ARTICLES BY JEFF JOHNSON
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 HANG THE O.J.
Recently, on June 12, 1994, O.J. Simpson’s ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson was stabbed to death in the tony Los Angeles enclave of Brentwood, California, along with 25-year-old waiter Ronald Goldman. I’ve never heard much about Brentwood, which sits just west of Beverly Hills—except in the Alex Cox film Repo Man, where a character says, “John Wayne was a fag… I installed two-way mirrors in his pad...
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  THE HEART & SOUL OF A BAND CALLED PAVEMENT
Now, we all know lots of stuff about that dreamboat Stephen Malkmus. We get it. He’s a lyrical genius, a hugely underrated guitar player, and he’s real cute. We also know enough, for now, about Spiral Stairs, Malkmus’s partner in Pavement leadership. He too can shred far above the usual indie-rock mope, he has a clean-cut...
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 ROBERT POLLARD
The great thing about Robert Pollard is that while he seems pretty pragmatic and passionate about his songwriting and Guided by Voices legacy, he's also kind of fuck-off about it. He's a 50-year-old grandpa who calls his new band Boston Spaceships, after all. And the name of their record is slightly...
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 THE DETECTIVE WHO BUSTED TWO OLD LADIES...
This year, in Los Angeles, two senior citizens, Helen Golay, 77, and Olga Rutterschmidt, 75, were convicted of murder. They were both sentenced to consecutive life terms. On two separate occasions, they had taken homeless men—Paul Vados and Kenneth McDavid—under their wings...
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 GEORGE SAUNDERS
The Vice InterviewGeorge Saunders is that rare sort of writer who may have gone ahead and invented a new genre. I'm not really sure to call it yet, but it's something along the lines of Dystopian Social Satire. I would say something else here about Chekhov and magical realism, but I don't want to get too clunky. Mayb...
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 HIS & HERS WATCHES
He called into a local radio station upward of 60 times in January of 1989. Provided a series of correct answers that surpassed the other callers' series of answers and advanced southward to the state capital for the semi-finals. One night at a Holiday Inn on the main drag (Golden Girls followed by ...
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 FAMOUS PEOPLE
Hate Stuff TooSPECIAL LETTERS EXTRA: WHAT DO YOU HATE?
Hello Vice,
I detest smoking. I smoked for more than 50 years and finally quit when I had my car accident a few years ago. I was then shocked at how awful everyone smelled...
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 AMERICAN HISTORY X'D
Correcting the Lies You're ToldAs Howard Zinn, Chuck D, and Zack de le Rocha have said countless times before, all that shiznit they taught you in school about Columbus and the earth being a sphere and all that other Eurocentric shit are nothing but a bunch of lies. So was most of that "math" crap (when we supposed to use that...
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 AIDS IN AFRICA
Cass McCombs' Cheeriest DittyIn Africa, somewhere near 29.4 million people are living with HIV/AIDS, and 3.5 million new infections occurred in sub-Saharan Africa in 2002. Ten million African youths from 15 to 24 years old and approximately three million children under 15 have HIV. And almost eleven million children have been o...
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 SWEAT ROCK
Frog Eyes Get a SoakerCarey Mercer is the 27-year-old brain behind Frog Eyes, a band from Victoria, BC, that makes music composed of equal parts glam urgency and complete Tom Waits bat shit. Clothingwise, they don't jazz it up too much-they've got a Home Depot/your-cool-uncle thing goin' on. However, the sheer brilliance...
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 SOMETHING LIKE AN ANOMOANON
The last decade brought a lot of embarrassing Bonnie Prince Pretenders out of the woodwork, but the only warbler who matches Will Oldham note for note is, of course, his older brother Ned. And Ned's got a band called the Anomoanon, who look and sound like smart, woodsy stoners that dabble in Nixon-e...
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