J.T. Ready (screengrab)

On Wednesday May 2, J.T. Ready ended a violent argument in his Arizona home with a rampage. Ready killed his girlfriend, three other adults and a toddler before committing suicide. His actions marked an explosive and tragic end to a colorful career as a cause-hopping rebel who bounced between various extreme social movements using xenophobic and racist rhetoric to grab the spotlight along the way. The Christian Science Monitor goes more in-depth:

"Ready was significant because he was at the nexus of [several] extremist movements, including the white supremacy movement and the extreme wing of the anti-immigration movement, and he operated equally well in both spheres," says Mark Pitcavage, a researcher with the Anti-Defamation League, who has tracked Ready's activities for a decade. "Toward the end of his life, he was even making connections with the militia movement."

VICE interviewed Ready a while back for its video series, VICE Today. They posted their video with an introduction acknowledging Ready's murder-suicide a couple of days ago, writing, "Not too long ago, we interviewed J.T. for our piece on border militias, and while we understood that J.T. had a lot of anger, we didn't realize how deep his hatred ran."

The 4:25 video is below. It reveals an oddly affable-seeming man attempting to put a friendly gloss on what he's doing.

Interview with J.T. Ready & His Border Militia: VICE Presents 010 - YouTube.

Vice Magazine

Update: Vice has wrote to us that they aren't behind the Occupy Williamsburg thing. They just tweeted about it. So it's still not a joke, except the joke that Vice was making when they tweeted "Not a joke."

Oh please, Vice magazine. We know you are owned by HBO. We know that your current homepage features men in nice suits with signs saying "Suck 1% of My Dick."

So what are you trying to prove with tonight's event?

We hope this is a joke. Occupying Union Pool with pickleback specials is not an Occupation. It's spoiled rich kids whining about their over-privileged lives...oh wait, is this like some meta-commentary on the people of OWS? Because that would be funny.

DJ Vito Fun

Last night The Observer hopped on a hot, sweaty subway and emerged in the hot, sweaty Lower East Side. We trudged, wiping the sweat from our brow, to the Vice Magazine Photo Show.

Arriving at the door of the gallery, a mob of perspiring partiers was causing the doorman and bouncer much distress. “Everybody back up!,” the seasoned bouncer would periodically yell, muttering under his breath about the overwhelmed Vice rep at the door.  We got inside, hoping to escape the humidity, and found ourselves confronted with the feverish calidity of young drunken body-heat.

We waded down the slim staircase, and pushed toward the bar where tattooed youths waited for their helping of free alcohol. The drinks were strong. A booth and speakers had been set up in the small downstairs space where DJ Vito Fun blasted Florence+The Machine, the Killers and the like. “Racism is Gay!” his shirt read.

Tipsy hipsters clapped to the music and danced, hand in sweaty hand. Girls in lace dresses dabbed at their foreheads in futile desperation while boys in T-shirts soaked through with sweat looked on.   Within minutes we were overcome by the raging temperatures and had to step back outside where the crowd had not subsided. “Everybody back up!” we heard once more as we walked down the street.

The back cover of Vice magazine, a signature spot for the retailer and one it's held since June 2003, goes for a little more than $24,000 an issue, according to the publication's 2010 media kit.

This could be the end of a beautiful relationship of symbiotic skeeze. How will we know that Vice is transgressive if there isn't a crotch on the back?

Though the event's futuristic installations — celebrating those who push "creative boundaries through technology," according to a press release — provided an amusing distraction, most patrons were there for the event's bands, who seemed to be have been selected more for their popularity than their technophilia. The roster included M.I.A., the Rapture, Die Antwoord, Interpol and the aggressively lo-fi Sleigh Bells.

"My experience with technology is really about my lack of resources, not having any technology. Those early demos are really kind of blown out because the equipment I was using wasn't very good," Derek Miller, one half of Sleigh Bells, told the Transom. "Pushing the limits was the only way I could get really cheap drum machines to sound even mildly exciting."

"But I think that's good. We're not the first band to take advantage of our limitations," he added. "Boundaries seem to help create."

Asked why his band attended, Interpol drummer Sam Fogarino smiled and referenced a popular feature from the magazine: "We just didn't want to be a Vice 'Don't.'"

None of this is to say that the installations weren't popular. The musical performances tended to fall on the short-and-sweet side, giving visitors plenty of time to peruse the electronic playground. 

One popular project, "The Digital Flesh," featured a dim room containing a teepee-sized glass cone attended by two male models. These acolytes guided curious patrons inside the cone to have their heads scanned and projected as a computer rendering on a disc above the structure.

Radical Friend, the music video–directing duo behind the project, said it will follow the Creator's Project to its next five venues, finishing with the Project in Beijing, where they'll project a holographic amalgamation of every participant's face.

"Imagine if everybody in this room got squished into this one giant ball. It's like cells growing," said Julia Grigorian of RF. "I think it's going to be a little horrific, but so is life."

Other standouts included newly created games for the original Nintendo console, and a short film from Spike Jonze about tragic lovers that happen to be androids. "I'll walk around here and literally not know what I'm looking at," said Vice co-founder Shane Smith enthusiastically. "I'm like, 'I want to start taking acid again.'"

Complexity was a detriment to at least one installation, though. We overheard a PR girl, either from Vice or Intel, complaining about a light projection near the entrance that users had failed to manipulate.

"People are supposed to be moving that block off to the side, but they don't know," she said, frustrated. "I saw someone sitting on it earlier!"

After the sun set, Interpol took to the stage. Earlier, lead singer Paul Banks told the Transom that New York audiences are harder to impress ("There's more head nodding and less clapping in the air") but it didn't seem to be a problem as hands clapped and fists pumped for their greatest hits, accompanied by a pulsating light show. The performance took place in the building's loading dock, separated from the street by a barrier, and as the band played, a graffiti artist named Words tagged a building across the way using a high-tech laser pointer. A nearby projector traced his writ-large strokes, transforming them into dripping, green simulated spray paint over the High Line for some 30 seconds. Then the building was clean, ready for a new display of virtual vandalism.

The book will be called The Death of Cool, but McInnes says the subtitle remains undetermined: he was considering "From Teenage Rebellion to the Hangover of Parenthood," but "the daddy thing" is only about a page and he doesn't want to mislead anyone. The rest is "basically a big pile of bar stories." There's the time he showed up for a blind date and discovered the girl was paralyzed, for example. And the time he gave himself gonorrhea of the throat.

"We didn't want it to come across as a memoir," he said. "It's really a punk rock version of I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell."

He hopes to complete The Death of Cool in time for a summer 2011 release. Meanwhile, Street Boners--a book of style commentary from his current site, Street Carnage--is out May 27 from Grand Central.

In addition to humor, there will be "a tiny bit of sadness" in the form of heroin overdoses, and some discussion of the "intense satisfaction" he gets from raising his children.

"I'm not cool anymore," said McInnes, who is 39. "I gotta pass the torch to the next generation of wastoids."

Dave Eggers spoke recently at Berkeley's J-School about print journalism. He and fellow McSweeney's leaders took the opportunity to explain the economics of the quarterly's recent newspaper experiment, the Panorama. Reports SF Weekly:

Many people assumed Dave Eggers' business model for the next-generation newspaper was something like, "I'm so cool, people will write for my paper for free!" Not so--it wasn't for free....

[Panorama publisher Oscar Villalon] said writers typically made between $500 and $1,000 for their stories. Some writers made less, in the $200 to $250 range. Villalon, former book editor at the Chronicle, said this compared favorably with the Chronicle's freelancer rate, which he said could be as low as $50 or $100 per article.

And, yes, the cachet of taking part in a super-duper cool happening definitely helped. Stephen King, for instance, wrote an entire eight-page section on the 2009 World Series. What did they pay him? "Believe me, it was not over $1,000," Villalon said.

Eggers remains steadfast in his support of print, and said that almost none of Panorama's content would go online. He also declared it "impossible" that Gourmet magazine was not profitable, an idea that no one in the audience challenged. (Choire Sicha, however, has some thoughts on that.)

By way of a counterpoint to Eggers' vehemently old-school approach, there's the story of Vice-grows-up, which David Carr examines in this week's Media Equation column:

Last Tuesday night, there was a semiannual meeting for the Vice tribe. The company has grown to 560 employees in 30 countries, with 2,500 freelancers who are mostly paid in hipster cred. This success has created some dissonance for a crew of raconteurs who have spent much of their lives laughing at the stiffs who live pointless lives in dumb jobs defined by their next PowerPoint presentations.

Yet there they were, Shane Smith, one of the company's founders, and the creative director Eddy Moretti clicking on the next slide at their corporate event in a bar on 6th Street in the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn, the hippest street in the hottest neighborhood in the coolest borough ... well, you get the idea.

This much is certain: the media of the future will need to be extremely cool.

Vice, according to their press release, is pleased:

"Most people reading this press release will think, 'Vice and CNN, hmmm... That's an odd pair of bedfellows for you.' And you'd be right the 'Hipsters Bible' hooking up with the World's Global News Voice is a bit odd," said VICE founder Shane Smith. "But when we found ourselves evolving as a company and covering news stories around the world there was truly no other option for a partner. CNN was our first and only choice. In a world of hyper-partisan OP/ED 'news' CNN is the only one left with both credibility AND reach. We couldn't be more excited with a partner unless it was Jimi Hendrix (nod to all the Baby Boomers out there) joining our rock and roll band."

Apparently expressing respect for the Baby Boomers is the final frontier in irony!

Meanwhile, CNN.com, coyly praising Vice for its "very transparent approach to journalism," has this to say on its new Vice-centric Web page:

"The staff at CNN.com has recently been intrigued by the journalism of VICE, an independent media company and Web site based in Brooklyn, New York ... We believe this unique reporting approach is worthy of sharing with our CNN.com readers."

At the Last Crack Hipster’s corner bodega, the code word is “Casaban.” You’re handed a brown paper bag containing the glass tube with a tiny bunched-up ball of steel wool at one end, and a little lighter. It costs $2.50. (A can of Coca-Cola is 75 cents.)

For a moment a few years ago, among the downtown “edgy” set, crack was hip. At least as an idea: “Crack is Back” was the logo on downtown curator A-ron’s $60 T-shirts. No one ever really did it. The Sun reported back in 2005 that Kate Moss had done crack; but the Last Crack Hipster says she never really did crack--wasn’t a “crackhead.” For the Lower East Side artists, it was enough that Dash Snow smoked it and took lots pictures of it. Now he’s dead. The Last Crack Hipster says he’s got mad respect for Dash Snow.

The Last Crack Hipster wants me to keep mum about most of the personal stuff. He’s around 30 and a longtime member of a graffiti collective.  The Last Crack Hipster looks a bit like a raccoon, but not in a bad way. He’s a shower man, prefers the spray to the soak, has an iPhone and a serious girlfriend. Grew up out West. His parents aren’t millionaires, but if he’s in a tight spot, they’ll help him out. His apartment is littered with art books and kitty litter. A high-school doodler and onetime community college dabbler, he never lost the fascination with pop culture that ate his homework; his eyes are still wide. They’re bulging now, as he tears open a fresh Chore Boy. People will call it Brillo, but it’s Chore Boy, the one with the little boy on it. You have to get the copper-scrubbing pad because the other one is aluminum and it’s terrible for you. It burns your brain. So once you’ve got the copper-scrubbing pad, you pinch off about a gumdrop’s worth. You hold this over a flame, burn it really good, because there’s like a layer of cleaning product—well, whatever it is, it burns green at first. Wait until it turns black. If you don’t, you can taste some sort of chemical, probably cancerous.

Are we having fun yet?

You also need something to push the burnt copper into the glass tube. A chopstick will do. Push the Chore Boy down a little bit, to allow for enough room at the top to put the crumbs of crack on. Crack comes in a baggie the size of your fingernail with the yellow rocks in it. Twenty bucks. It’s ready to smoke. Ready rock. Hard. When you buy it, you say, “I want Hard.” A lot of crackheads on the street melt all their crack down into the Chore Boy and it looks green. If they get frisked by a cop, it’s just paraphernalia.

When being smoked, crack doesn’t have a strong smell; it’s like a sulfuric smell but with a sweetness, and the smell goes away really quick. Your house isn’t going to smell like crack, even if you don’t have one of those discreet cardboard kitty shitboxes lying around.   

When you’re smoking crack, ideally you want to keep the flame on the crack and away from the Chore Boy: You want the rock to heat up and cook down into it. It starts to melt and then it slides down and that’s when you go boom and level it out so it stays right at the screen. It’s right there bubbling and you’re not sucking like a cigarette or a joint; you’re basically like inhaling as little as you can. You just want to direct the flow into your mouth; you don’t want to suck the liquid down. Once the burning crack passes through the Chore Boy, it smokes as it cools. That’s the smoke that you want. Most people don’t seem to get that. It looks like the crack is gone, but you can kind of see it in there, in the Chore Boy, ideally it sits there and bubbles. The brown juice that drips down and looks like a film of motor oil on the side of the glass is the crack rock’s sweet nectar. People call it the Caviar. Taking someone else’s Caviar hit is uncool. 

THE LAST CRACK Hipster insists that, as negatively hyped as it is, crack is not really that big of a deal compared to a lot of things. Granted, it’s highly addictive, and granted, it destroys people’s lives. Lots of times, a person will hit it and not feel anything much and be like, What’s the big deal? You hit again and again and again for a night. But the next day you don’t necessarily want crack again.

The media got it a bit wrong, he said. It’s not quite the bogeyman that they make it out to be. People who snuffled mountains of coke for years, the instant someone mentions crack, they freak out, panic, run the other way.

Crack Hipsters were a reaction to their parents’ nudge-nudge, upper-income-bracket embrace of cocaine. The Last Crack Hipster likes to point to the 1990s. The year that Nevermind dropped, in September 1991. A week or two later, the world went gaga for Michael Jackson’s album Dangerous, with the hit single, “Black or White.” But by January, Nirvana was ruling the charts. David Geffen had signed Sonic Youth. They didn’t have to release anything on any schedule. But Geffen knew if Sonic Youth signed, the best new grunge bands would follow.

Geffen bet right. Kurt Cobain didn’t want to go on Geffen’s label; Sonic Youth leader’s, Thurston Moore, talked him into it, so they could go on tour together. The kids ate it up. Everything had been getting too phony and theatrical. They wanted something real. The grunge scene was real. Heroin somehow went along for the ride, as a “real drug.”  But how did crack snake its way into pop culture?

In 1994 Kurt Cobain blew his brains out; meanwhile, a couple of fellows in Quebec start Vice magazine, a significant force in the mash-up of graffiti artists, skaters, DJs, male models, slam poets, drug dealers, party promoters, T-shirt designers. Maybe you just worked the cash register at Supreme, but you could be a “lifestyle artist.” You could be an accountant by trade so long as you wore it right. You want to do the ’80s rocker thing with the long hair and the tats, or how about go the exquisitely sloppy route, all Middle America with the wifebeater and the potbelly? Do it.

There were also the hard-core pioneers: graffiti writers from Sherman Oaks who would slice your face open, or guys who declared, I’ll fuckin’ smooch a dude, whatever, yo. Whatever the pose, do it right and you can collect your prize: You’re an artist now, the superstar of your own show. If you’re lucky, your picture might wind up in the Do’s and Don’ts of Vice, alongside the skinny Puerto Rican kid with no teeth, neon full-shutter sunglasses, an oversize pristine baseball cap with the bill flipped up, taking a leak on a street corner in broad daylight. 

But by the early 2000s, the cycle of cynicism that began in the ’90s caught up to the Vice generation. Heiress Paris Hilton got fucked from behind on camera, the ultimate star of her own show. But the purists still had a card to play: crack. A new lease on coolness, bohemian transgression, mystery.

The Summer of 2004, the cover of Vice magazine showed Pete Doherty hitting a crack pipe. A few months later he’s dating Ms. Moss, a cracked romance.

Oh dear God no. No, no—no way. Check this … It’s so … ha!

A powerful thought was rattling around the Last Crack Hipster’s brain. So check it out, the downtown hipsters were doing their thing, crack jumped the pond and burned up London; meanwhile, the hip-hoppers were gassing. In 2005, the rapper Juelz Santana came with the hit single “I Am Crack”:

Touch the coke, touch the pot, add the soda what you got ME!

I am what I am I be what I be and that you will see I AM CRACK

Santana was saying, “You think crack’s cool, here’s the recipe, tough guy, you will see.”

THE LAST CRACK Hipster had finished the Hard and was settling into Mad Scientist mode with the Soft and the spoon and the baking soda. Something about patience being the key, don’t rush it. Things were getting weird.

He suggested I call the coke dealer he says taught the Lower East Side set how to “cook”: that is, how to turn a bag of blow into a crack rock. The Chef’s clean-cut, L.A. born and raised. He spent three years milking the LES.

By early ’07, crack had begun its inevitable decline in the fickle world of fashionable downtown New York. (Some people didn’t get the memo; the original Crack Dork Amy Winehouse fixed that.) But in the days when Ms. Moss and Mr. Snow were doing the twist at his Tribeca studio, it wasn’t uncommon for the Chef to teach 10 or more “rich kids” how to cook, in a week. Lots of these youngsters didn’t have the dedication, patience or mental fortitude to create “the miracle of life;” they preferred to pay for the goods and the show. “I was known as the best chef around, so people would call me just to get me to come over and cook,” he told me. “But yeah, obviously, most of these kids were in it to be cool or whatever, lightweights. Except for those who weren’t, who eventually fell off.” It was usually dudes, but then there would be girls with the dudes and then sometimes the girls would start calling. The Chef feels pretty bad about what he did, says he saw a lot of good kids go bonkers, wind up in jail or the nuthouse. He may or may not still be in the game, but it’s been years since he trained any new chefs. He made a vow.

I pulled a big art book, Nest, from a nearby shelf: a beautifully bound volume documenting Mr. Snow and Dan Colen, the kings of the New New York School artist crew, creating one of their famous hamster nest experiences in an empty apartment. Here a photo of a naked pregnant babe teetering on top of a ladder, shreds of paper floating all around her; there a mangy red-eyed maniac grinning as he tinkles on the rising tide of paper and pillow stuffing. Ten pages of Nest is enough to make a man lunge for the crack pipe, or sledgehammer, whichever’s handy.

The Last Crack Hipster pushed an extra thumbtack into the blanket covering his window. He was getting the wah, wah, wahs. Basically, your adrenal glands are pumping and your fight-or-flight instinct kicks in and you become naturally fearful, maybe toward the police because of the drug’s illegality.

All of this is ending, donzo: Last week A-ron hosted a bring your own homemade ’zine party, open to anyone with a glue stick and a Kinko’s card. We’re on the cusp of something new. The Last Crack Hipster can feel it in his bones. These kids are coming up and technology is going to drive them hard. Insane. Everything that you do is just going to be out there. Look at Twitter: “I’m eating dessert.” 

The Last Crack Hipster finishes tacking the blanket in front of his window. Then he sits down, leans forward and lights his lighter. With a candle. No clicking noise, see? 

editorial@observer.com

This story was updated from an original version published Oct. 20, 2009.

So, off to Brooklyn we go! Vice Magazine is throwing an absurdly un-frugal Halloween party in Williamsburg on Oct. 31, with expenses totaling more than $250,000, a spokesman for the magazine said.

And why throw something so ostentatious at a time when we're watching the ax fall in every other part of town?

A press release for the party reads that "while the dinosaurs that surround us slowly suffocate in the tar pits of their financial ruin, [Vice] is throwing a massive Halloween birthday party to celebrate our 15th anniversary."

Testy!

It'll take place in an unoccupied warehouse on North 10th Street between Berry and Wythe in Williamsburg, directly across the street from the Vice offices. There will be an open bar all night, several skating ramps and dozens of security men and firemen and policemen. The warehouse has a capacity of about 1,800 over two floors.

The party is celebrating the 15th anniversary for Vice, and the release of "a never-before-seen 1994 issue," which includes "an interview" with Elizabeth Wurtzel, "an essay" by then-Sassy editor Christina Kelly about why My So-Called Life should be saved and a Kato Kaelin "interview."