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VICE MAILLetters - The What We Do Is A Secret IssueEATING HUMBLE PIE Hey Vice, The political writers and the travel journalists in your magazine are the best in the country. They take chances and ask questions that are not done anywhere else in the world. The person who wrote the Madden 08 review, however, knows little. The reason Madden is such a popular game is he told them that he would not put his name on it unless it had 11-on-11-player competition when the first edition came out. Until then, that did not exist in a game. The head-to-head capabilities of Madden changed the way games were played forever. As a man, Madden visited injured players in the hospital when he was a coach. He is a great man. Sorry if you feel that because he is fat he doesn’t measure up to your cool code. However, he was coach of the Raiders in Oakland in the 70s and could walk down any street there without being fucked with. I doubt you could even drive through that area without shitting yourself. STAL HERZ Via viceland.com OK, sorry. We got our facts wrong in a review of a video game that the whole world forgot five minutes ago. You’ve got us. LOVE IT OR LUMP IT? Re: the “War Resistant” article: All you military deserters deserve exactly what you will get. You were never forced into it. You joined of your own free will. Then, when the going got tough for you, you made excuses and RAN. You turned your back on your country AND its citizens when you were needed. Now this country will turn its back on you. Say what you want about the beauty of Canada, there is an emptiness in your heart that can only come from a man or woman that has no country to call his or her own. Signed, LOVER OF LIFE IN THE USA! Via viceland.com You’re saying it in a way too shitty and belligerent way, but we sort of agree with you. We were more interested in the whos and hows of going AWOL than in trying to say we’re big fans of the practice. Still, fuck you. CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTION Dear Vice, I grew up really poor and quit high school to work full-time to pay bills and buy food. I know that not everyone has the money to pay for education. I needed help, but I didn’t join the military to pay for it because I didn’t want to deal with possibly GOING TO WAR. It’s not the only option. It’s called doing research, getting my high school diploma, and finding ways to pay for school, like Pell Grants and low-interest loans. I have minimal debt, a master’s degree, and I’m not a douchebag. TARA Via viceland.com Damn, there was the burn we were just looking for after that last letter. Thanks, Tara. BEAT BRAT To Whom It May Concern: I am a writer and editor of the finest caliber. I am mostly a poet but have dabbled in prose and editing for many different companies under many pseudonyms, all for a quick buck. I am offering my services to do the same for you. I have traveled, bummed, and thumbed around this country for many years of my provincial life. I am steeped in the teacup of America, particularly the backwoods, psycho-eyes, music and whiskey-jug crowd, and the industrial-wasteland glaze-eyed set, sometimes side-by-side. I have learned from gritty, dishtowel experiences on skid row as well as from clean-cunt, floated excursions on the peripheral banks of silted rivers, haberdashing and grazing with the elegant and dour brides of this country’s highest regarded institutions of learning. I am still only 25, and quite the handy wordsmith. I am tired of staying in neon-light dive motels surrounded by and writing about grimy, steel-painted people who are all too often angrily starving for some star-gone, perverted fix. It is time for me to go back to the world of the dying statue from whence I came. I have a refined sense of this doleful world of culture, having been sponsored in Paris by a wealthy diplomat family who were my benefactors when I was a poor artist. They commissioned some poems and music from me and needing ample time to compose them, I stayed there for almost a year. In that time I learned much about this ill-fated daydream viciously called “modern life,” living, as we were, on the Champs-Élysées and going to parties with rich debutantes and assorted humbucking daffies with daisy-chain, nubile ghost-waifs for companions. I can be a mighty asset to any organization, and I am a busy man but endlessly flexible. Looking forward to the pleasure of your acquaintance, DENNY Via email So wait, this is confusing. Does that make us the industrial-wasteland glaze-eyed set, or the world of the dying statue it’s time for you to go back to? Or maybe the dying-statue world is where we all return to when we’ve finished steeping in the American teacup, except for the steel-painted people? If you could drop a hint, it would really help. It’s been a long time since we’ve had to translate anything from high-school-Kerouac-fan-trying-to-get-laid into English and we’re a little rusty. Also, please post a video of yourself reading this letter aloud on YouTube and send us the link. Please, please, please. THE NAIL IN THE COFFIN Dear Vice, “Your tongue slides back and forth across the roof of my mouth. I can taste who you had for dinner. I don’t think I’ll ever kiss like that again: closed mouth with little interaction, shoulders too scared to touch. Let our hips be appalled of one another as our favored parts lay waste to future generations. I would gladly poison my young for a moment’s instinctive pleasure. We were given only the same courtesy, so let us extend only the finest of ourselves ahead. My finest intentions of how this world should be gladly become themselves to horrid branch-lings that grow and stretch upward but soon feel weak and fall to ash. We should be so lucky. To find ourselves nothing but inanimate is the only hope I have left. Please send me a message from heaven, I would very much like to hear about the life I will never have.” This is a sample of my writing. I have many things that are less and more vulgar. I believe that I would offer a somewhat offensive and eye-catching approach to a small section of your magazine. I am a writer from Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. I have a voice that would like to be heard. Your audience would be a perfect medium for me to infect further possible masses with my thoughts and ideas. I mostly write prose-style poetry. I would be happy to take a suggested assignment from you and turn it into something that your magazine would be enthusiastic about publishing. Please respond with suggestions and comments. MICHAEL G. DICK Via email Wait, is this Denny from the last letter again, just with a new fake name? If not, you guys should hook up and start a literary magazine. You can call it the Misguided, Lazy, Wet Fart Review. Between Denny’s “humbucking daffies with daisy-chain, nubile ghost-waifs” and your “horrid branch-lings that grow and stretch upward but soon feel weak and fall to ash,” it could be the most unintentionally readable thing ever. ICP NITPICK Dear Vice, In Thomas Morton’s piece about the Gathering of the Juggalos, he quoted a Juggalo as saying “woot woot.” I’m quite sure the Juggalo said “woop woop.” For some reason, I thought you should know. BRIAN HAMILL Via email The author responds: “Nope. It was woot.” AND THE WICHITA LINEMAN IS STILL ON THE LINE Dear Vice, Up until a few weeks ago my favorite bands were Toad the Wet Sprocket and Spin Doctors (I’m not joking). Things changed when my brother left a copy of your awesome mag at my house over Thanksgiving. I really felt changed after reading your interview with Cass McCombs. This guy looks so cool, calmly sipping his milkshake with shades on like he’s a really famous movie star—think Tom Cruise in Cocktail or Marlon Brando in anything. Look at his eyes… so awesome. I wondered, as I read your enlightening words, how does one arrive at this level of cool? Then it hit me. I live in Wichita. You guys in New York were born to do this. So I’ve decided I’m coming up and putting everything on the line. But I need some help. How do I become more like you and, more importantly, like Cass McCombs? He’s elusive and monumental at the same time. A real leader of the pack. I’d happily come work at your office for free and do anything to make it there. But I could only work for free for three weeks before I would have to find a paying gig (that is, unless of course you took me on). Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that you guys are tops in my book. Thanks for turning me on, I feel like every day is a Beatles song now. Best, MICHAEL BERGMAN Via email If you’re ripping on us with some Thetan level-8 sarcasm there, fair enough. If you’re not, and this is really what you’re like, then here is our advice: Don’t change! Fuck New York, fuck us, fuck music. Stay there in Wichita and pretend it’s 1993. You’ll be way happier. CORRECTIONS We forgot to credit Keith Gessen as the translator of Ludmila Petrushevskaya’s stories in the Fiction Issue. This is really bad because he is an excellent translator. Additionally, we had never even heard of Petrushevskaya and he brought her work to our attention, sent us three stories, wrote the bio for her that appears in the front, and got her to write the introduction to her stories. Keith is also the editor-in-chief of N+1 and the author of All the Sad Young Literary Men, which comes out in April 2008. Also: We misspelled Quiksilver in our last issue. Sorry about that.
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