iSpy

One-Man Cult Buster: Rick Ross“I’m ready to disbelieve you” would be a good motto for the Egon of Cult Busters, Rick Ross.You’ll notice his name in bold on most any Page Six item about Britney’s red bracelet fad or TomKat’s natal nuttiness.

As the media’s go-to guy on Scientology and the Kabbalah Center, Ross has helped expose such these and other groups as creepy enterprises which prey on the psychologically vulnerable, rob them of their fortunes and get away with it all by packaging themselves as “new religions.”

He entered the cult monitoring and deprogramming biz in the early 80’s after witnessing a sinister Christian sect try to convert aged Jews in his grandmother’s Arizona nursing home. Ross now heads up his eponymous New Jersey-based institute, whose website features one of the largest and most comprehensive databases on controversial social movements, anywhere.

Ross’ quarry includes “everything from the power of miracles, mysticism to ‘God Men’ gurus and traveling prophets.” Al Qaeda, Nation of Islam, Chabad, Mormonism, Burning Man, even AmWay – all receive their own dossier.

So We Light This, Like, Wicker Dude On Fire And Achieve Inner Peace: Even Burning Man Has Cult-Like TendenciesBut with such a widely cast net, he’s invited plenty of backlash, most of which depicts him as an semi-educated profiteer who’s as obsessive in his methods as the purported mind-fuckers he aims to take down.

Ross has been sued countless times, and was once tried criminally for “kidnapping” 18 year-old Jason Scott, whose mother had hired the deprogrammer to save her son from the clutches of the Life Tabernacle Church, to which she’d formerly belonged herself. Ross was acquitted, though the concomitant civil suit – which ordered him to pay $2,500,000 in damages – forced him into bankruptcy. (He later settled with the plaintiff for a much-reduced sum after Scott reconciled with his family.)

Ross’ consultation on the Waco fiasco of the late-90’s also had his tactics called into question, this time by the federal government. (The G-men of course otherwise did a bang-up job rescuing Branch Davidians).

Yet Ross responds that his slanderers are embarrassed apologists for cults, if not masquerading agents of them. See the extensive Scientologist-suborned campaign to discredit him, especially the Church’s front website Religious Freedom Watch.

After chatting with brainwashing's nemesis, I’m ready to believe him.

The Kabbalah Center could teach a course in brilliant marketing strategies. What do they do right, and can legitimate businesses or religions learn a thing or two from them?

First of all, what the Kabbalah Center does to a large extent is tell people what they want to hear, which can be very appealing. This includes various magical means to supposedly stop or slow aging, ward off evil and generally gain greater control over the world around you. This is not something the organized Jewish community can ethically offer.

Kangol Rabbi: Yehuda Berg, son of the founder of the Kabbalah CenterHaving said that, there are some things the Kabbalah Center does that may make sense, such as targeting demographic groups with specifically relevant programs, making holiday events such as Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur generally accessible through a per event ticket price. The Kabbalah Center also tailors its courses, classes and seminars to fit themes within popular culture and to answer common questions concerning people’s daily lives.

The various branches of the Kabbalah Center also offer a sense of community through constant ongoing activities. This appeals to many people, in a world that increasingly includes fractured families and a growing sense of individual isolation. A tight-knit small group structure affords more intimate personal connections and is the key to success for many so-called “cults.”

You stopped performing interventions a while ago due to the legal nightmares these entailed. Tell me what an intervention looks and feels like. What’s the procedure for confronting someone who’s been brainwashed, and what’s the most harrowing experience you’ve had doing this?

I have not stopped performing interventions on a voluntary basis. Families often retain me to do an intervention with an adult on a voluntary basis. I have done about 500 interventions since beginning my work in 1982, perhaps two-dozen were involuntary and those took place in the early 1990s. About half of these involuntary interventions were with minor children under direct parental supervision.

A voluntary intervention means the person is free to go at any time and usually cooperates to please their family. Most often the person that is the focus of the intervention is not told in advance to avoid group interference. But after the initial introduction and explanation, an adult is free to go if they wish.

Hurry-Up Time: Moonies and jihadists featured prominently in Don DeLillo's Mao IIAbout 70% of my voluntary interventions end successfully, which means the person who was the focus of the effort decided to leave the group or situation that drew concern. I still do involuntary interventions with minor children under the direct supervision of their custodial parent(s). At times I have also worked with adults under court orders, who were restrained legally due to some safety and/or welfare concern.

Interventions regarding groups called “cults” are much like alcohol or drug interventions. They almost always include family members. I never work alone. This type of intervention is not therapy or counseling, but rather an educational process that revolves around sharing information and discussing concerns. This process includes providing relevant historical material and documentation, discussing various persuasion techniques and related undue influences.

The concerns that typically prompt interventions are increasing isolation, estrangement from family and friends, the exploitation of the person involved potential safety issues and the probable consequences of further involvement. An intervention usually takes about three or four days, eight hours a day.

Perhaps the most harrowing intervention effort I have ever undertaken was working with a Waco Davidian locked out of the cult compound in 1993 because of the standoff that took place between the cult and federal law enforcement. That intervention actually occurred in Waco only a few miles from the cult compound during the standoff. And despite the media being everywhere no one ever intruded and the intervention ended successfully.

On your website’s FAQ sheet, you give the Merriam Webster definition of “cult”: “1. A formal religious veneration 2. A system of religious beliefs and rituals also its body of adherents.” You also claim that the “cult mentality” consists of “black and white thinking, a low tolerance of ambiguity and a relentlessly judgmental attitude.” Taken together, these characteristics make every person alive a cultist, don’t they?

No.

The Galactic Confederacy Says Call Her Kate: What Scientology Hath WroughtThere are three salient features that define the overwhelming majority of destructive cults and make them distinctly different. And these three features are common to most groups called “cults.”

First, there is an absolute authoritarian form of leadership without any meaningful accountability. A single living leader most often becomes the defining and binding element of the group. And members almost always submit to that authority without question. He or she becomes the locus of power and focus of attention, the hub of the organization and its driving force.

Second, there is a group process of indoctrination that generally denigrates critical or independent thinking and promotes a kind of group mindset. This mindset is based upon the leader’s value judgements, agenda and personality, rather than the individual thoughts and feelings of group members. This mindset can also be seen as the result of undue influence. The process used to achieve this mindset has been called “brainwashing.”

Third, the group does harm. The most extreme examples would be death due to medical neglect, suicide or violence prompted by the group. Cults often harm people through financial or sexual exploitation and also unfair labor practices. People involved may be damaged psychologically and emotionally because of the group’s demands and its practices.

Put these three things together and they make up the basic profile of most groups called “cults.”

Natural Born Psychopath: Branch Davidian David KoreshWhat’s the difference between a “guru” like Deepak Chopra and a “cult leader” like David Koresh?

First of all, Deepak Chopra is a medical doctor and David Koresh, whose given name was Vernon Howell, never graduated elementary school.

Koresh was a stereotypical cult leader. He made grandiose claims and was described by psychiatrists as a “psychopath.” Koresh also exercised absolute power over his followers. He exploited women and children sexually and demanded total commitment. That mindset of total loyalty and devotion to Koresh and his mission ultimately led to the deaths of most of his followers.

Deepak Chopra is essentially a benign spiritual entrepreneur and seems more interested in making money then in creating a cult. Chopra was once a devotee of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the old guru who once influenced the Beatles.

Other than claims about Dr. Chopra supposedly sexually harassing women he works with, he appears to be a relatively harmless proponent of the so-called “New Age” self-help movement. Chopra is a fairly straightforward businessman that makes money from books, seminars, lectures and various other products and services and I have never received a complaint to date about him from any family.

If you weren’t busting cults, what line of work would you be in, and why?

Before cult busting my work revolved around restoring old cars and auto salvage. I once worked as a vice president at a large salvage business in Arizona. I am still something of a car enthusiast, and if I wasn’t working to expose destructive cults and helping families to salvage the lives of loved ones, maybe I would still be salvaging cars.

Previous iSpys

The Whiz Kid of Warfare
How Noah Shachtman has revolutionized military reporting.

A Blacklist The Left Could Use
Meet the Christopher Hitchens of postpunk.

Hide the Salome
The prurient Victorian genius of Molly Crabapple.

Ultimate Fighting’s Norman Mailer
Meet Josh Gross, the most literate man in the world's most brutal sport.

Tribal Threads
The designer of Gytha Mander on the holy land, holsters, and honeys.

Name: Noah Shachtman
Age: 35
Site: defensetech.org

The Clausewitz of Cyberspace: Defense Tech editor Noah ShachtmanNoah Shachtman is where grunt meets geek. As the editor of the hugely popular military blog Defense Tech, he writes daily about the tools and techniques of modern warfare. According to one anonymous testimonial, even Pentagon staffers peruse the site— and probably get a better sense of what’s transpiring in Iraq there than they do through in-house analysis.

Defense Tech is more than an ain't-it-cool playground for Rambo wannabes. For me, the summa of its cultural importance came after Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed in Baquba by a carefully coordinated U.S. air strike. Within hours, the site had posted a readable primer on how the mission that ended the Al Qaeda thug’s earthly presence reflected a “revolution” in F-16 aerial combat. So it was a momentous day on two fronts.

Especially impressive is that the reigning Clausewitz of cyberspace has no formal military or science training. Shachtman began covering battlefield technology as an interested freelancer for Wired, the New York Times and the Village Voice. If there is a fanboy quotient to his reportage, it's only because he revels in the esoterica of tactics, strategy and materiel that Donald Rumsfeld must be saving for his memoirs.

Armchair general? Not quite. Shachtman has traveled to Iraq and Israel and, as this Forward dispatch demonstrates, he's probably the only foreign correspondent ever to witness a Kaddish for American war dead at Camp Victory, just outside of Baghdad.

Two years ago, Military.com—owned by Monster.com—bought out Defense Tech. Shachtman tells Jewcy that he’ll be stepping down as editor next week and moving to an undisclosed location (the only hint he'll allow us to give is that it's big media). Rest easy, though—his days of invigilating the military-industrial complex are far from over.

Wings of the Dove: The manless Predator drone performs recon without the human riskHow'd you become a military tech junkie?

It started slowly. Before 9/11, I was a straight-up tech reporter, covering everything from online drug dealers to Internet porn. A few weeks later, I was writing about Predator drones and how they might be used in the upcoming anti-terror fight. From there, more and more articles on the subject started to trickle in. My friends said that they loved the pieces, and encouraged me to write more. So I did. And a habit started to grow.

I couldn't believe how much cool gear—lasers, robots, supersonic jets, miniature sensors—there was. And how little attention it all received. I mean, this is a $500-billion–dollar-a-year industry. The stakes are life and death. And yet, the state of Brad and Jennifer’s marriage gets more ink. So the field was wide open, more or less. By the middle of 2002, I was pretty much permanently camping out in it.

Where do you get your info? You seem to have a great memory for devices and their uses in warfare.

I get my information any way I can—government websites, face-to-face interviews, anonymous tips. Military technology is a huge field; it doesn't lend itself to quick-hit, in-and-out reporting. Developing relationships and learning where to look all takes time.

I'm learning new stuff, literally every day, especially from my partners-in-blog-crime, like David Axe, Sharon Weinberger, and David Hambling.

Universal Soldier: For all his tech savvy, Shachtman still exalts the human above the mechanicalAny particularly noteworthy weapons in development right now?

The American soldier. I'll take a kick-ass infantryman, or a sharp-eyed intelligence officer, over any piece of gear. Every time. These guys are the ones that'll make the difference in the dirty wars the U.S. is going to be fighting in the years to come. And that's why it bugs me to no end to see them get short-changed, while gazillion dollar fighter jets and destroyers suck up all of the Pentagon's cash.

You spent some time in Iraq recently. What was the most awe-inspiring display of martial prowess you saw?

I don't know about "awe-inspiring display[s] of martial prowess." But I can tell you about soldiers that are really, really brave. I spent three weeks last summer with an Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit—a bomb squad, in other words. These guys, as often as ten times a day, would be out in Baghdad's 138-degree heat, defusing bombs, avoiding insurgent booby-traps, and dodging attacks. And they did it all with a cool professionalism that left me totally relaxed, even when the IEDs were going off. Here's a story I wrote about one of those days. Check out the ending, when Staff Sergeant Mark Palmer is hovering over a smoking mortar, trying to render the thing safe with a garden hose and a bucket of sand, before it explodes and kills us all.

A lot of Jews admire the IDF as the embodiment of Jewish dominance. How true is that conception? How capable is the IDF, and how do they compare to our own forces?

Does It Come In Black?: An IDF tank on patrolI haven't seen the IDF up close—at least, not since I got on this defense beat. (My last time in Israel was in 2000. I was supposed to go to the Golan for my honeymoon. But that trip was called off by Hezbollah.) I do know that the IDF is pretty much world-renowned for their abilities to handle everything from counterinsurgency to tank warfare, that they've spent years developing informants within the Arab community, and that they pioneered many of the high-tech war-fighting strategies that the rest of the world now uses—surveillance drones, for instance. All that said, the IDF seems to be running into many of the same problems in Lebanon that U.S. forces have found in Iraq. Putting a stop to a guerrilla army is tough.

You're quoted by both conservative and liberal bloggers. Yet judging by your blogroll, you tilt left. Is it wrong to associate war and military advances with the right?

I think the right in the U.S. is way, way more comfortable discussing military strategy and hardware than the left is. A lot of American liberals instinctually flinch from military matters. And that's a shame. Because, they're automatically taking themselves out of the debate over some of the country's (and the world's) most important debates.

Maybe that's what accounts for the inverse political correctness you regularly see in military circles. Everyone assumes that everyone else is to the right of Dick Cheney—that he or she is the only free-thinker in the bunch. Often times, the whole group turns out to be politically independent. But, publicly, they'll mouth conservative talking points, because they think it's one way to get ahead.

The Sorrow and the Pity: War is still hellIn a sense, you've made war your life. This means trafficking in death and destruction all day long. Ever have moments of doubt about this line of work? Is it depressing, or are you inured to the grimness by now?

Do I have moments of doubt? All the time. That whole 90's peace-and-prosperity thing was a lot cooler than what we have now.

What are your thoughts on the surge?

I'm skeptical. But I hope to hell it works. For more than three years, I've had soldiers complaining to me about the lack of boots on the ground. About how winnable this war might be, if only there were more of them patrolling Iraq.

But these guys didn't want a 10 or 15 percent increase in manpower, like the 21,5000 extra troops that the President publicly called for. The soldiers I've spoken to want their numbers dramatically boosted—by 50 percent, 100 percent, more. They want enough troops to completely blanket the country, or at least to pull off the classic counterinsurgency move of clearing out neighborhoods of guerrillas, and holding the areas for the good guys.

The problem is, there aren't enough people to send, these days. So American commanders are stuck making this incremental increase. Maybe, if they're positioned smartly, it'll be enough. Maybe. But I doubt it.

Counterinsurgency seems more akin to colonial civil service than combat. It's all about establishing trust and getting a local population to convert its loyalty to a foreign army based on that army's ability to lay the foundations of a new society. This gives our troops the added responsibility of acting like policemen and bureaucrats, doesn't it? Do you think they've got the chops, not to mention the necessary patience, to conduct "war at the graduate level," as counterinsurgency is often called?

Well, you've basically got all the guys teaching those graduate classes heading to Iraq for this push. And some of their announced moves—like stationing American troops

in downtown Baghdad, instead of holed up in U.S. mega-bases—sound smart. But again, I'm not sure even the most brilliant officers can turn Iraq around, at this point.

One of the suggested plans for concluding the war in Iraq has been to withdraw from Baghdad and establish semi-permanent garrisons in Kuridstan and "Shiastan." How viable do you think this option is? Can the Iraqi military secure the capital—and keep it secure—all on its own?

Not from what I've been told, no. Or at least, not without turning Iraq into El Salvador, circa 1983.

Gear Shift: Robots aren't smart enough to fight alone yetHarper's carries a cover story this month about America's "coming robot army." I wonder how much this reflects tech-savvy futurism, or the so-called "Vietnam Syndrome" of risk-averse warfare, taken to a fetishistic extreme. Do you think ground wars will ever be fought without human soldiers and the inevitability of human casualties?

I haven't seen the article. But if by “robot army” Harper's means an “all-robot army,” that isn't coming for a long, long, long time. Decades, at least. Ground robots are just too dumb, and don't see well enough. Hell, it's considered a major achievement if they can pick their way across uninhabited terrain, at slow speed. And then there are the safety concerns. We've all had our PC freak out for no reason. Now imagine your laptop had a machine gun. That's why armed ground robots that were supposed to ship out to Iraq years ago are still stateside.

Yes, there will be more and more robots in the military. But they will work in tandem with flesh-and-blood soldiers—and operate mostly at those human troops' commands.

Cool cover Harper's has got, though.

Previous iSpys

A Blacklist The Left Could Use
Meet the Christopher Hitchens of postpunk.

Hide the Salome
The prurient Victorian genius of Molly Crabapple.

Ultimate Fighting’s Norman Mailer
Meet Josh Gross, the most literate man in the world's most brutal sport.

Tribal Threads
The designer of Gytha Mander on the holy land, holsters, and honeys.

Men in Black: Strawn and the bandIf Joy Division and Sisters of Mercy had a kid, it would sound like Interpol. If they had another, more promising child with a likely trajectory into grad school, that little bugger would be called Blacklist.

Fronted by Josh Strawn, this brooding and cerebral quartet is already a common fixture at venues like the Knitting Factory and Mercury Lounge. They’ve also recorded a popular video on YouTube and been swooned over by Ultragrrrl, not to mention every other tattooed gamine with access to MySpace.

I first met Josh outside a debate about the Iraq war at Cooper Union. Apart from a shared interest in American foreign policy, we were there to support our former New School professor and mentor Christopher Hitchens. That night it was Hitch versus local radio “personality” and Black World Today contributor Playthell Benjamin, who said things like "Kuwaitis weren’t worth saving from Saddam in ‘91 because, see, I used to work construction with a bunch of Kuwaitis and they were all assholes.” For perhaps the first time in his eminently patient career, Hitch walked off the stage.

You might say the high comedy of this event crystallized the mutual affinity Josh and I felt for each other. Our anger was directed at the rhetoric wafting over from so-called “leftist” circles after 9/11, where anti-fascism and internationalism were non-starter concepts, and where there was nothing to choose between Bush and Bin Laden, let alone Bush and Saddam.

Well, it’s about time, I remember thinking. Here was lank-haired, mascara’ed musician not polishing the throne of Noam Chomsky but citing Paul Berman and Oliver Kamm, and the latest articles out of the social democratic literary journal Democratiya. At the very minimum, more signatories of Euston Manifesto should style themselves after Kiefer Sutherland in The Lost Boys.

Since this interview was conducted, Blacklist have hooked themselves onto even higher rungs of postpunk fame. They were included on a three-LP compilation album called Wierd Compilation [sic], which was recently celebrated in Art Forum (guess which act was most photo-friendly?) The band will be touring South By Southwest this spring.

The Old Man: Hitch's devoted followingDoes your fan base turn away when they discover Blacklist is an exponent of the so-called “decent Left”? Your lyrics are allusive enough, but you have no compunction about wearing your pro-regime-change politics on your sleeve, at least offstage.

I couldn’t say whether or not our fan base knows about our politics, though in a way they already appreciate them by virtue of liking the music. We play the way we do because we’re sick of complacency. It’s no wonder that much of what passes for independent music today is drab and lifeless—the people who make it are often soft-headed postmodern liberals. We want the intensity that came with believing there was such thing as truth and shouting about it.

That shouldn’t be the exclusive enterprise of conservatives, but it has been of late. What must it have been like to hear razor-sharp, swirling guitars in a dank club in Leeds circa 1982? Likewise, what must it have been like to live in a time when the notion of fighting against dictatorship, genocide, theocracy, and totalitarianism was embraced by the Left? On these two seemingly different questions, the politics of Blacklist is the same, and we preoccupy ourselves with offering an answer.

I will say that I have had occasion to discuss political matters with friends and fans here and there, and I have not yet been excommunicated. I will also say that that’s the way I think it should be. Liberals, progressives, leftists, whatever your term of endearment, these are the people who should be having conversations and embracing disagreement and debate.

At any rate, I think most people I speak with are actually interested to hear that there is a current of thinking that does not force one to choose between blindly supporting an administration with an unhealthy romance for power and marching in the streets alongside fascists and friends of fascism.

Post-ideological postpunk: Blacklist believes in a "decent" leftOn the other hand, nobody wants to budge too much from their anti-war position—which if you ask me is really more about being anti-American or anti-Bush than about being anti-war. People have a visceral hatred for Bush, which is understandable. But the politics of that side have almost nothing to do with internationalism. Or supporting the enforcement of the Genocide Conventions, for that matter.

The flip side is often forgotten. Namely, that the U.S. and Britain acted without the consent of major military and diplomatic powers, and in so doing, unilaterally (or bilaterally if you want) fulfilled their obligation to a very important agreement regarding the mass slaughter of national, ethnic, racial, and/or religious groups. We should be calling for more of this, not less of it, and I’d challenge anybody, whether they are a fan of Blacklist or not, to explain to me why they disagree.

I’m not asking for a Foreign Affairs white paper with this question, but what long-term strategies should we have for Iraq and Afghanistan?

I can make it somewhat short and sweet, then, and simply say that our strategies should involve nothing less than keeping our promises to the forces of liberalism and secularism in the Middle East. We shouldn’t abandon them to sectarian chaos and warlord-ism. Whatever anybody thought about the rationale for war, our having engaged in it can’t be reversed—which is, I think, the naive fantasy of much of the anti-war movement right now. Expressing solidarity with the liberal-democratic elements in the Islamic civil war should be the concern, in my opinion, of any decent Left.

And the issues in Gaza and the West Bank still need to be addressed. That the situation is an enormous violation of the rights of Palestinians should go without saying. As long as conditions of occupation remain the same, the situation will continue to provide a cover of legitimacy to bloodthirsty fanatics. If Sharon and George W. Bush can claim that the present arrangement is no longer feasible or desirable, then they should get on with seeing an end to it, regardless of what Hezbollah or Hamas does. To quote Christopher Hitchens, “Self-determination is not an award for good behavior.” Anybody who wants to be seen as a liberator by the Muslim world can hardly stand to sleep on this.

Base Materialist: French philosopher Georges BatailleYou used to read Proudhon and think that property was theft. But, like a lot of noble lefties, 9/11 changed your worldview. What sorts of dead philosophers are you absorbed in now, and what books can you recommend?

9/11 initially reinforced my worldview. At the time I believed that the chickens had come home to roost, that American corporate hegemony had been dealt a symbolic blow, etc. Not long afterward, that position started to strike me as an odd way to look at such a tragedy.

But the real break happened when I came to an impasse with postmodernism, which happened during a sustained engagement with both the writing of Georges Bataille and the current arguments in the philosophy of mind. As soon as the fashionable nonsense of relativism and authoritarian multiculturalism began to fall away, I found myself having to rethink things quite a bit. So it’s correct to say that 9/11 changed my worldview because I realized how wrong I must have been in making the same arguments as the Islamic Jihad Army and Mahmoud Ahmadenijad.

Lately I’ve come to agree with the point that history is philosophy with examples, so I’ve not been reading as much philosophy proper. When I do, my favorite dead ones are Spinoza, Hume, Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx. As for books to recommend, I think that if they haven’t done so yet, people should read at least a cursory history of the modern Middle East before anything else. Then, onto Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett, The Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan, and On Belief by Slavoj Zizek. I also think that the current scientific literature on the brain as well as the philosophical projects that have followed should be considered required reading for a human being living in this age.

I know you’re into promoting music from the Islamic world. Which are the hottest – and bravest – acts going? And why should we know about them?

The Persian Version: Iranian band AhooraMost of the artists making modern rock in the Islamic world that I know of are from Iran. They are all brave because the Iranian government prohibits their creative endeavors if they deviate even slightly from the government’s traditionalist template. Hack is by far my favorite. Every song on their most recent record, Man, is an absolutely fascinating blend of ethereal guitar textures à la The Cocteau Twins, driving rhythms and dark Persian melodies. It’s a very exciting record and, to my ears, some of the most musically adventurous stuff since The Mars Volta’s “De-Loused in the Comatorium” and Primal Scream’s “XTRMNTR.” Arsalan, Ban(s)hee, and Ahoora have some pretty great tracks too, many of which veer towards the psychedelic and bizarre, each in their own delightful way.

Hanging backstage with you once, I noticed that, apart from the usual vices of whiskey and cigarettes, the fare was pretty healthy. Soy Chips, etc. Are you guys vegetarian, or just trying to stay slim enough for the leather-and-jeans look?

Well, that’s what you get playing with a Smiths tribute band; the food was theirs. We do mainly Pakistani, Mexican, and Japanese. Some of us eat the flesh and others do not. Our favorite meal is Johnny Walker Black. Similarly, there are members of the band more hostile to regime-change policies than I am, and more inclined to postmodern relativism than to the Enlightenment. We’re a pretty pluralist bunch and we get along splendidly.

Demure yet outspoken, Molly Crabapple seems like a heroine out of Nabokov: perched on the fault-line between the Belle Époque and the postmodern, comfortable with Symbolist poetry as she is with the demimonde of the skin trade. Art or ardor: Who says you can’t have both?

Lady Crabapple's Fan: The Aubrey Beardsley influenceThe daughter of a Jewish-American mama and a Puerto Rican papa, Crabapple (née Jennifer Caban) took off from provincial Far Rockaway at 17 to travel the world. She learned to draw in a Paris Shakespeare & Co., working the register and sleeping on the floor, before legging it to Turkey and the mountains of Kurdistan, where she imbibed peasant folklore and not a little self-determination. You know how it goes at 17. But do you know anyone else at 23 who's been photographed frolicking naked through pink cupcakes and packing peanuts and peddles vignettes on-demand for The New York Times and Wall Street Journal?

Breasts, like ankles, were occasionally bared under Victorianism. Had Crabapple been sketching back then, Wilde would have had company at Reading Gaol. (Aubrey Beardsley, Oscar’s preferred book illustrator, is an avowed influence of hers.) A little over a year ago, she co-founded Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School, a palette guild cum rebel aesthetic movement where the models receive fair pay and the sketchers swill their absinthe and shade their bawdy in peace. The collective’s first volume, Dr. Sketchy’s Official Rainy Day Colouring Book, was released last month.

We spoke to her recently – just last week, in fact – about art, religion and sex, Anatolian history and why burlesque (making fun of people with no clothes on) is making a comeback.

When you were 18, you were briefly detained in a Turkish jail for sketching in Kurdistan. What did you make of the region? And as a Jew, were you sympathetic to the Kurds’ longing for their own homeland?

I love the Middle East generally, and Kurdistan specifically. I studied Turkish and Arabic for years—being just fluent enough in Turkish to get me into trouble, though not fluent enough to get me out of it. I dug the relaxed Kurdish take on Islam, their language, their raw, throaty music, the wild green hills near Dogubeyazit with the silver roads that went from nowhere to nowhere, how you could walk around, and within a few hours, women would invite you over for food, and how easy it was to talk to anyone. I even liked the guns and tribalism and sulfur whiff of violence.

But Southeastern Turkey five years ago was very recently a war zone. The Turkish government, despite being moderate by Middle Eastern standards, is no ideal democracy. Since Ataturk, the official party line is that minorities don't exist. Kurdish language and music were banned. Textbooks referred to Kurds as "mountain turks." "How Happy is He Who is a Turk" was written in thirty foot letters on the side of mountains.
Ver-sigh: Coppolla's missing dailies from 'Marie Antoinette.'
I stayed with people who had posters of Ataturk in the front rooms, and Kurdish nationalist posters in the back. I spent a long time in a village called Hassankeyf, all ancient and honey-colored, which the government was flooding to build their new dam. Of course, they didn't make any provision for the folks living there. You can check out Amnesty International for Turkey's dismal human rights record. Police in the East also constantly hassled me for talking to locals.

While I'm not sure about splitting Turkish Kurdistan off to make a Kurdish homeland (for one thing it would be vastly poorer than the more modernized West), the Turkish government could learn a lesson about multi-cultural tolerance from the Western democracies whose trappings they try to emulate.

So your parents just let you take off to travel the world at the age of 17? Not your stereotypical Jewish parents.

My dad's Puerto Rican, if that changes anything. And I'm just stubborn.

Is globe-hopping on no money an experience you'd recommend to anyone?

Yes! It teaches you diehard practicality, wile, guile, bits of several languages, how to keep yourself entertained on thirty-hour bus rides, and that everything you learned in high school is a lie.

What influenced you to move into the whole neo-Victorian, absinthe-drinking aesthetic? Aubrey Beardsley is not a point of reference one usually associates with kids from Far Rockaway.

I read lots of books when I was a kid. My mom's also an illustrator, and I grew up knowing about Toulouse-Lautrec and reading old copies of Salome. I'm not sure what initially tilted me towards that, but it sure stuck.

Like you, I also grew up in the unfashionable part of the outer boroughs. It can be a really hard place to be a creative, weird kid. How did you survive?

Feed Your Head: Molly in WonderlandBooks! And having an older boyfriend (something I recommend to every precocious teenage girl).

Do any books in particular stand out? And what do you recommend to the precocious guys? Older girlfriends?

Inspired by a Russian friend, I got really into the Silver Age Russian poets—Blok, Akhmatova, Tsetayeva. There was this sort of romantic, tragic decadence—looking back, we know that the Russian revolution was going to wipe out their way of life. Also, clichéd as it is, stuff about the Lost Generation made me want to go to Paris. I was a pretentious little twerp.

As for older girlfriends—if they can get them.

Do you think that the radical Jewish intellectual milieu had a big effect on your development? Any yiddishkeit in your way of seeing the world?

My family is a long line of Jewish non-conformists. My great-grandfather was an artist who joined the Bund, fled Russia in 1905, and opened a failed vegetarian chicken farm during the Depression. His paintings are now in the Smithsonian. The rest of my family were proto-hippies who went to India to follow the Baba, walked across America living on nuts, espoused communism and Madame Blavatsky, and got rejected by draft-boards for their long hair and pacifism. I definitely never felt out of place, looking at my lineage. There's something about Jews that makes us smart and nutty and dissatisfied.

You used to model nude for a bunch of places. Which ones? And would you do it again, or do you have qualms now that you're selling your art for the New York Times?
Maria Callas, Eat Your Colon Out: Pop Feminism at its Best
I've posed for Lowrider with a 20's automobile, in Shojo Beat fully clothed with crazy anime hair, thrice on Nerve.com, for prints that hung in swanky gallery shows and for books of pseudo-19th century French postcards. I've posed for photographers who I'm immensely proud to have worked with, like Aaron Hawks, who built room-sized sets for each shoot, or the French fashion photographer Eddie Briere. I've also posed for lots of sleazeoids with point and click cameras who could pay me $100 an hour.

I wouldn't be illustrating for the Times if I hadn't been a naked model. I got my Times job the way many illustrators get jobs—I did a postcard mailing to potential art directors. Postcard mailings cost hundreds of bucks. There's no way I could have afforded that if I were making $8 an hour (the fate of most art students). And, if I was pulling a 40-hour week, I probably would have been too tired to draw.

There's a huge precedent for Jewish Girls Gone Bad—moving to the Village, joining the counterculture, becoming artists or whatnot. Do you feel part of a grand tradition?

A bit. Right now I'm reading Trav SD's brilliant vaudeville history, No Applause, Just Throw Money, which is in part the story of Jewish girls who ran away from home, reinvented themselves, and took over the world.

Would you ever consider doing graphic novels?

Not my thing. Though maybe in the future, I'd love to do a heavily illustrated novel, though, a la Rent Girl by Michelle Tea and Laurenn McCubbin.

You told Gothamist that modern libertinism "all seems forced and passionless." Has sex become more commodified than it used to be? And how do you react against that in your work?
Art School Confidential: Don't ask what the egg timer's for.
I think that, like food and status, sex is too primal not to be commodified. And, as a former nude model and current pornographic scribbler, I'm just as guilty of selling sex as anyone. In fact, I'm all for selling it. You can turn a good profit. But glamourless, emotionless hookup culture isn't for me. And I found an awful lot of girls who were sleeping around were doing it for approval, not orgasms. Be promiscuous because you want to fuck.

My art isn't a grand statement about sexuality in modern America, so much as a reflection of my darkish, adolescent-boy sense of humor. Sex is funny. I also worked in some of the milder aspects of the sex industry, which led to lots of time standing around naked and thinking about sex and power.

Your style is reminiscent of Robert Crumb, who, despite his underground-comix origin, has become a serious figure in the art world. Do you have aspirations to be taken seriously by the bigwigs in Chelsea?

Heavens, it sure would suck to need a stiff, boring opening for validation. As long as smart, interesting people like my work, and have the cash to keep me in style, Chelsea can go suck it. Besides, high art temples wouldn't be much interested in my work. I'm an illustrator, which, for many galleries, is a hairsbreadth lower than whore.

Thank god for the amazing, Juxtapoz-fueled, pop-surrealist art subculture, which is rapidly infiltrating New York's white walled preserves. Mark Ryden recently sold a painting for a million dollars. With prices like that, we craftsmen don't really need to deal with high aahht.

It all started with the Ultimate Fighting Championships in 1993. Promoters brought together some of the baddest dudes on the planet—boxers, kickboxers, sumo wrestlers, jujitsu masters, and karate black belts—and paid them to pound each other in the balls, kick each other in the face, and choke each other to unconsciousness. The prize? The title of World’s Best Fighter. As the new sport of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) caught on in America, the only journalists covering it were wild-eyed, monosyllabic wingnuts who’d defected from professional wrestling journalism.

Enter Josh Gross, a mayhem-loving Jewish twentysomething from Beverly Hills. Josh decided the world’s most brutal sport deserved serious, thoughtful journalism, and before long he'd become MMA’s Bert Sugar and Norman Mailer rolled into one. Today he’s the editor-in-chief of Sherdog.com, the web’s most highly trafficked MMA site. We talked to Josh as he prepared to cover the December 30 “fight of the century” between UFC superstars Chuck Liddell and Tito Ortiz, widely regarded as the Ali and Frazier of the UFC.

So you’re a Jew from Beverly Hills who spends all his time with enormous, muscle-bound rednecks who make their living beating the shit out of people. Can they conceal their disgust when they’re talking to you?

You think I tell these people I grew up eating at the Peach Pit? No, seriously, for the most part we share the usual athlete-to-media relationship. Even the guys I’ve been highly critical of deal with me on a professional level. Why? I’m not sure.

How the hell did you get into this?

100 Percent Grade-A Badass: Bas RuttenCombine an unhealthy passion for sports with my distaste for all things scholastic, and there you have it. Didn’t hurt that I started training with Bas Rutten in 1998, which was around the time he made his U.S. fighting debut. For those of you unfamiliar with Bas: he’s half crazy Dutchman and 100 percent grade-A badass. If you’re not good at math that equals one sweet dude. (After a night of drinking in Roppongi I once saw him get plowed by a minivan. Turned out he was fine, and just minutes after flying 30 feet through the air he was kind enough to tell me he was free of internal injuries. Like I said, one sweet dude.)

What’s the worst ass-kicking you’ve ever seen?

Well, there’s that towel-whipping thing from the seventh grade I’m still trying to repress. Thanks. But as far as pro fights go... I once saw a Ukrainian killer named Igor Vovchanchyn punch a Japanese man named Enson Inoue so many times it looked as if Sloth from The Goonies had somehow swA Hard Day in the Ring?: Sloth from The Gooniesitched places with him.

Could Bruce Lee beat up these MMA guys, or would they tear him apart?

Who the hell knows? Many people credit Lee with being a forefather to modern MMA. I have my doubts. He’d probably fight at lightweight (155 pounds); if Lee couldn’t figure out how to stay on his feet or fight from his back he’d be toast.

Why do I love MMA? Am I a bad person because I enjoy watching people knee each other in the face?

Yes. But thankfully the world’s full of people like you, so nothing to feel too bad about.

Tens of thousands of men screaming themselves hoarse as they watch two sweaty guys hold each other close and squirm around on the floor. Is this a sport, or a new form of collective homoerotic hysteria?

Having grown up a mile from West Hollywood I consider myself a reluctant authority on “collective homoerotic hysteria.” Let’s just say it’s my well-schooled opinion that the author of this question is projecting.

Along those lines, isn’t The Guard basically just the missionary position? Every fight seems to end up in The Guard. And the guy on the bottom is in the dominant position? There’s got to be some kind of postmodern sex theory angle there, no?

Wait until you get a load of the North-South position. Or how about the rear-naked choke? Let the imagination wander.

How are the Krav Maga guys? I bet they beat everybody, huh?

I’ve never seen a Krav Maga practitioner in MMA, but that probably has to do with the fact that RPGs and small-arms fire are frowned upon. (FYI, I studied Krav Maga for three-plus years and really enjoyed it.)

What are MMA groupies like? Are they scary?

Alas, goofy-looking Jews aren’t their target demo. So, yes, they’re scary.

All the biggest MMA events are in Japan. Doesn’t it piss off the Japanese that all the best martial artists turn out to be big smelly honkeys?

I’ll never understand this about the Japanese but for some reason they love watching their countrymen get beaten to a fine pulp. Ever hear of Bob Sapp? Imagine Shaquille O’Neil on steroids. Anyhow, what did he get for continually pummeling these people? The cover of Time Asia.Cover Boy: Bob Sapp

Jewish men get a bad rap when it comes to physical toughness, and I’d be delighted to hear that there’s a good Jewish MMA fighter out there somewhere. Do you have good news for me?

Used to be a boatload of good Jewish boxers. In fact, at one point it was cool to pretend to be a good Jewish boxer. A bit of bad news when it comes to MMA, I’m afraid. Perhaps the best-known Jewish fighter is Rory Singer, who has fought in the UFC with mixed results. Oh, and even though he was born in New York he resides in Georgia, so I’m not sure he really counts. Sorry.

So you don’t tell these guys you used to hang out at the Peach Pit, but what about the Jewish thing? I mean, the last time most American Jews ran into tough, Middle American gentiles was when they were singing “Throw the Jew Down the Well” with Borat. Does your being Jewish ever come up, and if so, how have the guys reacted?

I’ve never experienced any sort of antisemitism in mixed martial arts. Once in a while someone asks me about being Jewish, and like I tell everyone, I don’t know jack about it except I was born to a Jewish mother and love matzah ball soup. I’ve always separated being Jewish from being religious. All the guilt, none of the funny hats.

In the early days of boxing there was tons of corruption and fight-fixing. As a competitive sport, MMA is still just getting off the ground. Are all the fights legit? I saw Bob Sapp get knocked out by Mirko Cro Cop, and it looked like a total fix. Before the fight Sapp was huffing and puffing with his eyes opened extra wide, very theatrical, basically screaming, “I’m about to try REAL hard!” Then in the first round he gets knocked out by some kind of “phantom punch,” and as he lay on the ground he had this silly “Oh, that REALLY hurt!” look on his face, which never happens when someone gets knocked out. Was that legit, or did someone pay Sapp to take a dive?

In its first years, particularly in Japan, there were documented incidents of fixed fights, which in MMA have been dubbed “works,” an expression straight out of the WWE. Thankfully MMA in Japan has cleaned up its act and grown out of that nonsense. Today news of a “work” would be major scandal material.

In the fight you’re talking about “Cro Cop” (so named for being an anti-terrorism officer in Croatia) socked Sapp square in the eye. Yeah, Sapp was doing his best big, bad wolf impersonation, but that’s part of his shtick. Here’s the problem with that though: You can be 6'6'' and 375 pounds of bulging triceps, but if your orbital bone is smashed, you’re gonna fall to the ground like someone just Krav Maga’d you.

So we've got this titanic clash between Chuck Lidell and Tito Ortiz this Saturday in Las Vegas. Who's going to win?

Liddell has made a career out of dropping grapplers that were forced to strike with him. Unfortunately for Tito, he's tailor made for Chuck's style and will likely go down early.