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YouTube Prankster Vitaly Explains Why He Did Porn

By Jennifer Browne

If you’ve ever seen a Vitaly Zdorovetskiy prank video, you probably know that he’s not afraid to try anything. 

From licking Nutella off girls’ asses to chasing people with a chainsaw and tricking girls into giving him their knickers, Vitaly doesn’t give a fuck. So it should come as no surprise that he’s dabbled in the porn industry.

What may come as a surprise, though, is what happened during the porno, and how he ended up getting into it in the first place. But it also explains exactly why he became a prankster.

After eFukt discovered his 2011 video with BangBus, it made its rounds on the internet, and let’s just say Vitaly learned that porn wasn’t for him the hard (or not so hard) way.

Being a case of stage fright, camera shyness, a deer caught in the headlights, or whatever you want to call it, it caused him to be unable to sexually perform. But his embarrassing moment also caused him to jump into YouTube stardom – just not for the reason you’d think.

In a new video posted to Vitaly’s YouTube channel VitalyzdTv, the 24-year-old ‘natural born prankster’ reveals why he got into porn and that his success as an online star didn’t come overnight – and it wasn’t easy.

Vitaly, who always wanted to be an actor, moved to America with his mum when he was seven-years-old, but it didn’t prove as glamorous as he expected. Unable to speak English, he couldn’t make any friends.

He said:

    I would go home and cry every single day because I couldn’t talk to anybody.

    My dad would yell at me, call me a fucking idiot, piece of shit, make fun of me, told me I’m gonna be the biggest failure in life.

He added that his step dad would beat him and his mother, and when his brother died, things got worse:

    He was crazy, but after this, he became a psycho. He would take all his frustrations out on me and my mom. If I drank a cup of tea and I didn’t put a cup in the dishwasher, he would beat me. It was bad.

    And I had to see my mom get beat up. I did what I could, I stood up for her, but he was just unstoppable.

    I was afraid for my life. I was really thinking, either it’s gonna he’s gonna kill me or my mom.

Vitaly explains that after getting a job as a garbage man, a side-of-the-road sign spinner dressed as Uncle Sam, and finally a bus boy-turned-waiter, he still wasn’t making enough money to move him and his mum out of the house, away from his step dad.

That’s when he got a call to do porn.

He said: “At this point I was a waiter, and I was desperate for money, I had to move out. So I had to do it.”

Shortly after Zdorovetskiy turned 18, he appeared alongside porn star Diamond Kitty, and it didn’t take him long to figure out he preferred the mainstream film industry over the adult one.

While filming in the back of the BangBus, Vitaly had serious trouble getting it up, causing Diamond to give up and move onto the other guy in the van. Ouch.

But despite the embarrassing performance, he doesn’t regret the experience and says he’s glad he couldn’t get it up, otherwise he’d still be in porn.

But it turns out it wasn’t all bad – Vitaly took the blue film money and moved him and his mum to Los Angeles. Doesn’t sound like a bad paycheque.

That’s when he got into YouTube. But after getting only 63 subscribers in three months, he gave up. It was only after he decided to try it again, on his 30th video, that he went viral.

Now, his main channel videos have garnered more than one billion views.
Capture 8YouTube

He said:

    People think I’m an overnight success. It was a lot of hard work, and look where I started: my transition into America, my crazy step dad, working those horrible jobs, my brother dying, embarrassing myself in that porn video, and having to work my ass off to make YouTube work.

    That was 18 years of trying and failing.

There are really two morals to this story. While it’s easy to assume that all YouTube stars fell into it because of luck, it’s not always the case. People – like Vitaly – do actually work hard for where they are now.

And the second? Even a really shit porn video will pay you enough money to move you and someone else to Los Angeles. –UNILAD

Why We Love Music

Researchers are discovering how music affects the brain, helping us to make sense of its real emotional and social power.

I still remember when I first heard the song by Peter Gabriel, “Solsbury Hill.” Something about that song—the lyrics, the melody, the unusual 7/4 time signature—gave me chills. Even now, years later, it still can make me cry.

Who among us doesn’t have a similar story about a song that touched us? Whether attending a concert, listening to the radio, or singing in the shower, there’s something about music that can fill us with emotion, from joy to sadness.

Music impacts us in ways that other sounds don’t, and for years now, scientists have been wondering why. Now they are finally beginning to find some answers. Using fMRI technology, they’re discovering why music can inspire such strong feelings and bind us so tightly to other people.

“Music affects deep emotional centers in the brain, “ says Valorie Salimpoor, a neuroscientist at McGill University who studies the brain on music. “A single sound tone is not really pleasurable in itself; but if these sounds are organized over time in some sort of arrangement, it’s amazingly powerful.”

How music makes the brain happy

How powerful? In one of her studies, she and her colleagues hooked up participants to an fMRI machine and recorded their brain activity as they listened to a favorite piece of music. During peak emotional moments in the songs identified by the listeners, dopamine was released in the nucleus accumbens, a structure deep within the older part of our human brain.

“That’s a big deal, because dopamine is released with biological rewards, like eating and sex, for example,” says Salimpoor. “It’s also released with drugs that are very powerful and addictive, like cocaine or amphetamines.”

There’s another part of the brain that seeps dopamine, specifically just before those peak emotional moments in a song: the caudate nucleus, which is involved in the anticipation of pleasure. Presumably, the anticipatory pleasure comes from familiarity with the song—you have a memory of the song you enjoyed in the past embedded in your brain, and you anticipate the high points that are coming. This pairing of anticipation and pleasure is a potent combination, one that suggests we are biologically-driven to listen to music we like.

But what happens in our brains when we like something we haven’t heard before? To find out, Salimpoor again hooked up people to fMRI machines. But this time she had participants listen to unfamiliar songs, and she gave them some money, instructing them to spend it on any music they liked.

When analyzing the brain scans of the participants, she found that when they enjoyed a new song enough to buy it, dopamine was again released in the nucleus accumbens. But, she also found increased interaction between the nucleus accumbens and higher, cortical structures of the brain involved in pattern recognition, musical memory, and emotional processing.

This finding suggested to her that when people listen to unfamiliar music, their brains process the sounds through memory circuits, searching for recognizable patterns to help them make predictions about where the song is heading. If music is too foreign-sounding, it will be hard to anticipate the song’s structure, and people won’t like it—meaning, no dopamine hit. But, if the music has some recognizable features—maybe a familiar beat or melodic structure—people will more likely be able to anticipate the song’s emotional peaks and enjoy it more. The dopamine hit comes from having their predictions confirmed—or violated slightly, in intriguing ways.

“It’s kind of like a roller coaster ride,” she says, “where you know what’s going to happen, but you can still be pleasantly surprised and enjoy it.”

Salimpoor believes this combination of anticipation and intense emotional release may explain why people love music so much, yet have such diverse tastes in music—one’s taste in music is dependent on the variety of musical sounds and patterns heard and stored in the brain over the course of a lifetime. It’s why pop songs are, well, popular—their melodic structures and rhythms are fairly predictable, even when the song is unfamiliar—and why jazz, with its complicated melodies and rhythms, is more an acquired taste. On the other hand, people tend to tire of pop music more readily than they do of jazz, for the same reason—it can become too predictable.

Her findings also explain why people can hear the same song over and over again and still enjoy it. The emotional hit off of a familiar piece of music can be so intense, in fact, that it’s easily re-stimulated even years later.

“If I asked you to tell me a memory from high school, you would be able to tell me a memory,” says Salimpoor. “But, if you listened to a piece of music from high school, you would actually feel the emotions.”

How music synchronizes brains

Ed Large, a music psychologist at the University of Connecticut, agrees that music releases powerful emotions. His studies look at how variations in the dynamics of music—slowing down or speeding up of rhythm, or softer and louder sounds within a piece, for example—resonate in the brain, affecting one’s enjoyment and emotional response.

In one study, Large and colleagues had participants listen to one of two variations on a Chopin piece: In version one, the piece was played as it normally is, with dynamic variations, while in version two, the piece was played mechanically, without these variations. When the participants listened to the two versions while hooked up to an fMRI machine, their pleasure centers lit up during dynamic moments in the version one song, but didn’t light up in version two. It was as if the song had lost its emotional resonance when it lost its dynamics, even though the “melody” was the same.

“In fact, when we debriefed the listeners after the experiment was over, they didn’t even recognize that we were playing the same piece of music,” says Large.

When playing the more dynamic version, Large also observed activity in the listener’s mirror neurons —the neurons implicated in our ability to experience internally what we observe externally. The neurons fired more slowly with slower tempos, and faster with faster tempos, suggesting that mirror neurons may play an important role in processing musical dynamics and affecting how we experience music.

“Musical rhythms can directly affect your brain rhythms, and brain rhythms are responsible for how you feel at any given moment,” says Large.

That’s why when people get together and hear the same music—such as in a concert hall—it tends to make their brains synch up in rhythmic ways, inducing a shared emotional experience, he says. Music works in much the same way language works—using a combination of sound and dynamic variations to impart a certain understanding in the listener.

“If I’m a performer and you’re a listener, and what I’m playing really moves you, I’ve basically synchronized your brain rhythm with mine,” says Large. “That’s how I communicate with you.”

Different notes for different folks

Other research on music supports Large’s theories. In one study, neuroscientists introduced different styles of songs to people and monitored brain activity. They found that music impacts many centers of the brain simultaneously; but, somewhat surprisingly, each style of music made its own pattern, with uptempo songs creating one kind of pattern, slower songs creating another, lyrical songs creating another, and so on. Even if people didn’t like the songs or didn’t have a lot of musical expertise, their brains still looked surprisingly similar to the brains of people who did.

But if our brains all synch up when we hear the same basic dynamic differences in music, why don’t we all respond with the same pleasure?

Large, like Salimpoor, says that this difference in preference is due to how our neurons are wired together, which in turn is based on our own, personal history of listening to or performing music. Rhythm is all about predictability, he says, and our predictions about music start forming from a pretty early age onward. He points to the work of Erin Hannon at the University of Nevada who found that babies as young as 8 months old already tune into the rhythms of the music from their own cultural environment.

So while activity in the nucleus accumbens may signal emotional pleasure, it doesn’t explain it, says Large. Learning does. That’s why musicians—who’ve usually been exposed to more complicated musical patterns over time—tend to have more varied musical tastes and enjoy more avant-garde musical traditions than non-musicians. Social contexts are also important, he adds, and can affect your emotional responses.

“Liking is so subjective,” he says. “Music may not sound any different to you than to someone else, but you learn to associate it with something you like and you’ll experience a pleasure response.”

Perhaps that explains why I love “Solsbury Hill” so much. Not only does its unusual rhythm intrigue me—as a musician, I still have the urge to count it out from time to time—but it reminds me of where I was when I first heard the song: sitting next to a cute guy I had a crush on in college. No doubt my anticipatory pleasure centers were firing away for a multitude of reasons.

And, luckily, now that the pleasure pathways are now deeply embedded in my brain, the song can keep on giving that sweet emotional release. –Source: Daily Good

Five Ways Music Can Make You Healthier

New studies are suggesting that music can be more powerful than medication.

When I gave birth to my first-born, I listened to CDs of classical music in the hospital. I figured that music would help calm me and distract me from the pain.

You might use music to distract yourself from painful or stressful situations, too. Or perhaps you’ve listened to music while studying or working out, hoping to up your performance. Though you may sense that music helps you feel better somehow, only recently has science begun to figure out why that is.

Neuroscientists have discovered that listening to music heightens positive emotion through the reward centers of our brain, stimulating hits of dopamine that can make us feel good, or even elated. Listening to music also lights up other areas of the brain—in fact, almost no brain center is left untouched—suggesting more widespread effects and potential uses for music.

Music’s neurological reach, and its historic role in healing and cultural rituals, has led researchers to consider ways music may improve our health and wellbeing. In particular, researchers have looked for applications in health-care—for example, helping patients during post-surgery recovery or improving outcomes for people with Alzheimer’s. In some cases, music’s positive impacts on health have been more powerful than medication.

Here are five ways that music seems to impact our health and wellbeing.

Music reduces stress and anxiety

My choice to bring music into the birthing room was probably a good one. Research has shown that listening to music—at least music with a slow tempo and low pitch, without lyrics or loud instrumentation—can calm people down, even during highly stressful or painful events.

Music can prevent anxiety-induced increases in heart rate and systolic blood pressure, and decrease cortisol levels—all biological markers of stress. In one study, researchers found that patients receiving surgery for hernia repair who listened to music after surgery experienced decreased plasma cortisol levels and required significantly less morphine to manage their pain. In another study involving surgery patients, the stress reducing effects of music were more powerful than the effect of an orally-administered anxiolytic drug.

Performing music, versus listening to music, may also have a calming effect. In studies with adult choir singers, singing the same piece of music tended to synch up their breathing and heart rates, producing a group-wide calming effect. In a recent study, 272 premature babies were exposed to different kinds of music—either lullabies sung by parents or instruments played by a music therapist—three times a week while recovering in a neonatal ICU. Though all the musical forms improved the babies’ functioning, the parental singing had the greatest impact and also reduced the stress of the parents who sang.

Though it’s sometimes hard in studies like this to separate out the effects of music versus other factors, like the positive impacts of simple social contact, at least one recent study found that music had a unique contribution to make in reducing anxiety and stress in a children’s hospital, above and beyond social contributions.

Music decreases pain

Music has a unique ability to help with pain management, as I found in my own experience with giving birth. In a 2013 study, sixty people diagnosed with fibromyalgia—a disease characterized by severe musculoskeletal pain—were randomly assigned to listen to music once a day over a four-week period. In comparison to a control group, the group that listened to music experienced significant pain reduction and fewer depressive symptoms.

In another recent study, patients undergoing spine surgery were instructed to listen to self-selected music on the evening before their surgery and until the second day after their surgery. When measured on pain levels post surgery, the group had significantly less pain than a control group who didn’t listen to music.

It’s not clear why music may reduce pain, though music’s impact on dopamine release may play a role. Of course, stress and pain are also closely linked; so music’s impact on stress reduction may also partly explain the effects.

However, it’s unlikely that music’s impact is due to a simple placebo effect. In a 2014 randomized control trial involving healthy subjects exposed to painful stimuli, researchers failed to find a link between expectation and music’s effects on pain. The researchers concluded that music is a robust analgesic whose properties are not due simply to expectation factors.

Music may improve immune functioning

Can listening to music actually help prevent disease? Some researchers think so.

Wilkes University researchers looked at how music affects levels of IgA—an important antibody for our immune system’s first line of defense against disease. Undergraduate students had their salivary IgA levels measured before and after 30 minutes of exposure to one of four conditions—listening to a tone click, a radio broadcast, a tape of soothing music, or silence. Those students exposed to the soothing music had significantly greater increases in IgA than any of the other conditions, suggesting that exposure to music (and not other sounds) might improve innate immunity.

Another study from Massachusetts General Hospital found that listening to Mozart’s piano sonatas helped relax critically ill patients by lowering stress hormone levels, but the music also decreased blood levels of interleukin-6—a protein that has been implicated in higher mortality rates, diabetes, and heart problems.

According to a 2013 meta-analysis, authors Mona Lisa Chanda and Daniel Levitin concluded that music has the potential to augment immune response systems, but that the findings to date are preliminary. Still, as Levitin notes in one article on the study, “I think the promise of music as medicine is that it’s natural and it’s cheap and it doesn’t have the unwanted side effects that many pharmaceutical products do.”

Music may aid memory

My now-teenage son always listens to music while he studies. Far from being a distraction to him, he claims it helps him remember better when it comes to test time. Now research may prove him right—and provide an insight that could help people suffering from dementia.

Music enjoyment elicits dopamine release, and dopamine release has been tied to motivation, which in turn is implicated in learning and memory. In a study published last year, adult students studying Hungarian were asked to speak, or speak in a rhythmic fashion, or sing phrases in the unfamiliar language. Afterwards, when asked to recall the foreign phrases, the singing group fared significantly better than the other two groups in recall accuracy.

Evidence that music helps with memory has led researchers to study the impact of music on special populations, such as those who suffer memory loss due to illness. In a 2008 experiment, stroke patients who were going through rehab were randomly assigned to listen daily either to self-selected music, to an audio book, or to nothing (in addition to receiving their usual care). The patients were then tested on mood, quality of life, and several cognitive measures at one week, three months, and 6 months post-stroke. Results showed that those in the music group improved significantly more on verbal memory and focused attention than those in the other groups, and they were less depressed and confused than controls at each measuring point.

In a more recent study, caregivers and patients with dementia were randomly given 10 weeks of singing coaching, 10 weeks of music listening coaching, or neither. Afterwards, testing showed that singing and music listening improved mood, orientation, and memory and, to a lesser extent, attention and executive functioning, as well as providing other benefits. Studies like these have encouraged a movement to incorporate music into patient care for dementia patients, in part promoted by organizations like Music and Memory.

Music helps us exercise

How many of us listen to rock and roll or other upbeat music while working out? It turns out that research supports what we instinctively feel: music helps us get a more bang for our exercise buck.

Researchers in the United Kingdom recruited thirty participants to listen to motivational synchronized music, non-motivational synchronized music, or no music while they walked on a treadmill until they reached exhaustion levels. Measurements showed that both music conditions increased the length of time participants worked out (though motivational music increased it significantly more) when compared to controls. The participants who listened to motivational music also said they felt better during their work out than those in the other two conditions.

In another study, oxygen consumption levels were measured while people listened to different tempos of music during their exercise on a stationary bike. Results showed that when exercisers listened to music with a beat that was faster and synchronous with their movement, their bodies used up oxygen more efficiently than when the music played at a slower, unsynchronized tempo.

According to sports researchers Peter Terry and Costas Karageorghis, “Music has the capacity to capture attention, lift spirits, generate emotion, change or regulate mood, evoke memories, increase work output, reduce inhibitions, and encourage rhythmic movement – all of which have potential applications in sport and exercise.” -Source: Daily Good

Bette Midler on Gay Culture: 'It's Sort of Ordinary Now'

The Divine Miss M dishes on her new album, It's the Girls, and her joy watching the gay rights movement transform from the love that dare not speak its name to 'the love that won't shut the fuck up.'

The first time Bette Midler heard a song by a girl group, she says, it changed her life.

“When I was a little girl, my family didn’t have much of anything and I remember this well-off lady once gave us a record player along with a couple of 78 RPM albums,” she recalls. “'It’s The Girl' by the Boswell Sisters was on one of those 78s and I used to listen to it over and over. I just fell in love with their sound. It was very jazzy and they were so sophisticated musically. It was just incredible. I don’t think I ever heard music the same way again after that and I’ve been in love with the sound of female voices harmonizing ever since.”

That memory was a part of the foundation for Midler’s new album, It’s the Girls, a collection of covers that pays tribute to many of the girl groups whose sounds helped shape the Divine Miss M’s love of music over the years.

Once she’d settled on the direction of her 14th studio album, Midler says she couldn’t wait to dive into the recording studio to put her spin on songs that had meant so much to her throughout her life, but she had only one rule before any track could be considered for the collection: it had to be a song from a “real girl group.”

“My favorite thing about girl groups, real girl groups, is that they put themselves together and they made their own sound,” she explains. “It wasn’t a producer that came along and imposed his idea upon them. They came with their sound and then the producer enhanced that sound. So a group like the Spice Girls — I know a lot of people love them and I think they’re adorable — they just weren’t for me.” 

From the Boswell Sisters and the Ronettes to Motown acts like the Marvelettes and Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, Midler says she and her longtime collaborator Marc Shaiman combed through dozens of songs before settling on those that appear in the collection, but she knew it wouldn’t feel complete until she bent the one rule she’d made when they embarked on the project.

“Oh, how I did love TLC,” she says, “and ‘Waterfalls’ was just a song I fell in love with the first time I heard it. To me it was always this terrible little tragedy, and I’ve always thought that because the beat was so captivating and the rap was so captivating that people didn’t really hear the misery in the lyrics behind the beat. So I’ve always wanted to do it as a ballad so that people could really hear the lyrics and the message behind them. I’ve carried that one around in my back pocket for years and I knew this album was the perfect opportunity to finally do it.”

Midler says recording the album was a fun, nostalgic trip that left her longing for the golden age of not only the girl groups who influenced her over the years, but also the gay fans who supported her throughout her career. “The extreme characters you used to see in the Village in the old days, you just don’t see them anymore, and I really do miss them because there was a feeling I used to get that people were expressing themselves in the most elaborate of ways,” she says of the flamboyant fans who were among the core following she gained during her time singing in the Continental Baths, a gay bathhouse, during the summer of 1970. “Now the [gay community] has kind of gone mainstream. It’s sort of ordinary now, and a little bit of the specialness has rubbed away.”

“It used to be the love that dare not speak its name and now it’s the love that won’t shut the fuck up,” she jokes, stopping to let out a long laugh before adding, “but seriously, the great thing about the gay revolution is that it has become ordinary and I’m happy to see how far it’s come and to see the community be more at peace with itself and, I want to say, more homogenized. Even being considered a gay icon — which was something that used to be whispered and bandied about — has become sort of mainstream, and that’s a good thing.”

While the battle for equality moves forward in the U.S., the 68-year-old artist and activist says she’s passionate about raising her voice in the pursuit of global human rights. “I’ve had no problem raising my voice and will continue to do so,” she says. “Of course, sometimes you get kicked in the face for it, but some people are always looking for someone to come down hard on. I say fuck ’em, because if you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.”

“Just look at the treatment of [LGBT people] and women around the world,” she adds. “I just think it’s ghastly what happens. There’s a gigantic threat there from all sorts of religions and I’m greatly concerned when I hear of things like women getting stoned because they looked sideways at some guy or gays being killed because of who they are. It’s just repulsive.”

Though Midler insists her passion for human equality isn’t something that will ever change, she says fans planning to see some familiar faces on her upcoming tour should prepare themselves.

“In the old days I couldn’t wait to do certain characters that have become staples of my shows, like Delores, my mermaid,” she says. “But I have to tell you I think I’ve had enough mermaid. The last time we worked with her she had a 21-mermaid chorus, and that’s a big chorus for a little fish. So I think that was the apex of her career.”

Through fits of laughter she continues, “At this point I don’t really see what more I can do except sauté her and serve her on a bed of lettuce.”

But while the legendary lady is happy to be leaving longtime companions like Delores in the past, she’s thankful others have remained in her life and she’s excited to perform for them once more. “I think I’ve been really lucky because my gay crowd had followed me to the limit and the fact that they are so vocal and so full of joy each time they see me, I think that’s a very infectious energy in the audience at my shows,” she says. “I think they’re the ones who brought the straight people around and it’s because of them that people get me to such a wonderful degree now.” -Source: Advocate

It’s The Girls is available now. For dates and tickets for Midler’s upcoming tour, click here.