Save Yourself For Kinky

It is too bad poltics aren't this fun nationwide. Kinky Friedman's run for the Govenorship of Texas is a crazy drunken giggle brought to life. Despite almost all odds he got himself on the ballot and the political status quo is shitting themselves on the precipice of November elections. If you wanna help or just laugh along dial him in at Kinky for Gov. Mark Foley is a boring perv.

Emancipation Cohabitation

Following in the footsteps of Duffy and the Ambassador, Bleauxdog and Edgar, and other Viceroys too poor to have their own place, Bensonhurst Bill and itsSUE have decided to lay down powder and take up straw together in their own humble Bedford Avenue abode. Keep an eye out for the American flag that the Brooklyn Bopper plans to hang out his window.

Will their fridge be stuffed full of all manner of Pittsburgher and Bensonhurst goodies? Will the grandaughter of a Nazi and the 'This is America' Fred Perry model get along? Wagers on the amount of time until copulation? Until they get to know each other in the Biblical sense? And what happens, fair reader, when Chin comes to visit? Will Bill fly the coop? The clock is ticking. Lots of questions, no answers in sight. Stay tuned.

Survey Says...WHAT?

A British survey revealed that the average woman spends two years of her life studying herself in mirrors, store windows, and other reflective surfaces. Men, who take quicker peeks, only spend six months per lifetime checking out how they look. This survey obviously neglected to take into account the dusty glances male VICEers are apt to take of themselves with dollar bills delicately shoved in nostrils. Although those in the statistics world would like to call these 'outliers', we all know the truth and it is this: with the proliferation of VICE as a worldwide multi-tentacled media lifestyle brand and the hiring of many delicately powdered fragile egos, we have reached a point where we are not 'outliers' but these face down mirror gazers are the every night norm. Survey is invalid without VICE!

The Pinkster

The following interview by Johnny Ray Huston appeared in the San Francisco Bay Guardian about our pal.

A poodle-permed Rosie O'Donnell horrifying John Ritter? John Walsh in full effect? It's all in a day's tele-trawling for Derrick Beckles, aka Pinky, of TV Carnage. Beckles recently agreed to talk about the madness behind his method for this week's cover story on pixel piracy.

Guardian: Earlier this week I was showing the Rosie O’Donnell meets John Ritter part of Sore from Sighted Eyes to another writer at the Guardian and she was crying from laughter. How did you fall into making the TV Carnage videos, and how much time goes into crafting one? I’d imagine it takes more than a while to put one of your comps together.
DB: It’s a multi-leveled task of insanity. I moved recently, but I have mounds and mounds and shelves and shelves of tapes. Stuff I’ve been taping off of TV with a VCR. It’s not so much that I’m always in front of the TV set. I’d just say that I have this divining rod for shit. I just have these psychic premonitions when I turn my TV on.
I have years and years of footage, and some stuff that is more subtle. I pull all of it into my computer and have this mountain of footage there and say, “Now what?” Then I take a swig of whiskey and go, “You’ve got yourself into it again.” I’ll start randomly piecing things together. Sometimes I have a bit of theme already decided on, and other times it comes to me as I go. After that, it takes over my life, and I do its bidding as long as it takes. I have no idea how long each compilation is going to take. The process ends up being a good portion of a year at least.

Guardian: Do the themes reveal themselves over time? For example, A Sore for Sighted Eyes has a lengthy white rap section.
DB: I think that’s the most pronounced theme that I’ve had so far. The combination of making it a bit more obvious and figuring out the direction I wanted to go. The underlying theme for that one is mind control. All elements of it or most elements have to do with some form of mind control – that if you do something enough it becomes normal. The white rapping part is pronounced. I had so much footage of it because I was obsessed with it, and I decided, “OK, it’s time to unleash that beast.”

Guardian: Seeing that part, I was thinking about the way rap has worked its way into everyday vernacular in the media.
DB: There’s usually no good that comes from any of that, but there are some things that are so Exhibit A-ish that I just think, “Ah-ha, you’ve just written my entire thesis for me with this 30-second commercial!” That’s what I go for, and you string it together. I just picture a conveyer belt, and there are just so many lines or points at which someone could have pressed a big red STOP button. But it doesn’t happen. It blows my mind that people are paid for some of these ideas as well.

Guardian: Yeah – just one of the reasons the Rosie O’Donnell-with-Down syndrome footage from Riding the Bus with My Sister is amazing is that Angelica Huston is the director.
DB: That movie was just…I interviewed Crispin Glover yesterday for this new project I’m working on with Vice magazine – Vice and VBS are launching an online station, and he showed What Is It? He’s really excited about the film and the film is brilliantly bizarre. I asked him if he’d seen the Rosie O’Donnell movie and he said that the actors in What Is It? with Down syndrome were offended by it, or they felt uneasy.
It is uneasy to see Rosie O’Donnell do her Pee Wee Herman impersonation and think she’s embodying someone with Down syndrome. It’s the most offensive thing I’ve seen in my life. And John Ritter’s reaction to that is my reaction.

Guardian: That sequence is really well edited. With your stuff and Animal Charm’s at first you’re just laughing your ass off, and then you begin to notice all the work that’s gone into it in terms of editing. The Rosie O’Donnell footage is amazing on its own, but putting it on a TV screen and having John Ritter react to it is what really sends it over. Especially the ‘worst hits’ of clips from the movie you’ve put together.
DB: She’s out of control in that movie. It just blows my mind. There’s this hubris that exists when people become these unattainable spokespersons for others who probably want to say, “Don’t do that – please!”

Guardian: There’s no one saying no.
DB: There’s definitely not a boardroom full of people with Down syndrome saying, “I don’t think you should do that.”

Guardian: It’s interesting that you talked about that with Crispin Glover, though, because he knows a lot about bizarre appearances on TV. I was a fan of his early on, when he was just in things like Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, so when he made that first infamous Letterman appearance (which I think was his second one), I saw it live and could not believe it. I was literally worried and shell-shocked. I was a teenager and didn’t have a keen sense of performance art pranks. Even if you were in on that, it was still sort of shocking that he turned the audience against him so thoroughly.
DB: Yeah – he did it, he actually went through the process. Everyone was so stupefied. And that’s what TV Carnage is to me – it’s my way of screaming!
I question people’s motives about so many things. There are so many ways that people misinterpret things and then assume that they’re interpreting it properly. Then hey put that forward as their ideal of what they want to represent and you think, “Jesus Christ, you’re so far off the fucking mark it’s not even funny!” It’s back to egos being so out of control.

Guardian: There's the old true cliche that TV is a drug and people want to be on it.
DB: It’s this drug and it’s also this tool that people use. People learn from TV. I see more and more kids that have TV as a parent. I’m just like, “Oh my god, you’re parent is so bankrupt it’s insane.” It’s become more and more of a carnival freak show.
I’m fascinated with the way things evolve, the way people act when they get in front of the camera. I’m serious about it, but I can’t be dogmatic, I have to use humor. People can take away what they will from it.
One of my favorite things is when people say, “Ah, it’s just a bunch of TV thrown together.” I laugh my ass off and go, “Yes, it is.” It’s not even worth trying to explain.

Guardian: Yep, it’s that simple.
DB: If only.

Guardian: What people were or are inspiring to you in terms of doing TV Carnage?
DB: I started doing this years and years ago in high school. Then I went to film school and worked for MGM for a good few years, so this has been my catharsis as well, because I was in the belly of the beast turning out shitty TV and laughing at it.
I’ve always actually been attracted to exorcising my own demons with television. I was always watching it when I was a kid. When I was making compilations with friends I didn’t know other people were doing it. Then I discovered more and more – I came to appreciate other people’s work afterward.
When I started doing it I was just really naïve.
I don’t want it to be overly analytical, or this discourse. To me it just becomes tedious and I start to feel like I’m in a lecture class I didn’t volunteer for, or in someone’s therapy that I didn’t volunteer to be in either.

Guardian: In Casual Fridays there’s a section devoted to children being adults and adults acting like children. That’s a great phemomenon to have singled out.
DB: There are always these precocious children on TV, the kind that I’ve never met, even as a kid. Or if I did, they didn’t last more than two or three days at school before being pummeled and forced to be kids again. Then there are adults that constantly have to know what’s going on with kids – and you know, teenagers don’t even know what’s going on with teenagers. From day to day, things change. One, you can’t keep up with it, and two, why do you want to? The reason kids are doing what they do is that they don’t want to be anything like an adult -- adults are their ultimate enemy. Adults are fucking idiots. Kids are like al-Qaeda – they’ll shift their plans every day to keep you wondering.
Then when you try to give it back to them, they’ll shift around even more. It’s a real cat and mouse game – good luck adults, you’ll never figure it out. You can slap on as much makeup as you want and squint your eyes and act like you’re not 35 but actually 18. I’m obsessed with teen shows where the hosts are, like, 30: “Hey, how’s it going!” I just fall on the ground whenever I see that.

Guardian: Some people on MTV are really working their hairpieces.
DB: You can just feel them trying to make their mortgage payments: “What are kids doing now? Slitting each other’s throats? Great! Let’s do a show about it!” They’ll jump on any fucking bandwagon – and way too late.
It’s that desperation that kids can sniff out so quickly.

Guardian: Can you give some background about the “swearing sandwich” in your When Television Attacks video?
DB: There’s this ad on TV for the American Cancer Society in which this guy opens up his fridge and this sandwich is telling him to drink a certain amount of orange juice per day. I just thought there are a lot of problems with that. A: if I opened up my fridge and my sandwich was talking to me, I’d check myself in or run out of the house screaming. B: if you take it in stride, now you’re taking advice from a sandwich. I thought, you know, if I was going to take it in stride, the kind of advice I’d want to hear from a sandwich – or the kind of advice a sandwich should be giving, because it’s in a refrigerator waiting to be eaten, so it shouldn’t be in the greatest mood – would be different. So I took audio from Winnebago Man, that tape where the guy is swearing: “Look, I’ve got something to say here, I’m not going to take any more bullshit. There’s going to be no more fucking around!” Then I kept cutting back to reaction shots of the guy nodding as he listens to the sandwich.
It kind of encapsulates my worldview. People who are into self-help – they might as well be taking advice from a sandwich.

Guardian: Can you tell me a bit about your next project?
DB: Yeah – the new one I’m doing is called Cop Movie. I’m taking 101 cop movies and making a full-length feature from them. It’ll be completely schizophrenic. I’m just completely obsessed with that genre. The same script has been used for hundreds and hundreds of cop movies – they just change the character’s names, using a name that sounds dangerous and slightly evocative of freedom or something.
There’s always a vigilante aspect to cop movies that people really celebrate. I don’t know if you want your law enforcement people to decide they’re going to do whatever is necessary to take the "bad guy" off the street – even if it means killing 80 innocent people. At the end, as long as the bad person is caught, everything is forgiven. I’m thinking, “You drove your car through countless homes looking for this drug dealer – are those people thankful?”
The reason I’m using 101 movies is this ridiculous mathematical thing that I’ve figured out. If I take a certain number of seconds from each movie it adds up to 66 minutes and 6 seconds, and the whole construct of 666 makes me laugh.
This is the most ambitious one I’ve done so far.

Guardian: You’re working within more rules – which is kind of great considering the theme that you’re working with.
DB: Yeah, and I wanted to step away from the randomness of TV Carnage. It’s not completely random but I didn’t want to put out something similar again. In the evolution of taking it way too seriously I decided to put out the cop movie project.
I’m going for the cop movies that take themselves seriously – it’s always a cop who just recently to get divorced or a cop who is about to retire and has a "last big case."

Guardian: I’d imagine it’s going to have big finale.
DB: I’ve already cut together a part where a guy gets hit by a car and there are five different people being hit by the car within four or five seconds. It goes from a blond guy getting hit to a black guy rolling over the car to a guy with red hair on the ground to a guy with a mullet being checked out by the cops, and it flows seamlessly. It’s a real acid trip. It’s kind of a psychological experiment.
So, after I finish it, I’ll probably just pick out a casket and go to sleep for a hundred years.

Guardian: You’re working with Vice as well?
DB: We started this TV thing, so I’m doing this on-air stuff. I’m going after stories that are semi-serious to me, such as environmental issues, and also adding my own approach to the more bizarre things that I see in the world. Basically, I’m lucky enough to find employment in being a jackass.

Guardian: Since you’ve worked in the entertainment industry, I’m wondering what kind of reaction TV Carnage has gotten from people within the industry, from stars to others.
DB: There’s a funny story. A friend of mine directs TV. He does a lot of stuff. He does videos fro bands that are half decent, but ultimately he’ll admittedly sell his soul and make horrible movies of the week. He’ll call me from sets – and I get this from other directors too who want to get in touch with me – saying, “I just made the worst movie in the world!” like it’s a badge of honor.
My friend Chris said on the set of one movie – it might have been the Showtime Queer as Folk – an actor did a scene and his delivery was particularly bad.

Guardian: Yeah. I believe it.
DB: Weird, huh? Anyway, the actor said, “I wanna redo that!” My friend Chris said, “I think we’re ok with that take,” and the guy snapped, “I don’t want this to be on TV Carnage! I want to redo this!”

Guardian: I had a bad experience in Toronto walking down Church Street – my boyfriend and I almost got corralled into a crowd scene for that show.
DB: You should have just gone to the craft services table and eaten tons of food and then split!
I also got this email from the US military once, I’m not shitting you. It was from the Entertainment Division of the US Military. I thought, “What’s more entertaining than the US military? They have an entertainment division on top of that? Wow!”

Guardian: It’s working overtime now.
DB: They were interested in getting TV Carnage to show to the troops. I was like, “Mm-hmm, I’m sure you are.” They sent me this document with all these questions like, “What is the motive behind your TV Carnage? Is there any underlying thesis or message you’re trying to get across?” It looked like someone had slapped together a bogus logo on some letterhead, but it was a real government division – I looked it up online.
The questions were so specific about TV Carnage, and so eerily “Feel free to narc on anyone!” that I didn’t respond. I never heard from them again. I showed it to a bunch of friends, and no one thought, “Oh, they probably want to show it.” They all thought it was creepy.

Guardian: What else are you working on?
DB: I recently did a documentary called Strip Club DJs, about the DJs that work as strip clubs, that will come out under the TV Carnage banner. And I want to go on tour with TV Carnage.

Opening Day

The VICE GUIDE TO TRAVEL is the for sale! It's a lot like VICE Magazine, except it moves. For this first one we dispatched correspondents all over the world to vist the planet's weirdest and most dangerous places. We went to such farflung locales as the Pygmy villages in the Congo, the radioactive ruins of Chernobyl, and the illegal arms markets of Pakistan. We looked for mythical beasts, met the PLO boy scouts (suicide bombers of tomorrow), chatted with a man who sold black market nuclear warheads and hung out with Osama bin Laden, and got shot at in the slums of Rio. This is travel at its most bizarre, equal parts LSD and adrenaline, and sometimes we can't believe we made it back.

World's Greatest Band

The Black Lips are playing tonight at the Bowery Ballroom in Manhattan. Pack a pipe, poncho and pogo stick and expect to get wasted, sprayed and tossed around. And if that doesn't sound like your of cup of pee check 'em out playing Cowboys and Indians for the big screen.

In Summation:
They’ve got three LPs and loads of singles on some of the coolest indie labels in America. They’ve toured Europe twice. They’ve been touring the States for the last six years. They’ve just become of legal age to hang out in the bars they play in. They’ve played five shows in the New York area in the last month, but call Atlanta home. They have songs called “Feeling Gay,” “Dirty Hands,” and “Everybody Loves a Cocksucker,” that alternate from Hank-drawled country, Soledad Brothers-esque blues and Stonsey rock with kerosene soaked vocals that go from yodels to screams.  They are the Black Lips, and the sooner you accept them into your life, the better off you’ll be.

Perry Caravello Day

Today is Scary Perry day. Windy City Heat the DVD has just been released and a million things are going on to celebrate it. They are:

ONE- the Perry Project’s website is going live which includes one of the stupidest blogs ever written.

TWO- we’re putting a teaser of an hour long prank call where they convince Perry to tell a prominent producer that he missed the audition because he was raped. (Perry even goes on to claim he “squoze” too tight and the bottle he was sodomized with broke in his ass.)

THREE- Hear The Big Three (Don, Mole, and Perry) on Adam Corolla’s radio show. Johnny Knoxville appears as the new Scary Perry and allows Knoxville to smash his penis in a mousetrap (click the picture to see the video) to show who is more deserving of the lead in Windy City Heat: Number 2.

FOUR- the guys at TV Carnage did a Perry thing where he substitutes Perry’s voice with The Thing from Fantastic Four because both Perry and The Thing think fedoras make you cool. Like movies?

FIVE- See The Big Three on Jimmy Kimmel Live here and here!  If that's still not enough Perry for one day you must be Randy Callahan.    

*Thanks to Dr. McInnes for this probing post!

YouTube.com: A New Musical Anthropology

Ten or more years ago, the best example I could give you of a subset of people who wasted large chunks of their time at work fiddling with personal publications was the hardcore music “fan ‘zine” set, many of whom worked at Kinko’s simply for access to the copiers, computers and paper so crucial to their output. In recent years, that subset has expanded exponentially to include enough of the contemporary workforce that employers often now utilize office monitoring software to keep their employees off of their blogs, their Friendster and Myspace pages, and so forth. No doubt that when Michel de Certeau wrote of la perruque (basically a French idiom for “stealing from the workplace”) in The Practice of Everyday Life he had no idea how fittingly it would describe 21st century Internet usage. The concept fits so perfectly for the vast amounts of time wasted everyday at an employer’s expense that one can imagine ads for the aforementioned software quoting de Certeau directly on the box: “LA PERRUQUE IS INFILTRATING ITSELF EVERYWHERE!” And now that the broadcast of web-based blogs has replaced the narrow niche of the photocopied ‘zine [and further, that what was once “subculture” has simply become “culture”], passively and/or aggressively, we’ve become de Certeau’s “very ordinary culture” of subversives engaged in “economic diversion”, stealing company time (and bandwidth) when we think no one is looking. The list of enabling vehicles for these “uses and tactics” grows with each new Internet phenomenon: my new favorite diversion is YouTube.com.

Even if you’ve wasted very little of your precious time on YouTube, you know what lurks there: fuzzy homemade videos of skinny emo boys punching each other in the crotch; infinite clips of half-naked 13-year old girls lip-synching to “My Humps” while rolling and shaking their own not-quite-developed humps to crappy off-camera boom boxes; shaky handheld footage of groups of guys beating the hell out of other groups of guys; stupid TV and movie parodies, re-edited with help from TiVo and iMovie; pixilated blooper reels of cows shitting on news reporters, monkeys attacking talk show hosts, and even a killer whale squashing a kayaker (fake, by the way). YouTube and its colleagues, like Putfile and Google Video, are the future (or at least the present) of a new democratic visual archive. If eBay is America’s yard sale, then YouTube is our A/V closet, and it looks a lot like an amalgamation of the Faces of Death series, America’s Funniest Home Videos, Jerry Springer, American Idol auditions, home made child porn, and the kind of footage previously only found at flea markets and thrift stores. It’s a mess, just like everything else.

But like so many closets, if you dig deeply enough you’re sure to find something interesting. Buried within the endless supplies of Numa song remakes and shitty “sponsor me” skateboard videos are some real gems: a friend of mine sent me this link (http://www.youtube.com/?v=F4wi_-oP-0E) to a clip of two Russian teens who can apparently run, jump or climb over anything, Jackie Chan-style. Or this Internet nugget (http://www.youtube.com/?v=L854AFW7GhU) mashing up a song from the Avenue Q musical with animation from a World of Warcraft video game. Or best of all, replacing the old ‘zine, with its poorly photocopied pictures of the Misfits or S.O.A. [to which my heart is still loyal, I might add] is an amazing, disorganized, and often equally amateurish archive of off-beat, early, or hard-to-find punk and hardcore music concert videos that people have culled from their private collections and posted to the site. If you’re willing to wade through the thousands of videos like “Alyssa and Patty Dancing Hardcore” or “Hardcore Kid on American Idol”, you’ll find a seemingly endless vein of videos by the Monks, Black Flag, the Misfits, Negative Approach, Bad Brains, Youth of Today, Naked City, Bikini Kill, Napalm Death, S.O.A., Void and so many more.

Due to the giant square pixels, overly compressed audio tracks, and various watermarks, these are certainly not archival quality pieces in online museum—but it’s all free. Like so many other inventions in the new economy, there’s no charge to host or to download the content. It is only a matter of time before some big institution steps in and messes with the site (like Napster or Myspace), but for now, it’s an interesting look into our collective psyche. Just whose psyche it is might up for grabs, though. I can’t speak for the volumes of weird homemade videos of kids dancing in their rooms or causing a scene at the mall, Jackass-style, but the music videos are obviously posted by fans—people who’ve spent a lot of time or money to collect rare videos of their favorite bands. Unlike on eBay, where collecting means hording away from everyone else, on YouTube, collecting means sharing. You can’t “keep” any of what is posted there; videos stream from the server, so you never download any actual content. And links often go bad, especially if the artist is well known (oh Prince, damnitall, please just let the world watch your 1985 American Music Awards clip whenever they need a lift!). But the specialist stuff is out there, if you’re willing to search for it. Judging by the number of hours so many have logged onto the site, apparently people are very much willing.

This Trailer Could Be Your Life

Funny how the times change. American Hardcore is now the height of fashion more than 25 years after it broke. Expect to see Negative Approach backing Nissan Altima commercials and Youth Brigade hustling Wendy's Frosty Dairy Desserts anyday now. But who can blame them? Hardcore broke long before MTV and Blogs, so the fact that most of America is just now catching on isn't really that surprising. But can it be merely hipster irony driving this rehash, when seeing fashionistas wearing a Black Flag shirts is about as poignant an Al Jolson blanket drapped across your dad or could it be that this shit rules?

Regardless, if you know the difference between slam dancing and moshing go see this move, skank around a bit in the auditorium then rent The Decline of Western Civilization Part 1, (and only Part 1 please) Another State of Mind and We Jam Econo. Like fist fighting to the oldies?

Bindi City Heat

Windy City Heat is finally being released on DVD. How great is that you ask? Look to Gavin's loving gospel in the most recent issue of VICE Magazine, if you are still out in the cold on this classic comedy. In the world of film, copycatting is a great way to get rich without doing any work, so Thobey thought we should do a remake right away. And because of VICE's ever encroaching international visibility, India was deemed the perfect place for this celulloid rehash tentatively titled Bindi City Heat Bollywood goes Bollockswood, if you will. Think the Peter Sellers classic The Party with a hint of Chi-Town Canadian dufus on top.

With the three red headed stars pictured, this is certain to generate a sub-world of south asian, if not world-wide, resentment. However, the abilities of this new Big 3 to sing and dance with daring aplomb has already proven untetherable time and again. And besides it's a dumb white guy story to begin with so please no complaints about make-up or bad accents. Whom exactly will draw the lead dumb role as GemStone Fury is anyone's guess. Care to vote for your choice?

Old Drug Buddies

Look we don't go all out for plays but when they're about drugs and Texans there is no way we can let that mayhem slide through the well worn boards of the stage unnoticed. So tonite you have to roll over to Fat Baby on Rivington and stretch out those flabby drama muscles at the Drug Buddy Launch Party where Butthole Surfer Gibby Haynes will be DJing and Spank Rock will be performing. Could you find an event more tailor made than this to rope in a date? Simply ask the attractive person of your choice to go see the play, ok? Follow the simple instructions below and, of course, if it sucks you remain blamless. haha

Drug Buddy written by David Folwell and directed by our old chum Alex Kilgore will be playing at The Cherry Lane Theater beginning Setember 27th. For more information go to the stageFARM

For friends of VICE there are special $10 tickets for sale - simply enter the code "BUDDY" at Smarttix.

9/11: A Day Beyond Belief

There is not much more that can be said about 9/11 that smarter people haven't already. If you happened to have witnessed the shit hitting the fan firsthand, your thinking is forever your own. If you smelled the death and trudged through the waste I've nothing for you. But if you were lucky enough to have been somewhere else, this incredible video will perhaps demonstrate how ungodly and surreal the whole thing was to eyes unaccustomed to the most evil of bullshit.

Be good whenever you have the chance and beat the fascists wherever you find them.

My extended remembrance of 9/11

Politrix At Large

Rap Music is a funny thing. It is at times both provacative and stupefying, which is also an apt
description for many a political campaign. So most of us at Intern Central thought it brilliant (and perhaps a fitting end) when one of the drunken big boys headed south to curry favor from a group of rapsters destined to happily bounce a beanpole wannabe Politician out of town on his ass with grevious bodily harm. If this syrupy saga is to be believed, it seems VICE's plan to raise the South again might just work. What political intrigue is behind this cockamamie duplicity is anyone's guess. Can we please find this guy a Political Party Machine?

Meeting of the Mindless

VICE staffers are under a lot of pressure to look snazzy and original. Successfully ducking Gavin's league of fashion police and DOs & DON'Ts paparazzi only works three days out of seven, so you gotta keep sharp to look sharp. John Martin is our maven, taking to the streets to sniff out the fashion beat. Homeless ensembles are his inspiration: clothes so awesome you live in them!

Behind the Scenes: VICE Records

Whereas once the older Interns cobbled together a creation myth worthy of the Magazine it seems the more media savvy of the front-rowers have put together a little behind the scenes movie about Suroosh Alvi, the point man of Vice Records. Dr. Alvi is a chameleon so masterful that you shan't be surprised if one day you recognize him and one day you don't. That is merely the magic of movin' pictures.

Class-Free Cafeteria Clowns

The shirtless gourmand chimes in again. This time on a VICE birthday lunch. Like Emily Posters?

Number Fucking One: Do not even touch your food until everyone has theirs. Especially when it's a birthday lunch and the birthdayee hasn't received his, even if they say it's ok to. It's a class thing. ADDENDUM: Some say that this rule is nullified if the restaurant has paper napkins instead of linen. A debatable point, but as a matter of class, don't touch the food until all have been served. It makes you look like you grew up in the South.

#2 Ordering an appetizer for your lunch. Last time I checked, Teddy's is not a fucking tapas bar like Avec in Chicago or Cobras & Matadors in LA!

#3 Salting your food before tasting it. Classic rookie move, most likely the product of a childhood culinary wasteland involving cube steak and Bok Choy. Blame the parents.

#4 Floridian table Jenga. Never rearrange the tables like a Rubic's cube. Scumbags who have never toiled in the service industry feel they have the right to do this.

#5 Same type of dickheads who write down their orders on the menu and hand it to the waitress.

#6 Bad orders. Crab cakes as a main? Only in Maryland or Alaska. Chicken? Only if it's Teddy's Fried Chicken. Vegetarian options? Please leave the table. You have no lust for life.

#7 No napkin in lap. More poor parenting. Also goes along with wearing a hatat the table. What is this, a little league picnic? Scumbags.

#8 Visible, multicolored tattoos. No explanation needed.

#9 Long hair. Come on now, brothers are not supposed to be sisters.

And in summation:
If you're looking for a classy lunch time experience avoid Teddy's and avoid VICE. You may be wondering what happened to the logical number #10 on this list. We'll it seems that after the aforementioned starch on starch fest, the shirtless one nodded out at the keyboard immediately after penning #9. The quite natural reaction of a body shutting down after having injested 2 pounds of fried potatoes, 8 tablespoons of salt and a pint fancy catsup in additon to a 3/4 pound beef burger.BlackedOuted Boysssss

JOHN MARTIN BITES BACK IN RESPONSE TO THE COMMENTS

Hey assholes, here is the fucking #10 I was dreaming up when the carbo coma spun me out.

#10 The ATM Rule aka the Melissa and Jake rule. If you are short on cash, it's ok. Just go to the ATM after you order, or before you go into the restaurant. Not when the bill comes. That's about as classy as Bill. What the fuck is wrong with you people?

Elbows on the table are acceptable. That rule is antiquated, and some say racist even.

I. Oedipal Ex

Canadian boys love their mothers, but when they started including them in the free porn perks, our minds were blown. It must be said, however, that LaWow's momma done trained her boy better than the rest of these Cannucks. Not only did he remember mumsy on a day not decreed a Hallmark Special Day of Remembrance, but he placed the thoughtful gift in a classy lavender Bergdorf Goodman bag (the subliminal messaging is right on: good son, Goodman). Multi-disc DVD blow job collections have no place in the classic American mom gift bag, but our sexy friends from north of the border apparently see nothing wrong with sharing the self-love with the family. Perhaps a pre-dinner bonding/bondage activity at LaWow's ancestral home is sitting around whacking off and discussing whether to have gravy on the poutine or not. Must be the French influence. I wonder why there isn't a gift bag for Pops? Unless LaWow heeded the age old Oedipal call and whacked off a family member in addition to his own...

Abandoned Apartment Complex & Other Mental Illin's

This past Saturday, select members of the VICE Magazine Adventure Field Trip team voyaged out to the Hamptons via the hospitality of our buddies at WE Clothing. The festivities were attended by downtown demagogues and Ludlow Street luminaries like Erik Lavoie and his buddies Ricky Powell, Kid Millionaire DJ Steve Aoki, Ben Dietztails, and of course, ex-Vicer gone bad: Mike Malbon.

Things got off to quite a start on the bus ride out, as we drank bubbly and danced to the sweet sounds of the Wu Tangs Clan. Luckily we brought our own Raprican American, Big Pinky to bridge the necessary cultural divides between us working stiffs and the Ludlow Street Luminaries in the back of the bus. Well hydrated by the 1-2 H20 punch of Poland Spring and Subway sandwiches, we really roared into the Hamptons. Upon arrival in the parking lot of the Pink Elephant, Blain VanDenBerg began slapping cans of Silver Bullet and Bud Ice out of people's hands like they were Aroostook County blackflies. You can take the babes out of Florida but... you get my drift.

Slapping stopped and clapping commenced when the ponytailed Brit event planner showed up blatantly test driving a Ferrari. (Side note: this guy could not and would not stop touching Trace Crutchfield's toes, he was Christened 'Toe Shaker') Anyway parking lot antics of the Downtown Crowd convinced 'Toe Shaker' to forego letting the VICE A-Team loose on his rented beachside mansion. So the the party moved to the inside grotto of the Pink Elephant - imagine an abandoned apartment complkex on the side of any highway in America with a kiddie pool in the middle and some sand and Viola! You have the hottest club in Southampton. WTF?

After settling into the our custom VICE VIP area, we had our first encounter with Toronto Mike (thankfully not pictured). Now, as most regular Rumor Mule readers know, most posts here are good natured and have their tongue firmly planted in cheek. Let's digress from that for a moment and make one thing perfectly clear: Toronto Mike is the biggest piece of shit to ever walk the Earth. It would be a better place if he did not exist. It started off bad, and got even worse. He starts pissing next to our table, which led to the comment 'Wow, Mike, it looks like a penis only smaller'. This sorry excuse for a turd then proceeds to bum out everyone at the party. Pissing, slapping, racist 'roid raging, boardshorts, creepy jock date rapist vibe, he really had it all. Luckily, our man Martin was able to go Tit-For-Slap with this Cannuck. The pinnacle was him getting kicked off the bus heading back to the city by Kid Millionaire for infractions too nefarious to note. The strange issue in all of this, is his familiarity with VICE's own Erik Lavoie and Liz Cowie. One could even say that they are friends perhaps? I wouldn't be surprised if our own Candians tried to distance themselves from this north of the border piece of shit.

When the toe shaking had ended and the dust had finally settled into the frilly confines of hipster moustaches, one thing was obvious: we had a great time with WE. Those who made their own fun had a blast. Those few Grumpy Guys who whined were obviously NOT part of the VICE domination of the festivities. A big thanks goes out to Eric, Eric, Greger, Jim and everyone else at WE!

Interns of a Feather

Bensonhurst Bill and Upper East Side Rya are VICE's two most audible interns of recent memory. Perhaps it's their shared upbringing in the metropolitan jungle, or maybe they both had parents that were hard of hearing. The dynamic duo finally met up at the VICE Photo Issue party last Monday. This photo would look best in a heart shaped frame, on a bedside table, somewhere in Weehawken. Also of note: Bill's two beers and Rya's 'I just met my internship spiritual predecessor' smile of joy.

Like Parties? Come see them in all their tongue wagging glory this Friday night.

The Secret Lives of Val Kilmer

Who is the mystery man bowling about town and then writing his name on the walls of hipster dives? Val Kilmer himself or a David Cross body double? A deranged fan or maybe Tony Barbieri even? Apparently the culprit is in the good graces of VICE's own Liz Cowie. Which begs the question, is the graffitist none other than Liz herself? Will the real Val Kilmer please stand up?