Employees of the Month

WILBERT L. COOPER Wilbert is from a suburb of Cleveland where every street is a cul-de-sac named after a forest animal. He now works for us in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which is arguably even more homogenous and suffocating, but at least you can smoke pot on the sidewalk without getting hassled (just roll it with a little tobacco). We put Wilbert in charge of the section of little newsy items at the front of the book and made him sit over next to Harry Cheadle, who reports that he smells like “clean towel mixed with very mild sweat.” Wilbert’s also working on a master’s degree in print publishing at NYU, which he keeps trying to tell us is not a joke, but we just keep shaking our head like “… This guy. This guy.” Hoping he catches on soon. See FOB
  ADRI MURGUIA Adri is a diplobrat who spent her first 20 years being dragged around the globe by her UN-employee parents. Sadly, there were no sexy spy jobs involved (they were a janitor and a chambermaid), and Adri used to make ends meet by stealing jewelry from the houses of her rich hosts and selling it to Gypsies. A couple months ago she went back to her OG homeland of Peru and spent a lot of time with the teenage girl gangs who roam the streets of Lima and going to huayno shows, which is basically traditional Andean flute music that’s been shot with a million-dollar glitter cannon. Since she’s been back in the office, three laptops, a couple of wireless keyboards, and literally every Sharpie in the building have gone missing. See QUEEN OF THE ANDES KELLY McCLURE AND A. WOLFE Like all women of taste, Kelly and A.(-pril) are massive Twin Peaks nerds. Since each of them live in the vicinity (Olympia and Portland), they got to go to this year’s Twin Peaks Fest in North Bend, Washington, and trade hugs with the actual Laura and Leland Palmer. In addition to making us so jealous we could barf, Kelly edits our record-reviews section and writes about her lesbian crushes weekly on VICE.com, and April is a writer and teacher of sorts and possibly an extremely successful lady in the comedy world? Only time will tell. Instead of a photo of the two of them to run with this bio, they sent us a picture of a pile of sandwiches. See A PLACE BOTH WONDERFUL AND STRANGE  BARRY GIFFORD A man we would never want to cross, Barry Gifford has electric hazel eyes that shoot lightning and the deft hands of a welterweight champ. At least that’s the image of him we’ve projected by reading his work, which is expertly crafted and bullshit-free. Probably best known for Wild at Heart, which launched the epic seven-volume saga about two outlaw lovers named Sailor and Lula, Barry is also an accomplished poet, nonfiction author, screenwriter, and actor (he recently starred in the Romanian film The Phantom Father, directed by Lucian Georgescu). For this issue, he sent us a short story with a title that’s a play on the name for the duct that passes sperm from the testes to the urethra. See THE VAST DIFFERENCE JAMES MOLLISON If you “go online,” you’ve probably seen pictures from James’s latest photo book, Where the Children Sleep, which contains portraits of kids around the world and their bedrooms. It’s a cute project, until you get to the eight-year-old Nepalese girl who works in a rock quarry, which is on like page 4. He’s also done cheerful smile-time stuff, like a series on great apes and a huge scrapbook of Pablo Escobar’s home photos. This month he went to the Kenyan-Somali border to document the residents of the Dadaab refugee camp, the world’s largest and home to 400,000 (and growing) people displaced by the region’s recurrent bouts of drought and civil warfare. See THE HOTTEST MESS ON EARTH