When it comes to women's rights, Saudi Arabia takes baby steps to a whole new level of infancy (In utero steps? Spermy steps?). Sure, the King Khalid Charitable Foundation launched the country's first ever anti-domestic violence advert last month, but women are still unable to defend themselves against those exact domestic violence cases in court. In 2013. 

One other huge breakthrough that I'm sure would have the Pankhurst sisters setting off streamers in their graves is new legislation that allows women to ride bicycles. Granted, they still have to be supervised riding their bikes by men – but bicycles! Think of the endless freedoms that come with finally being able to cycle around Riyadh, a city not built with cyclists in mind whatsoever!

Oh, also, girls in private schools are now allowed to play sport, but girls in state schools still can't. Which sounds about fair, right? To keep things balanced and fair, the amount of rights a woman should get should depend entirely on her wealth. 

Despite these astonishingly forward-thinking changes, Saudi Arabia was still ranked 131st out of 134 countries for gender parity in the 2012 World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap Report. So recent, optimistic reports of Saudi Arabia going through a "feminist revolution" seem a little off the mark.

I spoke to Nouf Alhimiary, a 20-year-old photographer from Jeddah, about the challenges she faced when she tried to put on an art exhibition about Saudi women in a country where basically every minutely inflammatory art piece gets banned from public display.

VICE: Hey Nouf. So how come you were only allowed to display half of your exhibition?
Nouf Alhimiary: You know that thing where you take a picture of your outfit every day and post it on Instagram or Twitter? I thought it was interesting that a lot my Saudi friends do it when they’re out of the country but can’t do it here because they have to wear the exact same thing every day: the abaya. I wanted to create a parody of that by photographing women wearing the same thing in different places. I wanted to call it “What She Wore/ What She Wore Underneath”. The plan was to take pictures of all these women in the abaya, take pictures of whatever they were wearing underneath and then display both pictures together.

But you weren’t allowed to do that?
The curator for the Mostly Visible show told me I couldn’t do it because the government would have rejected it. In Saudi Arabia, the government has to look at every art project that's going to be exhibited to decide whether or not it can be displayed. The curator told me that if I included pictures of women outside their houses not wearing the abaya, they wouldn’t display it.

So what did you do?
I settled for “What She Wore”, which I actually like because it makes you ask, 'Why do all these women look like they’re wearing a uniform?' But even though I only displayed pictures of women in the abaya, a lot of people at the exhibition came up to me and asked, “Why are you trying to change women?”

Are you trying to change women?
I’m not really trying to change anything. I’m just asking for the option to either wear the abaya or not. I’m not asking for tradition to be diminished, I’m just asking to be able to make that choice for myself and not have other people do it for me.

Were you angry that your work got censored?
Being born in Saudi as a woman, I’m used to it. I wasn’t really outraged. I kind of saw it coming.

Your pictures are certainly very powerful.
To someone who’s not from Saudi, it looks strange because you’re not used to people looking very similar. If you’re from Saudi, you’re used to seeing women dressed in the same thing. But seeing these pictures together makes you think, 'You know what, maybe we’ve taken it too far because Saudi men have the option of wearing traditional outfits or jeans and a shirt, and women don’t have that choice.'

A lot of the Western press is saying that Saudi Arabia is going through some kind of feminist revolution, what with the release of the recent anti-domestic violence ad and the change in cycling laws. What do you make of that?
When I heard about the cycling law, I thought it was ridiculous. I mean, come on, you can now ride a bike with a guardian? You might as well be driven in a car. The streets in Saudi are not made for cycling. It’s like the government is saying, “Look, we’re giving you something! Shut up, women!” No one wanted this. No one demanded the right to cycle.

Do your friends share your opinion?
Everyone jokes about it. Everyone thinks it’s really ridiculous. As a woman in Saudi, you’re always a minor, no matter how old you get. You always need a guardian watching over you. Even if you need surgery, a man has to give you permission. I also know a lot of people who want to travel outside of the country, but they can’t because their guardian won’t give them permission.

Do you think your photographs will help to change things at all?
The change is very slow and there are a lot of obstacles standing in its way. Young, educated women are trying, but most people are too brainwashed to think for themselves. But I do think art is the most useful tool when it comes to promoting feminism in Saudi Arabia, because you can speak about so much and still be vague.

How did you get into photography?
I started doing photography when I was in middle school and my dad bought me a camera. In Saudi, you don’t really hear about photography that much. I used to look at pictures in magazines, but the people in the magazines we had didn’t look like the people around here.

What was different?
You wouldn’t see pictures of women in the abaya. Even in Arab magazines, the pictures you’d find were Westernised. So I started taking photos of things around me and tried to make them look like the stuff I saw in magazines.

And now you’re exhibiting in Venice?
Yeah, I’m doing Venice with an arts initiative called Edge of Arabia right now. I’d love to exhibit more abroad; it’s given me an insight into what Saudi culture is like to other people. I think it’s interesting as a cultural experience.

Thanks, Nouf. 

Follow Tabatha on Twitter: @TabathaLeggett

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Saudi Arabia vs Israel: It's Cyber Warfare!

Greg Palast is a New York Times bestselling author and fearless investigative journalist whose reports appear on BBC Newsnight and in The Guardian. Palast eats the rich and spits them out. Catch his reports and films at www.GregPalast.com, where you can also securely send him your documents marked, "confidential".

It wasn't too difficult picking out the Fat Bastard in the crowd of Russian models, craven moochers and media mavens. Besides, Fat Bastard and I were both desperate for coffee and heading for the same empty urn.

(We’d both signed on for Kazakhstan’s annual Eurasia Media Forum, a kind of Burning Man festival for Eastern oilgarchs and their media camp followers.)

Now, it is my policy never to mention an interlocutor’s weight, nor question the legitimacy of their birth, given my own vulnerabilities. (A would-be groupie told me, "You could do a few sit-ups, you know." Yes, I know.)

But this particular Fat Bastard is asking for it. I had tried to put the belly of this beast out of my thoughts, but I still had a New York Times story folded in my pocket that begins:

ATHENS – As an elementary school principal, Leonidas Nikas is used to seeing children play, laugh and dream about the future. But recently he has seen something altogether different, something he thought was impossible in Greece: children picking through school trash cans for food; needy youngsters asking playmates for leftovers; and an 11-year-old boy, Pantelis Petrakis, bent over with hunger pains.

Fat Bastard – or Theodoros Pangalos, leader of the Panhellenic Socialist Party (PASOK), Greece's equivalent to Labour – thinks the little Greek kiddies should stop belly-aching. Pangalos, as you can see from the photo below, is not bent over with hunger pains. In fact, he looks more likely to be bent over with labour pains, but in truth he probably just can’t bend over at all.

Pangalos is best known for blaming the working people of Greece for the horror and the hunger among the ruins of what was once Greece’s economy. However, it is, of course, not his fault; until last year, and through the core of the crisis, he was just Greece’s Deputy Prime Minister – why should he be held accountable for anything?

Pangalos reclining.

Minister Pangalos is much loved by Europe’s banking chieftains, by vulture speculators and by Prussian President Angela Merkel because they’ve got themselves a gigantic Greek who will mouth their mantra: that his nation’s sudden collapse can be blamed squarely on olive-pit-spitting, lazy-ass Greeks who won’t work more than three hours a week, then retire while they’re still teenagers to swill state-subsidised ouzo.

Pangalos leads the Fifth Column of Greeks calling to accept Germany’s terms of economic surrender: austerity, meaning cuts in food allowances, in pensions, in jobs. As of this week, more than one in four Greeks (27 percent) are out of work.

While we hunted for caffeine, Fat Bastard told me that anyone who complains about the austerity diktat, “Is a fascist or a communist or a conspiracy theorist.” He didn’t tell me which of these three categories the 11-year-old kids complaining of hunger pains fell into.

Just for the record, Greeks who can get a job work 48 percent more hours a year than the average German (and way, way more than Britons or Americans).

But in the world according to Pangalos, Merkel and poobahs of the media, Greece went to hell in a handbag because the entire nation suddenly turned into work-shirking grifters. 

But there’s another explanation for wrack and ruin: Greece is a crime scene. And its working people are not the perpetrators of the crime, they are the victims – scammed, defrauded, their national industries looted and their treasury drained by financial flim-flam.

In 2001, Greece dropped the drachma for the euro. The drachma was good enough for Aristotle and very good for tourism, Greece’s main industry. But when sun-and-fun was re-priced in euros, tourists swam across the Adriatic for kofte meatballs priced in dirt-cheap Turkish lira. Pre-euro tourist visits to Greece outnumbered those to Turkey by millions; but by last year, it was the just the opposite, with two-thirds of tourists tanning in Turkey.

With its Treasury bleeding hard currency, the government of Minister Pangalos’s PASOK joined together with the opposition in a complex international currency kiting operation to conceal the losses from the public and, most importantly, from the European Central Bank.

German chancellor Angela Merkel with Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaris. (Image via)

Why the cover-up of the deficit? The answer is that the euro is more than a currency: it is a straitjacket, a set of constricting rules that, for example, prohibit any euro nation from running a deficit of more than 3 percent of GDP. 

That’s impossible in a recession – not to mention plain insane – as it requires cutting public spending when spending is needed most. The USA, China, Brazil, India – the nations that pulled the world from depression’s brink – all ran deficits way over the nutty 3 percent cap. I asked finance wiz Nomi Prins to calculate America’s debt-to-GDP ratio using euro rules, and she estimates that Obama’s deficits are now way down from recession’s peak – to 10.2 percent of GDP.

Greece, fearing expulsion from the euro loony bin, turned to Goldman Sachs. For a mere $400 million (£263 million) in fees, plus golden sacks of ill-gotten trading gain, the investment was willing to cook the nation’s books via a complex set of derivatives transactions. [For the particulars of the derivatives con, see "How Goldman Sacked Greece".]

Since the con was busted open in 2009, the Greek public has had to pay cheated bondholders a premium to insure against default of the nation’s debts. The credit default insurance costs an average of $14,000 (£9,218) per family per year. 

When I was a racketeering investigator working with the US Justice Department, in the days when we pretended America still had justice, we would have called the derivatives trick a “fraud on the market”. We’d handcuff the perpetrators, lock ’em up, or, at the least, make them cough up their purloined profits.

So, should Goldman pay up? Not according to Pangalos, because – in the worldview of our rulers – the victims of the scam are as guilty as the victimisers. Pangalos even put it into a famous (or infamous) motto: mazi-ta-fagame. That’s Greek for “We all ate it together” (a sample of which was used in a Plastic Flowers song). 

But the visible evidence suggests Pangalos, not Pantelis – the kid doubled over with stomach pain – ate all the pies.

The mass privatisation of public property at wiener schnitzel prices has German speculators dipping in their spoons as well, though the Federation of German industry is complaining about Greece’s own “princes” gobbling up the assets.

I was going to invite Minister Pangalos to lunch to test his theories, but he left in a pachydermic huff when I asked him about Geir Haarde. Haarde, the former Prime Minister of Iceland, was found guilty of criminally concealing his knowledge of the trickery used by Iceland’s banks before they melted that nation’s finances. 

I asked Fat Bastard, “Do you think you too should be in prison for” similar conduct in the Greek government? 

Maybe that’s why Minister Pangalos didn't want to go to lunch with me.

First two images courtesy of Anthony DiMieri/Palast Investigative Fund.

Greg Palast’s book Vultures’ Picnic, including chapters on Greece and Goldman, will be published in Greek in early autumn by Livani. Download the first chapter, Goldfinger, and videos at www.VulturesPicnic.org.

Follow Greg on Twitter: @Greg_Palast

Previously - A Novel Idea: Asking an Afghan About the Future of Afghanistan

Vitray's first memories are of the tent cities in Thailand where Cambodian refugees found safety during the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge regime. Vitray was one of the lucky ones, as his family eventually managed to emigrate to America – to a Nashville ghetto plighted by bullets and crack cocaine. At 24, he travelled to Phnom Penh to get engaged. A handsome American citizen, he was quite a catch, so his father arranged for him to marry Dain, his pretty second cousin. They were happy for a while. And then the nightmares started.



Vitray was haunted with visions – bloodied bodies, tortured faces, flesh torn from bones. Night after night the horrors returned, until he was too terrified to lie down. Then Dain began to change; she suddenly seemed ugly and her serene expression began to look stupid and infuriate Vitray. He began to hate her and the way she affected an American accent and laughed in a high-pitched shatter of tinnitus-inducing screeches.



Vitray was originally betrothed to another Cambodian girl before Dain – a girl who, according to Vitray's family, was pretty angry that she'd been snubbed of the opportunity to marry an American citizen. Vitray’s sister Molika told me the rest of the story: “I never believed in curses until I saw what happened to my brother – he was in love with Dain and then he suddenly hated her,” she told me. “Then he got sick with Bell's Palsy. To this day, the doctors don’t know the cause, but people told me that the family of the girl he was originally betrothed to put a curse on him.”

But c
an curses really result in mental and physical reactions? Author and druid Emma-Restall Orr thinks so, which isn't all that surprising considering she's a druid. “Whether we call it magic, cursing and sorcery, or we call it gossip and vindictive behaviour, the effect can be the same," she told me. "People can be profoundly psychologically affected and the ramifications can be extreme – sickness, accidents and spiralling down." While that explanation might not exactly be palatable to the Western mind, magic is very real in Cambodia.  



In the village where I live and work for a small NGO, folk religion is woven into the way locals experience daily life. People swap tips about the best local fortune tellers and healers. They chalk skulls and crosses on their door frames to protect their homes from malevolent ghosts, and leave fruit and incense out for the good ones. Western medicine is available in the town, but it's dispensed by poorly-trained pharmacists and doctors at a price beyond the income of most villagers. Here, the vicissitudes and uncertainties of life are taken to the local fortune tellers, healers and sorcerers rather than doctors and psychologists.

The fortune teller.

The village fortune teller is a middle-aged woman with two gold teeth and a diamond ring – status symbols earned by her supernatural perceptions. She was born with no lower legs, and when I met her the lower half of her pyjama trousers were folded underneath her thighs, so – if you didn’t know – you'd assume she was just kneeling. Grabbing a deck of playing cards, she arranged them on a thin blanket in front of her. I immediately drew an ace of spades. She screwed up her face and made a noise like she'd just seen a horse kick a man in the groin. Apparently my pick meant that I wouldn't find my lost camera, which was kind of a relief after the teller's ominous groan. 



A different arrangement of cards for a different question, and it seemed two girls were in love with me. The fortune teller grinned, her gold teeth snatching the afternoon sun. I asked her how she got her powers; “I was very sick when I was 18,” she told me through a translator, “then three spirits took pity on me and cured me of the disease. They have stayed with me ever since and help me tell fortunes.”

The spirits came from Phnom Kulen, Cambodia’s holy mountain and birthplace of the Angkorian king, Jayavarman II. She uses the cards in the same way as Western tarot readers: “The ghosts taught me how to arrange the cards so I can see the future of any person,” she explained. My Western agnostic mind balked at the story, but she did end up being correct about my camera – it’s still lost. So I guess I'll give her that.



The author after being coined.

While the fortune teller relied on the supernatural for her powers, Sarong – the healer – learned her skills from her mother. I went to see if she could cure my cold. After the initial bows and salutations, she told me in English to remove my shirt and lie down on a wooden platform that Cambodians traditionally use as a sofa and eating area. She smeared eucalyptus oil on my back, took a coin and began to scratch from my spine outwards. She scratched the same patch of skin over and over again. Then she scratched harder. I tensed up. It was far more painful than getting a tattoo – quite something bearing in mind that tattoos involve having needles slowly scraped through your skin.

The practice, known as “coining”, creates marks on the body similar to love bites – incredibly sore, painful love bites – and the hue of the bruise denotes the illness you're suffering from. Sarong made a clucking sound. “Your back is very red, you must be ill with a fever,” she said. Forty minutes later and I felt like I'd been through ten rounds with Charles Bronson. The healer wrapped me in a thin blanket and put me in a hammock to recover. “There is bad wind in your blood,” explained Sarong. “Now it is escaping through the scratches. We put this blanket on you so the wind will not infect our family." While I can't say the treatment worked for me, I have seen sick Cambodians come up smiling after a coining session.

After my experience with the healer, I wondered how much worse the Apb Thmob (sorcerer) could be. Trying to locate a sorcerer in a Cambodian village was like trying to score drugs at a music festival: embarrassing and largely met with cagey, suspicious responses. “Why do you want to see this person?” asked my friend, Raksme. “They don’t want people to know their history. It's dangerous; I can't help you.” Sambo, the energetic village teacher, looked uncomfortable when I asked him the same question. “This is bad luck for you,” he warned. I pointed to the small cross I have tattooed on my wrist. “This will protect me,” I pushed. Sambo looked skeptical. “Yes, sometimes holy tattoos help protect us, but not always. And anyway, Cambodian ghosts don’t believe in Jesus.”

It was Pring, a handsome 20-year-old from a nearby village, who agreed to help me. “So he can curse people?” I asked on the phone. "Oh yeah, sure,” said Pring. I considered how I could have black magic used within the boundaries of journalistic ethics. In the end, I plumped for casting a love spell on a friend who had given her full consent.

The Apb Thmob.

The sorcerer lived on a jungle road in a wooden house with a palm-leaf roof. He was 40-ish, wore a collarless white shirt and white trousers. He sat cross-legged on a thin cushion. On the wall behind him were pictures of blue Hindu deities. To the side was a statue of Buddha, curtained with thin gold lace and surrounded by mounds of melted candle wax. Around him were offerings left by clients: lotus flowers, incense and packets of cigarettes and herbs. His eyes opened, focused on me for a second and then closed in an expression of benign concentration.



Like the fortune teller, the Apb Thmob obtained his powers during a period of sickness. “I was very ill three years ago. I lost weight and I thought I was going to die, then ghosts came into my head,” he told me through Pring's translations. “They cured me and have stayed with me ever since, and now they'll do what I command.” As if to prove his point, he handed me a hardback bearing a picture of Buddha. Inside, the pages were covered in a strange script. “The ghosts tell me what to write,” he explained. Pring, who knows Sanskrit and Pali – the religious languages of Cambodia – took a look at the book and told me he didn't recognise any of the symbols.



I brandished my Blackberry with a picture of the girl I wanted to cast the love spell on. The atmosphere became suddenly changed. The Apb Thmob’s family members, who had gathered around to see what this white man wanted, tensed up. “It is not good for you to do this,” he said. “Even if I did cast the spell, it will not last. One day she will stop loving you.” In my village, people love gossiping, and I didn't want to earn the reputation of someone who uses black magic, so I acquiesced and asked him instead to heal my cold. He began to chant and flicked holy water on my forehead. I felt silly and thought about the mental eons that separated my worldview from that of the Cambodians who were watching the Apb Thmob in awestruck silence. “You will be cured in three days,” he said.



I was better three days later, but then I had also been taking antibiotics and colds don't usually stick around for much longer than a few days. Molika, the Cambodian-American sister of Vitray, remains convinced of the powers of the Apb Thmob. “I’m 85 percent sure that it was an Apb Thmob who was responsible for sabotaging my brother’s wedding and ruining his health,” she asserts.

Most Cambodians, whether raised in America or at home, don’t believe in the existence of ghosts and magic – they know. It’s woven into their worldview. However, when I met the fortune teller, the healer and the sorcerer, I didn’t find magic, I just found the edge of my Western agnostic mind and the distance that separates my world and theirs. 

More from Cambodia:

Evil People Are Exploiting Cambodia's Orphans

Our Absinthe Orgy on a Cambodian Island Made the Spirits Mad

Is Kok An Trying to Become Cambodia's Next Dictator?

Watch - Cambodia Fashion Week

In his increasingly valuable spare time, he makes bootleg covers of 80s new-wave songs and sneaks acrostics and anagrams into his very funny Twitter feed, @thaRealEdPark. (A recent tweet: “I need there to be a store called FOREVER 41.”) Somehow he still manages to knock out essays that examine continuums you didn’t even realise exist, like the connection between the magical logic of children’s books and Borges, plus write great short stories like the one below. 

In “Thought and Memory,” the author of a mystery novel sets out on a book tour, and from there, things don’t exactly go as planned. The narrator encounters two talking crows, named for Odin’s information-gathering ravens in Norse mythology, who belong to a mysterious woman with a glass eye and an oddly chosen tattoo, before discovering the bizarre, time-bending novels of a science fiction writer, whose works we hope will get call numbers at the Invisible Library. 

We paired Ed’s story with illustrations by San Francisco-based artist Yina Kim. We thought her work evoked the same sense of spectral absurdity, softened by an eerie and familiar pathos.

Illustrations by Yina Kim

1.

Back in 2008, when my first novel, A Tree Grows in Baghdad, came out, my publisher sent me on a West Coast tour. Sometimes folks came out in droves, sometimes they didn’t. It was great to see my public, regardless. The public, I suppose I should say. Most hadn’t read the book. And even though it was fiction, based more on stuff I’d heard about rather than experienced, I might as well have told all present that I’d written a memoir, and that in the pages open before me, every vegetarian pita eaten, and every thought thought, was true. No one cared about the book, really, only about what I’d been through in Iraq, and what my current position on the war was and whether I wanted to go back. 

The audience tended to be older. The men were what you’d call barrel chested. The women, too.

I found I liked signing books. I mean, the actual pen-meeting-paper part. I started appending a peace sign to my name. I must have shaken a thousand hands. 

2.

By the end of the week, I was going a little crazy. In Seattle, I woke up at 6 AM to do a live interview with a radio station in LA. But why six? The cities were in the same time zone. It must be for a station no one listens to, I thought, and after I hung up the phone, I wasn’t convinced that an interview had in fact taken place. Had she really asked me about my health, my diet, my bad back? Had I perhaps called my mother, out of instinct, or simply dreamt it all? I’ve had dreams like that, where I think I wake up, but I’m still asleep. I’ve had dreams in which I slap the alarm clock, over and over again, until I’m finally sprung from the clutches of sleep, grateful and gasping for air.

3.

In Portland, my handler, Jonas, took me to lunch at a locovore haunt that featured seafood haggis and artisanal fortune cookies. He looked vaguely like me, the same eyebrows and ears, which I found both troubling and comforting. Over lunch he told me how Oregon was originally established as a whites-only state.

“O Negro,” I blurted.

“What?”

“It’s an anagram for Oregon.”

“That’s wild, man. I’ve lived here 13 years, and I never thought of that one. Guess that’s why you’re the writer.”

We got in the car. Jonas regaled me with tales of other authors he’d escorted around town, dished about which ones were cool, which ones stuck up, which ones smelled. Then he asked if I wanted to play ultimate frisbee in some park with his friends. I was exhausted, paranoid that this was some kind of test. If I said no, he’d tell the next novelist who passed through town what a conceited, smelly douchebag I was. 

I pretended I hadn’t heard him. On the radio, they said that a science-fiction author named Vernon Bodily had died. He had written more than a hundred novels.

“Well?” Jonas asked. “What do you say to some ultimate?”

I mentioned my bad back, citing the questionable Los Angeles radio interview as evidence. 

Jonas dropped me off at my hotel, where I tried to write a letter to a woman named Mercy Pang on the embossed stationery. The paper was so nice I got writer’s block and took a three-hour nap. When I woke up I stared at the ceiling, wondering where I was. On the ceiling was a bright patch of overlapping circles, the reflection of water somewhere outside. I didn’t recognise the enormous armchair across from me, nor the ice bucket, the carpet, the drapes. There was no noise. It occurred to me that maybe it was 1979 and I was in the house where I grew up, lying on the sofa, imagining where I’d be in ten, then 20, then 30 years. It was a game I used to play. Sometimes I’d think of a word or image and use my brainwaves to send it to my future self. So was this me, sending a message back in time to the boy I used to be? I wasn’t even sure he was there anymore.

4.

In Berkeley, I read at a transgender open-mic night at a bookstore that isn’t one of those legendary Berkeley bookstores. It looked more like a police station with a few shelves on the walls. I wasn’t transgender, sadly, but it was all my publicist could line up. When I walked in I thought maybe everyone in attendance was transgender, or at least that the other readers probably were. I figured all the guys to be girls, the girls guys.

Mimi, the organiser, took the stage and introduced me. My name isn’t hard to pronounce, but she mispronounced it. I instantly thought: Canadian. She looked like the kind of person who speaks English but whose every third thought is French. 

I greeted my public in an unnaturally low voice that I thought might make me sound transgendered. It hardly mattered, since the passage I’d selected couldn’t have been less appropriate. It was about a team of art forgers who infiltrate the basement of the Baghdad Museum, intending to surreptitiously replace ancient Mesopotamian artifacts with cunning copies. They have come at a bad time. Fighting breaks out in the streets. Shells rock the building, and by the end, they don’t know which icons and ewers date from two millennia ago and which were browned in a kiln the week before. They wind up leaving everything behind, the real and the false.

5.

Afterward, Mimi bought me a microbrew with runes on the label. 

“Are you Canadian?” I asked.

“A lot of people think so,” she said. “I guess it’s because of the tattoo.”

“What tattoo?”

She turned around and lifted her shirt. At first I thought it was a port-wine stain, but then it resolved into a maple leaf. 

“I just like maple leaves,” she said.

“Are you transgender?” I asked.

“Would you like me to be?”

I shrugged.

“I do have a glass eye,” she said. “I don’t know you well enough, and my hands are dirty. Otherwise I’d take it out.”

“Which one is glass?” We were staring at each other. 

“Guess,” she said.

“The left one.”

“My left or your left.”

“Yours.”

“Right.”

“Right as in right or right as in correct?”

“Right as in right.”

“Wait. So.”

“Right.”

“What?”

“Come here,” she said.

6.

That night Mimi drove me to Los Angeles. She had to go anyway, she said. At a rest stop she took out her glass eye and put on a pirate patch. I should have offered to take the wheel, but I’ve never learned stick. In the backseat was a huge birdcage in which her two pet crows, Thought and Memory, kept saying hello to each other. I don’t mean hello in crow-speak chirps and clucks, but hello in English. They said it over and over, “Hello, hello.” They sounded like confused old men, happy to see each other again, even though they had just seen each other a few seconds ago. The idea was that Mimi would drop the birds off with her brother. They’d been his to begin with.

“What does your brother do?” I asked.

“He’s a science-fiction writer,” she said. 

“Have I heard of him?”

“Probably not. He’s never published anything. Just some online fan fic.”

“Did you hear that Vernon Bodily died?” I asked. “He wrote more than a hundred books.”

“There are about five that are any good,” she said, but she couldn’t remember which ones. I watched the headlights carve the road out of the night. The radio was off, and in the backseat you could hear Thought and Memory sigh in their sleep, dreaming their way through a backlog of crow frustrations.

7.

My big LA reading got cancelled. I arrived at the store, a place called Book Ark, a half hour early and they told me there’d been heavy water damage to the room, and that in any case, the shipment of my books had yet to arrive. One excuse, and I would have believed him; two made it sound like a cover-up. The manager felt bad about the whole thing and said that I could take any book I wanted, as long as it wasn’t an art book. 

“No worries,” I said. “I don’t like art.” I’m always saying things I don’t mean, just to fill up the silence. Later I’ll think that maybe I do mean them. 

I went straight to science fiction and found the Bs. There was a single thin Vernon Bodily title, with gaps on either side suggesting that his death had driven sales. It was called Handle with Care. 

I got a muffin from Book Ark’s café and then walked down to a record store but didn’t buy anything. I called Mimi but she wasn’t picking up. Her outgoing message was Thought and Memory saying “Hello.” 

“Hello,” I said, talking to the crows more than to Mimi. “Goodbye.”

8.

The next morning I took some stationery to the hotel pool. For the whole tour I’d been trying to write one lousy letter to Mercy Pang. I had four pages of false starts. She was in the middle of a six-week writers’ retreat in North Dakota. There was no phone service, no internet. The only way to be in touch was by letter, and since I was travelling so much, it was my duty to keep her apprised of my movements. But I couldn’t think of much to say. We’d left things too ambiguous back east. There were no histrionics, just an email from her saying, “I think I like men.”

The sun came out and I could see the wobbly net it made at the bottom of the pool, the light working through the water. I put that in the letter then drew a big x across the paper. My false starts looked like they’d been written by someone else. I thought about just sending these to her, my abandoned epistles. Mercy knew all about giving up, and she was a certified expert in not even starting. She was the smartest person I knew, but she could never get anything done. She always claimed to be tired yet had trouble going to bed. Even sleep was a failure. At night she’d slip on the eye mask, plug her ears with foam bullets, and flip the white-noise machine to the highest setting. Still she’d toss and fidget. 

In the pool someone was doing a splashless butterfly, lap after lap, so smoothly she, or possibly he, didn’t seem human, more like part of some giant living clock. I took out a fresh piece of paper and wrote, “Dear Mercy,” and left it at that. 

9.

I was booked for a noon lunch interview with a reporter from the LA Times. We were supposed to meet at a noshery called Barney Greengrass, an outpost of the famous Barney Greengrass in New York, which was on the top floor of Barneys, an outpost of the famous Barneys department store in New York. I waited for the reporter to show up. His or her name was Lane. Googling only turned up images of people Lane had profiled. 

I sat down, alone at last with my Vernon Bodily book, a trio of novellas. In the first one, a brave space explorer from the Terraplex, a gigantic floating city the size of a planet, is approaching the edge of the known universe. He has been on his journey for 10,000 years but has been frozen for most of it. Everyone he has ever loved has been dead for centuries. Soon he will be crossing into an area completely beyond human and, for that matter, alien comprehension. He braces himself, closes his eyes. There’s a sound, like the bursting of a membrane. Then he looks at his scan-screen. His pyramid-shaped ship floats in brightness. Behind him on the screen is what appears to be a huge, beige package, a parcel of immense dimensions. He can see the star-shaped hole through which his spacecraft has exited. Below it, in letters of the Common Tongue somehow printed a mile high, are the words handle with care.

10.

At three I got into a cab for LAX. My bags weighed a ton. Halfway to the airport, traffic came to a halt, as though a power blender had just been switched off, so I made another go at writing a letter to Mercy. I told her about Seattle and Portland and Berkeley, about the transgender audience and the event organiser with the eye patch, the talking crows with the funny names. I told her about how hard it was not to lie during the Q&A, since everyone assumed I’d fought in Iraq, when actually I was an embedded reporter – not one of those grizzled journalists on a hard-hitting, truth-finding mission, but instead a freelancer for Cigar Aficionado, doing a think piece on the fate of the country’s humidors. I wrote to Mercy about O Negro and the butterfly artist in the pool. 

After signing my name, I drew a peace sign. It was my best one yet. I tilted my head back and looked out the window at the clouds. I had another moment when I thought back to being nine years old, sitting in my parents’ station wagon on the way to violin camp, wondering where life would take me. It had taken me here. I was the same person, a body moving through time. Till what point? High above me two birds soared through the air, and though I knew they weren’t Thought and Memory, I added a PS and put it in my letter that they were. 

Read more stories on VICE:

The Minor Outsider

Zanesville

Gaudifingers

Last week, Ryan Fogle packed his bags and set out for another night of spying in Moscow. That old conundrum: What do you take with you when you're trying to convince an enemy spook to rat out his own country? After a moment's umm-ing and ah-ing, Fogle shoved two blonde wigs into his holdall. Then three pairs of sunglasses – a real spy can never have too many pairs of sunglasses. Then a compass. A map of Moscow. A crappy old Nokia. A hundred thousand Euros. A note asking his quarry to defect in return for a million dollars a year. A pen-knife. And an RFID shield. Which apparently prevents your passport from being read by remote passport-reading machines. He hadn't taken his passport, though. In fact, it was almost as if Ryan Fogle haven't even packed the bag himself.

Like many Generation Y-ers working long nights to get a payday, Ryan was probably just hoping to do his spying, then go home and put his feet up with a brewski and the Mets game. No such luck. Turned out the Russian secret service were all over him. He apparently went to a park to meet a Russian agent he was supposed to be trying to turn. Instead, the FSB turned up with some guns, arrested him, then paraded him in front of the TV cameras alongside the contents of his magic bag. Whoops: diplomatic incident time.

“Dear Friend,” read the letter allegedly penned by Fogle. “We are ready to offer you $100,000 and discuss your experience, expertise and co-operation, and the payment may go much higher if you are ready to answer certain questions. For long-term co-operation we offer $1million per year.” (It then offers a few instructions on how to go to an internet cafe to create a Gmail account to stay in touch. Somehow, the dead-eyed corporatism of Hotmail/Outlook always seemed more CIA, but perhaps that's the point.) Fogle has since been returned to the US Embassy, declared persona non grata and has now left the country forever. The US Government will "neither confirm nor deny" the truth about what's gone on.

Officially, Fogle's job was as the "third secretary" of the US Embassy in Moscow. He is 26 years old. And as the TV cameras will attest, he looks terrible in a ratty, part-blonde wig. He looks like a cabaret Kurt Cobain in drag. He looks like a rent-boy trying to lure you down a Koh Phangan side-alley. Which is a pity, because without his wig he has that classic "anonymous handsome" vibe that makes him perfect as either a spy or a second-tier good guy in a TV movie. It seems like half the reason for his recruitment into the CIA was simply that he has a talent for forgettableness: a face like a low quality JPEG of a more memorable face. A face like a suburban hardware shop.

The world's media remain divided over what Fogle's real mistake was here. Was it: “Don't go out spying with a spy kit you got with a coupon from the back of Boy's Own”? Or was it: “Don't get set-up by the Russian government and then paraded before the world's media by Vlad's propaganda goons”? Most reactions, to be honest, have cleaved sharply along whether you're Russian or not.

Certainly, the idea of a man who had lived in Moscow for two years going to a well-known, easily-findable park armed with an A-Z and a compass is laugh-a-minute. And the notion of him going out on a high-risk job armed with three pairs of glasses and two crap wigs seems incredibly schoolboy. The amount is also fanciful. Even in international espionage, a million bucks still remains Ay-rab money. You'd want some nuke codes for that. Or at least the passwords to Putin's personal Pinterest account. Then there is the question of currency. The letter refers to a hundred thousand dollars. But he turned up with a hundred thousand Euros, which – at current exchange rates – equates to about £18,847.41 more. If Fogle was framed by the Russians, the continuity editor wants sacking.

To be fair to them, at this point Russia's props-masters are more used to working with zany slapstick than gritty realism. They got a bit carried-away by the big occasion. Over-embellished. In this case, it even seems likely that there was a real attempt to contact and turn an FSB agent, but it may not have been unfolding at that exact moment, and simply handcuffing an American diplomat strolling through a park doesn't make for good TV. So they had to kit him up with a burglar's mask, a hooped jersey and a big bag with "SWAG" written on the back of it. There are certainly enough signs to suggest that Fogle was a spy. He used to live in Virginia, close to the CIA's national headquarters. He was on the mailing list of StratFor, a newsletter for geopolitics insiders who deem themselves a cut above. And, well, look at him. He just seems like the sort of serially-unattached young testosterone-vessel who'd fancy himself wearing a cloak and drawing a dagger. (Or wearing a wig and carrying a pen-knife, as it turned out.)

As reality-adherence goes, the bar is pretty low in Putin's Russia right now. This is a nation who recently put a dead man on trial. By their own submersible standards, the Kremlin has achieved as much victory as it needed. It has put the wind up the State Department. It has reminded Russians that for all their high-quality branded footwear, Americans are slimy assholes who definitely shouldn't be allowed to adopt children. Russian authorities have broken with protocol to publicly name the Moscow CIA bureau chief: traditionally a big international relations taboo. Whether they're actually hopping mad or not, they're trying hard to act like it.

The irony of Fogle's case is that the agent he was targeting was the one responsible for the North Caucasus, the zone the Boston Bombers hailed from. In other words: it seems as though he was planning to harvest information that the FSB would've gladly given them anyway. After ten years of wiping the blood of Chechen separatists off of its subway walls, Russia is no great fan of radical Islam. Indeed, it was the Russian intelligence service who first suggested that America take a good hard look at the Tsarnaev brothers. They were genuinely trying to be helpful, but hadn't counted on the CIA's ongoing distrust of ex-Reds.

Just as ironically, it is a paranoia that has now been proved right as much as the Russian paranoia about Americans. In the same week that Britain's Litvinenko inquest descended into farce – as the coroner ruled that he would exclude all evidence that suggested the Kremlin had killed the polonium-allergic defector, on grounds of national security – here was yet another reminder that the world's intelligence services will keep up their exploding-pen ping-pong long past the point at which it offers any real benefits to their citizens. If you give people whacking great budgets and a sense that they are the nomenclature inside a secret war, a basic law of bureaucracy starts to come into effect – one that says that the quantity of mischief created will expand to fill the amount of money supplied.

Follow Gavin and Marta on Twitter: @hurtgavinhaynes / @MartaParszeniew

Illustration by Marta Parszeniew

Previously – The Weird World of Mail Online Commenters

WATCH THE HIGHLIGHTS FROM OUR 'BEHIND THE LENS' EVENT

Last month, we teamed up with TIFF to put on an event in Toronto called 'Discovery Sessions: Behind The Lens', where we invited four highly talented, critically acclaimed filmmakers to share their unique filmmaking stories. J Blakeson (The Disappearance of Alice Creed), Larysa Kondracki (The Whistleblower), Barry Jenkins (Medicine for Melancholy) and Rola Nashef (Detroit Unleaded) each spoke about their personal experiences of getting their debut films made – all of which premiered at TIFF.

READ FULL STORY

FASHION IN FILM: SWIMWEAR

The flaunting of swimwear can be an awkward moment in film – at once stylish or sexy, it also reveals the inherent voyeurism of the cinematic gaze. Just think of Roger Vadim’s camera hovering over his wife on the beach in And God Created Woman (1956) or Harmony Korine’s slow motion, high-def shots of almost naked revellers – and another lead (and wife) Rachel Korine, in Spring Breakers. Often these scenes can descend into blatant camp: see Borat’s mankini or Pamela Anderson’s slo-mo red swimming costume in American TV series Baywatch (1989-2001).

READ FULL STORY

AMELIE DIRECTOR JEAN-PIERRE JEUNET'S NEW FILM GETS TRAILER

Amélie director Jean-Pierre Jeunet is back with his first English-language film since 1997's Alien: Resurrection. It's called, strangely, The Young And Prodigious Spivet and it stars Helena Bonham-Carter, Callum Keith Rennie, Kathy Bates, Judy Davis, newcomer Kyle Catlett and Dominique Pinon.

READ FULL STORY

COMPETITION: WIN HAL HARTLEY'S GREATEST FILMS ON DVD

To celebrate the re-releases of American indie director Hal Hartley's early films (Simple Men, Amateur, The Unbelievable Truth) we have some shiny, new DVDs to give away, courtesy of Artificial Eye. To be in with a chance of winning one of the aforementioned films, all you have to do is enter our competition.

ENTER COMPETITION

Keep your peepers peeled for more Grolsch Film Works updates next week. Go to grolschfilmworks.com to see what’s happening right now.

(via)

After two days of bombings targeting Shia Muslims in Baghdad, multiple bombs exploded in Sunni areas, killing at least 76 people and sparking fears that the increasing sectarian bloodshed could be building up to a civil war in Iraq.

Nobody has yet claimed responsibility for the bombings, but the fact that they targeted mostly Sunni areas has raised suspicions that the bombs were set by Shia militants.

Tension between the two groups has been on the rise since Sunnis started protesting against what they claim is mistreatment at the hands of the Shia-led government. 

The Shia government approach in post-Saddam Iraq has been to try to rebuild the country, restraining their militias when Sunni extremist groups such as al-Qaida have targeted them with large-scale attacks. 

Jawad al-Hasnawi, a lawmaker close to the Shia government, said, "It is clear that terrorist groups such as al-Qaida and Baathists are trying hard to reignite the sectarian war in Iraq."
 

Radical Rallies
SUPPORTERS OF ISLAMIST GROUP ANSAR AL-SHARIA CLASHED WITH POLICE IN TUNISIA
The group openly supports al-Qaida and, weirdly, the government didn't want them shouting about that in public 

(via)

Supporters of the extremist Islamist group Ansar al-Sharia clashed with police in Tunisia after the government banned its annual rally, saying they caused a threat to society.

Ansar al-Sharia openly supports al-Qaida and is considered the most radical Islamist group to have emerged from Tunisia since the country's revolution in 2011, so it sounds like the government have a pretty valid point.

As is now generally the case in these kinds of ad-hoc clashes, protesters resorted to that tired cliche of throwing stones at the police, before the police retaliated with tear gas. 

Hardline Islamist groups in Tunisia are seeking to impose more religious guidelines on the country's citizens, which – rightly so, you'd imagine – has the secular elite worried that they're going to try to force their strict views on people and compromise individual freedom, women's rights and democracy.
   

Erroneous Espionage
RUSSIA DETAINED A US EMBASSY EMPLOYEE FOR TRYING TO "RECRUIT A SPY"
Ryan Fogle may well be the worst spy since Anna Chapman

(via)

In an incredibly embarrassing attempt at espionage, Russia has detained a US citizen accused of trying to recruit a Russian intelligence officer to work for the CIA. 

Ryan Fogle, a secretary at the US embassy in Moscow (Russia's Federal Security Service have also claimed he works for the CIA), was caught carrying "special technical equipment", a disguise (that surfer-bro blond wig he's wearing above), a large sum of money and instructions on how to recruit his target.

You'd have thought a general rule of the thumb in the spy game would be to just learn how to recruit people, rather than write it all down ready to be used as concrete evidence, but as the old adage goes: "Never assume anything about spies because sometimes they're idiots."

What with the whole Cold War thing – and the fact that relations between Russia and America have become frostier since former KGB spy Vladimir Putin returned to the presidency last year – Fogle's arrest presumably isn't going to do wonders for any kind of solidarity between the two countries. 

Both the US government and the American embassy in Moscow have so far declined to comment.
  

Fast Food Trafficking 
PEOPLE ARE SMUGGLING KFC CHICKEN FROM EGYPT TO GAZA
Hamas apparently aren't too happy about Western food being brought into the region 

(Image via)

(via)

Buckets of KFC chicken are being smuggled through underground tunnels from Egypt to any residents of Gaza willing to pay around £23 for a family meal of battered battery farm birds.  

Tight restrictions on Gazans entering Egypt and the fact that there aren't any international food chains in the blockaded area means that anyone desperate for the Colonel's chicken are turning to the Yamama delivery firm to get their fix.

Hamas is reportedly angry about the importation of food from the Western franchise. 

However, a Yamama worker told media that his company was doing the people a favour, claiming that some people who've never been abroad before have, "all their life heard of and seen adverts for KFC and want to taste it… now they can try it with us for a reasonable price".
  

Social Media Slip-Ups
AN AUSTRALIAN POLITICIAN LIKED A PHOTO OF A TEENAGER'S GENITALS ON FACEBOOK
He's since apologised for being duped by the "sneaky nuts" prank 

(Image via)

(via)

Peter Collier, the Western Australia Minister for Education, has made a public apology after Liking what he thought was an innocent photo of a 16-year-old boy on Facebook.

Unfortunately for Collier, the photo was not innocent – it was, in fact, an example of the "sneaky nuts" photo phenomenon that's apparently swept Australia and "caused a headache for educators" since it was popularised on the Chris Lilley show Angry Boys.

In case you haven't been able to work it out by the two words in its name, "Sneaky Nuts" is where you slyly display your testicles in a photograph – something senior politicians probably shouldn't be approving of on the internet, especially when carried out by a minor.

In a statement, Collier apologised and said that the incident "obviously highlights the pitfalls of social media". Which is weird, because it kind of doesn't at all. 

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 privatisation, 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 to 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 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 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?

On the 7th of February, 2013, there was a dispute inside Guantanamo Bay over prison guards searching Qur'ans. For the following two days, inmates ate the remainder of the food they had – including stuff that was reportedly two years out of date – and, once finished with all of their decomposing rations, embarked on a hunger strike. Yesterday was the 100th day of the inmates' protest against their treatment and, out of the 166 still being held at Guantanmo, 102 are on hunger strike, with 30 being force fed.  

Authorities at the prison camp have revised their guidelines to allow them to shackle hunger-strikers to a chair, before fitting them with masks and inserting tubes through their noses and into their stomachs to force feed them for up to two hours at a time. Despite these efforts, some prisoners claim to weigh as little as 85lbs.

Several attempts have been made to punish or dissuade inmates against their starvation efforts. According to Shaker Aamer (the last British resident being held in Guantanamo) prison wardens have begun inflicting sleep deprivation on inmates, as well as adopting a new practise where, instead of shackling their hands and legs and pushing them along from behind, they're now clipping cloth dog leads to inmates' waists and dragging them around like animals.      

Aamer is one of 86 inmates who have been cleared for release but are still being held inside the facility. Something that, according to Clive Stafford Smith – a lawyer representing inmates at the prison – is completely irrational. “Any prison, even in the most despotic dictatorship, should not have 86 of 166 [52 percent] prisoners cleared for release,” he told me, before adding, “Obama hasn't shown the political will to do the right thing.”

Stafford Smith provided me with testimonies from three Guantanamo hunger-strikers in order to gain a little more insight into the Cuban detention camp that President Obama promised to close within a year back in 2009.

SHAKER AAMER

Shaker Aamer is a legal permanent resident of the UK. Aamer was volunteering with an Islamic charity in Kabul in 2001 when he was wrongly arrested, tortured and eventually deported to Guantanamo Bay. He was cleared five years ago, but remains imprisoned today. At the time of speaking to Aamer, he had lost 32lb.

Aamer speaks about “forcible cell extractions” (FCEs), a euphemism for sending in the Emergency Reaction Force to extract prisoners from their cells. These "procedures" are apparently almost always carried out during prayer time, which seems a little insensitive. Then again, this is Guantanamo, where guards seem to stem more from the school of brutality than sensitivity. In one instance, the force exerted on one of Aamer’s fellow inmates was enough to leave him hospitalised, unconscious for four days.

Despite full knowledge that the prisoners are starving themselves, officers carry out FCEs in order to deliver food. “They FCE’d me at 2PM to bring lunch,” Aamer explains. “They wouldn't take the lunch away. They left it until dinner.” He has also been FCE’d for water. “For three days now, if I say I want more water, they FCE me just to give me water.” Aamer has also been denied various items that were ordered for medical reasons and went ten days without being allowed a toothbrush. Which seems kind of a pointless thing thing to deny someone who's not eating any food.

Describing his experience of force-feeding, Aamer continually refers to "The Board" – something Stafford Smith describes as “a kind of hard stretcher that officers use to transfer prisoners involuntarily from their cells to the force feeding, or other things”. He goes on to add, “It's better to use the board than what they're doing now, which is to grab inmates by the arms and legs and to drag them.”

Aamer goes some way to explaining the psychological toll he suffers while starving himself and remaining in prison for a crime he's been cleared of: “I try to go to sleep early in the night. Then I feel as if I've just died.”

NABIL HADJARAB

Nabil Nadjarab is Algerian but spent most of his pre-Guantanamo life in France. He moved to London briefly, but found the cost of living hard and quickly moved to Afghanistan where he had heard it would be possible to live "without papers". Following 9/11, he – like Aamer – believed that, as a foreign Arab living in the country, he would be rounded up and killed by the Northern Alliance, an anti-Taliban military front.

Nadjarab escaped to the mountains, but was eventually discovered and captured. In 2007, six years later (SIX years later), the Administrative Review Board found that Nabil was not an "enemy combatant" and US interrogators have apparently even told him that his was a case of mistaken identity.

By the end of March, Nadjarab had lost 44lbs after being on hunger strike for ten weeks. He explains, “On March the 22nd, I was force fed for the first time. Since then, I've been force fed two times a day, every day. To be force fed is unnatural and it feels like my body is not real. They put you on a chair – it reminds me of an execution chair. Your legs, arms and shoulders are tied with belts. If you refuse to let them put the tube in, they force your head back… [it is very risky] because if the tube goes in the wrong way, the liquid might get into your lungs. I know some who have developed infections in the nose. They now have to keep tubes in their noses permanently.”

“The real issue here,” Stafford Smith explains, “is that the US is force feeding people in a gratuitously painful way to try to force them off their peaceful protest. So the US intentionally changed various procedures to make it less 'convenient' to be on strike. One change was to use only larger tubes. The second was to put the tubes in and take them back out after each feeding, rather than leaving the tubes in place. This adds immensely to the pain. Then they use the force feeding restraint chair and leave the prisoners in there for hours at a time. All of this takes a medical procedure that is, according to the World Medical Association, already unethical, and transforms it into something that is just torture.”

For Nadjarab, hunger striking is not just an act of protest, but the only solution to an insufferable situation. “I cannot stand being in here any further,” he says. “I am done. So I am sacrificing myself.”

YOUNUS CHEKKOURI

According to reports, Moroccan national Younus Chekkouri is one of the most compliant prisoners being held at Guantanamo. After leaving his home country for Pakistan in the 90s, he moved several times due to financial reasons and eventually settled in Kabul to begin working for a Moroccan charity. After 9/11, Chekkouri fled via Jalalabad and was met at the Pakistani border by officers rounding up people of Arabic descent en masse. After being apprehended, he was sent to a Pakistani prison, then on to Guantanamo.

Over the past decade, Chekkouri has been issued only one disciplinary. He began his hunger strike after officials raided his room, stripping him of "comfort items" that had previously been cleared by authorities. He reports that a close friend of his dropped to 120lb, his face turning from red to blue before he almost died.

Chekkouri is currently being fed Metamucil, a bulk-producing fibre supplement. “When I eat it,” he says, “it feels like the best food in the entire world. I am addicted to the small pieces of Metamucil.” But Chekkouri's forced diet concerns health experts, who believe the high-fibre supplement can prevent the body from absorbing key minerals. Chekkouri says that he wakes up from dreams in which he imagines “he is faced with large piles of food”.

Last month he wrote a sign on the window of his block: “Dial 911 – I’m starving.” And another that simply read, “SOS”.

-

That so many people are starving inside the facility seems to still have no impact on the political decisions surrounding its closure. “The hunger strike has already got Obama's attention,” Stafford Smith explains. “It is our job to make sure the world doesn't forget these men, who are simply making a claim for basic human rights. It is notable, and hypocritical, that the US has often praised people in Iran or Burma for going on hunger strike to courageously demand their rights.

“The world is forgetting 800 or a thousand years of experience. This is all down to the politics of fear and vilification that the US has currently turned on Muslims, and is sadly something that is being emulated around the world. I just hope that we can all work to ensure that it is a brief passing phase on the march towards human rights, rather than something permanent.” 

Follow Nathalie on Twitter: @NROlah

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Surrounded by howling kids and animals, I made my way across the show floor and discovered the Royal Canin Championship & Household Cat Show nestled towards the back of the room. 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 called out pet names while nervous pet owners prepared their felines for a few moments on the podium. On planet canine, swarms of spectators who were anxious for animal affection hung around with breeders, who discussed the peculiar particulars of their profession. It was weird, and I loved it.

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

My favourite four things in this world are 1) bargains, 2) rich people's houses, 3) celebrities who have been famous for so long they're losing their grip on reality and 4) snooping through other people's shit.

So I was overjoyed when I found out there was going to be an estate sale featuring the entire contents of one of the houses Nicolas Cage lost because of his financial troubles. Can you imagine a better celebrity house to snoop through? His whole financial mess was caused by him blowing money on stuff like dinosaur skulls and albino king cobras.

So I headed down to take a look around. 

Prior to my arrival, I'd been picturing madness. Not, like, Hoarders level madness, but that kind of controlled, polished madness that the sort of person who buys dinosaur skulls surrounds themselves with. I was expecting like, secret corridors, a trapeze room and a desk that used to belong to the Unabomber or something.

But, disappointingly, every room of the house looked like this. 

A totally bland mix of Mediterranean and oriental stuff, like every other Beverly Hills Mansion decorated by an interior designer circa early-noughties (see also: The Osbournes house, The Bachelor house, all filming locations for reality TV shows between the years of 2000 and 2009).

Ditto all of his possessions. Just standard gaudy rich people stuff. Like the kinda stuff poor people have in their houses, but purchased in shops without price tags where they give you complimentary champagne. 

There were some personal items scattered around, though. Like a couple hundred copies of a comic book that Nic wrote with his son about a reincarnated union soldier working as a detective in post-Katrina New Orleans (or something) that I never knew existed. 

Then I got to the closet of the master bedroom. This is just the hallway of the closet BTW, it was made up of several rooms. Its total size was, depressingly, larger than my entire apartment. 

Which is where I found a pair of Nicolas Cage's old long johns. I grabbed them to give to someone as a novelty birthday gift. 

The closet was also where I found this. Not sure if you can make it out from the picture, but it's a fireman's helmet and two whips (like, the kind of whips old people buy after reading 50 Shades of Grey, not like the kind you use for horse riding or tomb raiding).

Which, on the one hand, is exactly what I wanted to see in Nicolas Cage's house. It's weird and funny and indicative of something you would totally expect him to be doing in his spare time. But it also made me feel gross and voyeuristic. I couldn't shake the feeling that I was looking at stuff that he wouldn't want me to be looking at. 

Like, this is WEIRD, right? That Nicolas Cage's ex-wife's underwear was all just laying out for people to rifle through and buy for a dollar?

Which was kind of how I felt for the rest of my visit. 

Like, when I went to look around the library and found this. Which, obviously, is hilarious. 

But then looked into the box next to it and saw this. A parenting book about dealing with "children who are out of control," which was on top of a bunch of other self-help books about stuff like learning to live with Tourette's, communicating better with loved ones and how to stop yourself from getting wrinkles.

Which was kind of a bummer. 

:(

Also, "God Wants You to be Rich"...

This was a house where Nic had gone through a divorce. Where he'd dealt with someone's mental illness. Where he'd worried about normal people stuff like wrinkles and money. And which was now being repossessed by the bank because he fucked up his finances. 

I felt like a parasite, hunting for hilarious things to buy from a ruined man's life while people sneaked peeks behind doors marked "do not enter" around me. 

This was the breaking point. One of those cushioned toilet seats that are, without question, the absolute grossest thing in the entire world. Why did a man like Nicolas Cage have this in his house? Why did he let it get all cracked and nasty? I felt like I was looking at a physical manifestation of his depression. 

The thought of Nicolas Cage sitting on this thing, with years of farts and pee seeping out into his thighs through the cracks while his marriage crumbled around him and his uncontrollable child succumbed to Tourette's and OCD was too much for me. I felt like the biggest bottom-feeding shitbag in the entire world, and had to bail. 

I guess what I'm trying to say is: If you're given the opportunity to take a glimpse into the private world of a walking joke, DON'T. It will ruin them for you. Nobody wants their LOLs to be humanised. I just tried watching the "NOT THE BEES!" clip, and I didn't even crack a smile. All I could think about was Nic's miserable old mansion full of failure. 

I didn't even feel comfortable buying his old thermal underwear as a hilarious present, and had to go put them back in the closet.

I did snag this extension cord, though. I needed a new one, and at $4 it would've been irresponsible not to. 

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.

@BrianJMoylan

I'm not sure if this story about Barack Obama is actually racist or just really disturbing, but we're going to run it through the This Week in Racism "Racism-o-Meter" anyway, and see what comes out. With the assistance of my friends at the @YesYoureRacist Twitter account, I’ll be ranking this and other news stories on a scale of 1 to RACIST, with “1” being the least racist and “racist” being the most racist.

According to testimony given during the prostitution trial of his three former aides, Italy's former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi was alleged to have dressed women up like Barack Obama and then had them perform stripteases. Now, I am not here to debate the erotic merits of President Obama, nor am I here to question the sexual preferences of Silvio Berlusconi. I am here to wonder if these women wore blackface. Also, what about those giant fucking ears he has? Fake mole? I think this is one of those "teachable moments" I've heard so much about lately. I'm giving this a 2, because I'm genuinely still totally fucking confused.

- Police in Agoura Hills, California, are looking for someone who spray-painted racist graffiti on the walls of the local high school. The message included the phrase “Ni**ers will die,” which school officials erased without telling students or parents. Two days later, students showed up to school to find a “hit list” of African American students painted on the bathroom wall. They're right though. Ni**ers will die. Unfortunately, so will everyone else one day. RACIST

- This is the logo for a food truck in Los Angeles. I don't know why this is in here other than it made me laugh. Also, I've often fantasised about slapping my own mother.

- In Great Britain, a newly elected councillor representing the UK Independence Party – which goes out of the way to say it’s “not racist” – found himself in hot water after sharing on Facebook a cartoon depicting Muslims being burned at the stake using copies of the Quran. "I don’t have a racist bone in my body,” said Eric Kitson of Stourport-on-Severn. “It's just a bit of bloody stupidity." Kitson added that he has “several Muslim friends”, which of course automatically disqualifies someone from being Islamophobic, as everyone knows. Also, I don't think bones can be racist. What would a "racist bone" even look like? A bunch of swastikas on a femur? 8

- Last week we told you about Jason Richwine, the Heritage Foundation analyst who once wrote that Hispanics are genetically predisposed to have lower IQs than “native white Americans”. Ignoring the fact that there’s no such thing as a “native white American”, Richwine’s assertion that Hispanics are genetically inferior is pretty much a textbook example of racism. Even the Heritage Foundation agreed, firing Richwine soon after the writing was made public. But Richwine still doesn’t see how his assertion could be racist, telling the Washington Examiner’s Byron York, "The idea that I am some sort of foaming-at-the-mouth extremist never even crossed my mind." Probably not, but then again, I've heard Chris Brown thought he was just "explaining things" to Rihanna's face. Richwine added, "The accusation of racism is one of the worst things that anyone can call you in public life." I can think of a few things that are worse, such as being told your entire race is inferior... but what would Richwine know about that? RACIST

Jason Richwine's best friend, Ann Coulter, receives this week’s Ann Coulter Award for Excellence in Racism for this:

We've already established that Jason Richwine is a huge racist prick who has no sense of shame. The fact that Ann Coulter feels the intense need to paint a total asshole as a victim is one of those twisted pieces of logic that makes me want to curl up into a ball and die.

@YesYoureRacist’s 10 Most Racist Retweets of the Week [all grammar sic'd]:

10. @Jay_Flo6: “I'm not racist, but I couldn't date a white girl if she has messed with a black guy. #NoRacismIntended”

9. @Cal_E_Boi: “I'm not racist but as soon as I see a black man under the age of 25 driving a BMW I immediately shout drug dealer”

8. @RodeoPrincesss: “Im not racist but black people and white people just dont make cute couples.”

7. @bmill98: “Im not racist...but jews make themselves pretty easy to hate”

6. @2_jayyyz: “I'm no racist but I hate, hate, HATE, wet backs”

5. @SashaDaniels: “I'm not racist but im actually terrified of Jews”

4. @toriiiiz: “I'm not a racist but I f*cking hate middle eastern guys.”

3. @Mattt_Lee: “I'm not racist but that group of chinks can f*ck off. Twats.”

2. @graceegregory: “I'm not racist, but I understand where Hitler was coming from.”

1. @AlifNorazmii: “I'm not racist but ni**er really stink!!!”

Last Week in Racism:

Happy Confederate Memorial Day!

@dave_schilling

MAYBE THE BEST AIR MAX OF ALL TIME

I know having white trainers is stupid because you'll never wear them. Either it's raining and you're scared they'll get stained, or it's sunny and you're scared they'll get grass stains when you're frolicking. Or whatever, there are loads of reasons why buying beautiful pristine white trainers is a stupid idea, but why would you listen to any of those reasons when the trainers in question are as stupid-hot as these. As part of a collaboration with APC, Nike have designed four exclusive shoes including two pairs of Air Max, which, retailing at £120 each, have just rocketed to the top of my wish list.
 

YOUR HANDBAG IS DISGUSTING

Photo by Anna Curteis

No I don't mean it's ugly, although it probably is that as well. Actually I mean it's literally crawling with bacteria. Ew. Not so great for possibly every woman reading this, your hand bag is apparently dirtier than a toilet seat. Thinking about it, judging by the amount of last minute trips to a basement pub’s weirdly flooded toilets to brush up on your lippy, it makes quite a lot of sense. And also with the never clearing it out and finding receipts from “Abacus Bar” for £15 three weeks ago (?). The study carried out by Initial Washrooms Hygiene confirms that your bag, as well as a lot of things, like workplace countertops and draining boards, is very dirty. The researchers suggest women should wash their hands regularly and try to hang their bag up in bathrooms rather than sling them on the floor. Although personally, I wouldn’t bother, clean freaks are 100 percent annoying.

VERSACE VERSUS X JW ANDERSON

Image via Versace

Finally Donatella let the first collection of Versus designed by JW Anderson loose on the world, in a runway show in New York this week. The clothes, were both an homage to sexy slick Versace, and woven through with that unmistakable Britishness Anderson's clothes have always embodied. Boys in tiaras recalled a Meadham Kirchhoff-esque playfulness, while full on PVC skirt suits, and branded Versace stickers reminded everyone that glamour was still the by-word of the house. Gold safety pins holding the side slit of black mini skirt together, or the sleeves of a dress on, were such an obvious and totally stealable addition that you wonder whether Anderson is secretly hoping for a whole load of DIY versions to appear on the street. There's no better compliment for young designers at big fashion houses than having their ideas ripped off by the best dressed, least wealthy people on the street. At least, that's what I keep telling myself.

SELFRIDGES ANNOUNCE "DRIVE-THRU" LUXURY SHOPPING

Photo via

In a bid to enhance their already super-enhanced shopping experience, Selfridges are launching a new “drive-thru” concept in their store in January, where customers can select products online and then pick them up in a Burger King lobby-esque (well probably not quite) reception area. While high-end retailers like Net-a-Porter and Browns mastered the luxury shopping experience online yonks ago, Selfridges are still better known for their in store events and fancy shop windows. The decision to change up the experience is apparently in response to many large retailers such as Amazon and Wal-Mart creating “Locker” concepts where you can store and pick up the stuff you ordered online. As exciting as the thought of shiny glamorous people driving their white convertibles through Selfridges to pick up their advance order Prada is, it will probably end up being more like Argos.

Follow Bertie on Twitter: @bertiebrandes

Previously – This Week It's Fashionable to Be a Bad Bitch

Baz Luhrmann’s all-singing, all-prancing Gatsby has high-kicked its way into town this week, whipping up a storm of 20s retromania and “Top five speakeasy” lists. Jazz Age-themed guides abound: How to look like a celebrity flapper? Boom. Wearing shirts closed with a tie pin so you look like Leo-Gatsby? Old sport, for some businessmen the tie pin “never went away”. Dying alone in your deserted mansion? Replace “deserted mansion” with “small room in east London” and brother, you’ve got me down to a tee! Nah, I’m kidding, but with all this burlesque and cocktail talk flying about, Time Out must feel like pigs in shit right now.

What all this coverage seems to have ignored is that The Great Gatsby was not a piece of social history and we don’t read it today with a bewildered look of awe on our face, shaking our head as we marvel at “those funny folks from the 1920s and their strange, yet highly marketable ways”. We still respond to Gatsby because it’s a great novel and because it showed us a world that, in many ways, became ours. Our world is the new world Fitzgerald saw coming. It’s a world of cars and cities and broken dreams. We might not be huffing into our champagne flutes and the clarinet may no longer be at the forefront of popular music, but today Gatsby is all around us.

Gatsby’s story is a story of obsession. Like a group of young girls heading off to X Factor auditions or a bunch of lads at a pre-party, riling themselves up for the night ahead with Kanye videos on YouTube, Gatsby has spent much of his life aspiring to be a different, wealthier person. Like a lovelorn romantic scrolling through pictures of his ex on Facebook, Gatsby sits in his garden staring at the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. Sure, it’s weirder and more poetic than opening up that “Beach Holiday 2010” album, but the intention is the same. He’s obsessed with a lifestyle and he’s obsessed with a person. Neither makes him happy.

The internet actively encourages us to do 25-to-life in an emotional prison where the guards are ex-lovers and our rehabilitation arrives through a series of bitter realisations. Every conversation we ever have on our preferred IM platform (I’m all about the in-built chat function on chess.com, FYI) is stored for all time. “Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can!” Gatsby exclaims. And like Gatsby, we can constantly re-imagine the happiness we once felt, constantly castigate ourselves for thinking it would be a good idea to drop a winking emoji into every other sentence while imagining a future in which the past will be blissfully re-created. In the novel, Daisy is shown to be unworthy of Gatsby’s obsession, but of course the level of obsession that leads someone to spend every evening staring at a light for hours on end isn’t real. It isn’t real like a picture on a screen isn’t real.

This obsession and loneliness is at the heart of what still makes The Great Gatsby current. Like a Drake video, the party swirls around Gatsby but never really grabs him. He’s just so lonely and deep. Boredom, nihilism and pleasure are king. His parties still represent what so many people aspire to. His loneliness and obsession still represent what so many people feel, just without the questionable blanket of money. In a culture that is more and more about the individual, in which more and more songs are about snatched nights of hedonism amid bleak days of pain, Gatsby is a sort of patron saint.

(Image via)

The voyeurism that this life encourages – voyeurism that is played out every day in newspapers and across the internet – is embodied in Nick, the detached narrator, who stands aside, fascinated and appalled in equal measure. His detachment doesn’t save him from being poisoned by his world, though, or from loneliness. When he realises he’s 30, he reflects on the “portentous menacing road of a new decade” and the promise of this decade being one of “loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm…” Today’s cult of celebrity is foreshadowed in the cult of Gatsby. In one scene, a reporter comes to Gatsby’s house to ask him to give a statement about anything at all. The reporter has heard he’s famous and is scrabbling around for some titillation.

This culture of hedonism, of money and of success – no matter what the cost to morality or sanity – is what Fitzgerald was skewering when he skewered the American Dream. Today, the American Dream is still alive and well, but it has morphed into being the dream of much of the world. Fast cars, large houses, great shirts: these are the things we are still sold, these are things we are still told to want. John Steinbeck said that, "Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”

This is the driving force behind the insidious fiction of global capital – that we can all have Gatsby’s money without the associated pain and loneliness. Magazines that tell us how to look like Daisy or look like Gatsby are telling us how to look like we have money, telling us that you can trick people into thinking you’re the Lord of Long Island just by wearing a pink suit from Jigsaw. In reality, only Leo DC gets to do sexy yet manly shoots for Esquire and he already has a tonne of cash. Just as in the 1920s, class holds the majority back.

(Image via)

Fitzgerald showed the emptiness at the heart of the dream, showed us it was unreal even for those who “achieved” it. But rather than think about that, we think about how we can recreate the prohibition vibe of a speakeasy in a country in which, later tonight, numerous 14-year-olds will stride out of Costcutters somewhere with a bag of Tennent’s under their arms.

Finally, what we see in The Great Gatsby is another story about the loss of innocence, though Fitzgerald knows we never had any innocence in the first place. Jay Gatsby believes in the dream, believes in his obsession, although both the dream and the obsession are a lie. Gatsby, despite his criminal past and his money, is a truly innocent being. The truth is that, while we lost our innocence a long time ago – never even had it, really – we are in a perpetual state of mourning for it. In The Great Gatsby, Meyer Wolfshiem is the “man who fixed the 1919 World Series”, the man who shattered America’s innocence. Today, life – and sport – continues to throw up these moments. Just look at the shock surrounding Lance Armstrong.

Gatsby is innocent because he cares about the world, which is why he’s such an engaging and sympathetic character. It’s why we still care about him. However long ago our innocence was lost, we still like to imagine we can get it back one day, that maybe it’s not too late, that our Daisy will return to us or that our poverty will be relieved or that the corruption of the world will wash away, leaving us free to be borne not back into the past, but into a future of our own choosing.

Follow Oscar on Twitter: @oscarrickettnow

More film reviews:

Somebody Made an EDM Movie and It Looks Terrible 

James Franco Reviewed 'The Great Gatsby' for Us

Danny Dyer's New Movie Is So Bad They Won't Let Anyone See It

I Like the 'On the Road' Film and I Don't Care Who Knows It

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 organisation 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 monetising 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 realise 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 idolise*.

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. Here in Canada, we have much different standards for education, humour, 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 after all. Maybe King Robbie needs help*.

*Safe assumption.
 

Follow Patrick on Twitter: @patrickmcguire

Previously – Rob Ford Has a Terrible Photographer

I’m crossing London Bridge, looking at the Shard rising up in the skyline like the punchline to someone else's joke. Obviously, I realise that its spikiness is quite clear to anyone who has seen so much as a picture of it. Obviously, the whole point is the spike; the name means spike, it’s a 72-storey building shaped like a big slash of glass to stand out in a sea of square blocks. It’s the highest building in the European Union, the architect having been inspired by paintings of church spires and the masts of sailing ships. But there is something fantastically aggressive about that spike when it's all up in your sky.

And then when you walk right over to it, stand at the base, you twist your head back onto your sore neck to peer directly up at it, and it just narrows away into forever; the sightline making a pact with the infinite. Then it’s like the punchline to someone else's galaxy. It’s rude. You know, technically, that the vanishing point is the bit you can’t even see. But the more you look up, feeling dwarfed by the angry monologue of glass, the more you feel that the vanishing point is you.

At which point I had to stop having so many emotions about molten sand and go inside. There was a record label party happening at the very top of the monologue. A listening party so people could hear the Daft Punk album before it came out – but it’s a very shy record that doesn’t enjoy the attention, so I’ll try not to dwell on it. In fact, the album itself is a vanishing point, scarcely mentioned in the media in any form. The point is that there was a lot of arse-waggling and swankery to be done. There were free lychee cocktails and somebody actually spooning some caviar into my mouth. I don’t know if that equates to punk or daft or just having oral sex with a fish.

There were 360-degree views to be photographed and music journalists running round going, “It’s like the 1990s! When record labels used to fly you to Tokyo for a week to eat seared dolphin with a drummer who in fact lived on your street in Tufnell Park!” There was a man who turned to the man next to him and said, "I'm 25, I feel like I should be somebody?" There was a no smoking rule on the very top viewing platform as you were, in fact, still surrounded by glass, even though I was so confused by the fact you could see through the falls that I thought I was outdoors. So I’d just like to thank the security guard who didn’t actually have me ejected for lighting up inside the Shard.

There was Arthur Baker videoing hot blonde girls dancing to the music like sirens and another cameraman filming me and my friend Mark Moore dancing to the music like mums. I met Mark a hundred years ago when my friend Nadia and I were snotty little club kids who used to talk shit on Livejournal about the ageing relics we’d seen at Nag Nag Nag, and how people like Mark Moore – who was the man behind S-Express – and Boy George and some dude from Frankie Goes to Hollywood should all be at home having a lie-down and letting us lot get on with it. Mark got in touch to say they’d all sat round having a good laugh at my horrible writing. We’ve been friends ever since.

There was Jude Law at the bar at the top of the Shard, and a girl complaining to him that she couldn’t get served and could he get her order because, you know, he was Jude Law. And Jude saying he was quite sure they would all get served eventually, and then the vibes between them, like metal, and then a photographer coming and asking Jude for a picture, and Jude putting on his best photo face and then looking around him, perhaps for someone to put his arm around amicably, all shiny. Except the first person he found was still the girl waiting for a drink, so he didn’t bother.

And then there was the Giorgio Moroder song – okay I am going to have to talk about the music. Just this one. It builds, like a drug that you’ve taken and you know is coming but then you aren’t sure if you want it or not. Little flecks, electric sparks, coming off it as it builds. It’s too sure of itself, making you a little unsure of yourself. It sounds like something you wanted, and now it’s here you want it to stop, because it scares you. But you sought out this nightclub fear, and you know you did. It grows up around you, getting louder and bigger and enormous.

And then it’s the best thing in the world, amplified in a glass tower over the top of said world, where the speakers can’t even really handle the acoustics and the sound is actually a bit fuzzy, but never mind, you just want to bury yourself in them like that time you went to Fabric when you were nine months pregnant because the only thing you could find that was bigger than you was noise.

And just then, when you are lost in it, having become its vanishing point, it’s over, and now it's just a man playing the piano, which makes you feel a bit sad, and then just at that point a friend you’ve not seen for a while comes over and asks you how your daughter is, and then everything is a lot. And funny. It’s really funny. Here we all are, up a 72-storey glass tower, feeling all of our feelings at once. Memories randomly accessed or otherwise.

The next day Mark and I go househunting, because he wants to move. He’s been in his place a long time and is ready for a change. The estate agent wants to know what he does for a living. “He’s the king of acid house!” I say, helpfully, to a Foxtons man, bemused in his suit. Mark laughs and says he’s had The Sun on the phone that morning, asking him about the 25th anniversary of acid house and he’d had to remind them that they said it was the work of the devil back in the day. Scare stories about how it would take your children away to a terrible fate. The guy from The Sun laughed, too, apparently. Nothing lasts for ever. Even fear is a vanishing point. The only thing that stays the same is the sky, even when people try to jab their phallic towers of glass into it.

Follow Sophie on Twitter: @heawood

Previously – Three Things That Happened to Me This Week That Were More Punk Than the Punk Met Gala Ball

Okay, prepare yourself for some pretty dense internet jargon, all in the name of safety. Originally used as a from of online protest, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks – basically where you bombard a website with traffic until it has a meltdown – are becoming increasingly malicious as people realise they can use them to fuck with large companies who have websites, AKA every large company in the world. In 2012, DDoS attacks increased by a pretty ridiculous 200 percent, and 35 percent of businesses experienced some kind of disruptive DDoS attack.

For a powerful DDoS attack, hackers use botnets, which is essentially where you turn computers into an automated army that amplifies the traffic you're hurling at websites and works like this. If enough computers are used in an attack, you can end up doing some serious financial damage, like the time Anonymous left Paypal dealing with a hefty £3.5 million loss in a DDoS attack that paralysed the company's computer systems.

I was maybe a little over-worried about the future of internet terrorism, so I caught up with Dragon and PhäntömZ – two very experienced programmers who run a stresser/booter company called Agony – to find out a little more. In case you didn't know (which is incredibly likely), a "stresser/booter" is normally a software or service that allows the user to flood the network of their target. As in, the kind of thing you'd use to help you carry out a DDoS attack. 

Photo via

VICE: Hey guys. Talk to me about botnets.
PhäntömZ: We stay away from botnets at all costs. The same goes for shells and black hat hackers.

What's a black hat hacker?
Black hat hacking is an internet term for someone violating computer or internet security maliciously or for illegal personal gain, as opposed to "white hat", which is ethical hacking.

How can you hack ethically?
Oh, it's where a computer security expert who specialises in penetration testing will try to hack an organisation's information in order to ensure that it's safe.

Ah, OK. What do you think about people who DDoS maliciously for a personal or political agenda?
Dragon: I personally think that they're internet terrorists. The point of the internet was originally freedom of information, and most of the time that's not what people are using DDoS attacks for. Many of the attacks nowadays come from political parties or people trying to take out businesses.

What's your opinion on CISPA?
CISPA is just the government trying to spy on everyone, in my honest opinion. CISPA would waive every single privacy law ever enacted in the name of cyber security.

Would CISPA affect you?
Yes, CISPA would affect both of us. In fact, it would affect everyone. The issue is, when I want to do something anonymous online, I can't anymore – well, not without a tonne of work. After CISPA, if a state agency like the police says, "We want records on this person," everyone has to release them.

Could CISPA shut down your business?
If it grows into a more controlling bill, then it could have the potential to. I doubt it will, though.

Photo via

What do you think of Anonymous?
They’re just a bunch of kids – 99 percent of them are under 20.
PhäntömZ: They’re online terrorist groups. I've had a few of them try to recruit me, but I keep turning them away. The way those groups run is just helping the government have more reasons to put cyber laws into play.

Are DDoS attacks becoming a threat?
Dragon: DDoS attacks are becoming a real threat to some online businesses and individuals. Say you’re on a fun game online. A kid who doesn’t like you sees that you're having fun. With access to a booter, they can knock your entire house offline with the click of a button.

Have you been the victims of DDoS attacks?
We were hit by an attack for an entire week. I diagnosed it and managed to divert it and notified everyone I could to help get it discovered and healed.

What do you think of TOR and the Deepweb?
It's 99 percent bad; there's no purpose for it. It's expanded into a huge amount of illegal content that's mostly very disgusting and has no real purpose.

Don't you think it helps with internet privacy to some extent?
Privacy over the internet is overrated. Most of the time, if someone wants to find you or knows who you are, they can find out what you're doing. It’s like my friend used to say – "A lock is to keep honest people honest."

What do you know about the Reddit attack?
Reddit isn't that large of a website, so many different booter services could have been capable of an attack like that. Even our service, if tuned the correct way, could be capable of it.

Photo via

How does a DDoS attack work, exactly?
You either type a command into a server and it executes a program that attacks the target, or you use a GUI – otherwise known as a booter.

Do Stressing/DDoS companies work as a business?
They do, but they don't make much unless they have a large clientele, like us, or do illegal things. There are many services on hacking forums that offer to do that kind of thing for you, but most people would rather be able to do it themselves using a program or a website that sells subscriptions.

How would they go about doing that?
The only way someone would be able to make it themselves is if they had the appropriate programming knowledge and the server resources to create enough packets to stress whatever they were trying to stress.

Thanks.

Follow Will on Twitter: @Hypothesising

Read more about DDoS attacks and internet warfare:

The Shady Geeks Hiding in Bunkers Trying to Nuke the Internet

The Syrian Electronic Army are at Cyber War with Anonymous

Anonymous Calls Bullshit on the Future of Cyber Warfare

A couple of years ago, my friend moved out to Malaysia in search of a life where a winter wardrobe isn't a thing and you don't have to worry about stuff like moronic lad culture or seeing Lee Mack's face on television. What he found was a job as a bar manager in an establishment frequented by Malay punks covered in swastikas, wearing Combat 18 (a neo-Nazi terrorist organisation) T-shirts and harping on about "Malay power".  

Turns out they're a group of far-right nationalists who want to rid Malaysia of any non ethnic Malays and stop immigration into the country. Which, although pretty backwards and reductive, isn't all that surprising in the current world climate. What was surprising, and kind of confusing, is that they identify themselves as neo-Nazis, are fond of sieg-heiling and listen to Nazi bands like Skrewdriver and Angry Aryan, yet definitely aren't Aryan themselves. And adopting a worldview that specifically discriminates against your race seems a very odd thing to do.     

I was told that one of the most popular Malay power bands is an act named Boot Axe, so I got in touch with band member Mr Slay to find out why exactly a group of Malaysians are going through this bizarre, neo-Nazi identity crisis.  

VICE: Hi Slay. So what’s the deal with all this "Malay power" stuff then?
Slay: Malay power is important because we're concerned about keeping a pure Malay community all over the Malay Archipelago [the archipelago between Australia and Southeast Asia, believed by some to be the homeland of the Malay race]. I'm a second generation fighter for Malay power. The first generation, who founded the Malay power movement, have been less active recently. Malay power stems from a point in history – the 13th of May, 1969 – where the Chinese and Malay communities fought each other. However, the punk and skinhead Malay power movement started in Kuala Lumpur in the early 90s.   

As far as I understand it, the idea that there's a "Malay race" – which is supposedly indigenous to the Malay Archipelago – was proposed by German scientist Johann Blumenbach. There's a lot of contention over whether or not such a race actually exists. For a start, Blumenbach’s theory hinged around the idea that there were only five different races in the world, which is clearly pretty flawed. I take it racism features pretty heavily in your ideology?
We're extremists in regards to the Malay race, but that doesn’t mean that we're extreme racists. It’s not about racism; it’s all about being Malay.

Okay. How exactly is Nazism culturally relevant to Malaysians? Malaysia isn’t a country that most people would associate with Hitler and his Third Reich buddies.
Malaysia is home to people from China, India and foreign immigrants from Bangladesh, Africa, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Burma. The government can't control the entry of immigrants and we get so many of them. There are so many protests against the government about this issue, but they haven’t done anything tangible to improve the situation. Race has become a focus because of the inclusion of uncontrolled numbers of these people in our society.

How has immigration affected you? 
Malay people have been affected in socio-economic terms. Ethnic Malays also fall prey to criminals who come from abroad and sell drugs and commit murder, rape, robbery and so on. The lesson that we can learn from Nazism is that we can take extreme racist action if the position of the Malays is affected by these factors. We won't practice overt racism if the Malay race isn't compromised, but, if threatened, we will take action.

So you aren’t openly hostile to minorities at the moment?
We don’t like minorities in Malaysia if they can’t co-exist with the Malay race. If they are good, then we are good.

What about Jews? Most Nazis aren’t too fond of them.
All Malay power punk and skinhead bands are outright anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist. Study the origins of the descendants of the Malay people from thousands of years ago and you'll see that we're connected with the Jews. According to the Jewish scriptures, a "lost tribe" of children from Israel who are divinely guided – which means they must be Muslims – will kill the Jewish Zionists in Palestine. In the beginning, Zionists thought that Native Americans were the ancestors of the lost tribe. Then an American scientist and theologist called Professor Ralph Olsen concluded that the Malay in the Malay Peninsula are the descendents of the lost tribe. This hypothesis is a half-truth. The Malays are not one hundred percent descendents of the lost tribe, but Ralph Olsen’s theory about the adventures of a lost race is an interesting one.

This is all news to me. It sounds as if there's an Islamic ideology mixed in with Nazism here, which is a little confusing.
Malay power is connected to Islam. It doesn’t have links to any pro-Islamic movements, though.

So you’re a neo-Nazi movement with elements of Islam and some Jewish scripture thrown in for good measure? I’ve noticed that your band appears to be quite fond of the slogan "Blood and Honour", which is the name of a British neo-Nazi group. Were you influenced by neo-Nazis from over here?
We weren't directly influenced by British neo-Nazis because we realise that the extremists in the UK don't like Asian people. We just took the slogan "Blood and Honour" to demonstrate our identity.

Do you listen to British and American Nazi bands?
Yes, I listen to English Rose, Skrewdriver, Brutal Attack and Angry Aryan.

That’s quite a selection. Do you think Skrewdriver would be into Boot Axe?
No, I don’t think they would listen to our songs.

Do neo-Nazi groups exist in other Asian countries?
Yes, in Indonesia, Singapore and Japan. In Singapore, there's a Nazi black metal band called As Sahar.

Is every Malay neo-Nazi a punk? Or does Nazism extend beyond the punk and skinhead subculture?
No, all Malaysian neo-Nazis listen to punk and skinhead music.

You get anti-Nazi punks in quite a few countries – do they exist in Malaysia?
Yes, they do exist, but they dare not openly oppose us. They are afraid to speak out.

How are you regarded by the general public? Are they afraid of you as well?
Speaking honestly, maybe some people don't believe that the average, ethnic Malay citizens of Malaysia agree with us. However, we are not all that violent or extreme, as I have already told you.

How successful would you say your movement has been so far?
We make minorities afraid to commit crime in Malaysia. We always warn them not to cause trouble here. Violence isn't a solution for us because we begin with discretion, tolerance and politeness when talking to these immigrants. If they insist on continuing or if they are stubborn people, we will do what is necessary. We also do charity work for the community and for Palestine, Syria, Somalia and other countries that are at war. We've also tried to have discussions with the government about how to overcome the problem of having so many immigrants, but we were ignored. We're very different when compared to European and American neo-Nazis, who state openly that they want to eliminate races other than the white race. We start off with restraint and a zero tolerance stance, but we won't keep up this position if the Malays in Malaysia are threatened.

Okay. Finally, how do you square being a Nazi with not actually being white?
Most worldwide organisations say that Nazism is just for whites. And yes, we are not members of the blue-eyed, blond-haired Aryan race – our community is brown-skinned, brown-eyed and dark-haired. We've just adopted the spirit associated with Nazism as a symbol for the Malay race’s response if it's threatened by racial issues.

Thanks for answering my questions. It’s been enlightening.

All images courtesy of Slay.

More stuff about the far-right:

English Fascists Took Their First Beating of the Summer in Brighton This Weekend

The Boy Wonder of the British Far-Right Is Sad That Thatcher Died

I Dodged Bullets at a Polish Fascists' Riot Party