Employees of the Month

ALEJANDRO JODOROWSKY

Filmmaker, novelist, and psychomagic guru Alejandro Jodorowsky was conceived when his father, a Russian immigrant, beat and raped his mother for flirting with another man. This bred a mistrust of society in the young Alejandro, who dabbled in anarchism and miming before basically inventing the cinematic freak-out with films like El Topo, The Holy Mountain, and Santa Sangre. His autobiographical novel Where the Bird Sings Best hasn’t yet made its way to the States, an oversight that will be rectified next month by Restless Books. This excerpt for VICE is the first time any part of his epic family saga has appeared in English.

See EXCERPT FROM ‘WHERE THE BIRD SINGS BEST’

GRACE WYLER

Grace joined VICE as a staff writer earlier this year and has since been busy covering the Rainbow Gathering, New York City’s Phrosties phenomenon, disappearing Canadian aboriginal women, and happy-ending massage parlors. She used to write for Motherboard, our science and tech site, but couldn’t resist the allure of the booming and lucrative world of print publishing. For this issue she wrote about Puerto Rico’s debt problems and a virus that’s killing off piglets in the US. She’s real good at words and stuff and shows up to work on time most days, so we’re happy as a (non-diseased) pig in shit to have her.

NATHAN SCHNEIDER

Nathan Schneider has written about religion, technology, and resistance for publications including Harper’s, the Nation, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Al Jazeera, and the Catholic Worker. He is the author of two books, God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet and Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse, both published in 2013. He is also an editor of two online publications, Killing the Buddha and Waging Nonviolence, and is a contributing editor for the Social Science Research Council’s online forum on religion and public life, the Immanent Frame.

See WHO STOLE THE FOUR-HOUR WORKDAY?

JOHN MCSWAIN

John McSwain is a longtime contributor to and former employee of VICE who’s now a freelance video director and editor. The Florida native goes by the nickname Vacations and is known for his love of all things tropical. John is the drummer in a Nirvana cover band called Teenage Angst, has a very impressive meat sleeve (tattoos), and is obsessed with aliens. He’s responsible for this month’s cover story, for which he traveled to Florida to explore the thriving coral reefs that inhabit urban waterways and to find out whether the city’s polyps hold the key to saving psychedelic underwater invertebrates worldwide.

See MIAMI IS DROWNING

ULI KNÖRZER

Uli studied visual communication in Offenbach, Germany, and Paris. He currently lives in Berlin, working as an illustrator for various national and international magazines. A central theme of his art is the human being, whose emotions and fleeting expressions he captures in minimal, precisely positioned pencil strokes. His drawings quietly celebrate the beauty of transient moments of everyday life. To keep his own everyday life interesting, he’s packing his colored pencils (all 120 of them) in a couple of months and moving to New York City for a while. This month, we had Uli illustrate a short story about a woman who cuckolds her husband.

See OKAY

KATE KELLY

Kate Kelly has always allowed curiosity to get the best of her, and her passion for interesting stories and her compassion for the people who tell them have happily manifested themselves in her writing. She learned long ago that it is most often those who have been marginalized or silenced who possess an unparalleled magnetism—and the best anecdotes. Kate maintains a Francophile blog, FauxFrench.com, but she’s recently become interested in historical perversions and the culture that surrounds them. This led her to Hector Matos’s collection of vintage items and artwork from the gay leather scene, which she wrote about for this issue.

See LEATHER GRANDDADDIES

Illustrations by Geffen Refaeli