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The dad, seconds before being swarmed. Photo via Screenshot
"You're dead, you're fucking dead!"
The screams come from a teen standing in front of a bloody man. Seconds later the man is sucker punched by another teen, two minutes later the same father would be beaten mercilessly by a gang of teens on a road in a suburb.
The clip comes from the second of two videos posted on social media. Over their duration a father hits a student and then is followed, swarmed and beaten by a group of kids. This comes after three Toronto teens were charged with assault and accused of making Fight Club style videos that showed them jumping students.
Jesus Christ, is Ontario turning into Eden Lake or something?
The first of the two videos show a pre-organized fight between two kids. The two are going at it, having a nice little tilly, when the father—who was for some reason watching his child fight—steps into frame. The dad gets near the fight when another kid gets in his face the dad just straight up decks him.
Later, in the second video, shortly before being beaten by the group the father seems to explain his actions.
"I thought they were jumping in on him, what would you do if it was your kid?"
The Toronto Star reports that the fight occurred in an Oak Ridge, a community north of Richmond Hill, park between a student from Cardinal Carter Catholic High School and St. Theresa Lisieux Catholic High School.
York police say they are looking for any witnesses of the situation and that anyone with information should come forward.
The dad on the ground shortly after being swarmed. Photo via Screenshot
The longer of the two videos starts with the father, already bloodied, arguing with the kids in a wooded area.
One kid then sucker punches the dad from the side, and the dad, who eats the punch, just carries on leaving the area, while the group follows him to a street where the argument resumes.
"You hit a fucking girl bro," another student yells at him shortly before the swarming happens.
The dad is punched, kicked, and pushed on the ground and left bloodied and dazed as the kids scream at him.
Slightly before the gang beating, one of the kids threatens the man with a brick. The entire time the group is out on the street, the father's son is imploring him to leave and after the beating the father listens and staggers towards the car bleeding profusely. As the group walks away an unseen teen sums it up nicely.
"Yo, that's fucked bro," he says just before the video cuts out.
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It's pretty common to hear dudes complain about how hard it is to use Tinder when you have a dick. As a woman, I'm not surprised at that since I swipe left on 95 percent of the profiles I encounter in the never-ending human carousel. But if you're wondering why your matches are sparse or why you've been ghosted on so frequently, you might be stumped as to what you're doing wrong.
Tfw you're a woman and forget to check Tinder for like a day. We have options, and it's imperative you remember that.
I get the Tinder struggle. I've been using this wretched app for close to a year. Before I deleted the app recently, I had hundreds of matches, a Tinder Social gangbang, and blocked more phone numbers and Snapchat accounts than I care to count. Within the hours upon hours of time I spent swiping, I identified some common mistakes dudes make. You can hate on me for being a succubus, but I'm here to help you as a woman who has used this app entirely too much. And to do that, I've put together a guide for men looking to improve their Tinder game.
No one wants to take the time to try to guess which one is you. And especially if you are using a group shot as your main photo—which is way too common—you're inevitably going to get more swipes left. It's safer to just not.
From the thousands of profiles I've swiped on, it seems some of you are scared to take selfies. Stop that. Take a selfie, give us a shot of your body, another photo or two of you, and maybe a meme for good measure.
When it comes to bios, do less. Give us a couple brief points about yourself or write a sentence or two that shows you are creative, funny, or have some other desirable personality trait. Height shouldn't be mandatory (as many of you seem to think it is); I personally would ask if I was so concerned.
The profiles above are examples of things you maybe shouldn't put in a bio:
Animals are cute and pure and way better than humans. I tend to agree. Full disclosure: I've swiped right due to a cute cat or dog, and many women I know have done the same. It definitely can have an effect, depending on the lady. However, there's a right and wrong way to incorporate furry friends in our Tinder profiles.
In all the profiles above, we see some weaker ways to incorporate animals: laying out a bunch of dead birds on the ground like a physical manifestation of your toxic masculinity; a close-up selfie of you with a horse; you flailing a fish in a little girl's face. *swipes left*
The dudes below know what they're doing. Look at this cute (one-eyed?) cat; look at this man who is majestic as fuck riding a horse in a beautiful landscape. *swipes right*
It's really obvious when you're trying to flex. I'm sure it's attractive to some women, but I'd wager that a number of them just think you're corny. Dude on the left: OK, you're a chef, we get it, nice steaks. Dude on the right: Your condo's living room is not even that impressive, and it's sad that you think this is something worthy of displaying on a Tinder profile. Are we going to fuck on that IKEA coffee table, or what are you trying to say with this?
I personally felt a bit sick to my stomach every time I saw a super-like notification come up on my phone until I did myself the favour of disabling them. I don't know for sure why—maybe it's just the type of dudes I attract—but nine times out of ten, the men who super-liked me tended to be those I would never let touch me, let alone put their dicks in me. It comes across as aggro to super-like since you are immediately pushed up in a woman's feed. Sometimes, it can work if she finds you mutually as attractive instead of being instantly repulsed.
One of the first dudes I hooked up with from Tinder super-liked me; that ended with us fucking twice and me ghosting on him after because I could tell he was quickly becoming obsessed and possessive. Now, I tend to see super-likes as a warning sign.
In sum, if you're going to super-like, do so carefully and sparingly. I personally have only done it three times: two on accident, the other time to troll a friend.
YOU ARE LITERALLY THE FEDS. Also, what would your employers think of you being in your work uniform on Tinder? Hmm?
I mean, at least you're being open about being a gun nut so those of us who are freaked out can slam that red X. Props to you for that, boys.
Some men on this app are pretty vague with their intentions when you're deciding on if you'd like to meet up. If you want to fuck, just say it at some point instead of being coy—don't say you want to "chill." I think most women would rather know what they're getting into instead of showing up expecting to grab a friendly drink and then within five minutes you are trying to grab their pussy.
However, opening a conversation with "DTF?" or "I'm going to dick you down like Lex Steele" (yes, I've actually seen this) might not be the best idea. Again, the goal is to not creep out a woman immediately. Once you test the waters by exchanging a few messages, maybe you could drop a lewd line if she seems down. That said, let's work on openers.
Here's some examples of bad ways to get a woman on Tinder to talk to you: being corny, being clout-seeking, or asking a complete stranger to give you a birthday gift.If you want a reply, simple seems pretty effective: some version of "Hey, what's up?" Alternatively, you could ask her something benign about her job or interests from her bio or give her a compliment that is nice but not creepy. Here's a couple that worked on me:
First of all, DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT insist a woman you've never met from Tinder come over to your place for a first date. Or at least don't present it as the only option. If she brings it up, then go for it. But generally speaking, we are not pizza; you can't just order us to your house. Not saying it couldn't work for some brave ladies out there, but it's nice to give a more neutral option to start, say somewhere public like a bar or coffee shop.
I definitely swiped right on this profile.
Shave your head, delete your account.
This is important to remember. Seriously, sometimes it is just us. We lose interest, unmatch, get busy with our lives, ghost. Sometimes, just like you, we're here to people-watch.
The last thing a woman wants to see when she decides to open Tinder after a few days of not checking it is multiple messages from a man who is upset that she hasn't replied yet. If your message history with a woman looks like you're talking to yourself, you're doing it wrong.
If a woman unmatches you, please do not try to contact her on any form of social media. Trust me, it probably was intentional, and dwelling on it will only hold you back from future meaningless sex and potential meaningful relationships.
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The other day, I turned around while I was cooking, kitchen knife in hand, and tripped on my cat. I caught myself on my counter, but I'm certain that if I hadn't been standing in that perfect spot, I would have tried to brace myself with my knife hand, and accidentally sunk nine inches of Williams Sonoma steel deep into my own ribcage. (My cat, meanwhile, walked away looking mildly annoyed, as she would have had I stabbed myself.)
Thank God my girlfriend lives with me. If I'd been impaled on my knife she would have surely used her valuable skills as a comedy writer to save me. But if she ever left, I assume I'd be vulnerable not just to knives, but to all the hazards that presumably plague solo dwellers like choking, falling in the shower, and mental illness. But am I being presumptuous?
Sasha Cagen, the author of Quirkyalone, a guide for non-hermits who nonetheless enjoy being alone, told me there are dangers associated with living alone, but that in a way, they're irrelevant. In cities, she said, "Living alone has a kind of status to it. It's a luxury.
"People who want to live alone will live alone," Cagen added. "It's good to be aware of the cons, so you can compensate for them."
When it comes to physical danger, everyone I talked to about living alone had a story: One person found a solo-dwelling friend locked in her bathroom for hours after the doorframe warped. Another accidentally swallowed a grape. Another got a jolt from a lamp with faulty wiring. And as I've written before, back when I used to live alone, I once gorged myself on raw vegetables and got a giant wad of broccoli caught in my throat.
If those stories gave you a surge of panic as you remembered your own close call (sound off in the comments!), you could probably use a warm bath of science and data to soothe your irrational fear. A 2009 report from the Journal of Community Health found that over the course of four years, the percentage of people who fell in their homes was generally about 4 percent higher for people living alone. But that study only looked at people over 50, and only covered accidents that got reported. A study from 2012 on the more general effects of solitude notes this problem: "Most studies in this field of research have been cross-sectional and have concentrated on selected populations such as elderly people living alone or single parents," that report says. Very few scientists are studying that important group of people who live alone by choice and are totally fine with that.
As for choking, I couldn't find data about the relative risk for people who live on their own. In fact, the vast majority of choking fatalities that make it to the news happen with other people around. I only found one clear-cut news story about a lonely, Liz Lemon–esque choking death: In 2007, a guy in England who lived by himself choked to death on a dried apricot, and one of his kids later found him. While tragic, the story is a bit "dog bites man," so it seems entirely possible that reporters simply don't write stories about these incidents when they happen. (Choking—alone or otherwise—kills 2,500 Americans every year.)
Even if the numbers don't suggest that lonely people are under attack by under-chewed Blue Apron pork cutlets, the need for caution is obvious. Jonathan Epstein, senior director of science and content development at the American Red Cross and also a paramedic, told me when I spoke to him about a year ago that "the most important thing you can do if you're choking is to make someone aware that you are struggling to breathe." That means it's a good idea to flag down a neighbor and signal that there's a problem by doing the old "I'm choking" gesture.
Method for not choking to death, via 'Resuscitation'
If you live alone and in a secluded area, you're really fucked if you choke, and you should consider reading up on the latest in self-administered first aid. A paper published earlier this year by the journal Resuscitation pulls from multiple sources in medical literature, and concludes that—no joke—doing a handstand, or a modified handstand assisted by a chair (see diagram above), and then just letting gravity perform the Heimlich maneuver is among the best ways to save your own life. If you live alone in a log cabin, you should teach yourself to do this right now.
According to Cagen, accidents don't really register as a hazard for people who spend long stretches of time alone. Instead, a much more general "fear of dying alone" is one of the two main problems. The other is "the extreme discomfort of being sick alone." No matter how defiantly independent you are, Cagen said, there's simply no denying that sometimes it's natural to be around others. "We need other people in our times of weakness, and to share happy moments as well," she told me.
The psychological effects of isolation are well-documented. The journal Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology published a report earlier this year in support of this idea. Social isolation and loneliness in young people were two different observable mental health factors that were "moderately correlated," the study found, but both were linked to depression. A report from the journal Heart last year tied both loneliness and social isolation to increases in coronary heart disease and stroke. And according to a Finnish study from 2011, living alone—regardless of whether you say you feel lonely—is linked to a significant increase in death from the long-term effects of alcohol dependency.
So there are serious signs to watch for. To avoid them, Cagen suggested, you need to "make sure you have social contact," which she said gets harder when you start getting on in years, and "friends who are not living alone begin spending all their time with their families."
Even if the psychological effects aren't serious in your case, Cagen told me, there's also a risk that you might get too weird to ever live with another human being. She told me that people she's counseled about solo living, who then got into relationships, have reported long-term effects like "not really sharing the same bed all the time" and trouble adapting to another person's need to, y'know, clean up around the house.
When you're on your own, Cagen explained, "you get to live in the jungle, and return to what you feel like doing." And if jungle life is what you're really into, you're running the risk that you might never want to return to civilization.
UPDATE 12/7: An earlier version of this piece misspelled Sasha Cagen's name in some instances.
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Renato Rinino, top left. All images courtesy of Valerio Burli
This article originally appeared on VICE Italy
Some time in the early 1990s, renowned Italian thief Renato Rinino arrived at his father's funeral late, accompanied by about 20 police officers. By that time, Rinino had been in prison for several years for robbery and he had just kicked his heroin addiction. He asked the officers if he could maybe say goodbye to his father without his handcuffs on, but they didn't allow it. He was handcuffed for the duration of the funeral. He later said in interviews: "At my father's grave, I swore that I would never do any drugs again but also that I would never stop stealing. I kept those promises."
Valerio Burli's 2015 documentary Lupen – Romanzo di un Ladro Reale ("Lupin – Story of a Royal Thief") reconstructs Rinino's life through media snippets and stories from his friends and family. Rinino was a child prodigy when it came to stealing and later made his name as a sort of Robin Hood – a criminal with a heart of gold.
However, he gained international notoriety when he accidentally robbed Prince Charles in 1994. During this time, he picked up the nickname "the Lupin of the Ligurian Riviera" (after the fictional "gentleman thief" Arsène Lupin) and showed up countless times on Italian television. But his story was largely forgotten after his death in 2003.
The trailer for Lupen – only available in Italian, sadly. There is no distribution deal for the documentary yet.
Film school graduate Valerio Burli came across Rinino's story while finishing his degree at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Aquila. He was looking for a subject for his graduation documentary, when a bit of random googling led him to Rinino's Wikipedia page. "Reading it, I thought there was so much to his tale that it almost had to be fake, a hoax," Valerio Burli told me. "Hours after I pitched the project to my teachers, I left for his hometown, Savona." In Savona, Burli realised that the memory of Rinino was very much alive among the people who had known him.
Rinino was born in 1962, and showed an impressive talent for stealing from a very young age. According to the documentary, it all began with a toy trumpet he sneakily stole from one of his classmates. But his tendencies quickly got out of control. "When he was a toddler, he stole all of his classmates' toys and snacks," his sister recounts in the film. "When the break came, no one could eat because he had secretly put everyone's snacks in his own bag." When his family decided to send him to a summer camp a few years later, Renato took all the money the other kids in his dorm had brought, to pay for an early trip back home for himself.
Renato Rinino, third row, first from left, during his stay at summer camp.
When he was 11, social services sent him to the Garaventa after a number of offences. The Garaventa was a reformatory ship anchored in the port of Genoa, where delinquent minors were drilled and prepared for a naval career, as a means of getting them on the straight and narrow. Rinino's time there had the opposite effect – the ship was packed with petty criminals like him, and so his craft was perfected.
After leaving the Garaventa, he started breaking into apartments, which led to a few years of checking in and out of jail. In the documentary, his sister recalls having seen every jail in the area from the inside, thanks to her visits to him. Rinino tried to give up stealing more than once, but always resorted back to it when he couldn't find a legitimate job.
In local media he began to be known as a gentleman thief – someone with intelligence, charm and good manners, who never uses physical force to steal. One reason Rinino was well liked, was that he made a point not to steal from people who weren't well off to begin with. In 1989, when he realised through a local newspaper report that he had robbed a poor elderly lady, he immediately returned the stolen goods and gave her some extra cash for the inconvenience.
"In a scene I cut from the documentary, I interviewed a police officer about Rinino. He spoke about him with so much affection," Burli told me. But as Rinino developed a heroin addiction, his crimes became motivated by desperation. At 32, he had spent a total of 16 years of his life in prison.
Renato Rinino's tools. Still from the documentary
That year, in 1994, he committed a crime that would briefly give him notoriety around the world. Rinino had just moved to London for a fresh start but old habits die hard. One day, while passing St. James's Palace, he noticed that some scaffolding to the wall of the building had been left unattended. Completely oblivious to whom or what St. James's Palace housed, Rinino climbed onto the scaffolding, forced a window and went in. He happened to have climbed right into Prince Charles' private residence, so he stole the jewellery he found there – cufflinks, gold broaches, watches, some silver boxes and some documents. He subsequently managed to get out without being noticed by the guards.
Rinino wasn't aware of who his famous victim was, until he read reports on it in the newspapers the next day. Police were alerted to the fact that the thief might be Italian by a dealer, who Rinino had tried to sell his loot to hours after the fact. Still, Italy's thief managed to leave the country and get back to his homeland. The case remained unsolved for another three years.
Once these three years had passed, the statute of limitations on the robbery expired. Having realised immediately after the crime what an enormous media opportunity the scandal could be for him, Rinino turned himself in, in 1997 – right when he couldn't be persecuted for it anymore. He announced to Italian media that he would be happy to return the stolen goods – in exchange for a personal meeting with Prince Charles.
At first, Italian media didn't take Rinino seriously at all but that changed when he took on a lawyer, who insisted he had seen some of Prince Charles's stolen possessions. Rinino started looking into commercially exploiting the story by having cameras follow him in his pursuit of a meeting with Prince of Wales.
That was in the late nineties, a time when Italy's obsession with reality television had just started to blossom. Rinino wanted to take advantage of his 15 minutes, and the Italian media were more than happy to help him in that endeavour. TV shows began to consistently use him as a guest or host – one programme even sent him to London to watch a royal family parade. As for the stolen royal jewellery, Rinino returned these some time later, after months of trying and failing to personally meet Prince Charles.
Renato Rinino in a television interview. Still from the documentary
Italian media weren't just chronicling Rinino's quest for a private moment with a certain member of the British royal family – Burli's documentary also includes countless bits of TV items showing Rinino trying to rebuild his life, and questioning whether his criminal tendencies will come back to tempt him. He even received a few proposals for the rights to turn his life story in a biopic.
That never happened. Rinino was shot in the head by one of his neighbours, and died on the 12th of October 2003, aged 41.
"The media always depicted him with a sense of mystery, so when he died, there were a lot of conspiracy theories about who or what could be behind it. One such story suggested it had been former employees of St. James's Palace, who had lost their jobs over the theft and were out for revenge," Burli told me. "But in reality, it was just his neighbour, who shot him out of spite. Rinino had this over the top personality and he could really get in people's faces." A little after his death, the public interest moved on.
A big part of Rinino's story is the cliché of the mischievous charmer/thief. Burli's documentary shows that that's how he wanted to be known, and it shows how Italian media constructed that narrative to make him the most famous Italian thief of all time. But that's not what Burli wanted to do with his own film. "In the final part of the documentary, I tried to show the human side of Rinino. I saw what's true about the man by listening to his best friends."
More on VICE:
Criminals Explain How They Justified Their Crimes to Themselves
(Photo: Maria Jefferis)
You won't be able to remember the type of vehicle that hits you.
Nearly everything leading up to the accident is recalled as normal. That is to say: most of the memories are typically middle-aged in form. Granular. Prone to immediate temporal and spatial slippage. An emphasis on the weather. A tendency towards evanescence, defeatism, what-if? and melancholy. Essentially, my recollection of any event is a Tibetan sand mandala left exposed to the elements. What was originally sharply defined, ornate and colourful quickly becomes blurred, blotched and mixed up by the wind and the rain. But usually an overall pattern or schemata remains. There is enough left to get by on.
I nearly don't cycle to work on the Friday morning of the accident. The night before, slogging home in the drizzling dark through puddles of sodium orange and tail light red, I suffer four near-misses in Stamford Hill. These are due to unobservant pedestrians stepping into the cycle lane, passenger doors being flung open and cars pulling out too late without any indication. I come to a realisation: "If I get hurt or killed, it won't be in the rush hour traffic of Kings Cross or Angel, it will be within the Stamford Hill quarter of N16. Just yards from my own doorstep."
If we were driving, my dad – who was born in 1933 – would bring nationality into this, and this is why I won't get in a car with him any more. Generally speaking, a left / liberal-leaning man when walking, he sees no contradiction in becoming illiberal once behind the wheel. After all, what other explanation is there for the demonstrably bad driving in my borough than an inability to read or speak English properly? Other than possession of a y chromosome in some other cases, of course.
However, when cycling, I've nearly come a cropper thanks to a gratifyingly equal ops spread of people. My own observations show that age, race, gender, profession and nationality seem to be absolutely no bar to being an appalling driver where I live.
After dropping my son off at primary school, I pause momentarily before heading to my cycle locker. I'm not worried about the journey to work – the sky is uniformly blue, the air crisp; a beautiful day by any standards – but I slump internally, yet again, at the idea of returning in the pitch black. There is one thought that overrides all others, though: "This is the longest period of your adult life you've gone through without severe long-lasting depression. And a robust amount of cycling five or six times a week is prime among reasons why."
As soon as I head out of the estate onto Holmleigh Road, a vehicle passes me at speed. Cars are always parked bumper to bumper on either side of the road – apart from directly outside the school – and there is usually only space for a vehicle to pass one way with ease. Mini-traffic jams are common at rush hour, despite it being a residential side street. Regular drivers know this and some of them speed down here, lest they dawdle and get caught in a snarl up.
But what sort of vehicle is it? I stare hard at it. There is just a large gauzy white globe accelerating off down the road. It doesn't matter how hard I look at the disc of low wattage light, it doesn't resolve into the shape of a car or a motorbike. It could be Ted Glen's van from Postman Pat for all I know. It disappears round the corner onto East Bank at a fair old clip faster than the 20mph speed limit.
'Look at that dickhead,' I think to myself absent-mindedly as I cycle after him. But I'm not angry. What would be the point? This happens several times a day.
I round the corner onto East Bank, where a group of men in black hats stand shooting the breeze and a geezer is walking his dog. I see the indistinct pale disc a few hundred yards in front of me, near the entrance to the Stamford Hill post sorting office. The driver is in some kind of stand off with a vehicle coming in the opposite direction – one of them needs to reverse or they'll be there all day. The Liverpool Street to Shenfield passenger train rattles noisily past behind a chainlink fence.
I immediately abandon the idea of trying to cycle past the two vehicles – the gap is a bit narrow with cars tightly packed either side of the road, and if one of them doesn't see me I could get knocked off, or worse.
I slow to standstill and look at the back of... Ted Glen's van?... for reverse lights.
'After all, it wouldn't be funny if he just reversed straight into me!' I think.
It starts reversing, quickly, picking up speed. I have less than a second, at a guess. I look at the impenetrable wall of cars on my left and think, 'Oh for fuck's sake.'
It hits me full on, I go flying backwards and then someone switches on a strobe light.
There is sub-littoral whiteness. Not the black absence of everything but the whiteness of its complete presence.
But then, for a second, I can see a faint edge. An inner surface edge which ripples, swells and ebbs. Through it I can see: Ajay driving the Greendale Rocket. He waves to me. Hello, Ajay! And then, next to me on the tarmac, my bike – and just over my legs, the rear bumper of Ted Glen's truck. Naughty Ted Glen... you reversed without checking your mirrors! And then: Postman Pat's big black hand reaching down to me. "Shit! Are you OK mate? Don't move." Has Postman Pat always been a black cockney with a gold tooth? And then away from the edge back into the dazzling brilliance of sub littoral white. God bless the postmen of Greendale, a great bunch of lads.
There's nothing in the sub littoral zone. Not even me.
I'm back again and looking directly into the face of a dog. An estate dog with a giant serrated smile. He's as big as the moon! What a lovely doggy.
White, white, electric white.
Now I'm back and a kindly looking man with a Staffie on a lead who is crouched next to me puts a hand on my shoulder and says, "Nah, mate. Stay down. Don't get up. I've called an ambulance." I can't say anything. I can't do anything but fall back into the white.
The sublittoral zone is phosphorescent but is now becoming compromised by dimension. I can feel up. I can sense a surface towards which I'm heading. I'm floating in the direction of something that has colour, time and presence now. I'm all at sea but I'm definitely heading towards shore.
I'm sitting on a stool at the bar of The Royal Alfred Hotel opposite the train station in St Helens. It's so vivid. I've been here so many times.
"Can I get you a drink? A sip of dog?" says the landlord, offering me a warm bottle from the wooden shelf and a half pint glass to go with it.
"But I don't drink," I say. "I'm teetotal now."
The landlord smiles reassuringly: "Yes I know, but it's Christmas. You have one bottle of dog every Christmas morning. Don't you remember? Everyone says it's OK."
He's right. Why have I forgotten this? I do have a bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale every Christmas morning, and today is Christmas morning. I reach for the bottle.
But I'm not in a pub. I'm being helped up some steps into a vehicle. And I don't drink... I'm definitely teetotal. It's that fucking dream again. The same fucking dream I've had every single night for the last eight fucking years. But why am I having it now, on some steps at the side of the road? And who am I? I can't remember.
I'm thanking a man with a dog, saying goodbye. But what for?
A flash of white. Nearly at shore now. I can see sky through water. The back of my hand trails along ridges of sand under the water. Surf breaks over my head muffling everything before going clear again.
I'm sitting in a room, strapped upright into a chair with a blanket over my knees. There is a an empty stretcher in front of me. Ryan Gosling to my left and a policeman with scruffy hair and a notepad to my right.
"So he just reversed really quickly into you?" the policeman asks.
I shrug. I don't know what's going on.
"How is your shift going?" shouts the ambulance driver from the front of the vehicle – I'm in an ambulance!
"Nothing happening at all," says the copper. "Another minor RTA in Clapton at 8AM. That's it."
"Same here," she replies. It's hard to tell whether they're disappointed or not.
Ryan Gosling asks me for my name. I jaw away but no sound comes out so I shrug. I know this feeling... I'm so detached, not warm but protected, tripping my tits off, encased in cold liquid honey, sheets of Lucozade cellophane wrapped around my face like a blindfold. Not really sure who I am.
Ketamine. Oh yeah! I love taking ketamine! Weird taking it in an ambulance. Maybe it's an ambulance for horses! I would laugh but I can't feel my mouth or my tongue.
Remember when your mate fell out of a six-storey window and survived? The paramedics who found him stood over him and said, "You've had a nasty fall, sir. I'm going to give you ketamine, which is a powerful tranquiliser which disassociates..." And him looking up from the pavement and croaking: "I know what ketamine is, you cunt... will you hurry up and give me some?" Maybe I fell out of a window. I move my hands and fingers in front of my eyes. I wiggle my feet under the blanket. Or maybe I didn't.
I'm wearing padded gloves and a high-vis tabard. I reach up and touch my head gingerly. I'm wearing a helmet. It's broken in several places at the back. Was I climbing up the side of a building? How far up did I get? But then suddenly the cellophane and honey are gone.
I've been hit by a truck? I was cycling to... work? There was a train? A postman? As quickly as I can assemble my thoughts into some kind of chain, they turn to sand and blow away again.
There is a final brief flash of white and then someone switches the strobe light off.
No, wait, I've been here before. I've been in an accident and I know what this sensation is. I have concussion. Just stay with it. Don't panic. Things will come back. I remember that squaddies kicked me unconscious outside Spiders nightclub in Hull. Afterwards I spent a week in the flat on my own, forgetting my name, forgetting where I was, forgetting what had happened. Unable to see out of eyes that had been beaten shut. Cold food rotting in pans on the hob. The buzzing of flies drowning out the radio.
I was 21. Am I in Hull? Am I 21?
"The first thing you do when you get to work is you organise the files," somebody says, but I can't see who. What files?
"How old are you?" says Ryan Gosling.
"21," I say.
He must be a happy fellow. He's laughing a lot. So is the ambulance driver and the policeman. What larks!
"What's your date of birth?" asks Ryan Gosling.
"February 29th, 1971," I say without pause.
"Well, you're 45 then," he says.
"Don't be fucking ridiculous!" I spit.
The thing with the soldiers wasn't the last time this happened, though; I cracked my head open on the corner of an antique display case in Barry the Barber's shop recently and Little John was with me. I stood up awkwardly and ripped my scalp open on the hard wooden edge. "I'm OK! I'm OK!" I said as I swayed around, but I could feel a warm spray on my face and then thick droplets of blood spattered across Barry's black and white tiles. It's a good place to cut your head open, the barber's. They have those sinks for leaning back into. Shower heads to rinse you down with. White towels to dry you and stem the flow. The whole mess was cleaned up in minutes. While Barry was washing the last of the blood down the sink, I shouted to John: "Are you OK, mate? Not afraid? It looks much worse than it is." He shook his head, not looking up from the book he was staring at.
Later, on the bus home, John inspected my scalp and patted me on the head. "Don't worry," he reassured me. "I was a little bit scared."
I have a five-year-old son. I became a dad when I was 40.
"I'm sorry. Of course I'm 45," I tell Ryan Gosling, full of contrition.
Except it's not Ryan Gosling. It's a paramedic with a diamond ear stud, a rakish haircut and a rainbow-coloured enamel badge saying: LGBT Paramedics Association. Lucky gentleman or gentlemen of East London.
45. How did that happen?
Things are coming into somewhat sharper focus now. I have had concussion more times than I will ever be able to remember. On my first weekend away with Maria to Brighton 13 years ago to watch Arthur Lee play live, I surfed a wave of alcohol all the way down to the coast. I fell over on the train when it braked suddenly, head-butting a glass partition. Then, later that night down the Lanes, I knocked myself out on a sign screwed to the ceiling of a pub saying: "Please mind your head." And later still, after leaning out of a moving cab to shout at someone I thought I recognised, I broke my nose on the partially rolled-up window. The next day I could barely remember my name.
What a fucking oaf. How did I even make it to 45?
"Can I phone my girlfriend please?" I ask.
Operating my phone is near impossible. It's like I'm in a nightclub at 4AM on a handful of zesty pingers.
"There's been an accident, I'm afraid... knocked off my bike. I'm in an ambulance... Homerton. No... No. No, I'm fine. It's something and nothing. Can you come though? Thanks."
I could murder a drink. The paramedic hands me a little, slightly flimsy frosted plastic cup of water.
"The first thing you do when you get to work is to organise the files," a voice in my head is repeating.
I need to phone someone. We have a workie coming in today I need to let her know that no one will be in the office. I try looking through my iPhone's address book for my work colleagues but I can't remember anyone's surname. I am pretty sure they're called Luke Skywalker, Karl Lagerfeld and Christian Bale, but they don't appear to be in my contacts.
"What is it that you do?" asks the paramedic while taking my pulse.
I pause and think about it: "I'm a writer."
"What sort?" he asks, shining a light into my eyes.
"Not a very good one", I spit. "Too many mixed metaphors. I don't speak from a solid philosophical or political foundation. I get easily distracted during the editing stage. I use the word literally too often. My lack of a proper further education really shows in nearly everything I write. I lack the fundamental streak of cruelty one should have. My entire ethical code, as much as I have one, is based entirely on obsessive re-watching of The Walking Dead series two to five inclusive. And I'm not as funny as I used to be since I stopped taking drugs."
"No, I mean, what do you write about?" he says.
I stop and think very hard before it dawns on me: "Oh... I'm a music journalist. Oh..."
We set off for Homerton A&E at a snail's pace and, at one point, we even pull over to let another ambulance with sirens sounding pass.
At A&E Maria arrives full of concern, care and questions. She takes control. I am free to sink down into the trolley I'm on and count and recount the number of cracks on my cycle helmet. They number five no matter how many times I repeat the process. But I can't be sure, so I order another recount and begin again from scratch: one, two, three, four, five...
My doctor tests my muscle responses and addresses Maria: "The first thing you do when you get to work is to organise the files. His files are disorganised. They need to be put back in the right drawers and filing cabinets."
My head is lurching this way and that. Things aren't snapping back to normal.
The doctor continues: "I think he will be fine, but because he was knocked unconscious and because he had concussion for 20 minutes we need to be on the safe side. He must have cognitive rest."
I start laughing like I've just heard the punchline of a very funny joke, but no one joins in so I stop.
"He will get a headache soon. His files are being reorganised. He needs complete cognitive rest. If he does not get complete cognitive rest this headache will last for six weeks. So that means, for two weeks – no reading, no TV, no internet, no emails. And if he has to do any of those things after a week, he should have a long break; so an hour on, an hour off.
"He should not even have conversations. If someone insists on talking to him, he should just shrug, nod or ignore them. He should not reply."
Even though the goal is standing wide open, Maria heroically refuses to tap the ball in, by revealing to the doctor that this is usually how I behave when people try to engage me in conversation.
An hour or so later I'm walking slowly hand in hand with Maria through the graveyard of St John's in Hackney, then we're getting on a bus to go and have fish and chips at Suttons. Later we will go together to pick Little John up from school. I know that I can count myself as lucky.
A day later I'm in sheer mental torment, lying on the couch trying to do nothing. Maria and Little John are suited and booted in the hallway, ready to disappear off out for the day. John explodes into the room, bundles of toys in his arm, over to where I'm lying pathetic and prostrate.
He starts slamming down toys on my chest. "Who do you want? Ted Glen?" Bam! He slaps down the truck and its driver so I'm staring at the rear bumper. Bam! The Greendale Rocket joins the truck. "Ajay?" Bam! Postman Pat's van makes up the trio. "Or Pat?" He doesn't wait for an answer, but tears off, leaving me staring at the rear of three vehicles.
Maria sticks her head round the door: "Remember! No internet! No reading! No DVDs! You can go for a long walk. You can go to the gym. You can go swimming. You can sort through all of your records and leave them in piles: which you're selling and which you're keeping..."
Wait a second! I don't remember the doctor mentioning the gym or my record collection...
I get up and start pacing about the front room, picking things up, looking at them, putting them back down again.
On the table is a big pad of lined paper – a cheapo refill pad with ring binder holes, a light blue margin and thin grey lines. When it is time for my son's writing practice I draw out sentences as John spells out each word to me and he then copies them underneath.
"Dear Grandma and Grandpa,
I hope you are well.
We went on the bus.
We had pizza.
We went to the swimming pool.
Love from John."
Clutching the pad to my chest I lie back down on the couch, but the longer I spend horizontal doing nothing the more my head fills up with a jumble of images, associations and ideas; and none of them are welcome. Police scuba divers. House to house enquiries. Heavy boots crunching on suburban gravel. New referenda. The echoing stairwell of a tall building at nighttime. Opening an official envelope. Waxy white hands over starched hospital sheets. An unexpected knock on the door. Voices choked on crackling phone lines. The knife amnesty bin outside of St Ignatius Church. The swastika on the bus stop outside of Stamford Hill Library.
I sit bolt upright and tear off a page. I can still see the indentation of his words. I tear off two more pages until it becomes a palimpsest of nothing. The pad is no different to the one my dad would point at when I complained of boredom four decades previously. "How can you be bored," he would say, "when you have this pad and some pens?" And he was right. But now I long for boredom and writing is the only way I can hope to achieve it.
Through the net curtains, out of the window and above the blocks of flats, there is the sky and, beyond that, the sun. I stare at it intently. The carbide drill bit of the sun carves a circle through my eyeball and through my retina. I stare at the bright white circle and count. ONE: They didn't say I couldn't write in pencil on paper. TWO: I just need to make some notes. THREE: I mean, I actually need to because how does the headache of the concussed and cognitively unrested... FOUR: ...compare to the headache of the writer who is told not to write? FIVE: So I'll just make some notes, because for everything else in life there is always Paracetamol.
Thanks to the dog walker, the postman, the paramedic, the ambulance driver, the nurse and the doctor who sorted me out. And thanks also to Maria. Apologies to Luke Skywalker, Karl Lagerfeld, Christian Bale and anyone else who has been inconvenienced by my absence from work
John Doran's acclaimed memoir Jolly Lad, based on his long-running column MENK for VICE is available from Strange Attractor Presse Attractor Press.
Pissing statues. Photo by flickr user bradleyolin.
This article originally appeared on VICE Sweden
Church-goers in Kristianstad, Sweden are reportedly being disturbed by visitors who masturbate during service and piss and poop on the floor. One person even attempted to snatch a baby from the mother during a christening, SVT reports.
Heliga Trefaldighets Kyrka has become the centre of so many weird events recently that management has now decided to take in security guards. "One guy lay down and pulled his penis out. Even though a female police officer told him to stop it, he didn't," Bengt Alvland who works at the church, told local newspaper Kristianstadsbladet.
Staff at the church have also been forced to lock the church organs as intruders are allegedly attempting to play them. But when the unwanted guests can't play, they climb the organs and try to steal the church's silver, according to Alvland. "These people don't seem to have any sense of boundaries. Due to all of this, the staff feel very worried," Alvland said.
According to SVT and Kristianstadbladet, the intruders are a bunch of people who sleep rough, and who are unknown to the church's staff. According to Alvland, rough sleepers have turned to the church to keep warm because there are now more security guards at Kristianstad's central station. "The church has become the weakest link," he said.
It's unclear why people who want to keep warm as winter approaches feel that pooping on the floor is a good idea. But apparently, not everyone does the good ol' number two indoors. SVT reports that pissing and pooping occurs outside of the church, too.
*Stay tuned for updates as we will be sending a VICE reporter to Kristianstad to find out more.
READ: Puke and Pee Is Gradually Destroying the World's Tallest Church
Screenshot of The Red Pill, featuring some choice threads, like "HOW TO GET LAID LIKE A WARLORD"
If you're a woman and you use the internet, you will most likely have a complicated relationship with reddit.
It's not not like virtual bro forums 4chan and 8chan – homes of Gamergate, "jailbait" photos, doxxing and very angry young men – but a social forum largely made up of young-ish male Americans. Think of the archetypal reddit user as a fedora-wearing "but actually" atheist who likes Obama and maybe doesn't have objectionable opinions about women, but does think they should shave more often. And then imagine him getting slightly offended about my generalisation of a large group of men. That's a typical reddit user.
I used to spend a large amount of my time on the site. Although low-key sexism permeated most threads, I was able to overlook it – because how sexist can you really be on a food porn thread? I spent years on it finding news stories before they went mainstream; I read about relationship problems; and I looked at a ton of puppy pictures.
But then it changed. After various messages in response to my comments on boards telling me to "suck dick Gloria Steinem", the final straw came when a story popped up on my feed: Feminist SJW (social justice warrior) gets "destroyed" by David Starkey. This feminist was writer and activist Laurie Penny. The thread was pages of vitriol and hatred for a young woman attempting to take down an old white historian. It was full of misogyny; it was full of lies about her credentials as a journalist by American men who had little understanding of how journalism worked. It was a circle jerk of bullshit. I was out.
Some of the ideas being thrown around on The Red Pill (Background image: ParentingPatch, via)
That was until Trump won. As with all defeats of the left, soon came the accusations that we needed to "understand the right" more. So that's what I did. I spent a month hanging out on "The Red Pill", the men's rights activist (MRA) forum hosted on reddit and populated by plenty of "alt-right" types. It's a hateful, bitter place. Most of the posters are explicit about how not being "given" sex or rejection has shaped their attitudes to women, so it's easy to see the motivation behind their misogyny.
Feminism, the MRAs say, is stupid because women actually hold all the power in the world. This is because they're given the agency to deny sex. And so the forum pedals terrible pseudo-science to justify a "survival of the fittest" sexual market where "alpha" and "beta" men are rated in terms of value. For example, an "alpha widow" is someone who has been "abandoned by an alpha male". This is a real blow for her and for lesser males because women can't "date backwards" – once she's got with a male 8, she can't date anyone with a lower rating and be happy.
The result is that she becomes a "damaged woman accustomed to a tier of man she can no longer attract". Or, as TRP bros will say, she becomes "post wall", where her own view of her "sexual market value" exceeds her "actual sexual market value". Nice.
Some thoughts on, first, Donald Trump, and then on the Great Feminist Conspiracy (Background image: ParentingPatch, via)
Out in the real world, Donald Trump has given new hope to the men of TRP. Who better to idolise than an unwavering sexist figure with a model wife who bullshitted his way into ultimate power via stepping on a feminist? He is an "alpha" who convinced the white women of America to vote for him.
With Trump's win in mind, one of the main things I noticed was that rhetorical tools used in these threads are very similar to the lefty groups I spend time on. The memes, acronyms and echo-chamber way of thinking are all familiar. But instead, in TRP world, women do lie about rape and do like to be treated like shit. Seeing the exact opposite of your own opinion being spread via the same memes you would use does make you step outside your own online bubble and realise how absurd you must appear to a political opponent. Except, people on the left generally don't call rape survivors liars, or reckon they know better than the overwhelming majority of climate experts when it comes to whether or not climate change is real.
Americans are the biggest users of Reddit, ahead of the UK and Canada, but the politics is international, especially after Brexit became a buzzword for success among the right. And much like the way Brexit rhetoric was built on a bed of falsities, reinforced and regurgitated with authority, TRP is a similar example of lies, suddenly reinvigorated by the world's inexorable shift to the right.
One of the incredible feats of TRP is how it's managed to pack so much clout behind the ideas it purports. At every step there's a Red Pill theory that can be cited, backing up shallow arguments with more shallow arguments that have a Special Name. Just like the UK's Oxbridge universities maintain exclusivity with an entire language dedicated to the ins and outs of the institutions, the lexicon of TRP makes the users feel part of an established pseudo-academic sector or club. It's a home for the self-proclaimed "beta-male" rejects. This, like most cultish ideology, appeals to the lost.
The narratives created by TRP, in my opinion, are myths to enable its users to justify rejection, overcome a lack of self-confidence and are the result of a crippling power complex. Before I delved into TRP, I thought that the harmful, hateful opinions held there were alarming but unthreatening, occurring in an online space so distanced from my own personal political anchor. But perhaps we shouldn't be so detached: if today's politics are evidence of anything, it's that those who feel ignored have finally managed to wield the most power.
More from VICE:
The Women of the Men's Rights Movement
Why Australian Men's Rights Activists Had Their Bullshit Documentary Banned
The Shahjalal Jami mosque, Birmingham
"Community cohesion does not feel universally strong across the country," writes Dame Louise Casey. To tabloid headline writers, her "2016 Integration Review" proved Britain is a balkanised dystopia of ethnic enclaves, kept from Jihadist apocalypse by a thin veneer of patriotism and Marmite.
The Review purports to address all potential causes of injustice in modern Britain – "even your gender". In truth, it is a broadside at Islam, "putting communities... of Muslims of Pakistani and Bangladeshi heritage... under the spotlight".
At one point, Dame Casey lists the ten communities most swamped by "a minority faith or ethnic community". I visited Birmingham's Washwood Heath – number four in the chart, at 77 percent Muslim and 57 percent Pakistani – to see if the locals were really "contrary to British values and sometimes to our laws".
"I've not heard of one person going to Syria," said Sadia scornfully. The estate agent has lived all her 26 years in Washwood. "Growing up here there's nothing to do; there's no services, and the police pick on Asians for drug offences – they should focus on that."
Iram, 62, agreed: "We celebrate Eid, Christmas and Diwali together with our neighbours," she said.
The Islamic gift shop Iram co-owns with her husband
Yet isolated "terror threats" – like the one allegedly caused by mentally ill local man Zahid Hussain – swallow up headlines and resources. Stabbings and shootings aside, Washwood last made the news when the government was caught planting multi-million pound CCTV cameras to spy on its inhabitants.
Some of Dame Casey's proposals, such as improving IT literacy among at-risk women, are reasonable enough. Others – such as a compulsory "Oath of Integration with British Values" for migrants – have the tea-and-jam-sandwiches stench of neo-Imperialist fascism.
Most chillingly, Dame Casey is "proud and unapologetic" in valorising the Prevent anti-terrorism strategy, condemned by experts and community leaders as ineffectual, illiberal and racist. As she observes with mild understatement, Prevent is "not explicitly a programme to improve community cohesion".
Speaking outside Shahjalal Jami Mosque, Saf said he once spent two days being questioned by terror police after a raid on a Wolverhampton mosque. "But I have nothing to hide," he said. "I love this country, I've worked when I've been able to, I've paid taxes." He was later released without charge.
Highly-strung, with a history of incarceration and class A substance abuse, the 36-year-old was five days clean from a heavy weed habit. "Jihad means struggle – hundreds of different things for different people," he said. "For me it's fighting addiction – ISIS has nothing to do with it."
Though evidently vulnerable, Saf is only a threat to himself. He became distressed recalling the addiction that cost him access to his wife and kids, and a peer mentor from the mosque was there to soothe him. It is in Washwood he finds the "real peace" and "real support" he needs.
Emran on the front cover of a local paper in 2009
Leaning over the counter of his smoothie bar, Emran showed off a 2009 newspaper clipping. "Emran fled the terror of the Taliban at age eight," runs the headline, above a picture of a grinning, gap-toothed kid. "Now he has a home in our city." The contrast with the media welcome offered to 2016's child refugees – "give us your teeth and fuck off" – is stark.
Discussing the constantly-documented cock-ups of Prevent officers, Dame Casey admonishes against "allowing only critical narratives to dominate in the media". Muslims themselves are not offered any such protection. "Some... have argued that sections of the British media have on some occasions gone further than failing to highlight positive stories about Muslims," she concedes. That's one way of putting it.
"The media spreads hate against Muslims now. They pick up negative aspects of different Asian cultures and claim it's Islam," said Emran.
To 60-year-old corner-shop owner Yassin, it is not the madrasa but Morrisons that is isolating local Muslims. "Since big out-of-town superstores opened, people from neighbouring communities don't come into Alum Rock to shop any more," he said.
In Yassin's 40 years in Washwood, many of his white British neighbours have scraped together the funds to move elsewhere – this is white flight, for which communities of colour shoulder unfair blame. "We live here because we're working class, not because we're Muslim," Saf emphasised. "I'd live somewhere more diverse if I could afford it."
Even if Washwood's Muslims are "alienated and isolated" by "grievance and unfairness", with reported Islamophobic hate crime rocketing by 326 percent in a year, it's hard to blame them. "Muslim people live together because it's safer," said Emran. "If they go into a white neighbourhood they might be in danger."
Yet, Dame Casey concedes, "white British and Irish ethnic groups are least likely to have ethnically mixed social networks". Even in Washwood, the fourth-most Islamic of Britain's 7,669 electoral wards, two-thirds of residents were born in the UK. English is a household language in every single home, and a main language in 80 percent. Only 3.7 percent of residents cannot speak it at all. These figures hardly seem insurmountable.
As the Review highlights, those who cannot speak English are often women, isolated in the home away from education opportunities – and reporters. Twice as many British Muslim women cannot speak English as Muslim men, and 1,220 potentially forced marriages (primarily among Muslims) were referred to the government last year. On the other hand, Dame Casey found "the highest rates of domestic abuse are experienced by women from white, black Caribbean (14 percent) and Irish (12 percent) ethnic backgrounds", and noted the 19.2 percent gender pay gap across society as a whole.
Yet she dwells obsessively on Muslim "lack of integration", rather than government spending cuts – which have led to 80 percent of BME domestic violence survivors being refused support. Speaking outside Washwood Job Centre, nursery volunteer Sy said: "It's difficult for women to find work around here – that's what the government should focus on." Thanks to Arabic lessons provided by a Washwood community centre, the unemployed 32-year-old hopes to soon find teaching work.
"If one Asian commits a crime, the government says all Asians are terrorists," said Sadia. "They would never say that about one white person." Her argument maps on to gendered violence. Asian men are not inherently more or less sexist than their white counterparts: rather, a transcultural hatred of women is warped through different cultural contexts into different forms of violence.
The Ali mosque
The same applies to Islam and conservative Western ideologies. Dame Casey sketches a ghoulish picture of mosques as "breeding grounds for radicalisation and terrorism", but in the heated half-hour of mosque debate I attended, no one voiced an opinion more extreme than that bluster of a hang-em-and-flog-em Ukipper, with one man speaking sympathetically of Saudi-style corporal punishment – "it gets the job done" – though emphasising Sharia law should only be applied in Islamic countries to people who choose to follow it. "Under Islam, I have no right to hurt an ant," he said.
The congregation was united in fierce condemnation of ISIS. And, of course, the government that paid Casey to condemn Saudi influence in British mosques also brokers billions of pounds in UK-Saudi arms deals.
At the risk of stating the obvious, Washwood really is just England: kids giving girlfriends knock-kneed backies on BMXes, trampled Carlsberg cans cluttering hedgerows. Like any impoverished community, it faces its own challenges: a 37 percent child poverty rate, some of the worst child mortality ratings in the country, right-wing Islam as opposed to right-wing Christianity. People like Sy and Saf benefit from the care of the Muslim community, and a small number of women and children doubtless suffer in its blind spots – as they do everywhere else in society.
The real problem is not Dame Casey's bland suggestions for tackling these particular social issues, but how she gets there. She fails to attack the government for driving extremism in communities made up of "former colonies and territories of the British Empire" through arms sales and brawling interventions in the Muslim world, or to follow the lead of Islamic feminists in "accepting input as a two-way street".
Instead, she proudly trumpets an "absolute belief that we are a compassionate, tolerant and liberal country". Communities like Washwood must be hammered into drab alignment with post-Brexit Britain, "from the Monarchy and the BBC to queuing and talking about the weather", or suffer the consequences. This is weak tea, weak humour and crypto-fascistic.
To ordinary Muslims in Washwood, Dame Casey's relentless criticism of Muslim communities reveals a baseless obsession with ISIS bogeymen, rather than the genuine crises faced by Muslims. "Why would I become radicalised?" Saf asked. "That's not going to win my wife and kids back, is it?"
All quotations and statistics from the 2016 Integration Review or the 2011 Census unless otherwise stated.
Standing Rock has been hit by a blizzard and campers are being advised to leave. Photo by Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images
Last week, Standing Rock "water protecters" won a major victory against the company attempting to build the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) near native land, when the Army announced that it would not grant a required easement. That meant that the DAPL, denounced by critics as being potentially ruinous for the Standing Rock Sioux's water supply, would have to be rerouted. It was an unexpected bit of good news for activists who had been fighting for months to get more or less this result. Then it started snowing.
Temperatures in the area have dropped into the single digits as of Monday, and driving winds make it feel much colder. Two feet of snow has fallen on Standing Rock in the last two weeks, and though the thousands of indigenous people and their allies who have camped out to block the construction of the DAPL have been preparing for winter, it's still a tough task.
On Monday night, veterans that a VICE freelance reporter was camped with kept an all-night watch in shifts, checking in on people in tents to make sure they were OK. In the morning, search parties were organized to clear vehicles and tents and get people together in common spaces in order to account for them. On the roads outside the camp, some cars were stuck in huge snowdrifts. Rumors of deaths and near-deaths circulated in the camp, but were denied by representatives from the Standing Rock Medic and Healer Council.
"Our medical teams continue to show exceptional capacity in mitigating the effects of the weather with our winter emergency planning," said Noah Morris, a member of the council who was there until Monday. He added that there were "no significant injuries," but said that the council "continues in our condemnation of the illegal closure of Highway 1806, which has only made all of these efforts more challenging."
Photo by Cheree Franco
Last week, North Dakota governor Jack Dalrymple ordered campers to evacuate the area, warning that emergency services would not be provided to those who remained. After the Army decision to block the easement, Dave Archambault III, the chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, made a similar request for different reasons, asking all non-Sioux to pack up and leave, saying "their purpose has been served" in an interview with Reuters.
But despite all that, there are some in the Standing Rock camps who are staying, said Morris. The abysmal conditions of the roads are forcing some to remain put, and others don't trust that the fight is actually over.
"Folks see that the police have set up huge barracks and won't leave till DAPL does," Morris said. "They know they can't set camp back up on January 21"—the day Donald Trump will take office.
"I come back to the water no matter how hard I try."—Moana, "How Far I'll Go"
"Mni Wiconi. Water is sacred. Water is life."—Standing Rock protestors
With the second-best Thanksgiving opening of all time, Disney's Moana made $81.1 million in five days, uniting fans from shore to shore. The same week that we beamed at an indigenous heroine's trek across the ocean, "water protectors" resisting the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock endured tear gas, pepper spray, and threat of hyperthermia due to dropping temperatures. With water cannons and concussion grenades shot from police, protestors risked life and limb through exposure to the very element they were there to protect.
If last spring's Zootopia offered a tolerant vision of an urban future, Moana presents a progressive perspective of the indigenous past—a past that for weeks we were all too happy to praise onscreen, but leery to protect on our own home turf. Slate's Aisha Harris claimed that Disney has entered an "inclusive, progressive third Golden Age," with a film whose "multicultural creative team and message about honoring one's ancestors... present a world that the studio, and Hollywood more generally, tends to ignore or treat poorly." A musical praising the life of native people? A feel-good lure for overfed millions. Real native people fighting for their land? A wet blanket on a holiday spent pardoning televised turkeys.
And yet the stories of Moana and Standing Rock are eerily similar. Both rely on the premise that water and land are precious but endangered. Both reflect communities fearful of collapse. With Sunday's news of major victory for NoDAPL protesters—the pipeline construction halted to be rerouted off sacred Sioux land—it's time to break down what it all means. If Moana suggests that redemption comes when one leader is willing to sacrifice, Standing Rock serves as a reminder of the power of collective organizing.
"For generations, this peaceful island has been home to our family, but beyond our reef, a great danger is coming...." So starts the trailer for the film, quickly followed by a series of platonic meet-cutes between Moana and her supporting cast. In the movie, this danger appears in the form of missing fish and crops—and just seconds after an homage to the tenets of sustainability. "We share everything we have," the villagers of Motunui sing, tempting more mindful popcorn-chompers to get out of the multiplex and go off the grid. As incumbent leader of her village, Moana sets off to restore the heart of goddess Te Feti, or else face environmental apocalypse. With the help (and hindrance) of Maui, a marooned demigod whose bro-dawg antics triggered the crisis in the first place, she learns to sail the seas and navigate the stars. The souls of her ancestors guide her to Te Feti; goodness wins and the island is rescued.
But while Moana's people are saved through a feminist take on the Great Man narrative, to say Standing Rock was spared by a single person's heroics is more than problematic. In days preceding the decision, stalwart lefties like Bernie Sanders, Jill Stein, and Jane Fonda issued statements against the pipeline. Then the New York Times piped up, suggesting in an editorial that the president "step in to protect everyone's safety and pressure the sheriff's officers to stand down." Then this past weekend, more than 2,000 US veterans joined the demonstrations, providing water protectors "a moment of peace" after months of upheaval. Launched with a call for action from tribal elder Phyllis Young and activist Wesley Clark Jr., this push for solidarity between veterans and native people may have been what cinched the decision—it was the Army, after all, that called the project off.
"I know many of you have come together, across tribes and across the country, to support the community at Standing Rock and together you're making your voices heard," the president said to more than 500 Native American leaders in September. Given Sunday's announcement, to say that these voices—along with thousands of others—have finally been heard doesn't seem like an overstatement. As author and activist Naomi Klein put it Sunday in the Nation, "Standing Rock is different.... he movement was still out on the land in massive numbers when the news came down. The line between resistance and results is bright and undeniable... it shows people everywhere that organizing and resistance is not futile." In other words, protestors have every reason to rejoice on the reservation—with reservations. "Everyone here is aware that the fight is not over," writes Klein. "The company will challenge the decision. Trump will try to reverse it."
And it is up to us to resist. Polynesia isn't North Dakota and Obama is no demigod. Real change comes not from actions of one leader, but from the cumulative efforts of a united force. "My thanks to the Obama administration," announced Sioux Tribal Chairman John Archambault II yesterday, but "Standing Rock could not have come this far alone. Hundreds of tribes came together in a display of tribal unity not seen in hundreds of years. And many thousands of indigenous people from around the world have prayed with us and made us stronger."
Not a fairy tale ending—but at least a drop of hope.
Follow Eileen G'Sell on Twitter.
Over the past few years, Brooklyn's Bed-Stuy neighborhood has slowly transformed into the newest transplant hotspot, and a new meatless butcher shop opening in the area is about to become the nail in the gentrification coffin. That's right—a butcher shop that only sells meatless meat.
On last night's episode of their late-night show, Desus and Mero talked about the newest addition to Bed-Stuy and how this vegan paradise might be hell for some locals.
Be sure to catch new episodes weeknights at 11:30 PM ET/PT on VICELAND.
Defense attorneys surround former North Charleston cop Michael Slager in court on December 5. Photo by Grace Beahm-Pool/Getty Images
On Monday, a South Carolina jury could not agree that a cop shooting a fleeing, unarmed man in the back multiple times from well over a dozen feet away was murder. After a weeks-long trial, days of deliberations, and prodding from a judge for jurors to reach a verdict, Michael Slager, the white former police officer who killed Walter Scott, escaped conviction—at least for now—via mistrial.
The killing took place on April 4, 2015, in the midst of a national conversation about police brutality and the role race plays in determining when deadly force is meted out against citizens. But unlike some high-profile shootings of black men by white cops, Slager's actions were captured in a video that seemed to make the case against him airtight. The jury's refusal to convict, coupled with an incoming US attorney general some fear will refashion the civil rights division of the Justice Department, casts a pall over the future of police reform in America.
So what went wrong?
One plausible culprit observers quickly latched onto is the makeup of the jury. With 11 white members and one black one, the group seemed oddly skewed in favor of the defense in a region with a history of racially charged trials. Now, lawyers can dismiss potential jurors "for cause" (for reasons like being biased or related to the defendant), or use one of a handful of "peremptory" challenges that don't require a reason for dismissal. But as Colin Miller, a law professor at the University of South Carolina explains, the Supreme Court ruled in 1986 that the one reason lawyers aren't allowed to dismiss people is their race.
So if potential jurors who said they would not be biased in such a high-profile case happened to be white—as they (almost all) were here—the state had to make do.
Even with a demographically favorable jury, at the outset of the trial, it was tough to divine how Slager's attorneys could push back against such a seemingly damning video. But among other things, the lawyers ended up filing some creative motions; one brought the jury out of the courtroom and to the scene of the crime, where the attorneys may have had some luck suggesting there was more to the video than met the eye.
"I cannot in good conscience consider a guilty verdict," an anonymous white juror wrote in a letter to Judge Clifton B. Newman on Friday. The juror added in his note, which was read aloud in court, that it was unlikely the unanimous consensus needed to result in a conviction would be reached.
According to Miller, the reason that the judge didn't immediately declare a mistrial then and there is because he could issue what's known as an Allen Charge. Essentially, it's a command for jurors to keep trying to reach consensus. The order is sometimes referred to as a "dynamite charge" or a "nitroglycerin charge" by critics who think it amounts to bullying or at least influencing the jury.
"There are these two competing schools of thoughts," Miller explains. "The state of South Carolina said the goal is unanimity, while other states have said that's not the goal, and that we shouldn't try to force square pegs into round holes."
In an attempt to balance those two philosophies, Miller adds, Judge Newman gave the jurors a little bit of time to reconsider, but ultimately didn't push too hard. By Monday afternoon, it was all over.
Check out our new health site TONIC's look at the HIV crisis sweeping through the American South.
For his part, Eric A. Johnson, a law professor at the University of Illinois, wonders why that lone juror wasn't dismissed given that other panelists reportedly suggested he was ignoring key evidence and testimony. Johnson pointed to the case against the right-wing militia's takeover of a wildlife refuge in Oregon earlier this year. One juror apparently said at the outset of deliberations that he was "very biased" because he used to work for the Bureau of Land Management and was ultimately replaced with an alternate.
Apparently, Johnson says, any bias in this instance wasn't as overt.
The jury ultimately failed to convict Slager of murder, for which they would have needed to agree that he acted with malice. But jurors also failed to agree he was guilty of manslaughter, for which they would have only needed to conclude the ex-cop was acting out of passion. Then again, that the case even went to trial is pretty remarkable––since 2005, thousands of people have been killed by police and only 78 of cops involved in those shootings have been charged with either murder or manslaughter; convictions remain extremely rare, according to the Washington Post.
"It saddens me, but I am not shocked," Howard Friedman of the National Police Accountability Project told the New York Times. "The fact that out of 12 people you would find one person so prejudiced in favor of police is saddening, not shocking, because I know that kind of prejudice in favor of police is out there."
For what it's worth, prosecutors in the Slager case have promised to try the cop again. South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who was just nominated for a job as UN ambassador by President-elect Donald Trump, said she expects to see Slager back in court as well. If nothing else, her renewed call for "justice" suggests the case remains a relatively nonpartisan one.
That's good news for police reformers, as Slager still faces federal civil rights charges in a separate trial next year. Although the Department of Justice will have a new political boss and could vastly change its priorities under Trump, Professor Johnson, at least, can't conceive of the case being dropped entirely. The criticism would just be overwhelming.
"I guess its conceivable that a new prosecutor appointed by President Trump could make the decision to dismiss the prosecution," he said. "But it seems unlikely to me based on the basis of watching the videotape that anyone would think that would be an appropriate decision."
Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.
Photos by Caroline Tompkins
This story appeared in the December Fiction Issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.
I go to a May Day party at Alex's grandmother's house in the East 60s. I wear eyeliner I bought for $58 at Bergdorf's. Mercedes, the live-in maid, says, "You look OK today." Feeling gratified, I tell this to Alex. "Is your target audience really the maid?" He pats my upper arm. His father tells me I look just great, really spiffy, like a cocktail waitress. Alex's mother tells me not to worry, her husband doesn't know what that means. Alex's grandmother pats my wrist. "Poor people make good artists because they have to imagine what isn't there." She introduces me to everyone as a painter.
Ben brings me a canapé and tells me to stop telling our friends that he accused me of stealing his knives. "I just asked you where they went," he says. "You stay at my house for a month, I come back, and all my knives were gone. I just asked you where they went."
My therapist, a Russian, is less impressed with me than I am with myself for saying "ideological traitors," instead of "my enemies."
At a barbecue, a man asks me if I really stole all of Ben's knives to sell on eBay. He cuts me off before I even get to the part where I don't know how to cook: "Neither of you tells this story in a way that isn't boring."
My ex-boyfriend emails to say that a man has emailed him to say that he saw me at a party last night. I seemed not only to be "inebriated" but to have "a spastic grasp on narrative arc." Frank comes over to give me the keys back to my apartment now that I can afford not to sublet it to him. I explain the entire situation, reading all the emails aloud, some stretching back into 2015, but he just stares at me, dull-eyed like a fish, and calls me a "one-woman information clearing house." He says I remind him of a woman he met when he was in a psych ward for suicidal ideation when he was 18. He says if he had my problems he'd kill himself. I ask him what he thinks my problems are, and he says he heard I have a drinking problem and that I'm having trouble finding a job. I tell him I haven't applied for any jobs, which is true, because I didn't tell anyone that SoulCycle didn't call me back after my interview. (In the interview, they wanted to know why I wrote no answer on two of the six questions on their pre-Interview form.
I said it was because I didn't have a favorite color, and—I lied and said—I didn't know how my friends would describe me.)
I relay everything Frank says in an email to my ex-boyfriend, and he responds within two minutes: "Kaitlin. Here's the thing. Either you're cool and smart or dumb and lame, nothing is going to change your fate." In 2011, he emailed: "You're either with us, or you're with Psychology Today."
I do a search in my Gmail. "Classic mistake" gets "1–100 out of many." I delete an email from Sallie Mae, an email from Navient, an email from ConEd, and an email from Equinox. I do not open angry, concerned, and/or confused emails from editors and/or friends who work at seven different publications, and move them into a file called: "TO ADDRESS IN THE FALL."
I email my mother and ask her for $200. She says she'll send cash in the mail. I email the man I call, in mixed company, "my estranged father," and ask him to send $116 through Western Union for "my transportation needs," and to please this time specify which country it's coming from because otherwise I won't be able to fill out the form. He emails to ask if I have free time, since I'm still unemployed, and if I do, wouldn't it make sense if I worked for him, editing the novel he just wrote in six weeks in Ukraine waiting for "Anna" to get back from an unplanned business trip. ("Not the Ukraine," says my ex-boyfriend's best friend, repeatedly, at parties, whenever I'm at the peak of my rhetorical powers, explaining just how the internet age has allowed my father to marry a woman my age trapped in Ukraine without a passport.) I email back to say that I don't have any free time.
I wake up at noon, wait in line, put the money from Western Union in my wallet, call the Danish Poet, hop a turnstile, and sit on his bed cross-legged, talking about my finances and wiping the last of "Elon Musk's molly" from LA on my gums. He recommends the same book he has been reading for the six months I have known him about reconciling with your father, even though he has yet to reconcile with his father. I like the Danish Poet because he put me in his novel, which the Danish Artist says was published to "some acclaim" in Denmark. I am described as "a feminist." In the first draft, he, "the minor poet," called me "the redhead," and the Danish Artist, "the major artist." At the time, I said it was sexist to give the two men professions and the one woman a hair color. Classic mistake.
Because he wrote the novel in Danish and has yet to find an English publisher, the only translation I have of the entire novel is what the Danish Artist emailed:
I summarize: A minor poet and a major artist are best friends. The minor poet meets a feminist at a gallery dinner for the major artist. She has been stalking the major artist for months. (True.) She was not invited to the artist's dinner. (True.) Because the major artist ignores her at dinner (Questionable), she makes out with the minor poet. The major artist tells her to choose between the two men. She cannot. They all go home to the minor poet's house, because it isn't that nice (True), and the major artist is afraid the feminist will steal something from his house (True).
She becomes pregnant. (I hope not.) She calls them both on the phone. The major artist doesn't pick up, because he is giving a lecture. (Likely.) The minor poet isn't doing anything, because he is unemployed. (True.) They raise the child together. He doesn't request a paternity test.
I tell the Danish Artist I wrote my version of what happened between us as a short story. He gets very angry and tells me he's never talking to me again. Three days later, he emails to say that if I'm going to publish it, I have to say that he's the Swedish Artist. I say, "OK," and forward his email to my ex-boyfriend, who responds: "Stop emailing me about other guys." I ask him to pay my rent. He says, "Sure, but don't tell anyone." I text my mentor and say my ex-boyfriend is paying my rent so she doesn't have to but thank you anyway.
I do not publish my version of the threesome, just in case I want to keep having sex with the Danish Poet and the Danish Artist.
My therapist draws me a chart. "After one month, you should decide whether or not to be exclusive." He draws a big heart and writes: exclusive. Then he draws a heart with a lightning bolt down the middle: marry or break up. "This is after six months." I put it on my refrigerator.
A roommate I had in 2010, from England, went to a party and said, "New Yorkers only talk about romance." A man replied, "No. You live with Kaitlin Phillips."
A woman next to me on the F train is reading a pamphlet called "Safety Tips for Living Alone." I resist the urge to trip her. A homeless woman on a computer kiosk at the cafe across the street from the Strand posts on Facebook, "LONELY!!! SINGLE!!! LOOKING FOR SOULMATE!!!!! COMPUTER FOR ONE HR."
This story appeared in the December Fiction Issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.
(Photos: Jake Lewis)
Steve-O has just blown pube smoke in my face. He's stuffed a freshly-shaved tuft of his pubic hair into the gap between his little and ring finger, got his exasperated tour manager to light it and sucked the hole in his fist heartily. The acrid smell of singed hair gives me an immediate headache.
It's a trick that was suggested to Steve-O by a fan, but in the fan's version it's weed you smoke. Steve-O is sober, so pubes will have to do. He has given me command of his Snapchat and asked me to film him, to give the fans what they want. A couple of hours later he'll take to the stage in Liverpool to perform his stand-up-cum-pub-trick extravaganza, which he's touring across Europe.
The show is a mash-up of stories, anecdotes and light entertainment. Punctuating the tales of broken bones and arrests are balancing acts, mild nudity and an act that involves turning members of the crowd into a table. It's a very classic style of amusement, which is at odds with Steve's obsession with maintaining a strong social media presence.
"I'll certainly agonise over to try and continue to build my following," he explains. "I agonise over that way more than I should. There's just a sense of chasing my fucking tail, you know? Trying to keep up with it all. What am I going to do to keep the image going?"
The image of Steve-O is, in theory, a fairly easy one to grasp. Steve-O – real name Stephen Glover – is easily in the top three stars of auto-injury megalith Jackass, along with puppet master Johnny Knoxville and ageing problem child Bam Margera. He was always the most extreme – the one most willing to put himself in harm's way, to debase himself, cover himself in shit, piss, vomit and the rest. But the fire of this extreme personality dies down at home.
After a long and dangerous tête-à-tête with drugs and alcohol – the topics which form the funniest and most exhilarating stories of his show – Steve-O is now stone cold sober, the realities of which he thinks would perhaps let down his fans.
"My days at home would be terribly disappointing to the people who consider me a wild maniac from Jackass," he says. "They'd be like, 'Wow, it's fucking boring!' . Which is fine with me – I live a double life, there's no question about that. In my personal life I'm far more responsible and health-conscious... I've heard people say that they think I'm a much nicer guy than they expected me to be, which kind of fucking drives me nuts a little bit. People assume I'm a dickwad; people think I'm a right cock, you know? That brings on anxiety. Maybe I should work on seeming nicer."
This strikes me as strange, because for all of Steve-O's on-screen escapades, one thing that never comes across is him being a bad guy. He is constantly affable, the archetypal stoner buddy, always laughing in his distinctive way. The laugh that makes his skinny face contort into a blend of the dramatic masks of comedy and tragedy – sad eyes and a beaming white grin. It's easy to see the duality in him, though, because when he isn't cackling and smoking his own pubes he's contemplative and chooses his words carefully. To be fair, it's what you'd expect of a man of 42 who's been around the block. But it's easy to forget that him and the rest of the Jackass cast aren't skater kids any more, because, by and large, they still act like it. Some of them, understandably, yearn for those halcyon days, but Steve-O isn't so keen.
"Nothing like that had ever happened before and it will never happen again, the way I see it. I think it would be really wrong not to be protective of that," he says. "At the same time, too, there's the fact that we push our luck dramatically. Knoxville getting in front of bulls is the hardest thing to watch. You can see me in the movies – I'm just not OK with it, man. Personally, I feel pretty unaccountable for anything I do with sharks, but same difference. All of us have come far enough – to see Knoxville get in front of a bull and end up in a wheelchair... it'd be really upsetting. But to watch a Jackass movie where he didn't get in front of a bull would be a fucking let down!"
Aside from not wanting to see his friends get hurt, perhaps the kind of sensitivity that comes with maturity, Steve-O feels that a big reunion would rain on the personal parade he's spent so long cultivating. "I almost don't want there to be another Jackass movie because I've worked hard to build my own momentum, and for me to have a little bit of traction, and to be able to be getting away with having a career beyond Jackass... I want to keep that going," he says. "But I would never turn down anything Jackass-related."
Before the interview begins, Steve-O reveals a crinkled water bottle filled with a brownish-yellow liquid. It is, of course, filled with urine. Steve-O's urine. Urine given to him by a fan at his London show that is apparently 13 years old. So what to do with 13-year-old wild man piss? Naturally: test it for drugs.
Steve gleefully opens up the drug testing kit and carefully pours the piss into a cup, while a friend of his films it on a camera. "If this really is my piss there's definitely drugs in it," he says. The results, sadly, are negative. This bums Steve-O out for a few moments. Always the showman, he feels as if he's somehow let everyone down by not having his decade-old effluence being contaminated with traces of cocaine and weed.
"I've always been such a fucking attention whore, you know?" he says. "From childhood it was just all 'Look at me! Look at me!' I just was so unreasonably hungry for attention from birth, it seems. The idea of fame and celebrity is just that much more sparkly and magical to me, because, wow, these people get all the attention that I always wanted! So I think that the allure of fame and celebrity to me is more so than to another person, and so I'm more turned on by encountering it."
As with many who yearn for attention – and, by extension, to be loved – Steve-O is racked with anxiety about his success, how he can move forward and whether or not anyone wants what he has to give. He voices his concerns about a movie he wants to make, and if anyone will even care.
"Maybe I'm not big enough of a star to have a fucking big movie, and maybe I've just flung myself into this fucking movie and nothing is going to happen and I'm not going to get catapulted to some other level of success," he says. "Maybe there's no higher level of success, maybe I'm just where I'm at and it's just going to fizzle and fizzle, and soon I won't have the potential that I've enjoyed for however long. I'll have fantasies about , but I know I would go crazy and I would be miserable if I did. I don't want to get to a destination. I want to stay active and always be striving for something. I don't want to arrive anywhere."
But even if greater mainstream success doesn't reach him, you feel as if Steve-O's core fans will always be there, because he means more to them than they do to him. He gave a loveable face to the anxious outsider eager to please at any cost, and he's still that guy. His shows are filled with adults who yearn for days of getting wasted in parks after school and mindlessly kicking trees. People who want to light their farts on camera, but instead have to work a 9 to 5. Steve-O is still living that life, still smoking pubes, still piss testing age-old urine. His constancy has turned him from zany school pal into trusted old friend, and it's comforting to have that certainty, especially at a time like this.
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Cambodia's construction industry is booming, but the lives of its workers are perilous. With no safety equipment, regulations, or incident reports, builders are treated as disposable machinery. Every month, there's another story of someone falling to death. And as government inspections aren't exactly routine, it's a sector that has been left to essentially regulate itself.
I first came into contact with construction workers in Phnom Penh while working for a local newspaper back in 2014. I've been photographing them ever since, as the high rises continue to go up. I've met entire families who live on building sites, confined to small shelters built from leftover wood. I've met laborers who work 11 stories high without safety harnesses, wearing flip-flops on their feet and no helmets. They risk their lives daily in order to provide for their families or pay off debts.
US-based labor rights group Solidarity Center estimates Cambodia's construction sector workforce to be 300,000 strong, with an average salary of about $7 per day for unskilled laborers. They fear it will take a massive, unavoidable accident to usher in long-overdue changes. Such an accident is probably inevitable at the rate these building are shooting up.
"Until something really bad happens, it's hard to expect progress," says Solidarity Center director William Conklin. "It would take a major construction accident, a lot of loss of life, and even then, I don't know if changes would be sustained. It's sad that you have to say that."
I miss the way you make me feel. I miss the friends I used to have there. I miss the warehouse parties at the Rec. Center, going shopping on International with Jazper (Boytweetsworldx), going to the Farmers Market at Fruitvale Station, smoking blunts on Lake Merritt, and lingering at the San Pablo Flea Market on the weekends. I miss everything about you. You were the last place I remember calling home.
In 2010, I moved to Oakland from San Francisco. I lived off the MacArthur Bart Station. I recorded my first song in the closet of my friend Sad Andy's house in Oakland. I filmed my first music video in a nightclub in the Mission District of San Francisco. I played my first show ever off Telegraph Street in Downtown Oakland. I had a role as a hooker in the legendary Bay Area movie Licks shot in East Oakland. In Oakland, I made memories that I might have forgotten, but friends I will never forget.
When I heard about the fire Friday night at Ghost Ship my heart sank immediately. Ghost Ship was beautiful, covered with paintings and tapestries on the walls. They always had amazing curation of unique and diverse artists. Although they had a limited budget, the collective behind the space created an incredible environment for often ignored artists to be heard. I remember partying at Ghost Ship one time a few years ago, and after the party I went home with a tatted skinny punk boy. White, tatted, skinny punk boys aren't usually my type, not that I don't find them sexy, but the majority of them don't really fuck with me. But in Oakland, that wasn't the case. No one gives a fuck in the underground culture, everyone is family and friends, and everyone is down. If you are a misfit, queer, woman, person of colour, or an outsider in any way, there are always places you can go to feel safe and comfortable.
While I lived there, I rarely partied at bars or clubs, so I found myself lingering in warehouse spaces where people shared similar values, like Ghost Ship and artists' homes my friends were squatting at. One of my favourite places to party, record music, and hang out with the homies at was the Rec. Center. Sadly, after I moved away, the Rec. Center was shut down and the artists involved, including the infamous Oakland collective Trill Team 6, were driven out due to escalating rent and gentrification.
The energy in Oakland is hard to explain. The underground culture is so heartwarming and beautiful, yet it's the the fifth most-expensive rental housing market in the United States. And although it is wealthy and full of culture, there is also a dark side. I'll never forget this one night as I was walking home from MacArthur Station, I was attacked in front of my house. I was turning the key to the gate of my house, and all of a sudden a man came out of what seemed like nowhere and twisted my arm back and said, "Bitch, don't scream I have a gun." As he put a gun to my head I started hyperventilating and coming to terms with the fact that I was going to die. Things turned violent fast, and thankfully my roommate eventually heard me screaming for help and scared the men off. Although this story sounds terrifying and out of the ordinary, especially now that I'm living in Canada, it is not a rare occurrence in Oakland at all. Safe spaces in Oakland are so vital for just this reason alone.
It bothers me so fucking much that the narrative following the fire in most media has been about DIY spaces being places everyone goes to get fucked up on drugs. Yes, that occasionally happens, but I found, especially in Oakland, that what these spaces ultimately provide is a community for those identifying as queer, women, people of colour, misfits, and those who are usually sidelined by the mainstream culture. Because of the disparity between the rich and poor, artists can't find housing in most parts of the Bay Area, either because they can't afford it or it is unsafe for them. Most artists in the Bay Area seek refuge in potentially hazardous artists colonies like Ghost Ship or illegal residences where they squat. Imagine a world where this scenario would prompt the government, large tech companies, and the more affluent people in these communities into coming together to make DIY spaces sanctioned and support gender non-conforming people, POC, and all misfits in general in the arts and music communities. But sadly, this is not the world we live in. All I foresee coming out of incidents like the fire at Ghost Ship this last Friday is a loss of underground music, arts, and culture.
I would like to sincerely thank our so-called "humanitarian saviours" who have so bravely come to our rescue by reporting all DIY venues, squat houses, and artist colonies just to crush what little creative energy we have left. I've seen so many of my favourite spaces disappear due to gentrification-fueled displacement. As artists, we spend our lives trying to break down barriers and create spaces where we can care for each other and create a platform for marginalized artists that have never been invited to play at large venues, because of who they are. The infrastructure of capitalism isn't helping us much, but every day we still get on our hands and knees to collect coins off the floor, even though the floor burns us every time. We fight for each other. We come together to have our long-disparaged creative expression shine. If we don't have these spaces where we feel like we belong, we have nothing. We deserve better. We deserve our safe spaces.
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Photos courtesy of the author
Dispensaries have come a long way since the Fight Club-like existence of Toronto's oldest dispensary CALM (Cannabis as Living Medicine)—a place discovered only by accident and never spoken about. But within the last year or so, we've seen dozens upon dozens of dispensary storefronts pop up all across the city of Toronto thanks to Justin Trudeau's plan to legalize, regulate, and restrict access to marijuana in Canada. Many of these new businesses seem to be operating under the idea that by the time charges against them are put through the court system, the laws will have changed. Toronto Police have raided dozens of dispensaries but there seems to be little rhyme or reason to their actions and most dispensaries keep on selling.
Today, dispensaries are operating in this legal grey zone and business is booming. According to the Toronto's Vital Signs Report of 2016, released by the Toronto Foundation, the percentage of Torontonians reporting dispensaries in their neighbourhood doubled between March and May. It seems Toronto has unseated Vancouver as Canada's "cannabis capital."
Your experience at these stores will vary wildly from location to location but most stores make it fairly easy to get a gram of weed these days. If you have legal ID you can get re-up with little issue. But given the amount of change in such a short period, maybe weed smokers aren't quite accustomed to buying their dope at a shiny store instead of someone's basement. The interaction is most certainly different and many customers are yet to get it right. We reached out to budtenders from around the city to ask about their worst customers.
VICE: What are some irritating things your customers do?
Samson*: Sometimes you get people in here who want to smell every jar. The jar smellers are funny until they are not so funny. There's a lot of people who come here and treat it like a candy store. Look at every strand just for fun. There's a time and a place for that. When it's busy? Maybe not.
Brian*: There are ways to research, like with Leafly and Weedmaps. If you're so passionate that I have to have a 45 minute conversation with you, then be that passionate when you're sitting behind your computer.
Sasha*: This whole setup has turned people into weed snobs. They come in and they think they know a lot about weed because they smoked in a time when weed was not talked about. "Platinum? This isn't the same platinum as last week." Now that there are dispensaries and lots of variety, people are coming in like they are connoisseurs and there's nothing I can say. That's annoying, especially when they are 23. You know, I've been smoking for 23 years.
Sean*: It's also pretty annoying when customers accuse you of ripping them off, like we are purposely keeping the 0.1 gram you think we scammed from you. They give us shit when there is only popcorn nugs left. They always want the big buds even though it's gonna be the same damn thing after it's ground up.
What are some other common misbehaviours?
Samson: If we are asking you to sign up, don't expect us to break the rules for you. "Look man, I don't have my ID." I don't like being the guy on the other end shrugging and saying okay. I don't like breaking the rules.
Brian: As he stands in a pot shop.
Samson: If the cops come in here and see you without ID, that's another reason for them to shut us down. We can't push the envelope at the wrong time. We've always heard about undercovers being in the shop. Listening to what people are getting, what we're doing and selling.
Andrea*: We get people in their 50s saying, "Do I look like I'm 19 to you? Why the the fuck are you ID'ing me?" Literally, it's the only rule we have—we don't have a registration process, we don't need any prescription, we don't even keep your information. We just want to see that you have your ID with you and people are so fucking weird about that.
Stoners being paranoid? Go figure. How sketchy does this job get?
Samson: Since we are in the medical marijuana industry and medical marijuana is still classified as a drug, it's like we have access to all the drugs now. We've been asked if we can get some coke. We've been asked if we could get some meth, "Do you have heroin?" A lot of people have asked that.
Brian: The meth-head was a little bit surprised that we didn't.
Samson: This just isn't a gateway industry.
Sasha: I'm not an expert, I can't diagnose someone, but I would say you get your fair share of borderline personality disorders walking in here. If you got some anxiety issue and you don't know how to act with the world and some sativa helps you watch TV all afternoon and not be in my fucking face then you should be able to access that sativa. Go medicate at home, do what you need to do to feel better, and don't bother me.
Have you ever felt unsafe?
Andrea: There was this one guy, I forget what the confrontation was about, but we politely asked him to leave because he was really obnoxious, and he went outside and was spitting on our window, threatening to meet our manager outside at the end of the night. You do get some scary people coming in.
Tim*: Tell him about the guy with the fucking knife.
Andrea: This guy comes in and stands in the corner, hidden underneath the cameras. I'm by myself budtending. He waited until Tim was in the back and there was nobody there but me. He had his hands in his pants, he pulls out this knife, about half a foot long, and holds it behind his back. I see Tim and I make a gesture. Tim walks right up to him, intimidating him and just pushes him out the door. As he was walking out the door, you could see the guy second guessing himself and looking back. It was so scary.
This all seems like a hassle, why do you do it?
Samson: We're trying to change public perception. We'll always have people sticking up their noses. We're trying to treat it like a pharmacy. For us, it's a business and we try to run it like that and keep the mentality that it is medicine.
Sasha: We like to help people. Some people come in here legit sick. They are buying Rick Simpson oil and they are shaking when they are filling in their forms; I'm filling it in for them. So for that reason, I'm really happy we're here.
Sean: I love being able to help first time cannabis users with choosing a proper path to follow as far as picking out the proper products and consumption methods; then seeing them come back thanking you for making a difference.
I'm sure you also get some sweethearts in here too.
Matthew*: This 65-year-old English lady showed up once, and her son was signing up, and she was at the counter, I guess she had already signed up a different day, and in her accent she whispers under her breath, "Do you have anything that's really good for sex?" We had love potion at the time, so I sold her that.
*Names have been changed to protect the budtenders' anonymity.
Photo via Flickr user Gage Skidmore
Despite that meeting with Al Gore earlier this week, President-elect Donald Trump is still acting like a man who does not believe in or care much about climate change. By Wednesday afternoon, he'd settled on Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt—a tried and true friend of the fossil fuel industry—to head the EPA, the New York Times reports.
Since 2010, the Republican lawyer has used his position as Oklahoma's top prosecutor to fight President Obama's climate change regulations. He's been a party to suits against the EPA more than once and helped form an alliance with top energy companies to fight against new environmental rules. He's still involved in a lawsuit aimed at bringing down the president's Clean Power Plan, which will likely be heard by the Supreme Court.
Assuming he's confirmed as head of the EPA, Pruitt will be tasked with regulating the very companies he's sought to protect, like Continental Resources and Devon Energy. In return, some have helped power his political career. While Pruitt wouldn't be able to immediately overturn Obama's climate change rules on his own, he may erode them over time.
A few Democrats have already condemned the pick, and major environmental groups came out swinging when it was reported Wednesday.
"Having Scott Pruitt in charge of the US Environmental Protection Agency is like putting an arsonist in charge of fighting fires," Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, said in a statement.
