Religions > Atheism > Down and Dirty Tours A travel guide to places—Chernobyl, anyone?—you don't want to be caught, well, dead in.
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Religions > Atheism |
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"stoney" |
| Date: |
01 Nov 2006 12:13:47 PM |
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Down and Dirty Tours A travel guide to places—Chernobyl, anyone?—you don't want to be caught, well, dead in. |
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15482083/site/newsweek/
Down and Dirty Tours
A travel guide to places—Chernobyl, anyone?—you don't want to be caught,
well, dead in.
By Lorraine Ali
Newsweek
Updated: 11:01 a.m. ET Oct. 30, 2006
Oct. 30, 2006 - It's unlikely you'll see the "Vice Guide to Travel"
featured on Oprah, Expedia or the Travel Channel anytime soon. The DVD,
produced by the editors of pop culture's irreverent Vice Magazine and
under the creative direction of video and now film's Spike Jonze (Fatboy
Slim's "Weapon of Choice," "Being John Malkovich," "Adaptation"),
forgoes the gated resorts of Jamaica and spas of New Mexico to run with
illegal-arms dealers in Pakistan, converse with dirty-bomb dealers in
Bulgaria and shoot wild, radioactive boar in Chernobyl. In one segment,
a Vice reporter goes to Paraguay to visit the failed Nazi commune of
Nueva Germania and finds its last two inhabitants living in squalor. He
interviews locals who remember Dr. Josef Mengele, dubbed "The Angel of
Death" during World War II because of his horrific surgical experiments
on Auschwitz prisoners. The villagers recall that during his last days,
he ate out of tin cans and spent each night screaming in his sleep.
Odd but telling details like these make up much of the Vice guide, which
is available on the Viceland.com site as well as Amazon. (Vice is not
only a magazine—it's also expanded with several stores, a film company,
a TV show, a publishing house and a record label.) But the guerrilla
team of hosts and reporters, which include the magazine's own publishers
Shane Smith and Suroosh Alvi, dig up some fairly big and disturbing
stories, too. In Bulgaria, they track down a black-market merchant who
recently sold a dirty bomb to an undercover French journalist. They talk
with him over tea and find out just how easy it is to obtain nuclear
waste and turn it into a bomb. It raises the question, how is this
ragged and inexperienced team getting access to places and people that
CNN and the BBC are not? In Lebanon, they embed themselves in a troop of
Boy Scouts who aspire and train to become anti-occupation martyrs rather
than Eagle Scouts. Another Vice reporter goes into Rio's most notorious
slum, the City of God, and attends a gang-sponsored rave. According to a
local, when a prominent Brazilian journalist tried to do the very same
thing—film one of these parties—he was kidnapped, placed inside a stack
of old tires and burned alive. Yet the Vice reporter dances with locals
until sunrise and makes it out alive, albeit with a nasty hangover. "We
have fixers, local young people who know we're coming over," explains
Smith, who lives in New York but was born, raised and started Vice in
Canada. "We dress up the part and go with them. They say, don't act like
an American and you won't have problems. In Beirut, we got access to
[the] Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade because we came in with local dudes and we
don't look like CNN. When you're just kind of bummy, wearing an old T
shirt and have a beard with food in it, then no one looks twice."
MTV is funding part of the new venture, though it's hard to imagine how
any of this gritty stuff will fit in between "TRL" and "Pimp My Ride."
Smith is so skeptical that he wants to downplay Vice's tenuous deal with
MTV. "We believe there is a huge international and domestic market of
young people who want to see more," he says. "MTV is the biggest media
platform in the world ... what are they doing with it? 'My Super Sweet
16'? Look, I want to know that you can buy warheads on the black market
or that young children are being brought up to be transportation devices
for dynamite. People don't know anything about this stuff, and these are
huge, complex problems, but that doesn't meant they don't want to know."
The situations—or whatever you want to call what the Vice hosts
explore—are almost all deadly serious, but the commentary is not. After
Smith wraps up a tour of an abandoned school in Chernobyl, he says,
"Nuclear energy is the future? If this is the future, than we're all
f--ked." He also walks with a Geiger counter, and as the numbers get
higher and higher, he calls them out like a seasoned auctioneer, "1,200
.... 1,230 ... 1,300!" In Pakistan, Surrosh Alvi is stunned after leaving
an illegal-arms market where he shot off a semiautomatic weapon and met
merchants who'd had their tongues cut out: "America thinks they're going
to bat down the Taliban uprising by sending in American and Pakistani
troops? These people live in caves, have no tongues and makes guns with
their bare hands. Good luck." Smith knows the Vice style does not take
it's cues from conventional TV journalism, and that's a good thing.
"Look, we go there, and see what we see," he explains. "Rather than be
objective, you see how we feel about it how we react as human beings. I
can't say I'm an expert on Hizbullah or Israeli politics, but I can go
there and hang out and say this is what I saw and this is how I feel
about it. We're not "60 Minutes." If our hosts are a bit weird, or
freaked out, or flippant or drunk, that's cause they're real people in
intense situations."
Their next travel guide, out in March, will feature segments on Sudan's
Janjaweed death squads, robot brothels in Tokyo, raves in Iran and a
heavy-metal band in Baghdad who risk their lives to play Satan's music.
Smith says wanna-be reporters from around the world are sending ideas,
and Vice now has 2,500 freelancers across the globe. This influx of
interest, and more money from investors, means the next Vice travel
guide will be a slightly more polished affair. No, the hosts will not be
wearing flak jackets and concerned expression á la Christine Amanpour,
but the reporting will be more in-depth and the segments will be longer
(as of now, they are only about seven minutes each). Next year, the Vice
team also hope to put the guide out there via several different
platforms. "We thought, why not do an online network so it's totally
yours and no one will censor you?" says Smith. "That's a lot more
exciting to us than risking our lives for a cable channel. So we're
working on a worldwide network and have tech partners that are 18 years
old and have ideas that make Google and Yahoo look antiquated.
Playstation3 is embedding all of our content into their PS3 handheld
next year and we're doing all this stuff with Mac iPods. Basically,
we're destratifying the status quo." All the while welcoming viewers
into the most hellish places on earth.
/end
--
Fundies and trolls are cordially invited to
shove a wooden cross up their arses and rotate
at a high rate of speed. I trust you'll
be 'blessed' with a plethora of splinters.
.
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