest problem with Kanye’s desire for leadership: he doesn’t care where he’s leading, just that people are following.

Released in summer 2018, Ye, West’s eighth consecutive No. 1 Billboard debut, was met with a tepid critical response and saw sales plummet in the second and third weeks, failing to provide him with a musical covering for his behavior. In spite of questionable antics, rants, and breakdowns over the years, he’d always delivered art that kept people invested, engaged and forgiving of his erraticism. Until this.

Within months of Ye’s release, the West crew was in Uganda so Kanye could tap into ancestral energy for his new album, Yahndi. While there,he continued to chide the public. “I'm in Africa recording…The music is the best on the planet. I am the best living recording artist. We, rather, because the spirits flow through me. The spirit of Fela, the spirit of Marley, the spirit of Pac flows through me. We know who the best. We know.”

The comparisons to Fela Kuti and Bob Marley are poignant; both artists led cultural, social, and political movements through their music. These men are legend. Kanye seems to believe he’s destined to lead a movement. He wants to be legend. He just needed to find his own movement.

That’s where Sunday Service comes in.

There’s a long history of Black entertainers in search of redemption and rebranding going through the doors of the church to get there. They profess their sins, admit their failures, and ask for the grace and love of the community—and it often works. At a glance, Sunday Service felt like Kanye’s attempt to come home. When CyHi the Prynce posted a clip of Kanye, a choir, and live percussionists in a clearing getting it in on a Fred Hammond sample in March, those of us who hadn’t been paying attention to Kim Kardashian West’s weekly posts on Instagram finally took notice. Was the mythological “old Kanye” back? Did it matter? And what is this?

The concept is simple enough: Tony Williams, West’s cousin, vocalist, and director of Sunday Service’s rousing choir, The Samples, explained during one of the first weeks that the goal was “to be able to communicate love more effectively.” The sonic references are on point. West is doing what he has always done best: rearranging classic soul songs like the Gap Band’s “Outstanding,” Alicia Meyers’s “I Wanna Thank You,” Anita Baker’s “Angel,” and Soul II Soul’s “Back II Life,” plus deconstructing and rebuilding his own hits to make them bigger and more impactful with the help of the choir and live instrumentation. There are contemporary gospel favorites mixed in with the secular selections, guest appearances from gospel artists, and bona fide praise moments.

Band director Phil Cornish told New York Magazine, “Kanye is ministering musically, [Sunday Service] is intended to really, genuinely offer something that he can stand behind and say this can help people.” Yet it feels more like spectacle than substance. Everyone’s dressed alike, in what appears to be West’s own clothing line, in changing weekly palettes. There’s something ritualistic about the circular grouping in the wooded clearings and fields, and the configuration is odd for a worship experience—it makes attendees spectators, standing outside the center of energy, rather than participants. Add the invite-only celebrity parishioners like Katy Perry and Courtney Love, and it all feels more like a performance-based cult than a church.

Sunday Service isn’t Kanye’s redemptive plea. He’s not making an appeal to his offended fans or the Black community for his 2018 behavior; he isn’t even reaching back to the Black church. It’s a new platform, separate from anything that happened last year, for his own self-indulgence. In the aforementioned Jimmy Kimmel clip, Kimmel asked Kardashian West if people at Sunday Service worshipped Kanye or God. The audience laughed, but the question seemed genuine. It feels like Kanye himself is the center and the object of this worship.

Kanye was supposed to be a Coachella headliner, but plans fell apart when the festival wouldn’t erect a giant dome in monument to the rapper and his church. They’d conceded to building him a hill for an Easter Sunday Service. “He had a date waiting for us,” he told his congregation. We can imagine that “He” does not refer to a Coachella executive.

On Sunday morning, Coachella pilgrims made their way out to the little green mountain outside of the festival campground to partake in Easter Service, Yeezy style, buying $225 sweatshirts reading “Holy Spirit” out of a “Church Clothes” tent along the way. Here again, Kanye was ironically modeling the most damning parts of scripture; a few people referenced Matthew 21:12-13 in response to images of the merch, “Jesus went into the temple and threw out all those buying and selling....He said to them, ‘It is written, my house will be called a house of prayer, but you are making it a den of thieves!’”

Kanye’s Easter Service wasn’t designed as a collective worship experience, it was worship-as-performance, staged for hipsters, influencers and VIPs. TMZ claims50,000 people showed up for the set. That’s half the total attendance for Coachella, and almost half the weekly global attendance for Hillsong services. These parishioners weren’t gathered for a powerful and life-changing morning; they were there as spectators, and this was spectacle, because Kanye can’t help but be Kanye.

From a production standpoint, the performance delivered as a grand-scale payoff of the gatherings that happened over the last several months. Chance the Rapper, Teyana Taylor, and returning ministry guests DMX and Kid Cudi joined as assistant worship leaders. The incredible choir, dancers, and musicians all in shades of mauve created a beautiful moving tableau scattered around the manmade hill. The mount expanded on Sunday Service’s signature circular set-up, with multiple, increasingly smaller levels of elevation. However, it was painfully and obviously metaphoric: the throngs of “common” attendees were at the base of the hill, fenced off from the action. Next were the VIPs, still separate from the service itself, but on the mount. Then came the disciples, the dancers and choir, then the musicians, and then the designated performer at the smallest and highest point of elevation.

Inside the circles were the spirit and power Sunday Service promised, inside the circles were invocation and praise, but the energy wasn’t projected down to the crowd. The design seems like it was more for Kanye’s desired experience—a manufactured reverence, ministering to a huge crowd from the top of a mountain. Kanye has perhaps not realized the difference between doing the work great men are adored for, and simply wanting to be adored as great men are. In the church of Kanye, you’re blessed because you’re watching Kanye be blessed. Your praise is through Kanye’s praise. We’re there to support his connection to God, not seek our own.

Kanye is still arguably a musical genius, but he’s lost the controlled chaos that made him compelling. He’s lost the ability to make us believers. Now, he’s just a dude playing church, and the public is watching for entertainment, not enrichment. Kanye’s ministry is really just about Kanye; Sunday Service is designed for him. He is both the seeker and the redeemer, both the one who needs saving and the one who will save. It’s a church of one, with invitation to watch, but never truly join.

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‘Gay Chorus Deep South’ Confronts anti-LGBTQ Politics, Starting At Church

“There is a storm. And we have to learn to dance with the storm,” an offscreen voice says in the opening of the documentary Gay Chorus Deep South, currently screening at The Tribeca Film Festival. The movie follows the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus as they go on a two-week journey to play 25 shows in churches throughout some of the most anti-LGBTQ regions of the south. The group, which was founded in 1978 in the wake of San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk’s assassination, goes on an emotional whirlwind tour through Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, and the Carolinas to test the nation’s capacity for empathy.

The South is currently in the midst of a widespread political backlash against the LGBTQ community. Legislators in states like Georgia, Texas, Tennessee, and Florida have introduced bills or pursued other tactics to make it easier for employers, businesses and adoption agencies to discriminate against LGBTQ people, as well as reintroducing bathroom bills that prevent transgender people from using the appropriate accommodations. There are advocates fighting fiercely in southern states against these policies, but as the queer former Alabama state Representative Patricia Todd says in the film, “[in the South] the Bible is more important than the Constitution.”

“We’re not going to affect change in our legislation before we affect change in organized religion,” chorus leader Tim Seelig says. He came out at 35 when he was married with a wife and kids, working as an associate minister of his Baptist church in Texas. He says the church stripped him of his family and set out to make his life miserable afterward. But now, he uses his preaching abilities to spread a steadfast philosophy that channels spirituality to heal wounds for queer people. His philosophical statements anchor the movie, as he goes from jokingly describing the line “I was lost and now I’m found,” as actually being about coming out to poignantly stating that grace is a feeling of acceptance that can come from having community.

The gay men’s chorus may have a certain air of respectability and privilege, being comprised, as it is, mostly of older white men in formal vests singing in a classical style. But their song lyrics address the gay experience of feeling excluded by the church in a pretty blunt, almost confrontational, way. They tell worshippers they’re “not afraid of [the worshippers'] children” but rather “afraid of what they might do in the name of the Lord,” and they move between solemn songs about rejection to upbeat celebrations of gayness.

Communities are surprisingly receptive, straightforward lyrics notwithstanding. Not every church allows them to perform, and they face a small protest group in Selma, Alabama. But for the most part, they’re welcomed by pastors who have no idea how their communities will react—and are willing to take heat from their congregation to find out. Time after time, pews fill up with curious faces, with many older congregants wiping their eyes, thanking them for coming by the end. That includes family members of chorus members who hadn't previously accepted them. One member, Jimmy White, says his father told him he wished he’d never been born, but the show loosened him up enough to say he enjoyed it afterward.

The tour demonstrated that even in places with the harshest anti-LGBTQ political battles, there’s more nuance and room for change than one might expect. In places like Charlotte, North Carolina, itself an epicenter of bathroom bill debates, the chorus sang alongside relatives backstage in the biggest tear-jerker scene of all. The movie also does an excellent job highlighting the pulse of the queer communities in the towns visited, casting a spotlight on local queer audience members at multiple shows and letting them speak about their concerns and their pride in the spaces they've built. And allies emerge from the woodwork throughout the film, like an older woman who gives a younger chorus member a handmade quilt with a mixture of southern images and pride symbols.

Despite all the reason for optimism in the film, there’s still a looming question of what it can tell us about the state of the country, or even the South, outside of its final cuts. It’s always possible the chorus's fans could be a self-selecting audience. Maybe the doc editors left footage of low attendance on the cutting room floor. And perhaps the MAGA-hat wearing radio host who seems hell-bent on wishing them the best would have been different without so many cameras around. But the sheer power of the bet the chorus took is undeniable. They kept showing up with 300 people, on their own dime, to churches where they had no idea how many people would come and pastors certainly couldn’t assure them that they'd be welcomed. The film is a powerful study in doing the unexpected, making the bet that someone actually might just meet you halfway even if you have every fair and practical reason to think they won’t.

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The Obamas Just Announced Seven New Movies and Series for Netflix

A year ago, the Barack and Michelle Obama announced that they'd be following up their massive, multi-million-dollar book deals with, uh, a massive Netflix deal. The streaming service basically gave the Obamas free rein to produce whatever film or TV projects their hearts desired under the pair's new production banner, Higher Ground. Now the Obamas have unveiled their first seven projects—and it looks like they're going to be making everything from kids shows to a Frederick Douglass biopic, according to Netflix.

Higher Ground's extremely varied slate of projects also includes a post-WWII period drama, a documentary about Ohio factory workers, and an adaptation of Big Short author Michael Lewis's new book, The Fifth Risk, about the dysfunctional shitshow that is our government.

"We love this slate because it spans so many different interests and experiences, yet it’s all woven together with stories that are relevant to our daily lives,” Michelle Obama said in a statement Tuesday. “We think there’s something here for everyone—moms and dads, curious kids, and anyone simply looking for an engaging, uplifting watch at the end of a busy day. We can’t wait to see these projects come to life—and the conversations they’ll generate."

Here's a complete rundown of the seven projects in development, via Netflix:

American Factory

A documentary feature that "takes a deep dive into a post-industrial Ohio, where a Chinese billionaire opens a new factory in the husk of an abandoned General Motors plant and hires two thousand blue collar Americans." The film was picked up by Netflix and Higher Ground after it won Best Directing in a US Documentary at Sundance earlier this year.

Bloom

This scripted drama series from Thelma and Louise screenwriter Callie Khouri is "set in the world of fashion in post-WWII New York City" and centers around "barriers faced by women and by people of color in an era marked by hurdles but also tremendous progress."

Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

A feature-length biopic about Frederick Douglass, based on David W. Blight's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of the same name.

Overlooked

A scripted anthology series based on the New York Times's long-running obituary column, "telling the stories of remarkable people whose deaths were not reported by the newspaper."

Listen to Your Vegetables & Eat Your Parents

A children's show from Drunk History's Jeremy Konner and actress Erika Thormahlen aimed at preschool-aged kids. The show "will take young children and their families around the globe on an adventure that tells us the story of our food."

Fifth Risk

A non-fiction series based on Big Short and Moneyball author Michael Lewis's book The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy.

Crip Camp

A feature-length documentary about a summer camp in upstate New York where, "just down the road from Woodstock, in the early 1970s, a parallel revolution blossomed in a ramshackle summer camp for disabled teenagers that would transform young lives, and America forever by helping to set in motion the disability rights movement." It is co-directed by a former camper, Jim LeBrecht.

The seven projects are set to roll out over the next couple years, but given the multi-year deal the Obamas have with Netflix, these will probably just be the start of Higher Ground's tenure on the streaming service. Hopefully Obama will tap into his inner nerd and get weird with a sci-fi show next, or a choose-your-own-adventure series about being Leader of the Free World, or maybe a Parks & Rec-style comedy, since the Obamas have been known to love that show. We'll need something to fill that Office-sized hole in our hearts anyway.

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Legalization Is Bringing an End to the 'Wild West' of Weed

Across the US in 2018, 200,000 to 250,000 people were estimated to be working in the $10.4 billion dollar legal cannabis industry. It’s projected that by 2021, one cannabis job will exist for every 1,000 people in the US. That’s roughly 325,700 jobs nationwide. While it’s clear that the growing legal cannabis industry is yielding winners and losers, reporter Danielle Simone Brand explains that legal weed has also made it possible for some people to switch from being employed by quasi-legal or criminal enterprises to above-board businesses. On this episode of The VICE Guide To Right Now Podcast, we talk to Brand to learn more about the new career paths being created by cannabis legalization.

You can catch The VICE Guide to Right Now Podcast on Acast, Google Play, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. And sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.

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Everything You Need to Know About the Mess That Is Woodstock 50

For months, Woodstock 50 has been drumming up hype for a revival of "the festival that started them all," featuring an "amazing lineup" that would draw 125,000 attendees to upstate New York for a three-day bonanza of peace, love, and music. On Monday, the whole thing turned into a complete mess.

Woodstock 50's biggest investor, Dentsu Aegis, announced that the festival had been canceled, citing issues with health, safety, and logistics—but a few hours later, the organizers behind the festival insisted that it was still happening, and threatened to sue Dentsu for saying otherwise. So what the hell is actually going on here—and how did a massive, multi-million dollar event in the works for almost half a year spiral into chaos in what seems like a single day?

In reality, the festival has been plagued with issues from the get-go. Woodstock 50's organizers couldn't lock down the site they wanted—about 800 acres in Bethel, New York, where Woodstock was originally held back in 1969—and they had relocate to a racetrack 150 miles away in Watkins Glen, which is a whole lot harder to access and, you know, a goddamn racetrack. In March, according to Variety, word broke that the festival had run into "financial problems"—and last week, Woodstock botched its ticket rollout, blowing right past the day it had planned to put them on sale. While the organizers said sales would be "delayed," there's still no way to buy passes.

All of that evidently came to a head on Monday, when Dentsu Aegis, which has reportedly poured more than $30 million into Woodstock, announced it was canceling the festival. According to Variety and Vulture, Dentsu basically didn't think there was a way Woodstock 50 could happen. While the festival's organizers promised a sold-out crowd of more than 100,000, they only applied for a permit to accommodate 75,000 folks—and they still haven't gotten it. A source at Dentsu told Variety the company had serious concerns with the infrastructure of that racetrack in Watkins Glen—too little fresh water, sanitation problems, and issues with the entrances and exits—and that it was impossible to solve all that by August 16, when the festival is set to begin. That's not to mention the talent: While big names like Jay-Z, The Killers, and Janelle Monáe have signed on to perform, a number of artists never put the festival on their tour schedules, and The Black Keys, who were supposed to headline, dropped out earlier this month without explanation.

"Despite our tremendous investment of time, effort, and commitment, we don’t believe the production of the festival can be executed as an event worthy of the Woodstock brand name while also ensuring the health and safety of the artists, partners and attendees," Dentsu said in a statement. "Dentsu Aegis Network’s Amplifi Live, a partner of Woodstock 50, has decided to cancel the festival.”

And yet bafflingly, Woodstock's organizers still claim that the festival is happening. They "vehemently" denied that the event had been called off and vowed to sue Dentsu, but they haven't said how the hell they plan to pull off a 100,000-strong, three-day concert series without their biggest investor. According to Variety, a big chunk of Dentsu's $30 million investment has already been paid out to the headliners, who reportedly each locked down fees in the $1 to $3 million range. Meanwhile, the cost of a ticket—if they ever actually go on sale—is only going up. A source told Variety that, at this point, a three-day pass would cost $500 at a minimum.

We'll have to wait and see if Woodstock 50 somehow manages to come together. The organizers still haven't said anything beyond denying it was canceled, and Michael Lang, who helped put on the original Woodstock and is at the helm of this year's iteration, hasn't spoken to the press since this fiasco started. But for anyone hell-bent on trekking to upstate New York to celebrate Woodstock's 50th anniversary, there's still one sure bet. Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, where the festival was held all those years ago, is putting on its own slate of shows: a four-day event complete with sets from Santana, Arlo Guthrie, Edgar Winter, and, uh, no sign of a catastrophic fiscal and logistical meltdown in sight.

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Trump's 'Record Economy' Is Making Americans Miserable

After running a campaign on the idea that America was an impoverished wasteland, Donald Trump has spent his presidency bragging about the economic expansion that began under Barack Obama but continued under him. Though he might be a glutton for credit, Trump isn’t wrong, exactly, when he celebrates the “record economy” in his tweets: Unemployment in the United States is at a 50-year low, the stock market is soaring, and GDP is growing at a brisk clip. Polls have found that people are confident in the state of the economy.

But that doesn’t mean Americans really believe a rosy overall economy is improving their lives.

A Monmouth poll released on Monday provides more evidence that this economic recovery is not lifting everyone up equally. Of the 801 American adults surveyed, just 12 percent believed they’ve “benefited a great deal from recent growth in the US economy.” And while 31 percent indicated “they have received some benefit from the economic upturn,” 27 percent said that they haven’t been helped “much,” and another 27 percent said that they haven’t been helped “at all.” Just 18 percent of respondents said that Trump’s policies helped middle-class families a lot, and high earners were more likely to say the rising economy gave them a bump: 58 percent of people who make $100,000-plus a year said they’ve benefitted, while just 34 percent of people earning less than $50,000 per year and 42 percent earning $50,000 to $100,000 said they did.

These numbers aren’t necessarily shocking. Nor are they that different from 2018 or 2017, right before Trump took office. That suggests the fears of poorer and middle-class Americans, which helped Trump get elected, have been far from relieved. Anecdotally, some Trump voters in swing states have been frustrated that his promises to bring back manufacturing have not materialized. That means economic populism could still be a strong message in 2020, despite all those upward-facing indicators.

The Monmouth poll also found that people were greatly concerned about healthcare affordability, with 19 percent of respondents citing that as a top concern, up from 13 percent last year. That in part explains why left-wing Democratic presidential candidates like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have been calling for Medicare for all along with the erasure of student debt and tuition-free higher education.

Those policies seem aimed at voters who are still concerned about their day-to-day survival even as the economy as a whole hums along. Wages are now rising, but not yet enough to erase the damage done by the last decade’s downturn. Americans also have to contend with skyrocketing costs for the essentials of life: education, healthcare, and housing. Trump’s signature legislative accomplishment, the tax cut bill of 2017, mainly benefitted the rich, and some taxpayers were outraged when they got smaller refunds this year, even though in many cases that was because their regular pay had gone up.

What the Monmouth poll measures is not whether a growing economy is benefitting ordinary people, but whether those people see themselves as benefitting from it. Maybe Americans are better off than they were a few years ago on average, but maybe they’re also more aware of inequality, or have a sense of being cheated. Trump’s message in 2016 was partially about how economic statistics masked the pain of real people—he went so far as to call those statistics, like unemployment numbers, “phony.” That evidently resonated among key swing voters in certain Midwestern states. But now Trump is the incumbent who has to claim that America is doing awesome, and that the economy is truly benefiting everyone. The question is, will people believe him?

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Meet the Superfans Spending Tens of Thousands on Escape Rooms

Escape rooms have come a long way from their early internet browser game origins. It’s only been about a decade since the first IRL escape room was created in Japan and it wasn’t until 2012 that they reached the US. In the years since, they’ve spread across the country like wildfire, with ever-increasing puzzle difficulty and production value. In major metropolitan areas, they’re now as ubiquitous as Targets, and have transitioned from novelty to a staple of date nights and corporate team-building exercises. Firmly cementing their spot in the cultural landscape was January’s Escape Room, a horror film taking place inside an elaborate one filled with boobie traps.

As with any leisure activity, escape rooms have picked up their share of fanatics. These enthusiasts travel the globe to tackle the best rooms on offer, cataloguing and comparing notes on each new venture within their tight-knit online community. Completion times, number of hints used, and personal rankings of rooms on the unofficial five key system devised by escape room-ranking site, Escape Authority, are all up for discussion, but the only metric that really matters, of course, is how many you’ve completed.

Dallas software developer Jeff Carter grew up playing escape room Flash games and was elated to find out in 2016 that thousands of their real-life analogs were out there waiting to be experienced. “I remember as a kid thinking it would be so awesome if they were real,” says Carter. “Then my dream came true.”

In the less than three years from the time he learned of their existence, carter has played over 290 rooms, chronicling his journey in an Excel spreadsheet. His family jokes about his sudden fanaticism, but Carter defends his passion. “They call it an obsession, but I don’t like the way that sounds,” he says. “I tell them I’m an enthusiast. They know it makes me happy but they think it’s a bit excessive for me to do so many.”

Details from the escape rooms at 60Out

Since catching the escape room bug in 2014 when a friend dragged her along to one, LA-based enthusiast Sheryl Bon has completed 115 rooms. She now works part-time as a manager for escape room franchise 60Out to supplement her acting career. Like Carter, Bon keeps a meticulous spreadsheet of her trials that covers each room’s location, how many players were on her team, how many players the room allowed, whether or not she made it out, the time it took, and notes about what she did and didn’t like. She estimates that, when factoring in travel costs, she’s already spent $20,000 on the habit.

“It’s an expensive hobby,” she acknowledges, “but I don’t really mind.”

Bon’s newfound obsession has taken her across America and around the world. When we speak, she tells me she's just returned home from an escape room sojourn to the UK and France with her boyfriend, who she helped indoctrinate into the escape room lifestyle.

“Relationships are made and broken in escape rooms,” Bon explains. “Before [my boyfriend] even knew [of my fanaticism] I tested the waters with him by bringing him to one. Needless to say, he passed. Now I have him on my team.”

Bon’s far from the only one to rope others into the hobby. Orange County, California, enthusiast Jim Dangcil says his friends now regard him as an “escape room pimp.”

“I’m like a drug pusher,” jokes Dangcil. “It’s like ‘what? You’ve never done an escape room? Let’s go do one right now.’”

Instantly hooked at a company event less than a year ago, Dangcil has already completed 96 rooms, but he says his fervor pales in comparison to his girlfriend’s, who got addicted after he exposed her to his new hobby. He recalls a time when, after an exhausting full day spent at the Orange County Fair, she was jonesing to squeeze some rooms in along the drive home.

“She was like, ‘there are rooms available right now,’” says Dangcil “’We can fit in a few before heading back. If we hustle, we can get there in the next ten minutes.’”

Some enthusiasts, like Edwin Tactay in San Diego, fell so hard for these puzzles that it changed the course of their lives. After being introduced to the rooms with a three-in-a-row blitz, Tactay picked up a part time job as an escape room "game master"—the person who explains rules, offers hints, and monitors the progress of customers. He performed this role at a few locations before he was enlisted by another escape room company to help design a new room and its puzzles. He soon became an in-demand consultant for escape room builders across the SoCal region. Eventually, an investor approached him with the opportunity to open and design a room of his very own, so Tactay quit his day job as a creative director at an apparel website to work on escape rooms full-time.

"I’m not a great business person with all the taxes and forms and everything," Tactay tells me over the phone. "But I love puzzles and building the game, so that’s why I decided to go for it." Like Bon, he estimates he’s spent “at least $20,000” on the hobby, even with many other room owners comping him games.

If there’s a Mecca for escape room enthusiasts, it’s 13th Gate in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The community reverentially compares the location’s production values to that of Disneyland, and Escape Authority was compelled to provisionally modify its five-key rating system with a 6th and then 7th key just to give its rooms—one spanning 3,300 square feet—their due praise.

Tactay tells me that he’s celebrating his 40th birthday by flying out there with some fellow enthusiasts to hit all five of their rooms in a day. Those room bookings alone cost him $700. Dangcil remarks that his girlfriend never had any interest in traveling to New Orleans, but after learning of 13th Gate, a mere 90-minute drive away, she planned the four-day birthday trip to the city with 11 escape rooms on the itinerary.

It's not all sweetheart getaways for this culture, however. Every so often, a bit of drama creeps into the online escape room community where these folks swap suggestions for new rooms to try and grouse about bad puzzles. The biggest taboo is for an owner to promote their own room without divulging their connection to it. But by and large, it’s an exceedingly positive place where these fiends can geek out together, and every enthusiast I spoke to seemed thrilled to not only have found a new passion, but a group like-minded people that share it.

“I didn’t think I’d ever be into something so much as I am escape rooms,” Bon gushes. “Now everyone knows me as Escape Room Girl. The first thing [friends and family] ask me now when they see me is: ‘What number are you at?’”

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Legendary 'Boyz N the Hood' Director John Singleton Has Died

Legendary writer, director, and producer John Singleton is dead at 51, the LA Times reports. The filmmaker suffered a stroke earlier this month and later fell into a coma. He died Monday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

Singleton's family announced that they were taking the famed director off of life support Monday morning, following some premature reports of his death. "It is with heavy hearts we announce that our beloved son, father and friend, John Daniel Singleton will be taken off of life support today. This was an agonizing decision, one that our family made, over a number of days, with the careful counsel of John’s doctors," the family said in a statement, according to Deadline.

"John Singleton is a prolific, ground-breaking director who changed the game and opened doors in Hollywood, a world that was just a few miles away, yet worlds away, from the neighborhood in which he grew up."

In 1992, then-24-year-old Singleton became the youngest director and the first African American to earn a Best Director Oscar nomination for his debut movie, Boyz N the Hood. He went on to write and direct Higher Learning, the 2000 Shaft remake, and Poetic Justice, starring Tupac Shakur. Recently, Singleton co-created the FX drama series Snowfall, about the origins of the crack epidemic in 1980s Los Angeles.

"John was such a supernova in his youth that we forget that he was only beginning to fully assert his gifts as a director," the statement continued. "Kurosawa was 52 when he directed High Low. Hitchcock was 56 when he directed To Catch a Thief. As much as we will treasure his body of work, we were looking forward to the films John would have made in the years ahead."

There has been an enormous outpouring of support and admiration for Singleton ever since he was hospitalized April 17, with everyone from Snoop Dogg to William Friedkin to Pose creator Steven Canals taking to social media to express the impact the director had on their lives. "There was a time when I was struggling to pay my bills in film school and not sure this town was for me," Shonda Rhimes wrote in an Instagram post last weekend. "And one day, not long after Boyz N The Hood exploded on the scene, my phone rang. It was John Singleton. John did not know me at all. But someone at USC had told him I was talented and he was kindly calling to offer me some words of encouragement. He told me to keep writing. I never forgot it. Praying for him and for his family now."

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Oobah Butler's Guide to Faking Your Way to the Top

VICE's Oobah Butler just released his first book, How To Bullsh*t Your Way To Number 1: An Unorthodox Guide To 21st Century Success. We scammed an excerpt from the chapter "Adventures in Being a Bullshitter," which you can read below.

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I think it’s fair to say you bullshit a lot. Sometimes you don’t know you’re doing it, but you are, constantly. Nobody is above bullshit. If you really want to get down to it, bullshitting is hardwired into the very nature of human psychology—taking that small nub of you that lives inside your head, that you know so well, and projecting it outwards, shooting it onto other people with a cloud of confidence, and thin air, and projection—that’s bullshit. Every time you express the soul of yourself in any way outside of you through your mouth, you’re technically bullshitting a little, just letting people know you’re there by making some noise about it. Don’t be afraid of being a bullshitter. It’s happening all the time.

The first time I bullshat, it was a wild success. I was five years old. My family was taking a beach day, and our dad handed us all a shiny £1 coin to go and buy a toy to play with for the day. I, impulsively, bought a sort of ray gun thing, a tiny plastic pistol that made electric whirring sounds when you pulled the trigger. You know the ones. You had one as a kid as well. It was alright.

My cousin, however, went to the shop 20 minutes after us, and while she was there she managed to find a far greater prize: a plastic bow and arrow set (that could actually shoot!), and maybe I am hyping it up with my nostalgia but the bow was as big as she was and the arrow could fire for approximately one hundred million miles. I absolutely had to have it, but I had already spent my toy money. “Dad,” I moaned, “Daaaad. Can I have another pound to buy a bow and arrow set?” And he said: no.

I want to make it clear that I have, with difficulty and a therapist’s help, forgiven my father for his cheapness, but at the time I was furious. The oral history of this incident is hard to factcheck, but among my brothers it’s pretty unanimously agreed upon that I went missing not long after this. I was from a large family (one of six siblings) so it was easy to slip away from the pack and go off and do your own thing. After a while, there was some mild parental concern about my whereabouts—”Where’s Oobah?”—that turned to a bigger group effort to find me—”Right, your brother’s missing—everyone go spend five minutes trying to find him”—until, at the top of the beach, on the base of the promenade up to the shops and the parking garage standing above it, they found me, smirking and pale and topless, hands held neatly behind my back.

I was selling a seashell to a grown man for 20 pounds.

What had happened in the minutes since I’d disappeared was this: with a sandcastle bucket in hand, I had scoured the beach for treasures—a shiny pebble here, an interesting-looking shell there, a couple of tiny crabs dipped up out of a rockpool—and arranged them on my beach towel in the form of a shop front. Then, with great showmanship and a whole lot of formative bullshit, I started selling to passersby.

Would you buy an interesting shell from a 26-year-old man? You would not. But back then, when I was just a cute, entrepreneurial little boy, the plan worked. Armed with my youth, my charm and my towel full of treasure, I managed to sell trinkets and sea gems and raised enough for one bow and arrow and an ice cream. The whole walk back to the car, my brothers covered in sea slime and sand, me eating and ice cream and firing an arrow into the sun, I beamed like the smug little goblin I was. This was my first taste of bullshit, and I instantly craved more.

When I was 15, me and a couple of my brothers were in a band. Obviously, nobody takes a band full of dish-faced teenage boys particularly seriously, so it was hard to secure any kind of paying gig anywhere in the surrounding area. We tended to play annual ‘Battle of the Band’ shows and the occasional pub-that-turns-a-blind-eye-to-underage-drinkers open mic night. That’s until I came up with the bright idea of hiring Martin Davey.

Martin Davey was a gravel-voiced middle-aged cockney band manager, with a wealth of experience bringing local bands to the top and the gift of the gab to prove it. He also was just me, on the phone, pretending to be an old cockney band manager, calling up venues and fronting to them as if our band was good. And… it worked. Not every time, but most. Realizing that venues took bands more seriously when they had representation, I got us representation. It just also happened to be me, doing a voice, after watching one too many Guy Ritchie films.

This went well for a few months—we booked the kind of gigs that, sure, weren’t going to have stadium rock bands shaking in their boots, but put us a couple of strides ahead of similar bands in our local scene. Then we made it to Madhouse, a big practice and rehearsal space in Birmingham, and that’s where the scheme started to fall apart.

Turned out the venue was run in a kind of backwards way where all the bands appearing there had to pay a compulsory fee to play to cover the usual ‘cost of putting a gig on’ stuff, like security and staff and the hiring of the venue. I didn’t understand that, because I was 15 and an idiot, and when my band and I turned up we were shell shocked that the venue’s staff immediately asked where Martin Davey was. “He was supposed to pay us ahead of schedule!” they said. “You can’t play without it!” I just shrugged indifference while they desperately called the mobile phone that was buzzing in my jorts pocket. “We just work with him,” I said, innocently. “We don’t know where he is.”

In the end, we played, smashed it (according to the six to eight fans of ours who came to see our segment of the show, anyway), and after the show the desperate venue staff ended up apologizing to us for all the confusion. “And here’s a band now,” the announcer said, as we made it up onto the stage, “they’ve had a difficult night so far and I’m so sorry your manager’s let you down, boys…give them a big round of applause, it’s The Meek!” Once again, bullshit won out.

As my teen years progressed, I started to put a lid on these silly bullshit schemes of mine. That was due to a mix of things. There were voices of doubt around me, an internal nagging need to be seen as mature, the idea that abandoning such folly was a grown-up thing to do. I plodded from my teens to early adulthood largely bullshit-free.

And then I found myself in the rut I described earlier. You know, living in a shed, stagnant career, strange-smelling clothes. I was working for someone else doing work I didn’t believe in and didn’t feel anything for. I was making just about enough to get by but nowhere near enough to live comfortably. Bills were piling up, stresses and debts were piling up. I was, as I have detailed at length, living in a shed.

And then I met Georgio Peviani. And my faith in bullshit was restored to me.

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Let 'Jeopardy!' Contestants Make 69 Jokes, You Monsters

Jeopardy! is one of those cultural institutions that has basically been the exact same show forever but, somehow, never slips out of the collective consciousness for long. Whenever it seems teetering on the verge of antiquation, a Ken Jennings type swoops in to get everyone excited about weird, backwards trivia once again. Right now, that person is James Holzhauer, the sports-betting mastermind who's currently laying siege to the Jeopardy! coffers, thanks to a mixture of random knowledge, gambling genius, and some preternatural buzzer skills.

It's great that Holzhauer's winning streak got everyone talking about a 55-year-old game show again, but the newfound attention has also brought a disturbing bit of Jeopardy! knowledge to light: Namely, the show won't let its contestants make "69" jokes anymore, Vulture reports.

Ken Jennings first revealed the shocking truth on Twitter last week, telling a fan that wagering $69 is "officially forbidden on Jeopardy now" thanks to some new 2018 rules.

As the world reeled in horror, Holzhauer himself chimed in to confirm the shocking revelation, saying that $69 is just one of five different bets banned by the game's producers:

Of course, 69 jokes are as enduring a part of our culture as Jeopardy! itself, no matter how many times Trump tries to kill the whole format for good. For the love of god, Jeopardy!—what gives you the right to censor your contestants if they want to make a $69 gag or two?

But before we all take up pitchforks to protest the deeply lame ruling, the folks over at AV Club dug up the other numbers banned by Jeopardy! and—well, they actually make some sense. Betting $666 is banned because the devil or whatever, and the three other banned numbers are all Nazi-related. Per AV Club:

The numbers $14, $88, and $1488 (all associated with neo-Nazi propaganda) were all banned from the show last year, allegedly after a contestant accidentally bet the latter number as part of an effort to hit a particular target score.

Still, if you manage to land a spot on Jeopardy! and feel the urge to appease the seventh-grader still lurking inside us all, worry not. You've still got options, $69 aside. Thankfully, $420 is apparently a fair and legal bet, and if you want to pull a Holzhauer and make a massive Final Jeopardy wager, it seems like $42,069 is still totally kosher. Nice!

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Woodstock 50 Has Been Canceled

Well, it happened: After a botched ticket roll-out and a brain-bleedingly weird lineup, Woodstock's 50th Anniversary festival has officially been canceled, Billboard reports.

Dentsu Aegis Network, the company footing the bill for the festival, announced the news in a statement Monday, saying that "despite our tremendous investment of time, effort and commitment, we don’t believe the production of the festival can be executed as an event worthy of the Woodstock Brand name while also ensuring the health and safety of the artists, partners and attendees."

The 50th anniversary festival was originally slated to take place August 16-18 in Watkins Glen, New York, a hundred miles from Yasgur's Farm, the site of the 1969 festival. The lineup, which included everybody from Woodstock legacy acts like John Fogerty and to Miley Cyrus, Jay Z, and Run the Jewels, was met with a, uh, variety of reactions.

The first real sign of trouble came after the ticket on-sale date got bumped last-minute because the festival hadn't locked down a permit to actually put the thing on yet. Now, it looks like it won't be happening at all.

"As a result and after careful consideration," the statement reads, according to Billboard, "Dentsu Aegis Network’s Amplifi Live, a partner of Woodstock 50, has decided to cancel the festival. As difficult as it is, we believe this is the most prudent decision for all parties involved." Apologies to every 14-year-old out there who just discovered weed and Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and was actually excited about this one. There's always the 75th anniversary.

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The Best Memes from ‘Game of Thrones’ Season 8, Episode 3

Seven bless me. After a looong build-up in the first two episodes of season eight, Game of Thrones's seventieth chapter was almost certainly the most cataclysmic installment of the series to date. We still have a LOT of questions about what exactly went down at the Battle of Winterfell, but that’s a different article. Into the breach once more, my memes. Charge!

First off, The Long Night featured some questionable-at-best military strategy, and people took note. Sure, the Dothraki light cavalry might be best served by attacking the dead outside Winterfell’s walls, but why wasn’t everyone else behind the stone walls, or at least the fire trench? You guys know every soldier you waste turns into an ice zombie, right?

For a guy who learned combat in a paramilitary organization based in a castle next to a giant fucking ice wall, you’d think Jon Snow would know more about defending a medieval fort. But, no, just run around with your sword, that’ll for sure work, dude.

Like the first two episodes, this episode was also very dark. Like, literally.

And there were some tragic deaths...

...but honestly, way more people survived than many expected. Brienne and Jaime shippers can rest easy, and it looks like Grey Worm is going on that beach vacation with Missandei after all.

While everyone else was fighting for their lives, Bran did the eye thing for some reason. Thanks, Bran!

Things eventually went south in the crypt, but who didn’t see that coming?

Finally, Arya jumped out of a window and slayed the bad bad ice man.

Winter is coming? Winter is here??? More like Winter just blew a 3-1 lead in the Finals. On to episode four, and the return of chaotic, evil wine mom Cersei.

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'Dark Side of the Ring' Shows the Human Side of Pro Wrestling's Most Dangerous Era

Professional wrestling fuses actual athletics with scripted theatrics in a way that's unlike any other sport in the world. While nowadays its over-the-top sagas and carefully crafted redemption stories make it seem more like live theater than anything else, there was once a time when the audience—and even some wrestlers—couldn’t separate the in-the-ring theatrics from real life. The new VICELAND series Dark Side of the Ring investigates stories from the sport's heyday in the 70s and 80s, when what was going on offscreen was frequently much more violent and deadly than what the cameras captured.

Wrestlers at the time were rewarded for making their characters seem as authentic as possible, which led to real-life consequences for many. The series looks at characters for whom this rang true, like the humungous Bruiser Brody, known for charging into the audience and hitting people with a giant chain—and the tricky aftermath of trying to get justice for him after he was murdered in a mysterious locker-room stabbing. It also delves into stories of abusive real-life partnerships between famous co-ed tag teams like Macho Man and Miss Elizabeth, who had a parallel abusive relationship plot line in the ring. More than an inside peek into dark rumors of the wrestling world, though, the series is a study in human nature and the spiral effect of pseudo-reality entertainment.

I caught up with director Jason Eisener to hear more about how the era's chaos got so extreme in the first place, and what that chaos says about the nature of entertainment.

Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

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VICE: Why did you feel compelled to start telling these stories?

Eisener: Wrestling is unlike any other art form or sport. The time period we’re really interested in is when the audience thought wrestling was real. Every wrestler had to live their character's persona in their everyday public life; if they were playing a larger-than-life character, they’d have to act like that out in public, or if they saw their rival in public they’d have to act as if they were at odds with each other.

Bruiser Brody, for example, did such a good job at protecting his character that no one knew the real person. But that actually ended up working against him after his murder; his killer was taken to court, but the jury couldn’t separate Brody's actual persona from his evil character. Since you could watch Brody in the ring swinging a chain and running up into the audience, parting seas of fans and scaring people, people back then thought that’s who he really was. They didn’t know that underneath that character, he was a super-brilliant, loving father and husband. He would play the character, but no one knew he was also part of the camera crew, editing footage and calling some of the camera shots as well. So that’s one of the big reasons we really fell in love with his story.

What do you think allowed all of this drama to boil over behind the scenes at the time?

The sport went to great lengths to protect the mystique. One of the stories that got us really interested in doing this series was hearing about people like Rowdy Piper in the 80s. He’s considered to be maybe the greatest wrestling villain of all time; people hated him so much he used to have to wait for everyone else to leave the arena before he went to his car so they didn’t throw rocks and bricks through his window. But one night he ended up saving a woman from being attacked by three guys in the parking lot, getting stabbed in the process. They had to hide it from the press; if people heard he was a hero, that would go against his character in the ring where he’s supposed to be a villain that everyone hates. I think it’s so fascinating.

Do you think fans knew that what they were watching had off-stage consequences?

One of the things that made me want to tackle this was hearing how much people really believed it. There are stories from back in the 70s of Bobby the Brain Heenan, a villain character, who people hated so much that they used to pull out guns and shoot toward him. There are stories of people being shot in the neck just because they were next to the ring. Back before wrestlers had a separate entrance to use, they'd have to walk amongst the crowd and you’d hear these stories of wrestlers just fighting for their lives to get back to the locker room. And then they'd get back there and look down and see knives sticking out of them from people who had stabbed them. So yeah, people really believed it.

Why would anyone want to keep subjecting themselves to such a dangerous environment?

That’s a good question. Some people didn’t really have a choice. They may not have had another option. It was an ok livelihood and they may not have had other options. When you read the stories of Rowdy Roddy Piper, he got in the business when he was fourteen or fifteen and it was like running away to the circus in a lot of ways. Some probably ended up loving it. I imagine there’s an addictive feeling, even if you’re playing a villain and you get the crowd so mad at you they want to kill you, there’s gotta be a thrill behind that.

Are there still remnants of that culture today of wrestlers acting like their characters or experiencing repercussions because of their characters in real life?

I think there’s a little bit of it. That’s one of those reasons I really like Ronda Rousey, because there’s this blend of who she was in the MMA world and her transition into the wrestling world. It seems like they’ve done a good job of blending her personal life with her character and the blurred lines there are pretty fascinating. It’s not quite the same as it used to be, but there are still moments where people wonder whether it was real or scripted.

People may not be fighting each other off-camera because of their characters anymore. But since wrestling still relies on creating entertainment out of these plot lines, can’t that still inspire negative real world attitudes?

Well, looking at the Macho Man and Miss Elizabeth relationship, when his character was mistreating her in the 80s, the fans wanted to speak up for her and wanted her to leave him. Wrestling can do some powerful things reflecting the culture. That could empower other people to see "oh, this relationship isn't good," and there are probably other people in relationships like that. So when they see the characters going through those sort of scenarios, seeing people want to defend them and get them away and make them stronger, I think that’s good for people to see. And that always happens in wrestling—they figure out a way to reflect what’s happening in culture and you can always learn something from it.

What’s the reaction been like from wrestling fans?

My favorite reactions have been from die-hard wrestling fans who showed it to their friends or family who don’t understand why they’re into wrestling, that it really opened their eyes to this art form. And to me, that's like a gift to other wrestling fans like us who feel like they can show it to their friends and family and help them understand why we like pro wrestling and get a perspective on it they might not have had. So that means the most to me.

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