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The Psychedelic Booby Trap Issue

Employees of the Month

GUIDO GAZZILLI A sweet and lovable 27-year-old rapscallion, Guido Gazzilli is a photographer who was born in Rome. His friends call him Guidini, because a) it sounds cute and b) it distinguishes him from all the orange-skinned, steroid...

GUIDO GAZZILLI

A sweet and lovable 27-year-old rapscallion, Guido Gazzilli is a photographer who was born in Rome. His friends call him Guidini, because a) it sounds cute and b) it distinguishes him from all the orange-skinned, steroid-and-silicone-filled meatballs who should be fixing our plumbing rather than roaming New Jersey beaches. Guido documents both music-related happenings and heavier, geopolitical stories. He trained under the preeminent Italian photojournalist Paolo Pellegrin, and his work has appeared in Italian

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Rolling Stone

,

Vice

Italy,

Nero

,

Foto8, PRIVATE

, and other magazines. For this issue, Guido traveled to Lampedusa—an island south of Sicily where tens of thousands of Tunisians fled following the revolution and ousting of former president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali—to get the real scoop on the refugee crisis.

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TOO MANY TUNISIANS, NOT ENOUGH TOILETS

HANNAH BROOKS

This tall drink of water was born in Bowen, a small North Queensland town famous for its delicious mangoes. At one time, Hannah was the music editor of our Australian edition, which is why you may know her from documentaries like

Heavy Metal Gangs of Wadeye

and

Nimbin Mardi Grass

. She is currently exiled in the paradise that is Byron Bay, where her days consist of loafing around the beach, walking the fine line between burning and tanning, riding her bicycle, wearing black on principle (she says there’s “too much color in Byron”), getting calluses on her fingertips from playing guitar, avoiding bongo players, learning to drive (public transport isn’t an option up there), and conducting interviews with interesting people such as Rainbow Guy, the mastermind behind Byron’s Rainbow Temple and a deep, dark tunnel without a destination.

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PLEASURE TO MEET YOU, RAINBOW GUY

JAN VAN TIENEN

The first time we met Jan, we were a little baffled. He looked more like a young dot-com entrepreneur than the editor of

Vice

’s Dutch edition. With our help, he experienced his first-ever Halloween. He showed up to a Brooklyn bar in a black ski mask (tags still attached at the top), holding sparkly cheerleader pom-poms. We weren’t exactly sure what he was supposed to be (we don’t think he was, either), but we liked his gusto. In spite of being from the rural backwater of Zeeland, he has adapted nicely to Amsterdam’s latte-stained yuppie district, where he enjoys tending to his bangs, collecting zombie books, Maoam candy, and “the disco music.” In this issue, you’ll find Jan’s account of tagging along with a bunch of young European Muslims on their way to protest France’s burka ban.

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ALLAHU AKBAR IN A PARKING LOT

PAUL MALISZEWSKI

One of Paul’s first short stories, written when he was a Tolkien-obsessed kid in Shreveport, Louisiana, involved a character walking into a pub, draining a pint of mead, and conversing with a face that appears at the bottom of the glass. He composes stories that alternate between painfully realistic examinations of the human condition and dreamlike narratives that reveal as much as they bewilder. Paul has received all sorts of well-deserved attention for his fiction and his essays, including two Pushcart Prizes and a book blurb from editor extraordinaire Gordon Lish that says, “Paul Maliszewski takes no crap,” which is like God saying someone is incapable of sin. Of course, we’re thrilled to be publishing three excerpts from his brand-new fiction collection,

Prayer and Parable

, which will be released this month by Fence Books.

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A PRAYER AND TWO PARABLES

ULTRAVIOLET BLACK-LIGHT CALENDAR

This very special calendar came into our lives last Christmas during a Secret Santa gift-off. It features 13 classic images from

Ultraviolet

, a book celebrating the “out-there-ness” of black-light posters. Despite our shock that a publication dedicated to black-light posters actually exists, we’ve really been enjoying it here at the office; we count on its groovy date boxes to keep us on track for deadline and inform us of important psychedelic historical dates like the FDA’s approval of oral contraceptives (May 9) and the signing of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (May 26). There’s also loads of cool imagery: pretty girls with flowing hair and boobs made of flowers, mustached neon bikers, a naked couple making out in front of an enormous peace sign, outer space, and, of course, an ode to Jimi Hendrix. Now all someone needs to do is send us a black light.

See THE BRICK WALL ABOVE OUR ASSOCIATE EDITOR’S DESK