Amidst a bunch of howling kids and animals I made my way across the show floor—and discovered, nestled towards the back of the room—the Royal Canin Championship & Household Cat Show. Each section of the convention could be described as a miniature neighbourhood, and in this case, it appeared as though the dog-people and cat-people were kept separate by a divide of birds and fish (naturally). Over in cat world, a loudspeaker calls out pet names while nervous pet owners prepare their felines for a few moments on the podium. On planet canine, swarms of spectators who are clearly anxious for animal affection hang around with breeders—who discuss the peculiar particulars of their profession. It was weird, and I loved it.

See more of Nathan's work on his internet website.

As you’ve probably heard by now, Rob Ford, mayor of Toronto and the hearts of young people everywhere, smokes crack, or at least there is a video that multiple reporters have seen of a guy who looks an awful like Rob Ford smoking something out of the pipe. Although mayors have been caught sucking the glass dick before (most notably Marion Barry in 1990), it is still big news, because, wow, it seems like if you were running a major city you shouldn’t be hanging out with shady dudes and having a puff of the old crack.

Rob Ford is somewhat of an erratic dude for someone with so much power—he’s sort of a cross between Homer Simpson and a Canadian version of Caligula—so the notion that he enjoys hard drugs recreationally isn’t the craziest idea. But what would it be like if a more respected authority figure, like New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, was found in similar cracked-out circumstances? We wandered around Brooklyn asking people to find out what their reactions would be.  

VICE: How would you react if Mayor Bloomberg got caught smoking crack?
Kristina, attorney: I would be surprised. He seems to be a very conservative kind of guy. He keeps to himself, he’s very private. If he got caught doing it in public, that would be a huge problem for the city of New York. I think our politicians need to be role models for the people of the city.

Can a crack user be a good role model?
I think a crack user who’s in recovery and has done something positive with his life and has chosen to take a different path can certainly be a role model for other people. But if they’re going through those problems and issues, that’s what they should be focusing on, not leading a group of people.

How would crack affect the choices a leader—like a mayor—makes?
It affects the mental and psychological well-being of a person, and that’s fact. Whether or not people choose to use it is their business. But if you’re going to use something that alters your physical and mental stability, then certainly it would not be in your best interests to be leading a city.

How would you feel if Mayor Bloomberg were caught smoking crack?
Carlos, ironworker: So-so.

Why so-so?
Sometimes I like him, but sometimes... y’know...

Do you think it’s OK for politicians to do drugs?
Yeah. I like doing them sometimes. I like a couple of them.

How would you feel if Bloomberg were caught smoking crack?
Anna, dancer: I’d go “hmm, mmm.” I’d probably need more information before I got really mad or anything.

You wouldn’t be surprised? Offended?
I guess I’d be surprised. I don’t think I’d be offended, though.

Is there any personal choice that a mayor could make that would offend you?
If he said mean things about gay rights, or do anything violent.

Do you think we should care if mayors are totally strung out?
I think that’s kind of a personal thing. I think it depends if it affects his job or other people.

Javier and Diana, architects from Madrid.

Who’s the mayor of Madrid?
Javier: Ana Botella

How would you feel if Ana Botella was caught smoking crack?
Diana: I don’t think she would do it. She’s very right-wing religious.

Rob Ford, the mayor of Toronto, is also a right-winger and  he was caught smoking crack.
Javier: Crack just makes it too hard for a mayor to perform his work competently.

What if the mayor were doing other drugs that didn’t get in the way of his job?
Javier: I wouldn’t care about that.
Diana: It depends if he does it in his free time or while he’s working.

Is there any job people can do while high on crack?
Javier: Well, not crack, but I know a lot of architects who smoke a lot of stuff.

How would you feel if you found out that your mayor was smoking crack?
Gertrude, journalist and radio host from Copenhagen: I would think that that’s just way too much.

Do you think smoking crack makes you a bad person?
No, not necessarily, but I think it means you make risky decisions. It’s a risky thing to do and I wouldn’t trust the ability of that person to make wise decisions on behalf of the entire community.

What do you think a mayor on crack would do differently from a clean mayor?
If you severely abuse any kind of substance, you just start making bad decisions. That’s not just for mayors, that goes for doctors and educators. They start making risky decisions because the more hooked you get on this drug, the more you’re going to take risks to keep your secret and get your drugs.

How would you feel about mayors and other professionals doing a little bit of crack, as long as they’re not abusing it?
I’m pretty liberal in terms of smoking joints and stuff like that, but crack is just the next level. You can have a spliff from time to time and still be a reasonable person and enjoy social events--it’s not my thing, but if other people like it, that’s fine. But crack is just the next level.

Who’s the mayor of Copenhagen?
He’s named Frank Jensen. And I don’t think he smokes crack.

How would you feel if Bloomberg were caught smoking crack?
Stephen, bookseller: I wouldn’t feel too good about the state of things.

Do you think it’s OK for mayors and other people in politics to do drugs?
I don’t think they should smoke crack.

But you’d be OK with them doing other drugs?
What other drugs?

Pot or acid, say.
I don’t know about doing acid. Smoking pot I wouldn’t have a problem with. I don’t really need to know if someone’s smoking pot. If they’re smoking crack, I want to be aware that they’re smoking crack.

Of all the gifts that God supposedly bestowed upon gay men—a dandy fashion sense, preternatural design abilities, a predilection for the word "fabulous"—the gaydar is both the handiest, and the most elusive. To an outsider (read: straight person), the ability to instantly catalog and assess a litany of small signs and signals and determine whether any old person on the street is gay or straight might seem innate in all who enjoy homosexual romps in bed, but it is actually a learned skill, like algebra or injaculation.

And you can learn it too! These days with more and more social circles becoming sexually diverse, how can you tell if the guy swinging a glow stick next to you at some Bushwick "rave" is looking to put his pole in a hole or looking for another pole to pole all over his face? [Wait, what?—Ed.]I enlisted the help of Jeffery Self, the author of Straight People: A Spotter's Guide to the Fascinating World of Heterosexuals. He turned his sociological skills around and instead of telling us gays how to detect breeders, he's teaching everyone the best practices for finding queers and dykes out in the wild.

VICE: At what types of places or events is it easiest to spot a gay guy?
Self: Oh! I'm so glad you asked, Brian! The easiest places to spot a gay are: Broadway open calls, boutique gyms, one man shows, any major city with a bar named The Eagle, SoulCycle classes, and Kevin Spacey's Annual Memorial Day BBQ, which, as an FYI, is being moved from Ojai to Brentwood this year. Please read the invitation VERY carefully as no one is allowed to bring more than ONE guest. Last year simply got out of control and Taylor Lautner is literally just NOW able to ride a bike again.

What's one sure giveaway that the guy you are looking at is gay?
Nowadays it's very hard to tell the difference between straight and gay men, probably because gay people control the media and ultimately the world. If the guy you're speaking to refers to screenwriter Dustin Lance Black as simply "Lance," he is without a doubt homosexual. Another rule of thumb is that if you look at a gay man VERY closely you will see the off kilter glare of a guy who has genuinely wondered why Monique hasn't made a movie since Precious.

OK, let’s flip the coin. What's one sure sign that the gentleman in question is straight?
Do what I always do... surprise him by slapping your penis against his side and see if he shouts "Jesus Christ!" or "Eva Longoria!"

How do you tell the difference between a gay man and the fabled "metrosexual," or, just, you know, your garden variety European?
Metrosexuals have made everything A LOT more difficult. With the exception of Ryan Gosling, who has, as a rule, made most things A LOT easier. However, a metrosexual tends to try a bit harder than a gay man. Coco Chanel had that famous quote about taking off one piece of jewelry before you leave the house. Gay people are WAY more likely to know this quote/follow its suggestion. On a related note, few metrosexuals have heard of Coco, the Broadway musical starring Katharine Hepburn in the title role and cowritten by one of the guys who wrote My Fair Lady.

Are there different skills for picking out lesbians?
NOT MY DEPARTMENT. I'm sorry. Shall I transfer you downstairs to Ellen and Portia's Vegan Dungeon?

How can you tell if two girls making out are just drunk straight people or actual lesbians?
Drunk straight girls tend to be WAY messier than actual lesbians. Unless we're talking about k.d. lang, in which case I have reason to believe she is QUITE messy as well.

Aside from “Do you like penises?”, what sort of questions should you ask to figure out if your target is gay or not?
"Have you ever heard of The Wiz?"
"Have you ever seen The Wiz?"
"Have you ever been in a production of The Wiz?"
"What role did you play?" (This last question is more about my own curiosity, because you seem like somebody who could totally pull off Addaperle.)

Does the company someone keeps make it easier to spot their sexual orientation? What does someone's group say about who they want to bone?
Unless it's Stockard Channing, it's hard to say.

How can you tell the difference between a really butch gay and a straight guy, or a really femme lesbian and a straight lady?
First and foremost, let me say that butch gay guys are the hottest men on Earth. Period. They also make it hard to tell whether they're gay or straight. As a rule, most butch gay guys will dress the same as butch straight guys with one exception—the underwear. A butch gay guy can look as gruff and tough as you can get but underneath those distressed Levi's is a pair of blue trunk cut Andrew Christian briefs.

Femme lesbians vs. straight ladies are tricky for me. Mainly because the straight woman I've spent the most time looking at is Dixie Carter, and she's closer to a butch gay than anything else.

If you see a man who is dating Renee Zellweger, how should he register on your gaydar?
DAUNTING.

Previously - Guys, It's Time to Stop Shaving Your Junk

@BrianJMoylan

The story of my parents’ lives can be read, or at least inferred, through their record collection. There is a long period of album purchases that suggests they were pretty fun to spend time with during their college years and immediately afterward. There's rock, preppy folk, and a lot of very good jazz records; a few edge right up to Nixon-era avant-garde, without ever crossing into the sort of Pharaoh Sanders zone that would imply a prolonged and serious dalliance with hallucinogens. Then the collection peters off abruptly right around the time of my birth. Some Springsteen albums were purchased after that, and a great deal of Handel and Bach and other things that well-educated adults of their generation played in order to get their kids to stop screaming for one goddamn minute, please.

And then my sister is born, and it's just over, virtually nothing for a decade. Later, there's a series of strange impulse buys and NPR recommendations—a long and unbroken line of A Country Christmas Anthology Vol. VIII’s and Lucinda Williams records. It isn't that they stopped being interested in interesting things, I don't think, and it isn't that they gave up, although keeping two neurotic kids in Umbros and orthodontia presumably cramped their style somewhat. I think, looking back at the story those records tell, that it might have been something as simple as things just starting to sound different to them, their ears tuning themselves to different, more parental frequencies. Their taste didn't evaporate so much as it aged. And this is fine. That is what I tell myself, at least, when confronting the fact that I have come not just to admire but enjoy the San Antonio Spurs and the way they play basketball.

There has always been plenty to admire about the Spurs, who have spent the last decade and a half as one of the NBA’s best teams—they've won four championships during that time—and also one of the league’s quietest and, frankly, dullest. Their future Hall of Fame forward, Tim Duncan, is known for his deadly midrange bank shot and ceaseless silent imploring of refs; he is as exciting to watch as unbuttered toast is to eat. There is also a crazily quick but faintly bat-like French point guard Tony Parker and mercurial, balding Argentine wing Manu Ginobili and a rotating crew of supporting professionals that brings significantly more to the table in terms of defensive rotations and savvy on-court decision making than they do in terms of personality. Their coach, Gregg Popovich is an impatient, sarcastic, supremely brilliant tactician who looks like a grouchy lieutenant demanding Michael Madsen's badge and gun in a shitty Showtime thriller—he refuses to deal with the media as most other coaches do and once gave an interview in which he only said four words. If the team never quite evinced the ulcerous Patrick Bateman-ian seethe of the New England Patriots, the Patriots still seem a reasonable enough comparison: the Spurs are also just as relentlessly efficient and effective, and as colorful and stylish as miles and miles of khaki extending into the distance.

It was natural, almost reflexive, to loathe them at their apex, and to resent the way in which they took this wild, expressive game, turned it into an especially virtuosic exercise in cubicle-bound Minesweeper, and won. The core players from the 2002–03 championship season are still there, all older without actually seeming at all old (or maybe they were old back then too), and the Spurs are still playing the same style of basketball at a similarly high level. They move the ball until an open shot emerges, never panic, play great team defense and have a seemingly never-ending supply of productive players they pick from the NBA trash heap and the lower ends of the draft. It's can be frustrating, if you have a partisan inclination toward a particular franchise, because the Spurs are almost certainly a better basketball team than the one you care about. But mostly it's just annoyingly dry, all this lockstep excellence. Yes, they're tight, smart, fearsomely close to perfect for dauntingly long stretches of time. But there's no life in it; imagine a very good wedding band playing your favorite songs, note-perfect, poker-faced, and be-cummerbunded, for hours on end. The music is objectively very good, but you simply can't dance to it.

That was how I used to view them. But the Spurs have become a team I no longer merely grudgingly appreciate, but actually, actively like. It's fun to watch them work, to recognize the patterns as they pull them from the game's basic state of ordered chaos; it's bracing to see the shapes and plays they make from and for each other. In San Antonio's series against the Golden State Warriors, this year's resident playoff upstart and a team that plays whirling, gunning, unconscious basketball—albeit with an itchily blessed-out Fellowship of Christian Athletes vibe—I've had the strange experience of feeling not just the usual grouchy awe but actual delight in the Spurs' perfect unity of conception and execution. I want them to win. It seems like they deserve it. My ear is retuning itself; I can finally hear something other than “ugh” watching San Antonio play, which is cool except how it parallels suddenly finding a Rod Stewart Sings the Standards record soulful and great.

But it has happened, I am on the Spurs' wavelength. Their version of basketball is suddenly not just dignified to me but actually graceful, humble, and kind of elegant. In their last playoff series, the Spurs dispatched the Warriors without trouble in six games. The younger team gunned and surged and flubbed manically while the Spurs simply moved the ball around until opportunities opened up, then took adavantage of them. They weren’t made up of flailing but talented parts, they were a single elegant whole. It's fun to watch, it really is. The shock of it is finally hearing that hook for the first time.

@david_j_roth

Previously: Leave Derrick Rose Alone

The Canadian Ufology Survey was just released and it has revealed some pretty shocking data. The report claims that in 2012 alone, the number of UFO spotting across Canada had doubled from the year before, reaching an all-time high of almost 2000 spottings in just one 365 day period. That’s kind of an insane number, so I called up Chris Rutowski, the guy responsible for running the survey, to try and find out what was going on.

Rutowski initiated the survey back in 1986 when, as an astronomy student at the University of Manitoba, he started to realize a lot of Canadians were seeing some pretty crazy stuff in the sky. “Very few people would take these reports seriously at that time, so I decided to start calling these people back to try and find out what was going on and it took off from there. A lot the time these spottings can be explained, but sometimes they really can’t be, and that’s the truly fascinating part of it all.”

“Right now we are trying to figure out why the number of spottings doubled last year. In fact in one year it went up 100 per cent and that is very unusual.” 

Chris says there are a couple possibilities for why the number increased so dramatically. “The Chris Hadfield phenomenon probably has a lot more people looking up in to the sky. Another thing is US military testing. We know the US is always testing drones (http://bit.ly/XksYtG) along the border, but we really aren’t privy to too much of that information, so it’s sometimes hard to confirm.”  

It turns out Canada has a rich history of UFO spottings. In October of 1967, citizens of a small town in Nova Scotia were calling the police, reporting to have seen a plane crash into the waters off Shag Harbour. Once arriving at the scene, the RCMP and six others, reported seeing a large craft in the water, under “thick, glittery, yellow foam,” before disappearing. To this date, the unusual spotting is still Unexplainable.

“A UFO spotting is marked ‘unexplainable’ when all other possibilities have been ruled out.”  From the 2012 UFO survey, 7.5 per cent of the reports have been marked as “Unexplainable” cases. “This type of thing really makes us scratch our heads and ask ‘what is going on here? One of the highlights from the report is a family from Winnipeg who reported seeing a flying octagon over their vehicle that then took off over a field.  Pretty incredible stuff.  We just can’t explain that.”

The Canadian UFO survey data is the foundation of which all the other speculation is based, including government cover-up, abductions and close encounters.

So I had to put it out there: Who has seen a UFO? Within a couple hours of posting the question on social media, I got a response from a young man who calls himself, Barney Rumble.

via.

VICE: So Barney, you think you saw a UFO, what happened?
It was a while ago, but, I was outside on the roof of my house with a friend, having some beers and smoking, and out of nowhere this thing, that looked like a spaceship appeared in the sky.  It was in front of us, but still off in the distance.  At first we thought it was plane, but then we realized it couldn’t be.  It was shaped like a triangle, and inside there were large, circular, red lights, and it was just appeared to be floating in the sky.  It kept getting closer and closer to us and within a matter of ten minutes it was overhead. We were amazed. We just kept watching it.

We’re you scared?
We were freaking out!  We just stopped doing anything and we went silent and didn’t move. We were both so freaked out. We were wondering if we were seeing it because we were fucked up on acid or if this was actually happening. It was so messed up.

So. How much acid did you take that night?
We’d taken a couple hits. We’d gone out to get weed, but there was a fair going on in town and our dealer had acid too, so we got some.  We ate it at the carnival and then came back and the acid started to kick in as soon as we got home. We also go out on my roof and just chill. We were just drinking some beers, listening to Wu-Tang and smoking cigarettes and laughing. Having fun, and then we saw this crazy fucking thing in the sky.

It wasn’t moving like a plane should move—it went across sky from one side of the skyline to the other. Like the Sun, overhead east to west. 

How long did it last (the UFO, not the acid)?
It lasted about ten minutes, maybe even twenty. It felt like it lasted a really long time though. Especially because at that point we were pretty messed up.

Have you taken a lot of acid in your lifetime?
Not really. Maybe 20 or 30 times. It’s $5 bucks a hit. That’s why we did it, because it was so cheap.

Did you ever see another UFO on another hit of acid?
NO. That was the only time. Which is one reason why I think it was probably real. (Or maybe just really good acid, just saying’)

Did you guys tell anyone what you saw, like your parents or the police?
We told lots of people we saw a UFO, that it was pretty crazy and that we were freaked out. Like, at first, we were really excited about it and wanted to tell everyone. But as soon as we told them we were also on acid, they didn’t really believe us anymore. They just think you’re tripping out and that part was really disappointing.

Did you see the UFO leave?
No. Eventually we went inside to grab a camera, but when we came back it was gone. Too bad. It would have been pretty awesome to have a picture of it, so we could prove it, and I guess just to have a picture of a real UFO.

That is too bad.  So what did you do next, after the UFO left?
We just kept drinking and smoking because we were so hyped, like we fucking saw an alien! It was awesome. 

I described to Rutowski what Rumble thinks he saw, and he says he couldn’t explain the UFO either. But he did recommend that Rumble, and anyone else who thinks they’ve spotted one, to email their report, so that they can collect all the data for the next survey. I also asked Rutowski if drugs could explain a lot of these sightings and surprisingly, he said no. “I don’t think it’s just people trippin’ or making stuff up, because a lot of the time we can actually explain it. Like maybe it’s Jupiter.” 

IF you ever feel like taking a hit of acid (or not) and want to make sure you see something flying in the sky, you can increase your chances by going to this website. You just punch in your co-ordinates and it will tell you everything that is flying overhead.  Rutowski says it’s a great way to start seeing what’s going on. (That’s pretty fucking cool) “The sky is a pretty happening place, there is a lot that can be seen. It’s really very fascinating stuff.”

Gangsta Boo is hip-hop legend. As the sole female member of the epochal Three 6 Mafia during the late 90s and early 2000s, she helped forge a space for females in hardcore rap, with aggressive rhymes on classic records like Choices: The Album, When the Smoke Clears: Sixty 6, Sixty 1, and her solo debut Enquiring Minds. I've been listening to Gangsta Boo since I was a kid, and she always fascinated me—and scared me a little. As a prepubescent horndog, I loved bumping girl rappers who talked about explicit sex shit because it was perfect fodder for my wankbank. But Boo never played herself like that for her male listeners. Even when her verses started off sexy, they ended defiant—like "Tongue Ring," which begins with her "pussy wet as a river" and ends with her using a razor blade to horrifically "slice yo' shit."  There's no beating off to that. You just have to respect it, because the rhymes are hard as hell. 

I had the rare pleasure of meeting Boo at my 25th-birthday party thrown by VICE's funny-book tsar and DJ extraordinaire Nick Gazin. Boo and I hit it off talking about what's great and what sucks bloody AIDS-infected penises in modern hip-hop. As agressive as her raps are, one thing that struck me about her was how genial and graceful she was. She reminded me of the ladies who offer you a candy when you sit next to them in church when you're a little kid. Basically, Gangsta Boo is a hardcore rapping saint. 

I think she embodies a lot of what is desperately missing in the rap game right now. So, I invited her to the VICE offices in Brooklyn to continue our discussion of hip-hop, by sitting together and watching some music videos by some of the hottest lady rappers out today. Here's what she had to say:

AZEALIA BANKS'S "212"

VICE: You’ve seen this before?
Gangsta Boo: A couple of times.

What do you think of it?
She’s pretty, and she is representing for the brown-skinned ladies. I like that. She’s got an international vibe too. I don’t know too many of her songs to be honest, but I do like this one.

What do you think about the style of the video?
It’s black-and-white, and it has a retro feel to it. It’s simple. It focuses on her teeth a lot. She’s got some pretty teeth. It’’s cute, it’s basic. It’s one of those classic New York videos.

When you were working with Three 6 Mafia, was New York a hard place for you guys to break into?
Yeah. Absolutely.

Were there any female NYC MCs you looked up to?
Yeah, Lil' Kim, Foxy Brown... Rah Digga—she’s not from New York, but she is East Coast or whatever. I’m not an Azealia Banks fan, but I love how she uses “cunt” in this song. A strong a black female saying cunt is kind of ratchet.

IGGY AZALEA'S "MY WORLD"

You know she’s from Australia or something?
Really? I had no idea. She doesn’t rap like it. She doesn’t have an accent or anything. Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, but she’s definitely sexy and fly. She’s got swag for days and she knows how to work it in this video.

Do you think it’s weird for somebody to take on a different place’s twang—like her sounding like she’s from the States?
Nah. I’m a fan of The Walking Dead and it's so weird how they all talk like they have an American accent, but they are actually all from Australia, London, and other places. Sometimes it’s believable, sometimes it’s not. This particular video is believable, but a lot of her music isn't. However, I do like this song

Do you feel like artists taking on other styles is part of the creative process? Or are there rules in hip-hop?
Absolutely. There should definitely be rules in hip-hop because there are G-code rules in the streets. It’s cool to have fun, but at the end of the day it would be wack for me to rap like I’m from New York. It is cool to get influences from other places, but I want everyone to know that I’m from Memphis.

KITTY PRYDE'S "OKAY CUPID"

Do you know Kitty Pryde?
I know her. We have a song together.

Oh really? Is it out, yet?
No, I haven’t put it out yet, but Nick Catchdubs did the beat. It’s called “Fool's Gold.”

What do you think of Kitty?
I like her because she’s poetic. You can tell she’s a writer and what she is talking about is very believable. I hang with white girls like her all the time.

When you were first coming up, was there a lot of white female MCs?
No, but they’re everywhere now. It’s like a flood of these little white bitches. That’s what’s up though. I think Kitty Pryde is dope. She’s got that TV-friendly face.

Speaking of Kitty’s writing style, how do you write?
I get inspired by different things that I go through. That’s why I like traveling to different cities and catching vibes. I like to get outside of Memphis and get inspired by other people and new scenery.   

Do you write with a pen and a pad?
It depends. Sometimes I write on my phone, and sometimes I write on paper and sometimes I just go off the the top of my head.

WASH 'N' SET'S "PRIVATE PLAY"

I premiered this one on VICE.
Yeah, I only know about them because of you.

Do you like it?
To me, honestly, it’s wack. Everybody doesn’t need to rap, man. It is cute. But I can’t take them serious. 

I think some younger rap artists feel like they can just have fun with the art form. But when you were coming up, more doors were closed to female MCs, so you guys had to go harder on the mic than the best male rappers.  
Exactly. For me, this kind of stuff is offensive because I feel like they’re taking up space for somebody who takes it serious and is starving in a place where there are no opportunities. There’s a lane for this, and there’s a lane for real shit. I just stick to the real shit.

Damn. I like this song. Besides the rapping, do you at least dig the beat?
It reminds me of “It’s So Cold in the D.” It was like extra wack. But I would tear this beat up.

KILO KISH'S "NAVY"

What’s your take on Kish?
I think it’s nice that a lot of cute girls are rapping now, but I just don’t know if I would bump them personally. I would take this more serious at an open mic. I don’t consider these girls rappers.

You're saying she is trying to do something, but she hasn’t mastered her craft yet?
No, I think she’s mastered what she’s doing. I just don’t think she’s really rapping. It’s more poetic. My homegirl does poetry in Houston. I went to a few of her open mics and it sounded a lot like this. Not saying Kish couldn’t write a rap or be a dope MC, I just don’t think that’s what she trying to do and that is OK for her.

What do you think the line is between poetry and rap?
Rap to me is more aggressive, more in your face.

When was the first time you heard a girl rap with an aggressive flow that inspired you?   
Da Brat. She was dope.

Which song?
Probably “Funkdafied.” She was the first female MC to go platinum.

Did you ever feel like you had to be extra aggressive to get respect as a female MC?
I had to rap with, like, five different dudes, so I always had the mentality that I had to outdo everyone I was on a song with in order to stand out. I’m a girl in a man’s world, so I trained myself to always go harder than them. Period.

PINK DOLLAZ'S "BAD BITCH"

Any thoughts?
The concept is basic. I don’t consider myself a "bad bitch." I’m over that. The hook is wack too. But it does have a dope beat. I like the whole West Coast flow too. But the “bad bitch” concept throws me off. It’s just kind of tired of it. I don’t want my daughter calling herself a “bad bitch.” What does that even mean? I don’t have kids, but if my daughter said something like that, it better be because she is in school making good grades. Not because she has red bottoms. Being a bad bitch is fine, I’m just kinda over the materialistic aspect of it.

Do you think materialism is hurting rap right now?
Let’s get back to the music and less of this fashion stuff. It’s an expensive lifestyle to keep up with, and it’s all an illusion anyway. But hey, if you got it, rock that shit. I really can’t tell you what hip-hop needs today. People need to just stand out on their own and do them.

LADY'S "TWERK"

Look at those bootiess shake! I love this video. This song is strictly for...
The strippers? I’m known for making stripper anthems. Maybe she’s a stripper and she just wants to represent her set.

What do you think about the video?
Basic bitches shaking their ass.

When you write a “stripper anthem,” how do you approach it?
When I did “Where Dem Dollas At,” it was inspired by Jazze Pha. He did a beat for Tela called “Hoes in the Club.” But when I came up with “Can I Get Paid,” that was considered the stripper's anthem. Writing those songs, I was thinking about the mind frame of a stripper. I was younger then. Now that I’m older, I wouldn’t make a video like Pink Dollaz. I might make a strip-club song, but the video would be different. This looks low class.

Did you spend any time in strip clubs when you were younger?
Oh yeah. Man, watching the girls dance and do tricks—that’s what I like to do. Magic City in Atlanta has some dope females who do some crazy tricks. I fuck with the A and their strip clubs. Maybe these girls are strippers turned rappers. There’s a few of them nowadays. Make your money, ladies. But there’s a fine line between classy and trashy, and sexy and messy. And it takes time figure it out.

SNOW THA PRODUCT'S "COOKIE CUTTER BITCHES"

I found this a few minutes before you got here. I was surprised it had so many hits. A lot of people are talking about this girl.
She's almost at a million. Yeah, they're talking about her.

What do you think?
I fuck with her. I like gangsta bitches. We met at South by Southwest and may do a song together. She’s thick, she’s pretty, but she’s not showing her ass. She wants people to hear her lyrics and not that other mess. If she wanted to take off her clothes, men would just die. But they have to respect her for what she’s saying—having a nice body and being pretty is just a plus.

Because rap is a lyrical art form, do you have to come with the rhymes whether you’re pretty or not?
I think so. It’s like, "OK, I know you have a big ass. Who doesn’t? You can pay for those nowadays. Let’s hear what you can say."

BROOKE CANDY'S "I WANNA FUCK RIGHT NOW"

I love Brooke Candy.
Yeah, I couldn’t believe this video. I was like, "Oh my God."

You can tell that she has been listening to some Gangsta Boo records.
Definitely. And for some reason, I believe this video is just representing how she really is. She doesn’t seem like she is lying. She must have been a stripper or something. I can tell by the way she hits that pole. It just seems like it’s her. Plus, any chick that rocks snakes and shit in their hair is hands down, a real bad bitch.

Yeah, this video is insane. What was it like making your early videos?
I did “Where Dem Dollas At?” in New York my first time out there. It was fun, especially coming from country-ass Memphis. It was fun then and it’s still fun. The cool part about it now is receiving the love from the younger generation. It’s just dope and it feels good and that’s why I get down with the young artists like the Raider Klan.

Was it hard to get your videos played back in the day?
Not that much after we got signed. It was pay-to-play at that point [laughs]... Are all Brooke’s songs like this?

Yeah, they’re pretty intense. It’s weird because a lot of people hate on her.
What are they hating on her for?

Too much sex stuff, I guess. And they think she looks like a man or something. I think she looks great.  
Shit! They’re always saying somebody looks like a man. I don’t care. I like her. There’s so many dancers that come into the rap game and act like they don’t dance anymore and then have to end up going back to the strip club. At least she’s still in the strip club.

MIA'S "BAD GIRLS"

This is a good one.
This bitch is one of my favorite bitches of all time. This is one of the hardest videos ever, just because she’s so sexy and she’s just swagged out. And she's got that whole Sri Lankan vibe. Her and Brooke Candy are my favorites out of everybody you've shown me thus far.

When did you first hear MIA?
“Paper Planes.” And then when this video came out, everyone was talking about it, so I got on YouTube and watched it... Was that car really doing that?

Yeah. From what I hear, they really do that.
Wow. I wish she didn’t settle down and have a baby. But she went and got her some money and that’s real... Are they on skates?

Looks like plain old sneakers to me.
Boy, what are you talking about? Sneakers? I love how they have her chain bouncing on her chest. That’s crazy. Her videos are empowering.

Does it ever surprise you when you see people interpreting rap, a culture that you’ve been a part of, and spit it back at you in different ways?
I think it’s cool. It’s inspiring to know that people are watching you everywhere.

DIE ANTWOORD'S "BABIES ON FIRE"

But I don’t think this is dope. It’s weird. She looks like a fucking freak.

ANGEL HAZE'S "WERKIN' GIRLS"

OK, moving on to Angel Haze. What do you think?
To me she kind of sounds like Nicki Minaj.

Is that played out?
I don’t think it’s played out, I just think it’s Nicki. It’s that whole New York thing.

I think she’s from LA actually. That’s what’s weird about rap today and the internet. Regional sounds have kind of faded away.
She’s cool. I would need to hear some more to tell if I'm really into her.

She’s definitely a spitter, but it takes more than great bars to make a good song. When you write, how do you approach hooks?
Man, those hooks are not easy to write. It has to fall off your tongue. You can’t think too hard and you just have to go with it. Sometimes when you’re writing those lyrical songs you have to take a step back. That’s why Gucci Mane has been able to stay relevant for so long, he just says whatever. Gucci just raps. Literally. He freestyle raps. And I think sometimes when you write hooks and stuff like that, especially if you’re a rapper, you should just let it roll out of you. That’s how I write a lot of hooks. I just let it roll. Sometimes you have to—not dumb it down—but make it people friendly.

For sure. Thanks, Gangsta Boo!

Gangsta Boo has a new mixtape dropping this month called It's Game Involved, which she assures us will mark the return of Ms. Yeah Hoe. Look out for it on LiveMixtapes.

For more rap stuff from Wilbert, check these out:

Never Party with the Brick Squad

Gunplay Doesn't Fear the Pine Box or Prison

A$AP Rocky and Jeremy Scott Schooled Me on How to Be a Pretty Motherfucker

The Underachievers Talk About Stop-and-Frisk and Kimani Gray

Caleb "Kai" Lawrence McGillvary with Jimmy Kimmel. Photo via Facebook

Remember Kai? The hatchet-wielding hobo of SMASHH!! SMAAASSHHH!! SAAAMAASHHH!! fame? The guy who made headlines after stopping some psycho who claimed he was Jesus Christ and ran over a bystander before attacking a group of women? Well, now Kai's wanted for murder.

ABC Local is reporting that an arrest warrant is out for Lawrence in connection with the murder of one Joseph Galry, who was found dead in his home on May 13. Reports are spotty, but authorities are considering Lawrence, last seen on Tuesday, to be armed and dangerous. He was last seen at a rail yard near Haddonfield, New Jersey. No matter the outcome, it's a truly bizarre and tragic twist to the "home-free" tale of everyone's favorite hatchet-wielding hobo, who it's been said harbors a bit of a violent streak. As he told told VICE last month, recalling busting up another guy after the Jesus incident: 

He was on a trip of dominance and control. I think he had a poisoned psyche. I've heard some of the research that people have been doing about his life and apparently he was a high school basketball coach for girls. That is fucked up. That truly sickens me. When I hear stuff about him getting jumped by six guys in a Fresno County jail and getting his jaw broken, I'm not going to lie to you, I celebrate that. People like that need to be fucking stopped.

For now, all we have are these words, which Lawrence put on Facebook two days ago:

what would you do if you woke up with a groggy head, metallic taste in your mouth, in a strangers [sic] house... walked to the mirror and seen come dripping from the side of your face from your mouth, and started wretching, realizing that someone had drugged, raped, and blown their fuckin [sic] load in you? what would you do?

Read the rest over at the new Motherboard.VICE.com. 

There came a point on Thursday afternoon—after learning that Rob Ford had taken some time off from an important city council meeting to wander around a parking lot sticking ‘Rob Ford’ magnets to cars—that I figured it would be time to update you lazy commoners about the ongoing saga that is Robbie’s intoxicated reign over the Kingdom of Toronto. Way back when, before the already infamous crack cocaine scandal of May 2013, the magnet controversy of 24 hours earlier in May 2013 didn’t seem so important. That is, of course, until Gawker (a celebrity gossip and crack-cocaine savvy web tabloid) broke the story that some guy, somewhere, has a video of King Robbie blazin’ crack tokes from a glass pipe—and the footage is for sale. Until someone buys it, you can always watch the Taiwanese CGI reenactment.

Gawker—who have decided that this is not an “alleged” or “supposed” crack smoking incident, given that they’ve got a graphic that reads “Toronto Mayor Rob Ford Smokes Crack” on their homepage—have caused a major firestorm for King Robbie the First in the City of Toronto. The Toronto Star, an ungrateful and petulant organization that is hell-bent on taking down the Mayor, has viewed the tape “three times” but was clearly too cheap to buy it and stream it for the royal subjects of the Rob Ford empire aka The Birthplace of Kardinal Offishall. Plus, according to them, they saw this video on May 3^rd. Why keep all this crack smoking mayhem a secret? And what kind of incompetent blackmail video salesman is behind this controversy? How can you mess up on monetizing such a golden piece of footage? One must assume they’re ready to let it go at fire sale prices right now—hear that, Doug Ford?

But, regardless, The Star claims they were shown the video—that allegedly shows Rob Ford raising a “lighter and [moving] it in a circle motion beneath the pipe”—by a “group of Somali men” who are “involved in the drug trade.” Apparently these upstanding gentlemen showed the Star their all-of-a-sudden infamous footage wherein Rob Ford allegedly calls Justin Trudeau a “fag,” audibly says, regarding the cell phone that was recording him, “that better not be on,” and allegedly refers to the players on his beloved high school football team (in a mumbly tone) as “just fucking minorities.” Since all this has broken, Rob Ford has denied it, but is probably angry at his buddy Don Cherry for foreshadowing this whole situation when he told a council meeting in 2010 to “put that in your pipe you left-wing kooks.” We know now that Don Cherry was probably referring to street drugs.

So this is all quite sad and lame, huh? What’s worse is that these drug dealing blackmailers—who have captivated the attention of the media very fucking quickly—also have a photo of Rob Ford chilling with (who many believe to be) a Toronto drug dealer who died during a gang-related shooting outside of a King St. W club. Now, I don’t really know what your background is, reader, but I do not encounter many crack dealing gangsters in my day-to-day life; because I generally avoid smoking crack. The fact that our King was hanging around crack dealers is a bit fucked up and suspicious—and that’s the beauty of it all.

If you could actually use your brain and flex your critical thinking muscle for a minute, you’d realize that Rob Ford is currently at the centre of the world’s most elaborate anti-drug campaign. Think about it, sheeple. What does a man with royal blood have to gain from such a bland position as Mayor of Toronto? A man with the intellectual pedigree of Rob Ford and the body of Chris Farley does not require the miserable salary and excruciating hours (which he does not keep, but, whatever) of a mayoral position to maintain his profile or accumulate wealth. This crack smokin’ hullabaloo is simply an example of performance art, in which we are all part of the audience.

Toronto evidently has a cocaine problem that Rob Ford is trying to expose. By planting himself in a room full of crack loving drug dealers—while some random dude films him on a cell phone and gets Robbie to say crazy, racist shit—Rob Ford has presented the planet with a POV look at what it’s really like to hoe your life out for a glass dick. We should be thankful that we all have such an excellent role model like Robbie, to show us what pathways to never, ever go down. Because that’s what a mayor is for! If anything, this is just an elaborate callback to the great comedian Marion Barry who Rob Ford is known to idolize*.

So don’t buy into the tabloid narrative that somehow it’s a bad thing to have a crack-smoking mayor who appears to be totally chill about being filmed while his lips are wrapped around the smoky nozzle of a crack pipe. Those people over at Gawker who are trying to make this into such a big deal don’t know what they’re talking about. Because they’re American. Canadians have much different standards for education, humor, and acceptable crack use in the political arena.

Or, maybe we don’t. Maybe King Robbie isn’t so infallible after all. It was all fun and games when he managed to get fired and come back from the dead, or when he was posing for crappy photos inside of sports cars he doesn't own, but now the guy is being secretly filmed doing hard drugs in a sketchy apartment. Perhaps it’s not a joke. Maybe King Robbie needs help*.

*Safe assumption.

Follow Patrick on Twitter: @patrickmcguire

Previously:

Rob Ford Got a Better Photographer

Rob Ford Has a Terrible Photographer

King Rob Ford Loves Women and Gambling

Watch more at the VICE show page and check out VICE on HBO every Friday at 11 PM.

I arrived in Jerusalem on Nakba Day expecting shit to get wild. But the speed with which the demonstration went from zero to fucked shocked even me, a relative veteran of the West Bank protest scene. 

Nakba Day is the bleak mirror image of Israeli Independence Day. Where Israelis celebrate the founding of their state on Independence Day, Nakba (a word that translates as "catastrophe") Day commemorates the 750,000 Palestinians who were forced from their homes when Israel became a state in 1948. Roughly one-third of the refugees and their children (now numbering around five million) continue to live in refugee camps 65 years later.

The Israeli government, of course, is not all that happy about large groups of people banding together to shout about the creation of their state being a catastrophe, and Nakba Day demonstrations are often marked by violence. The largest Nakba Day gathering this year was in Jerusalem, although clashes also broke out in Hebron, Bethlehem, and several other points around the West Bank. Luckily, they weren't even comparable to scenes in 2011, when Israeli police shot dead 13 pro-Palestine demonstrators, but that's not to say there wasn't still a disturbing amount of violence.

This year kicked off quietly enough at the Damascus Gate, the main entrance to the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem's old city. About 100 Palestinians were gathered, waving flags and chanting. I sat there for about an hour and was just getting bored enough to wander off in search of a falafel when everyone jumped up and started running out to the street. 

A much larger Nakba Day march was headed toward the Damascus Gate and the Palestinian demonstrators were rushing to meet it. The police had been watching calmly until that point, but as soon as the two groups met it was like some high-pitched police whistle had been blown that awoke them from their ennui and immediately made them really angry and unnecessarily violent. 

Cops on horseback, a favorite in Jerusalem, came out of nowhere and began trying to run down everyone in sight—Palestinian, Israeli, international, demonstrator, journalist, passer-by—literally anyone with feet. The fact that the groups had converged right in front of a police station didn't help the situation much, and riot cops were soon swarming the scene like heavily-armed fire ants keen to bash up some Palestinian skulls. And that's exactly what they did: beat up and arrest a bunch of Palestinians at random. 

Busloads of Palestinians came in from all over Israel and I chatted to a guy from Nazareth for a while. He told me that his bus had arrived early in the morning so people could pray at al-Aqsa mosque, but that they'd been turned away by Israeli police. "I had a Palestinian flag. They called me a terrorist," he said.

I hung around for a while taking pictures and trying to avoid being run down by the giant, demonic warhorses with weird ankle fringes, until I noticed people shouting at something down the street.

Industrious photographer that I am, I ran as fast as I could to see what was happening, dodging the other rubberneckers to get a better look. I ran out into the middle of the street and came face-to-face with a skunk truck. If you're not aware of what a "skunk truck" is, it's basically a truck that drives around at protests spraying something that smells worse than liquid shit at protesters. Imagine if you left a potato to rot for a year, mashed that toxic musk up with the contents of a curry festival porta-potty and used the liquid to marinate a charred, decaying horse. You're now maybe halfway to understanding how bad this stuff reeks. 

Watching the spray shoot out of the truck, I tried to skid to a stop. But since the ground was already wet with the muck, I skidded right onto my ass instead. Horrified, it took me a moment to realize that they had switched the skunk out of the skunk truck and replaced it with normal water. Apparently it's fine to spray it all over Palestine, but they can't foul up the beautiful streets of Jerusalem since the smell hangs around for weeks and is impossible to clean. 

The water cannon was directing all its energy at a single middle-aged woman waving a Palestinian flag. I watched it spray her head-on at least ten times while she held her ground and continued waving the flag, apparently completely unfazed. 

A few at a time, the demonstrators managed to make their way around the cops and headed back to Damascus Gate, where the violence intensified even more. People gathered in groups, waving flags and chanting until dozens of police stormed the square, beating and/or arresting everyone they could catch. The demonstrators would run away, forcing the cops to chase them, and then circle back for another round of chanting until the police came back and the cycle started all over again.

At one point, I saw a guy hit a cop with a flag—the flag itself, not the stick it was hanging from, meaning he basically brushed the cop with a cloth. Because of that reprehensible offense, the entire police force went completely ape-shit. Around a dozen cops with machine guns chased the guy down, cornered him, threw him to the ground, and dragged him off screaming.

At one point, a female Palestinian journalist in a hijab was taking pictures of a cop when, without any kind of warning, he grabbed her and hurled her roughly to the ground, looking incredibly proud of himself as he did it. The woman was less than five feet tall and couldn't have weighed a third of what the cop did.

Protesters started to throw stones and glass bottles at the police. The "Palestinian stone-thrower" is often trotted out in pro-Israel media as a terrorist archetype, used to justify all sorts of brutality against demonstrations in the West Bank. But the police were beating people up for at least an hour before I saw the first stone fly, making it appear less an act of terrorism and more an act of improvised (and let's face it, ineffectual) self-defense.

After a couple hours of beatings, arrests, sound bombs, and water cannons, it seemed like things had started to calm down a little. Back at the Damascus Gate, I ran into a friend of mine—a community organizer from Palestinian East Jerusalem.

"What do you think?" I asked her. 

"I'm happy," she said. 

"Even with all the violence?"

"I'm happy because of the violence. This never happens in Jerusalem."

I could see her point. The fact that the police resorted to such extreme measures meant that the demonstration had made an impact. If there hadn't been such a large turnout, there wouldn't have been clashes. The police could have tossed a sound bomb or two and called it a day. But the massive number of demonstrators provoked a heavy-handed police response, which can definitely be seen as a victory from a non-violent-resistance point of view. 

I went off looking for some food when everybody went crazy again. The cops began firing a massive amount of sound bombs, injuring at least one person that I saw. They brought in a second water truck, and myself and a couple of colleagues ended up crouched behind a fruit stand while the truck blasted water at us, three foreign photographers clearly doing nothing dangerous. I got soaked but managed to keep my camera dry, which I'm calling a victory. 

As we finally piled into the car and made our way home, I thought about the Jerusalem Day celebration that I'd covered the week before. For Jerusalem Day, the cops shut down the entire Muslim section of the old city, confining people to their homes to accommodate thousands of flag-waving Israelis marching to the Wailing Wall. But switch out the Israeli flags for Palestinian ones and the response is noticeably different.

Just normal life in Jerusalem. Sixty-five years on and every Palestinian demonstration is still a catastrophe. 

Follow Andy on Twitter: @HanDetenido

More from Israel and Palestine:

Dancing Idiots, Rubber Bullets and Candy Floss at this Year's Passover in Hebron

Israel's Radical Left

One Young Druze Vs. the Entire Israeli Army

You likely already know how overcrowded and abusive the US prison system is, and you probably are also aware that the US has more people in prison than even China or Russia. In this age of privatization, of course, it’s also not surprising that many of the detention centers are not actually operated by the government, but by for-profit companies. So clearly, some people are making lots and lots of money off the booming business of keeping human beings in cages.   

But who are these people?

Using NASDAQ data, I looked through the long list of investors in Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group, the two biggest corporations that operate detention centers in the US, to find out who was cashing in the most on prisons. When we say “prison-industrial complex,” this is who we’re talking about.

Henri Wedell
The individual who’s invested the most in private prisons is Henri Wedell, who started serving on CCA’s board of directors in 2000, when the company was struggling with scandals related to prisoner abuse and mismanagement. He now owns more than 650,000 shares in the company, which is far more successful these days. Those shares are worth more than $25 million.

I called Wedell to ask him what it was like to make a fortune from the incarceration of others, and whether it bothered him to profit off a system that puts more people in prison than any other country in the world.

“America is the freest country in the world,” he told me. “America allows more freedom than any other country in the world, much more than Russia and a whole lot more than Scandinavia, where they really aren’t free. So offering all this freedom to society, there’ll be a certain number of people, more in this country than elsewhere, who take advantage of that freedom, abuse it, and end up in prison. That happens because we are so free in this country.”

Presumably, when he’s referring to all the freedom Americans have, he’s not including the 80,000 inmates in 60 prisons operated by CCA.

George Zoley
Another prison profiteer who presumably has no moral qualms about the business is George Zoley, the CEO of GEO Group and the second biggest investor in the incarceration industry. In fact, he’s so proud of his business, which has committed a laundry list of human rights abuses, he tried to get a college football stadium named after it.

Zoley made nearly $6 million last year through salary and bonuses alone, but the real money is in stocks—he owns more than 500,000 shares in GEO, and he has made $23 million in stock trades during one 18 month period. But you can’t accuse him of not earning his pay, exactly. GEO saw a 56 percent spike in profits in the first quarter of 2013, and the company’s executives reassured investors that the incarceration rate wouldn’t be dropping any time soon when announcing its earnings. Zoley will be mega rich for years to come.

Jeremy Mindich and Matt Sirovich
Both Wedell and Zoley are big donors to the Republican party, but that doesn’t mean those from the left side of the aisle can’t play their game. Matt Sirovich and Jeremy Mindich both donate to Democratic politicians and are involved with progressive-leaning organizations like Root Capital, a nonprofit lending company that offers loans to farmers in developing countries to alleviate poverty.

Their day job, however, is running Scopia Capital, a hedge fund that is the one of the largest shareholders of GEO Group. The fund owns about $300 million in shares in that company, which represents 12 percent of its entire portfolio. Like Zoley, they are good at what they do—their fund outperformed the market by 20 percentage points, and the State of New Jersey hired Scopia to manage $150 million worth of pensions.

I called them up to ask their thoughts about being politically liberal but heavily invested in private prisons, but Mindich refused to answer any questions and Sirovich was unavailable.

It should be pointed out that while being far on the left politically might seem incompatible with investing in prisons (or managing a hedge fund in the first place), the Democratic party is totally fine with the incarceration rate. Although Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan are largely responsible for the drug war policies that caused the prison population to skyrocket, Bill Clinton was a “tough on crime” president who continued their ideas. And current vice president Joe Biden was a principal player in the Clinton era’s crime policies—he wrote the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which, among other things, called for $9.7 billion in increased funding for prisons and stiffer penalties for drug offenders.

Though the US prison population is shrinking slightly, the number of inmates in federal lockup is increasing, and while Obama keeps saying he’s ending the war on drugs, he’s also proposed budgets that call for increasing the amount of money spent on the Bureau of Prisons. So it’s not such a stretch that a Democratic donor would also be in the men-in-cages industry.

Retired People and Probably You
The Vanguard Group and Fidelity Investments are America’s top two 401(k) providers. They are also two of the private prison industry’s biggest investors.

Together, they own about 20 percent of both CCA and GEO. That means if you have a 401(k) plan, there’s a good chance you’re benefit financially from private prisons. And even if you don’t, there are many more mutual funds, brokerage firms, and banks that invest in private prisons—it being a growth industry and all—so if you have money somewhere other than your wallet or your mattress, it’s a good bet you’re involved in some way with companies that are locking up and probably abusing inmates.

This is especially true for government employees like public school teachers because their retirement funds are some of the biggest investors in private prisons. According to NASDAQ data, the retirement funds for public employees and teachers in New York and California together have about $60 million ($30 million each) invested in CCA and GEO. Teacher retirement funds in Texas and Kentucky have $8.3 million and $4 million invested in prisons respectively, and public employees in Florida ($10.3 million), Ohio ($8.6 million), Texas ($5.6 million), Arizona ($5.3 million), and Colorado ($2.25 million) are also connected to the industry. Except for New York, which has only one privately run detention facility, each of these states has several prisons run by CCA and GEO Group facilities. And it’s not just Americans who have ties to prisons. Foreign investors have money in them as well, including the pension fund for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which recently sold off its $5.1 million worth of GEO Group stock.

Most of these employees are probably unaware that their pensions are tied to prisons—and it’s hard to say that these are “bad” investments from a purely capitalistic perspective, since these prisons are making money hand over fist. The private prison industry is entrenched in our society. And the only way to make sure that we’re not individually and collectively profiting off of it is to close these things.  

Follow Ray on Twitter: @RayDowns

More on prisons:

Prisons I’ve Known and Yelped

Don’t Get Caught

Why Can’t We Cane Criminals?

Four years ago, we made a film called Inside Afghanistan with veteran war reporter Ben Anderson. Since then, we've enjoyed a harmonious, fruitful relationship that mostly involves Ben hanging out in warzones and sending us amazing stories from the frontline. The latest feature Ben put together is the film This Is What Winning Looks Like (below), which documents his time embedded in the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police as they prepare to take over policing of the country when allied forces withdraw in 2014.

What Ben found was a police force riddled with corruption – openly admitting to kidnapping and sexually molesting young boys, selling their weapons, pulling down the sides of their bases to sell for scrap metal and smoking hash and heroin while on patrol – and an army still misunderstanding the rules of engagement after all these years of combat. None of those exactly being ideal when you're in charge of making sure an entire country stays on track.             

At 4PM today, Ben's going to be doing a Reddit AMA, where you can ask him about anything from his new film – which is currently sitting at the top of Reddit's documentary section btw – and the five years he spent embedded with British and American troops in Afghanistan, to hanging out with deportees and pimps in Cambodia, covering gang wars in El Salvador and spending time with third generation Agent Orange victims in Vietnam. And a bunch of other insane/interesting/dangerous stuff he's done throughout his career.               

Here's where you want to go to do all that.

(via)

The incident: A man named Barry Swegle became upset about a fence his neighbor had installed. 

The appropriate response: Talking it out with the neighbor, if that doesn't work, maybe contacting a local council or something. If that doesn't work, smashing down the fence when your neighbor isn't home then denying all knowledge.

The actual response: Barry got into a bulldozer and partially leveled his neighborhood. 

Apparently the fence, which was installed by Barry's neighbor several months ago, was blocking Barry from being able to move his logging equipment in and out of his driveway in the small town of Port Angeles, Washington. 

This caused some kind of dispute between the neighbors which, according to Barry's brother, turned Barry into "a ticking time bomb."

On Monday, Time Bomb Barry exploded. He got into his bulldozer and smashed down the fence. But his rampage didn't end there, he carried on rampaging, and destroyed four houses, a boat, a truck, and knocked down a telephone pole. 

Once he was all rampaged out, Barry was arrested and charged with two counts of first-degree assault and six counts of first-degree malicious mischief.

Cry-Baby #2: Monroe County, Pennsylvania 

Criminal mooning?

(via Reddit)

The incident: 18-year-old high school senior Larry Liero mooned a couple of kids. 

The appropriate response: Nothing. Mooning is funny. I guess if it was really bothering the kids, they could have yelled at Larry or something. 

The actual response: Larry was suspended from school and arrested.  

According to police, Larry mooned two 13-year-old girls that were being taken on a tour of his school, Pleasant Valley High School in Monroe County, Pennsylvania. 

The mooning victims told their teacher, who told school officials, who told the School Resource Police Officer.

Larry was escorted from the school in handcuffs and taken to the local police station, where he was charged with disorderly conduct and open lewdness. He was also barred from taking part in his school's graduation ceremony and suspended. His charges could lead to a year in prison.

In a statement, Doug Arnold, the school district's superintendent said, "It's a violation of law not to keep your clothes on. It's unacceptable in school." Adding, "I don't know that anybody would condone mooning someone"—suggesting that Doug knows some really, really fucking boring people. 

Who is the bigger cry-baby up in here? Let us know in this poll:

Previously: The school that suspended a kid for being a kid Vs. the farm that fired some people for being sensible

Winner: The school!!!

@JLCT

Click to enlarge.

Previously - The Overtime Secret

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We were feeling celebratory. We were on vacation, and we liked the place. Unfortunately, it was nearly midnight—on a Sunday. And we wanted Champagne.

For a Canadian, this usually means: game over. We were tiring of the bars, and the clubs were cheesy and vaguely threatening. We just wanted to grab a bottle and retire to our balcony.

We were also in one the largest metropolises in the Muslim world.

Montreal or Toronto we would have been totally fucked. But not in Istanbul. In Istanbul, where the conservative Erdogan government has been cracking down on all things alcohol-related for a decade (sample statement from the Prime Minister himself: “they want all of our youth to become alcoholics!”), there were, on a short stretch of Siraselviler Cadessi in Cihangir, three late-night stores of the surly-man-behind-a-grate variety available to take my lira in exchange for a bit of bubbly. And this wasn’t strange or anomalous.

Canadian-style liquor store setups are exceedingly rare. There are almost no countries that require you to purchase spirits in the manner that we are accustomed to. In legalistic, rule-heavy Switzerland, I have—personally—rolled up to a Geneva late-nighter with an all-too-fat wad of francs (damn Swiss) and emerged with a little something-something.

In sleepy Basel, union-run Paris, staid Vienna, and still-kind-of-Catholic Dublin, things proceed with a similar (from a Canadian perspective) abandon. In Communist China, it’s a free-for-all. Meanwhile, in Ontario, employees of the vaguely Yugoslav (except every ex-Yugoslav country is cooler about this) LCBO are preparing for their first-ever strike, which will see Canada’s largest city reduced to the status of that place Kevin Bacon’s mom moved to in Footloose.

Did we lose a war?

Last week, British Columbia Conservative leader John Cummins promised voters that, if his party is elected, beer and wine (sorry, mixologists) will be available in corner and grocery stores from Victoria to Fernie. Yesterday, the Saskatchewan government released a long list of slightly relaxed regulations that will—among a great many other things—“allow customers on tour buses and boats to self-serve alcohol,” thus increasing the appeal of a double-decker bus tour of Regina by approximately infinity per cent. Even in Toronto the Good, as VICE Canada’s LCBO-hating Managing Editor Patrick McGuire outlined back in December, Conservative Party leader Tim Hudak has made noises indicating that the reign of the sex-shop-in-Victorian-England-like “Beer Stores” might, if his party is elected, come to a merciful end.

So it’s not like there isn’t anybody fighting the good fight.

Unfortunately, as I have previously outlined, Canadians can be a prickly, defensive people. Even though we are, in my experience, a boisterous, party-loving bunch, arguments for liberalizing our liquor laws must overcome one very significant hurdle: they require us to admit that we were wrong.

This is not an easy thing for Canadians. In exploring this topic in various booze-friendly roundtables across our kind-of-great nation, I have encountered a few significant counter-arguments, all of which are intended to make the would-be revolutionary feel somewhat less-than-festive; provincial, even. Out of the loop.

Of these counter-arguments, the most interesting is the epicurean one. According to this line of thought, whose hedonistic veil hides a savagely puritanical visage, Canadians need the LCBO system (as well as its non-Ontario analogues) because Canadians enjoy quality spirits. Canadians, according to this argument, are not the type of disorderly, depressing lowlifes who nip out to sketchy late-nighters for an overpriced bottle of Jim Beam. Instead, we are connoisseurs—a people whose sophisticated requirements can only be met by the immense buying power (and vast selection) that a grandly-scaled Provincial liquor monopoly can provide.

“I don’t know,” such people hesitantly utter while looking away from you, “I guess I’ve never been in that situation. I just sort of try to keep the place well-stocked, and besides—I’m not sure if a corner store would really sell the sort of 900-year-old, monk-distilled, dungeon-aged whisky that I like to drink.”

In Montreal, where slightly looser legislation allows for beer and wine to be sold in corner stores, this argument has a trashier (because: Montreal) analogue. In this formulation, your booze-after-11pm-on-Sunday-night requirements do not represent a failure of tastes or morals, but rather one of knowledge: Montrealers always know a guy.

“Oh yeah, dude—I know it sucks. But do you seriously not know Dépanneur Super Plus Bronzage? It’s, like, this tiny place under a sidewalk grate and behind an abandoned sugar factory in Griffintown. Ask for J-F (pronounced “gee-eff”)—he’ll totally hook you up. Anything you want. I can’t believe you’ve never heard of this!”.

Clearly, we are kidding ourselves.

In my experience, insecurity—whether personal or cultural—is a difficult hurdle to overcome, but it can be done. You just have to make an appeal to ambition. For Canada’s great cities, whose residents are totally-sure-but-still-kind-of-not-sure that they live in the sort of fantastic, cosmopolitan, beacon-to-the-world type of places that people from all nations flock to, I present a traveler’s dilemma:

It’s late evening, and it’s been a long day. Starting in Zurich or London or Buenos Aires or Bangkok or even Cairo, you’ve been put the wringer of endless ticket lines, implacable baggage regulations and babies developing ear disorders at 35,000 feet. But it’s over. You’ve landed. And as you walk through downtown Montreal or Toronto or Vancouver (or Ottawa or Calgary or Halifax etc.), all you can think is that it might be time for a little nip. Just a small one. Back at the hotel. For the nerves.

You walk around in a daze, looking for the sort of minor convenience that is common where you are from, but find, in its place, a mystifying profusion of Red Bull and Snapple. No relief. You try to ask a local for help—Canadians are friendly, right? But all you receive are confusing directions to distant locations that “might be open.” You pass darkened displays of wines from all over the world, and tug on locked doors. Literally dispirited, you give up, heading back to your room while thinking:

“What is wrong with these people?”

Almost nobody does it like we do, Canada. We’re an outlier. We’re a weirdo.

Isn’t it time we loosened up?

Previously:

Tim Hudak Wants Ontario's Corner Stores to Sell Booze

I’m sure by now you’ve seen that video that Los Angeles-based writer Greg Karber made where he hands out a buch of Abercrombie gear to homeless people. It’s embedded above if you haven't.

Karber made the video in response to that stuff that Abercrombie CEO Mike Jeffries said about their “no women’s clothing above a size 10” policy. Essentially, Jefferies only wants “thin and beautiful people” shopping at his stores, because he doesn’t want the “cool kids” to have to endure the horror of seeing a fat person wearing the same outfit as them. I think we can all agree that the most shocking part of Mike’s statements is that they reveal there’s a person out there who thinks that the cool kids are wearing Abercrombie.

Photo via

Karber handed out A&F clothing to, as far as I can tell from the video, a fairly bewildered homeless population on Los Angeles’s Skid Row. His goal was to “rebrand” Abercrombie & Fitch by putting their clothing not on the cool kids that Mike Jeffries so loves, but on the homeless, who, I guess, are the opposite of cool.

Now, if you only think about it for a few seconds, it would appear that this is a great campaign. Karber wanted to make a point about Abercrombie & Fitch and to “clothe the homeless,” in his words, while doing it. Unfortunately, “Fitch the Homeless,” as Karber dubbed his campaign, is fucking stupid. For one thing, Karber doesn't appear to ask these people if they want Abercrombie & Fitch clothing, or if he did ask them, he cut those parts from the video for some reason. He just sort of dumps polo shirts and A&F brand tees onto the residents of Skid Row, as if they were pack mules and he were a sherpa venturing into the mountains to deliver striped rugby shirts to a monastery.

Perhaps Karber realized that homeless people make great props for your viral video. You can dress them up any way you want, bribe them with free stuff, and the worst that can happen is maybe they bite you, but they don’t brush their teeth, so it’s doubtful they’d break skin. It’s just too damn easy to use a homeless person to elicit sympathy from gullible viewers, so why not? We have no idea if these individuals are even in need of clothing, or if the clothes given to them would fit, and yet that is hardly the reason this video exists. It’s a   prank that uses the most abundant scenery in Los Angeles, which is dirty people. Also, Karber himself says several times that Abercrombie & Fitch clothing looks “douchey,” which it does. By his own logic, why would the homeless want it?

The “Fitch the Homeless” campaign centers on the idea that homeless people are dirty or gross: the anticool kids. Karber’s thesis seems to be “Mike Jeffries would be so mad if homeless people wore Abercrombie & Fitch, because the homeless are lowly and disgusting. This’ll show that crusty old CEO!”

Photo via

Karber’s video has gone viral, receiving over 2 million views in just two days. He’s already appeared on several talk shows. On Twitter, the hashtag #FitchTheHomeless is thriving. That’s because at the end of Karber’s video, he called for others to raid their closets and give all their Abercrombie & Fitch clothes to the homeless, as he had done. Many people have tweeted about what a good idea this is, how this really sticks it to Abercrombie & Fitch and helps the homeless in the process, so it may be too late to say this, but please don’t “Fitch the Homeless.” This is all just some cheeseball stunt perpetrated by a guy who really wants attention and saw an opportunity to get it. Yes, it seems clever, but making fart noises with your armpits in seventh grade seemed clever, too.

@AllegraRingo

More on people without homes:

How to Best Handle Being a Homeless Person  

Going Underground with the Homeless of Ulan Bator 

You Do Have To Live Like A Refugee  

Scroll to the bottom of this piece to watch the exclusive premiere of Tony Clifton's music video for "Lonely Girl." It's safe for work... ish.

Before the flood, Jeremy Johnson and his wife were always in the process of starting or ending some new independent business venture. Nothing ever stuck. Before Hurricane Katrina filled their New Orleans home with poisonous water, they’d curated a personal museum of pop-culture knick-knacks that they eventually tried turning into a thrift shop. Looking back on it, the most important items in Jeremy’s collection included the official WWF Andy Kaufman and Jerry Lawler figurines, and a copy of Lynne Margulies's Kaufman documentary I'm From Hollywood, which told the story of the aggressively strange, groundbreaking comedian and performer’s venture into the wrestling ring. “Andy Kaufman hit me hard at a young age,” Johnson explains. “In sixth grade, this male friend of mine would get these girls in the neighborhood to come over, we would watch videotapes of Andy Kaufman wrestling women, and we would wrestle the girls in his parents’ living room while watching the videos.”

Katrina also flooded the school where Jeremy had been teaching moderately disabled high school kids, so in 2007, at the age of 27, Johnson began working at a coffee shop, while rebuilding his home. As an emotional booby prize, Johnson finally had the time to indulge his amateur filmmaking urges. “For a long time I’d been denying my creative side,” Johnson says. He slung coffee to a number of New Orleans layabouts, including an old gray-haired hippie type who began coming in every day to chat up Jeremy about pop culture, especially film. Not until the ponytailed fellow asked Jeremy to help him film a commercial for insult comic and “singer” Tony Clifton’s big comeback tour did Johnson recognize him as Andy Kaufman’s former writing partner, Bob Zmuda.

By the time he approached Johnson, Zmuda had been doing charity work for decades, pretty much ever since Kaufman's death in 1984. He founded the American version of Comic Relief in 1986 in Kaufman’s memory and put on a number of high-profile comedy shows to raise money for philanthropic causes, mainly benefitting the homeless. The organization has raised tens of millions of dollars and in the process helped break the careers of Dave Chappelle, Bill Hicks, Dane Cook, Sarah Silverman, and many others. In 2006, after an eight-year hiatus, Comic Relief reemerged to put on a show to benefit the victims of Katrina. When he hired Johnson as a videographer, Zmuda was working on a more ambitious project than a one-off gig: a tour featuring two dozen New Orleans musicians and dancers that would both raise money for performers still dealing with the effects of Katrina and restart the long-dormant career of Tony Clifton.

Clifton is a character, both figuratively and literally. Andy Kaufman claimed to have “discovered” the drunken, foul-mouthed nightclub performer in 1969, but in reality—if the word reality applies to any of Kaufman’s projects—he might have emerged from Kaufman’s head, like Foreign Man. In any case, since the 70s, the Clifton costume and persona has been passed around like a handle of warm whiskey in a green room. In his book Andy Kaufman Exposed! Zmuda copped to having first worn Tony’s signature thick prescription sunglasses, and starting in 1979 Kaufman impersonated Clifton as well—so often and with such hateful aplomb that audiences quickly came to consider the character Andy’s original creation and forgot that a “real” Clifton supposedly existed somewhere. In public, Zmuda and Kaufman played an elaborate, years-long Tony Clifton shell game that lasted until Kaufman’s death in 1984. In the 1999 Kaufman biopic Man on the Moon, Jim Carrey played Kaufman doing Clifton, and Paul Giametti imitated Zmuda imitating Clifton. Andy’s brother Michael Kaufman has also publicly donned the Clifton leisure suit, as has Criss Angel, though both Johnson and Clifton say Angel sucked at it.

“I work for the original Tony Clifton, though,” Johnson says, “the guy Kaufman discovered in a Vegas nightclub.”

Most people believe today’s Tony Clifton to “be” Zmuda, who’s now old enough that he no longer needs prosthetics to approximate Clifton’s jowls. Either way, Jeremy has always served two bosses: Zmuda—who Johnson by now considers “a dick”—and Clifton, whom he much prefers. Johnson has spent over five years as Clifton’s de facto assistant, on-call videographer, and sometimes writing partner. People close to the duo have suggested that Johnson is to Tony what Zmuda was to Kaufman. Which still doesn’t mean he can answer the most basic of questions: Who is Tony Clifton?

Jeremy Johnson and Tony Clifton pose in a photo booth.

Jeremy’s employment with Comic Relief began in earnest in 2008, when Clifton and his Katrina Kiss My Ass Orchestra  spent several weeks' worth of long afternoons practicing more than 100 songs at One Eyed Jacks in New Orleans’s French Quarter. A lot of work needed to be done if the crew was to revive Clifton’s career—other than a one-off appearance in 2004 commemorating the 20th anniversary of Kaufman’s death, Clifton hadn’t performed live onstage since 1985. Suddenly here he was, rising from Katrina’s toxic floodwaters for a second act.

Johnson’s job was to film the shows and also run the videos that played during the performances, like the footage of ships battling on the high seas that accompanied Tony’s nasal rendition of Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” The show did not debut in New Orleans but rather with a successful run in Georgia. Jonhson was then asked to stay in Chicago for the summer, to shoot another set of Clifton’s live shows, a gig that turned into a cross-country tour. The show’s cast included famed burlesque dancer Trixie Minx and members of her Fleur De Tease troupe, plus musicians on the level of backup singer Whitney Meyer, who recently impressed the judges on The Voice. Clifton’s trumpet player Ashlin Parker has backed Aretha Franklin, while saxophonist Adrian Crutchfield has played with Prince and Lionel Ritchie.

Like so many other well-meaning Katrina charity projects based in New York and LA, Clifton’s show helped in one way but also removed a lot of important talent from an already weakened New Orleans music scene. Still, Clifton maintains, “I did a good thing getting them out of this hellhole.”

Despite fronting a charity project benefiting New Orleans, Clifton claimed to hate the town. “While Bob Zmuda, president and founder of Comic Relief, cared a great deal about New Orleans after the flood,” says Johnson, “Tony Clifton didn’t give a fuck about it.” Tony supposedly only ended up on the tour as part of a plea bargain in a New Orleans rape case. Tony calls it a drunkard’s simple mistake: he came back to his hotel very late and wasted, accidentally entered the wrong room, and crawled in bed with a woman who got the wrong idea, freaked out, and pressed charges. “That broad was old as dirt,” he says in his defense. “I do not under any circumstance fuck anything over half my age.” He claims to have only led his band of Katrina survivors as part of his community service. “Fuck New Orleans. New Orleans put me in fuckin jail," Clifton grunts. "I think the best thing that happened to this place was that big fucking wave comin’ here and cleaning out a lot of the nigs.”

Another thing about Clifton: he has the tendency to be as racist as you’d expect a weathered old alcoholic lounge singer to be, both privately and especially publicly.   

The Katrina Kiss My Ass tour came to a close with two killer shows in New Orleans. The first night’s collection of songs, skits, racist and pedophilic jokes, and puppet shows was so awe-inspiring, I returned the next night and caught a completely different, equally hair-raising show. A lot of comedy is falsely described as “dangerous,” but at those two shows it genuinely felt like something bad might happen. Clifton doesn’t use the word nigger to break down its associations and our prejudices, the way Louis C. K. does with hot-button words; he spits it out with abandon. Tony makes Quentin Tarantino seem tasteful. You wonder how he would ever find even one black musician to work for him, much less five of his 11 band members—especially since he claims he doesn’t warn anyone what they’re in for before he hires them. Johnson admits, however, that the show’s musical director went behind Clifton’s back to explain things. “Think of Tony Clifton as Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse,” Johnson says, quoting the official line. “Heʼs a bigoted Archie Bunker–type man, and he says what he wants. Part of his shtick onstage is to always push boundaries. No matter how hard it hurts, he’s just going to go for it all the time.”

Carved into Jeremy’s shoulder is a large Public Enemy tattoo, which makes one wonder how he feels about hearing the N word constantly from a white man. Chuck D likely wouldn’t see it as funny. “I have felt guilty in certain situations, where I just don’t want to be there while he’s saying that stuff,” Johnson admits. “But then I remember this is part of the game, the ride, the act. And also, what the fuck else am I gonna do?”

Zmuda claims to not like the racial component to Clifton’s act either. “I don’t agree with people saying the N word onstage,” he says. “But Tony’s able to get away with it because people perceive him to be a character. Use your own name and say it? You’re dead. It’s different when said by a character. But to do it at all, it has to be well thought out.”

It was Clifton’s offstage verbal abuse, however, that finally sunk the ship. “One night Tony didn’t like the ending of a song, or something,” Johnson recalls. “He was hammered as usual, and backstage, I’d never seen Tony Clifton more pissed. He was runnin’ around with his shirt off, stomping up and down, yelling, screaming in the hallways, ‘Just fire these fucking niggers!’ And the band was like, ‘Wait a minute. We were cool with what you were doing onstage, but you’re not on stage right now.’” At the next night’s performance in Denver, Colorado, an extra large dose of N words finally compelled four black members of the Katrina Kiss My Ass Orchestra to abandon Clifton midset. Trombone player Kyle Rothchild got behind the drum kit and moved the awkward show forward. “Some of the burlesque dancers came out on stage crying,” remembers Jeremy. “They still felt they needed to do the numbers to get the paycheck.

“I came to tears, too,” he admits. “I mean, this really wasn’t what I signed on for. It was too much, every day for a month, with no relief, stuck out on the road with Tony Clifton.”

When asked why he abruptly quit on Clifton, respected New Orleans sax player Khris Royal answers simply, “Somewhere there has to be a line.” While he doesn’t regret walking off stage that night, Royal does feel conflicted. “Tony just wanted to see where our line was, so in some ways I was a sucker,” he says. “I did maintain my line, but he got the reaction he was after.”

Clifton claims that “the Denver Massacre,” as he calls it, made him realize he needed to henceforth really befriend all of his employees. “I am now very close to my band members,” he says. “I’ve learned that I need to be talking with my people and communicating with them directly. People who work with me now know who I am, and know where I’m comin’ from... Some of the people who decided not to leave the band that night, by the way, were also black. But they saw the bigger picture. So, it’s not like all the blacks left the band at once. Just the niggers left.”

Tony Clifton's house.

After that precarious first tour, the remaining employees were rewarded with an invitation to Clifton’s killer digs on Lake Tahoe just south of Reno, Nevada—a grand estate equipped with a recording studio, movie theater, dance studio, and hot tub. His backyard opens onto 10,000 acres of protected forest and mountains. When Johnson arrived there with the rest of the staff, he had been working for Clifton for seven months. “In Tahoe, Tony was the most relaxed I’d ever seen him,” recalls Jeremy. “He pegged us all with a lot of questions about what happened on the road, and a lot of truth came out. He also needed to know where his loyalties lay. He invited us out there so he could figure out who had to go, and who needed to stay.”

At that two-week retreat, Johnson and Clifton grew close, as the story of Comic Relief’s new Sony Z7U camera illustrates. “I was at first using old hand-me-down gear from the 90s,” says Jeremy. “But I wanted to stay on the Clifton project so badly I went into $7,000 worth of debt for a serious camera. Then, after a while, I told Comic Relief we really needed a second camera. I got shut down by Zmuda. But when the cast was out in Tahoe and we finally got to hang with Tony as a real person, I brought it up again. After a few drinks, he asked me, ‘Will the HD make me look good?’ I said, ‘The HD is gonna make you look fabulous.’ He said, ‘OK, I’ll talk to 'em.’

“So the next morning I got a phone call from Zmuda. He said, ‘I’m kind of angry about something. We hired Tony to do this thing mainly because we don’t have to pay him, and it’s not costing us much money. But I got a phone call from Tony this morning, telling me that he thinks the HD is going to make him look good, and that we really need to get this second camera. You’re not in trouble this time, but any time you’re fucking hanging out with Tony Clifton don’t you ever talk to him about money or ask him for any kind of fucking equipment. He will always want it, and we’ll have to pay for it. And we really don’t have any money, Jeremy.’”

Johnson got down on a more personal level with Tony after the cast all left the estate and Jeremy stayed behind. Soon, a snowfall made Tony’s driveway impossible to traverse—and Johnson didn’t have the money to return to New Orleans even if the ice melted. He was trapped, forced into living alone with Tony Clifton in Tahoe for a winter that turned into an entire year.

During that time, Johnson never saw Zmuda—meaning he either never broke character, or else Clifton's not his character. Jeremy and Tony filmed continuously and made six music videos. “There’s so much beautiful green space there around Tahoe,” says Johnson. “We shot tons of stuff up in Reno, Carson City, in the woods, up on a mountain.” It wasn’t all beauty though. “Tony Clifton was all up in my shit the whole time,” Johnson recalls. “Once he had me there, he had me. I was on the clock the entire day, and the day would stretch into weeks and then months. I just couldn’t get any fresh air. We started to not have such a great relationship after a while because I was trapped in his magic castle. Any time of the day he could bombard me. I mean, I like talking about ideas, but it was just nonstop.”

Meanwhile, back home in New Orleans, Johnson’s marriage began to crumble and he was losing his house to bankruptcy, situations aggravated by his absence. “I was having a total breakdown,” Johnson says. “The only thing I had that I could almost call stable was the Tony Clifton gig. It sounds fucked up because you should also have a commitment to marriage but… it’s not every day that an historic comedy icon gives you a job. Sometimes something will cross your path and you have to have the gumption to take it."

Predictably, Clifton wasn’t exactly Ann Landers when it came to marriage advice. “When I first mentioned divorce to Tony, he immediately said, ‘I think that sounds like a good idea,’” Johnson remembers. “He has a strict policy: no relationships with women except hookers. So there were a lot of times in Tahoe that I just wanted to say to him, ‘This is not the life I pictured for myself at 32 years old, you know? Getting divorced and having no friends and being trapped in the snow sleeping on your couch… Can’t you just act like a human being?’”

Clifton and companions.

By Thanksgiving of 2009, Johnson was officially separated—and thus free to be taken by Clifton for the first time to Moonlite Bunny Ranch in Mound House, Nevada, the whorehouse most famous as the set of HBO’s Cathouse. Though Clifton admits to being a “big supporter” of legalized prostitution, and to visiting Thailand multiple times a year, he denies he bought his Tahoe property 22 years ago to be close to the Bunny Ranch. “He claims he lives there because he likes the fresh air,” Johnson chuckles. “But yeah, absolutely, he’s a 45-minute drive from the biggest legal brothel in America, with the best girls.”

Clifton tells anyone else who’ll listen how he's the “official tester” at the Bunny Ranch. He calls Bunny Ranch owner Dennis Hof “the PT Barnum of booty” and claims, “Nobody gets laid more than Tony Clifton... As soon as Hof gets a new girl, I go down there and test to make sure they can do all the nasty things that clients want. I’ve fucked, on average, two or three girls under 25 years of age every week for the last 12 years. And they get nervous that I’m not gonna give them a good report! So they’re like, ‘Do you want me to suck your cock again? Do you want me to swallow your cum? Do you want anal?’ I am the luckiest guy on the Earth.”

Zmuda has never joined the crew at the Ranch, so Johnson has gone either with Clifton or alone on all of his roughly 40 visits so far. Clearly, Tony has rubbed off on him. “Not that I have participated every time,” Jeremy says. “But I was completely alone in Tahoe with the snow, and I was going through divorce, and I didn’t have any friends. So just going to the Bunny Ranch and hanging out at the bar and shooting the shit with the girls, those were some of the most fun times I’ve ever had. You don’t have to be fucking ‘em.”

Johnson remains most impressed by the Thanksgiving feast he shared that first night with the girls. “There is always food at the whorehouse,” he says. “The Bunny Ranch has this immaculate kitchen. Hof hires special chefs. Great people come from all over the place to cook and eat in there.” Once, around an opulent Thanksgiving spread, Clifton gathered Johnson, Hof, and all the girls to make a poignant toast. “Today is not a day for thinking,” he said. “I don’t want to intellectualize, or think too much today. The only serious decision I want to make today, is: Will I have white meat? Or dark meat?”

It wasn’t until Christmas 2009 that Johnson finally came back to New Orleans for a visit. His marriage was officially over, but he had a partner in Tony Clifton.  

Following the stint in Tahoe, Johnson moved to LA and says that only recently, finally, have his prospects improved. This year Clifton and Johnson premiered their Katrina Kiss My Ass Orchestra concert documentary Tony Clifton: the Movie to a sold-out crowd at New York’s Museum of Modern Art; afterward, Tony and crew traveled to Austin’s South by Southwest festival to again screen their documentary, hang with the Flaming Lips, and accept High Times magazine’s Lifetime Achievement Award. “For a couple years after those Katrina tours, there was a lull,” admits Johnson. “And I wondered if the project was going anywhere. But MOMA reinstituted my faith, and [New Orleans-based event-planning company] Huka Entertainment has hooked Tony into events with all kinds of musicians and comedians. He’s working with R.E.M. and Smashing Pumpkins. I think Tony is about to blow up, finally. And maybe I can one day buy a house again.”

Johnson hadn’t been back to New Orleans—which he still considers home—until earlier this year, when he made the trip with Clifton for Buku Fest, where Huka had booked Tony to judge an air sex competition.

It’s a more corporate vibe than Andy Kaufman traveling the country, challenging women to wrestling matches to be sure—Huka is owned by SFX Entertainment, which is in turned owned by giant Clear Channel. But Clifton is clearly excited for new opportunities to do his act for a younger crowd who know nothing of the dead comedian who popularized him. “I have energy and I have a big fucking heart,” he brags. “And the trick is to keep yourself associated with young people. Going back to Dennis Hof: I don’t fuck any girl over half my age, and I promise you.” He pokes my chest for emphasis: “Fucking, young, girls, will, keep, you, young. Their pussy juice is the nectar of the gods. It’s my secret to life.”     

Clifton and Johnson at work on the set of one of the singer's videos.

Like the Republican party, Clifton may have to remake certain aspects of himself to appeal to this younger demographic. These days, Tony rarely unpacks the mean version of his act for strangers. “He’s trying to adapt to people he wants to work with,” Johnson says. “After 30 or 40 years, he’s learning to respect people.” And that includes respecting Jeremy. “One thing that changed after our miserable year in Tahoe,” Johnson says, “is it made us much more honest with each other, and helped us keep less secrets—secrecy being a huge part of this project. Up till then I’d been a good little soldier, but after that I just said what I thought, regardless of the consequences.” This mostly meant Johnson limiting his work hours, and not answering his phone for every one of Clifton’s drunken 3 AM epiphanies about women or performing.

When I accompanied him and Johnson to the Buku Fest, Clifton didn't insult even one young person, all of whom were clearly rolling their faces off—he was feeling the contact high and seemed enamored of the incredible bass and ear-splitting squiggles that the kids these days call music. He smiled and waved at the oblivious young’uns who shouted, “Nice costume, man!” In New Orleans he’s just another costumed kook.

“I don’t think Tony’s ever been able to come to life the way he has in the last five years,” Johnson shouted over the blaring dubstep. “Ever since he finished his community service, he’s felt rejuvenated to actually want this career again. And now that he finally has Andy Kaufman off his back, this is the first chance Tony’s had to just be himself, to be who he wants to be.”

A scantily clad Lolita led Clifton into some heavy, molly-induced flirting, and we all danced a bit as Kid Cudi performed “Man on the Moon,” which is named after the movie named after the R.E.M. song about Kaufman. An extremely high young man cut between us, aimed his swirling eyes down at Tony and asked, “Andy? Are you in there?”

As we headed towards the scheduled air sex contest, I noticed Johnson didn't walk beside Clifton, so I took the chance to ask Jeremy, finally, if he and Clifton are friends. “We definitely are on a certain level,” he replied. “But I’ve separated myself somewhat because I realized it wasn’t a good thing to be friends with my boss. Because one day everything’s good, then the next day he’s screaming at me. And then I’m like, ‘Wait, aren’t you my friend?’”

Here's the premiere of Tony Clifton's new video:

Epilogue:
The Katrina relief funding that had paid Johnson's salary has now run out. He is now moving home to New Orleans, where he will continue to do Comic Relief’s bidding on a more limited basis.  

Michael Patrick Welch is a New Orleans musician, journalist, and author of books including The Donkey Show and New Orleans: the Underground Guide. His work has appeared at McSweeney's, Oxford American, Newsweek, Salon, and many other publications. Follow him on Twitter here.  

More about Andy Kaufman and his legacy:

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Commander’s Jam-Log: Entry 001
NASA recently approached me about recording the first full-length music album in space. They claim it’s to generate good PR for the space program, but I’ve been briefed on their real motive. They want to definitively determine whether it’s any cooler if your dad sings to you from space. In other words, to produce conclusive results, my three adult children will have to lose their minds to their father singing NASA-approved songs from the ISS. There will be scientists on the ground measuring factors like dungaree moisture levels and the presence of "Dad Sweats".

My initial reaction was that this was both frivolous and perverse, and would probably not help the program director reconcile with his estranged family. But I do have my own motive for going along with the project, in addition to all the literally star-struck land poon I’ll be getting after I land. An acoustic guitar, you see, is the perfect way to smuggle a penis pump and furtively test its properties in space, away from the prying eyes of our Earth's Lord, and in brazen defiance of his iron-fisted genital theocracy. I got the idea from Glenn Frey’s short-lived TV Miami Vice spinoff Smuggler’s Wild.

The purpose of this log will be to record my own findings, as well as keep track of the process of making an album that I have little to no interest in.

Commander’s Jam-Log: Entry 002
NASA is thrilled with my suggestion of a collaboration with Ed from the Barenaked Ladies. They love the Canadian angle and the beyond-inoffensive music. What they don’t know is that Ed is my partner in collecting penis pump data.  His stinkstick is as similar to mine as anyone I could find given the time constraints, so he’ll be serving as my control back on Earth.

Commander’s Jam-Log: Entry 003
NASA waited till I was up here to tell me that the album will be all covers. I was the first Canadian to walk in space. Now I'm the first Canadian to memorize Foreigner lyrics in a vehicle over $8,000 in value.

Also, I’ve been told the Queen of England has sent me her “best wishes.” What a thoughtful, heartfelt sentiment. I’m sending her back “regards” from my “undermustache” (a signed headshot of my star-taint).

Chris Hadfield's photo of the Bahamas. Found in his diary and via.

Commander’s Jam-Log: Entry 004
I'm going off book. This can't be entirely covers. I'm not representing our galaxy with a fucking novelty record. Like it or not, they're getting something straight from this Spaceman's universe-sized heart. Here are some of the originals I started penning as soon as we launched:

"Blastoff Your Ass Off"
"The Space Between Our Groins"
"I Swear I'll Make You Mrs. Cosmos"
"Saturn Smiled at Me"
"Backseat of my Astrowagon"

Commander’s Jam-Log: Entry 005
I should mention that the rest of the crew is mostly made up of session musicians (they’ll be billed as Marsman Mitch and the All-Mars All-Stars) and hit-making producer Don Was (“Walk the Dinosaur”, the Rolling Stones’ Voodoo Lounge). They’re having a hard time adjusting to the diet up here, which mainly consists of astronaut ice cream, astronaut semen (rich in protein and testosterone to intimidate alien parasites), astronaut meat, astronaut Cheetos (ice cream flavor), and astronaut Vitamin Water.

Commander’s Jam-Log: Entry 006
It turns out space cures cancer. Well, back to miking this amp.

Commander’s Jam-Log: Entry 007
NASA heard the first demos and is livid over the lack of covers. They want to hear an established hit by tomorrow or they’re going to start “fucking with the oxygen.” I said I’d throw them a bone by including a version of “Spaceman” by Babylon Zoo, but they turned it down on the grounds that it “sucks major shit.”

Turn down the oxygen all you want, you shitheel cowards. You think I need air to deliver the greatest album in NASA history? All I need is an acoustic guitar, this filthy mustache, and the courage to say what every astronaut is thinking.

Commander’s Jam-Log: Entry 008
As promised, they’re making the air harder to breathe. The band is concerned about delirium, but I told them not to worry. I’m maintaining a sane public face for all of us by sending down videos of how I clip my nails and brush my teeth in zero gravity. I’m saving the three-hour feature on our plastic piss-sacks for an emergency.

In other news, my own penis pump testing is proving inconclusive. To be honest, this was the result I was hoping for. I mean, I can't come out here every single time I need to upbeef my meat.

Chris Hadfield's photo of the sun. via.

Commander’s Jam-Log: Entry 009
Instead of complaining about the “lack of oxygen” and “reduced brain function,” I’m making the best of things. Going to try using my pump as a guitar slide, like a penis-obsessed Jeff Healey, which might have been Regular Jeff Healey had he been able to see his own dink.

I also got to put on a green bowtie and sing “Danny Boy” for St. Patrick’s Day. I love taunting the Irish and their shit space program.

Commander’s Jam-Log: Entry 010
I suppose my greatest fear is falling endlessly through the infinite void of space and I can't open my spacesuit to change the song I have on repeat to learn it for the record and the song in question is "Sunset Grill" by Don Henley. But it would be a small price to pay for pushing the limits of human accomplishment to the limit.

Commander’s Jam-Log: Entry 011
The program director’s insisting on Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” I’m going along with it for the sake of the men’s morale; it may be the only thing that gets them to stop hiding in the astro-crawlspace.

It’s a shitty, obvious choice, but I’m not a prima donna. I’m a simple guy; I was married in a Reebok tuxedo, for Christ’s sake.

Unfortunately, Don Was just suffocated in the airlock. I told him it wouldn’t be “great for vocals.” He’ll be producing “Butt Town” in heaven tonight…

Commander’s Jam-Log: Entry 012
These Bowie lyrics are pretty fucking depressing. I do not love my wife very much. She knows.

Commander’s Jam-Log: Entry 013
Despite seemingly everyone turning on me, the recording’s finished. Things started moving along once I got to use the arrangement I wanted. All I had to do was convince the band to get into the escape pod, which was really just the compartment we use to jettison garbage. They’re in a better place right now, a place I like to call “off my bozak.”

Regardless of what comes of this, I’m not sure what the lesson is here. I can only lie back and listen to the playback of my own voice, nature’s own organ expanding into a vacuum that holds nothing we can ever wholly consume.

 

You should watch our show about space, Spaced Out:

The Artstronaut

Outer Space Interior Design

Making Mars with Tom Sachs

Once upon a time, long before Angelina Jolie got a mastectomy, she adopted a Cambodian child. As a result, privileged Westerners of all nationalities flocked to the country's orphanages in the hope of simultaneously nurturing a child and their own sense of self-worth.

In 2012 alone, Cambodia was visited by 3.5 million tourists, so I guess someone was eventually bound to put two and two together and realize that the hundreds of orphanages throughout the country could be exploited into becoming a tourist attraction for the rising amount of foreign visitors.

The country's orphanage boom all began in the early 70s, when Pol Pot marauded around the country, intentionally splitting up villages, slaughtering families and imprisoning the educated populace in an attempt to win the civil war. The tactic worked for Pol and his Khmer Rouge regime, but left thousands of children displaced, so NGOs came flooding in to salvage the situation by building orphanages all over the country.

Thirty years later, Cambodia now boasts more than 500 orphanages—a figure that has doubled in the last decade, presumably because the large donations they receive are a much easier way to make money than actually working. Sadly, that nifty little ruse seems to have become public knowledge, and the exploitation of Cambodia's orphans has turned into a booming, multi-million dollar industry.

Dr. Setan Lee, a Cambodian who lived through the Khmer Rouge era, has watched the spread of corruption through his country's orphanages. There are Westerners who come to Cambodia under the pretence of helping orphans, Lee told me, but "literally all they're doing is fulfilling their own lusty lifestyles" by siphoning off the donations intended for the children into their own pockets.

(Image via)

Foster schemes and effective family planning are arguably much better alternatives to orphanages, but unfortunately neither of them exist to a sufficient extent in Cambodia, largely due to the country's poor economy. According to Tara Winkler, founder of Cambodia’s Children’s Trust (CCT), it's that same economy and "lack of alternative support" that's making parents "feel forced to send their children away" to orphanages.

Tara continued, saying that there's a common perception among Cambodian parents that, if they send their children to orphanages, they will be provided "an education, access to medical care, and better nutrition.” That perception now means that orphanages are no longer comprised of just orphans, but also children from poor families.

In fact, according to a 2011 UNICEF study, an estimated three out four children in Cambodia's orphanages still have one living parent. That clearly seems to be dodging the definition of "orphan" a little, but those in charge couldn't care less about stuff like definitions or, say, morality, because the more children in their care, the more donations they receive to pillage for their own ends. A well-intended scheme that has now become a loophole for the corrupt, with some orphanages even offering small sums of money to parents in exchange for their children.

A number of unlicensed orphanages are now popping up around Cambodia and starting to reel the kids in. They are all, Tara tells me, “operating without official registration and without essential documentation, like child protection policies.” So we can only guess what goes on behind closed doors, but Tara is certain that whatever it is, it's deeply corrupt in some shape or form. Dr. Lee goes one step further, claiming that the children in these unlicensed orphanages are being "forced to do labor in jobs that they don't want to do.” It's Oliver Twist, only with exploitative, morally corrupt caretakers who ruin lives, rather than charismatic weirdos who teach you how to pickpocket.

Children in these orphanages are rarely given an education, instead being put to work until the tourists come to visit, when they're wheeled out as bait for donations. Unsurprisingly, little of those donations end up being spent on their care. And it's not only the physical toll on these children that's worrisome, but the damaging emotional effects that come with your parents handing you over to a workhouse where you're forced to live in worse conditions than you were at home.  



(Image via)

Tara works with many children and families in Battambang, a region in northwest Cambodia, and her observations of the children’s feelings sum up the issue pretty concisely. “Imagine being one in 100," she says. "Imagine not really understanding why you’ve been taken away from your family, and imagine how it would feel to miss your family and siblings, knowing they’re only a few minutes down the road.”



Tara went on to warn that children being turned into “moneymaking tourist attractions” isn't even the most serious issue currently plaguing Cambodia's orphanages. Sexual abuse is rife, and according to Dr. Lee, Western child abusers travel to Cambodia to work in its orphanages just so they can gain easy, unsupervised access to the children in care.

In 2007, Tara’s organization, CCT, rescued 14 children from an orphanage named Sprouting Knowledge Orphans, where the director had been sexually and physically abusing the children in his care. The children, Tara told me, were “provided with so little food that they were forced to catch mice and rats to survive.” Working in the country for the last six years, Tara assures me that cases like that are endemic in Cambodia's orphanages.

Earlier this year, an Australian-run orphanage was closed down amid accusations of child abuse and child trafficking. The orphanage in question—the ominously named Love in Action—had "rescued" 21 children from the streets of Phnom Penh and, like many others, was unregistered. A week later, a director of another institution in the city of Siem Reap was arrested for sexually abusing two girls, one 11 years old, the other 12. His orphanage remains open, but is expected to be shut down.

Although the likely closing of the orphanage seems like a good thing, when orphanages are shut down—or when children escape or grow too old to stay—they're forced out onto the streets with no family or support. They're vulnerable and susceptible to becoming tied up in work that's nowhere near suitable for children.

Young girls often end up offering themselves to geriatric sex tourists in small, dirty bars, and others—according to Dr. Lee—flock to factories to get work because they don't have the education required to apply for any other jobs. And while it may beat sex work, life as a factory worker in Cambodia still isn't that desirable—you're basically guaranteed malnourishment, exceptionally low wages, and only about four days off a month.

It took the Cambodian government 20 years to establish a tribunal system to punish the Khmer Rouge members guilty of genocide in the late 70s, so it's unlikely that they're going to step in and put a stop to the orphanage exploitation any time soon. Accentuating that problem, Dr. Lee tells me that a quick, "$750 or $1,500 will keep [the authorities'] mouths shut, so even though these people should be sent to prison, it's very hard to do anything because the government is so corrupt."    



That said, the government has promised an investigation and, if necessary, raids into the offending orphanages. However, there's no real sign of that being carried out any time soon. The most realistic aim, according to both Tara and Dr. Lee, is trying to keep children with their parents, but that's far easier said than done in a culture where those parents genuinely believe that orphanages will provide their kids better prospects than they can offer themselves.

Of course, the legitimate, licensed orphanages still doing things the right way may well be able to offer these kids the futures they deserve. So perhaps it's time to start paying a little more attention to where exactly the donations are going.

Follow Sascha on Twitter: @SaschaKouvelis

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