Dir: Joey Silvera
Rating: 8
evilangel.com

In the four years since my eldest son was born, I’ve been eagerly awaiting my kids’ starting school so I could attend parent-teacher conferences. My mother worked the night shift in a factory and was never able to be involved with PTA. I always wonder if she would’ve gone to some of the meetings if she had happened to meet a swell fellow suitable to be a father to my sister, brother, and me. Maybe she preferred to remarry, rather than live the rest of her life in celibacy.

Judging from the variety of pornographic storytelling I’ve closely examined and reviewed over the years, a lot of romances spark in the schoolhouse. I’ve always thought PTA meetings would be a good place to creep out on hot MILFs and have the type of sensual lovemaking that you only see on the internet, films that capture the magic of stuff like a woman sitting in a urinal.

For years I’ve imagined what that first PTA meeting with my wife would be like. A room full of lonely, deprived, and depraved stay-at-home moms in nothing but thigh-highs and garter belts, with hopes of a sexy, suburban orgy breaking out in my kid’s cafeteria. Instead I was handed a steaming heap of reality on a plastic tray to be washed down with expired USDA milk: There are no MILFs in the suburbs. Only porkers. Sadly, my wife had to work the night of our first PTA meeting, so I didn’t even have her cleavage to get lost in. I texted her, “Wish you were here.” I then basically mentally raped the chalkboard for 90 minutes. And she wanted it. If she didn’t, why would she dress like that? GREEN MEANS GO!! GREEN MEANS GO!!

I kid. Rape is no laughing matter. Especially the rape of a chalkboard. I imagine if you really went for it, the slate could sever a man’s penis. (Note to self: invent an antirape IUD that cuts dicks off.) But even less funny than rape and MILFs is wearing an ill-fitting superhero costume to your son’s school Halloween parade so all your new PTA “friends” can see if you live up to your coffee cup’s WORLD’S GREATEST DAD boast.

It’s probably worth mentioning that I recently lost 40 pounds and am currently struggling to buy clothing that fits me properly. Last January I was a 38-inch-waist wastoid; today I’m a 32. What size is that in a Robin costume? Not sure. My wife guessed a medium.

Unbeknownst to me, the Jokers at the costume website sent me a size small; I somehow fit into it without taking heed of the size labeled on the tag until later. I checked after noticing the atomic wedgie I was feeling, how my balls were perforated by the hiked-up crotch and how my manhood seemed stapled to my inner thigh. But I just chocked it all up to how superheros wear their outfits.

“I can see your junk,” my wife informed me when she saw me dressed up for the first time. “It’s really bad.”

I was all jammed up. The parade was about to begin, and I had to be Robin. We were a superhero-themed family. My two-year-old was going as Batman; I had to hope no one would notice my mistake. Or my penis.

Of course, they noticed. The first mom I spotted, her eyes went right for my package. She dick-checked me. “Wow…” she said with a hungry smile, “I really like your costume.”

This was not the sexy PTA encounter I had envisioned. I spent the rest of the evening with my cape wrapped around me, hiding my cock, telling children I was a masked magician.

After that night I’ve been thinking that being a superhero, with all the spandex, latex, chains, and whips, is just a front for some sort of devilish secret sex party. I hope it’s a lot hotter than a PTA meeting.

More stupid can be found at Chrisnieratko.com or @Nieratko on Twitter.

Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter is one of the most unique and peculiar films at this year's Sundance Film Festival, which isn’t surprising since oddball brothers David and Nathan Zeller wrote it. They have been making the Sundance cut for the last decade. This is the first time the Zellner's work has made it into the revered main competition at the festival, where Sundance's Director of Programming Trevor Groth said, "This is them peaking. This is the most interesting film they've ever made, and it was a lock for competition the moment we saw it." The amazing thing is that the film is based on one of the most insane and absurd stories of modern time—but told in a weave of multiple fictionalized accounts of the events.

The first piece of the puzzle starts with a botched kidnapping, a series of grisly murders (one involving a woodchipper), and a briefcase loaded with cash buried on the side of the road. It might sound familiar, since it was the basis of the Coen Brother's 1996 film Fargo. At the beginning of Fargo, title cards read, "This is a true story," but, Joel Coen would later admit, "If an audience believes that something's based on a real event, it gives you permission to do things they might otherwise not accept." Fargo wasn't true, but it was a combination of crimes and places imagined as one. The Zellner's movie is based on what happens a few years later, when a dreary, lonely Japanese woman believed the Coen's story and set off on an international adventure to uncover Steve Buscemi's buried briefcase. While on the search for the money, the woman freezes to death. The Zellner's take, like the Coen's, combines urban legends. Their central character, Kumiko—the adventurous Japanese woman who is played by the fantastic Rinko Kikuchi—is such a unique and relatable protagonist that her portrayal comes across as fact, but in reality, the team is just creating a new truth to the story—similar to Fargo. 

I met up with David and Nathan, as well as the film's star, Rinko, in Park City to chat about their filmmaking process, the challenges of making their most ambitious film, and bringing an old offbeat charm to an already offbeat plot.

VICE: You guys have been making movies for years together. You’re a brother pair like the Coens and you give yourselves similar titles. David, it says you directed this and Nathan, you produced. But do your jobs overlap similar to theirs?
David Zellner: Everything overlaps. We have different strengths, but everything we do is very collaborative. 

You guys are two years apart. Did you grow up fighting?
Nathan Zellner: We didn’t hate each other, but we fought like any brothers. 
David: We would do pranks to each other. I put lunchmeat in Nathan’s wallet.
Nathan: That was in college though.
David: [Laughs] Oh, God!
Nathan: Every time I pulled out a bill, I’d be like “P.U.” Because it was in there for a month, but I never noticed since I never had much money in there.
David: Cured meats are fun.

Do you fight on set?
David: If we have a disagreement we talk about it privately. We’ve lived with the movie for so long and we want to make the same movie so there’s not much to disagree about.
Nathan: A lot of it is worked out during pre-production and writing. There were a lot of changes with weather or if someone has a better idea we can be like, “Oh, at least we have something to fall back on so let’s try this other thing.” 

You said you’ve been living with this movie for a while. How long after you discovered the true story did you start planning a feature?
David: We started working on it right away, partly in an abstract way because it was so curious. It seemed so mysterious that something like this could happen in modern day. It’s almost like a folk-tale or an antiquated treasure hunt. To have a character that would have that approach was liberating and fascinating to us. We started filling in the gaps based on the basic urban legend of this woman going to America in search of that fortune. Then we made our own story from there. Years later, some other elements of the story came out that conflicted, other accounts, but it made us like it all the more. There’s different version of truth out there about it. For this version, we liked our truth.

Kumiko made up her own mystery adventure and you guys made yours with the movie.
David:Whatever the truthful elements that actually happened quickly took a life of their own through the telephone game. I feel like that’s how all stories take shape. Seeing it happen in real time was really interesting. 

How long did it take you to find someone that could properly play this kind of character? How did you find Rinko Kikuchi?
David: The whole movie hinges on the Kumiko role. There’s a lot of internalized things being processed since she’s alone for so long so we needed someone with a wide range of skills as an actor. When we watched Babel we saw how amazing Rinko was in that and then this film called Funky Forrest and, even though it’s a smaller role, we were like, “Oh, she’s cool.”

Rinko, you’ve worked with many new auteurs like Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Rian Johnson and Katsuhito Ishii. How is it different working with the Zellner Brothers?
Rinko Kikuchi:Each director is really different. Basically, other directors have their own very specific ideas of what I should do so I just act that. I felt the Zellner’s were much closer to me, which was very helpful.

They also act in the film with you too. Have you acted with your director before?
Rinko: Actually, before they acted with me I was a little worried. [Laughs] They’re really good actors, I know. But I thought they were directors and then they changed the roles. I had never had that experience, so I was worried but…
David: But it all worked out. We met her like six years ago. From the first meeting with Rinko we’ve had good conversations, although it was through a translator at the time, but we have similar tastes in movies and she just knew the tone we were going for right away. 

A lot of treasure hunting or adventure movies don’t star a meek, super quiet protagonist. Usually it’s a go-getter, but things force Kumiko’s hand here and the more she’s pushed into fantasy, she withdraws from reality. Why that protagonist?
David:It was more interesting to us. We hadn’t seen anything like that. We didn’t want a macho guy adventure. We wanted a person, a human, in a troubled place where not everything is clear and worked out. In real life, it’s much more complex and messy than that. Also, people don’t deal with things so directly as they do in films. Directly in terms of their own actions or how they deal with other people. Sometimes people internalize things, are passive-aggressive, bottle things up and so we like the idea of this person being really driven and passionate about this quest but her way of going about things was indirect and based on regular human folly. One thing leads to the next.

In all of your movies, and especially this, you showcase great Americana observations: the small-town old woman’s obliviousness, teens screaming out of cars, dopey salesman, etc. Did you try and add Japanese versions of those moments in Tokyo?
David: We just tried to create human moments that we would like to see that would be interesting. Whether it be Kumiko’s interaction with the old woman or her interaction with her mom. We tried to create different dynamics that would be interesting and complex and help motivate her to want to break free. I mean, we did as much research as white guys from Texas can do. You know, we’ve been to Japan a couple times, but we were still outsiders obviously. When we went there we just tried to be open with the crew and Rinko. It’s heavily stylized, but we wanted a note of truth to it. We were always doing gut checks with that stuff.

In part three of Fresh Off the Boat - Shanghai, Eddie spends his final day eating some quality breakfast dumplings, going undercover at a bootleg mall, and enjoying classic Chinese-American food in Shanghai while discussing what it was like growing as a Chinese-American in the USA.

A few years ago, Zanta was the unofficial push-up king of Toronto. Photo via.

In December of last year, I walked into Jet Fuel Coffee and found it decorated from top to bottom with drawings of a shirtless, smoking Santa—pumping his fists and shouting “Merry Christmess!” The art was from a graphic novel by Jason Kieffer called Zanta: The Living Legend that came out in 2012, but is receiving some new attention from Jet Fuel’s art show. I’d somehow never heard of Zanta, because apparently I spent the better part of the 2000s living under a rock. That said, I can’t tell you how excited I was to discover that Zanta is a real, living character.  

For those of you who also hadn’t discovered Zanta when he was at his peak, the man is known for shirtless, furious knuckle-pushups that he once performed all over Toronto—while wearing a Santa hat, and smoking. As recounted in Kieffer’s graphic novel, Zanta was arrested on multiple occasions, spent a bit of time in jail, and was eventually banned from most of the downtown core, along with Toronto’s public transit system. That was back in 2006, and as a result of his banishment, Zanta effectively vanished from Toronto.

I wanted to find out what happened to everyone’s favourite Christmas-loving, cigarette smoking, push-up guru, so I got in touch with him at his mother’s house where he currently resides, and he told me all about the legend of Zanta in his own words. 

In the spring of 2000, David “Zanta” Zancai was doing some construction work with his father when he fell from a height of 25 feet, while painting a ceiling, and landed on a staircase. David fell into a coma for 23 days, and was on life support for 17. For a brief period, no one knew if he was going to make it. “I remember cutting into the ceiling, and then I don’t remember anything else,” said Zanta.  

When he woke from his coma, he was in a body brace for a month, and doctors told him he was never going to be able to work again. But after that fall, something had started brewing inside David (soon to be Zanta) and he was beginning to experience bouts of mania. According to his friends and family, the fall caused brain damage that triggered schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder. He grew restless at home and couldn’t just sit on the couch—so he started doing pushups anywhere he could. Pushups were the only exercise he could do without hurting his back, and he wanted to get in shape. During this time his then girlfriend left with their daughter, and he soon started doing thousands of pushups a day, all over the city and on the subway. His goal soon became: “get famous and let everyone know what happened with my daughter.” 

In 2003, police took him to the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) after they found him doing his pushups while making strange noises in public—which Zanta says are modeled after car hydraulics. From there, Zanta told me he was sent to a CAMH facility located in downtown Toronto for 30 days, because he was talking too fast. He hated it there (he referred to it as “a nuthouse”) and claims no one tried to help him; they just put him onto prescription meds. “They give you medication to go back to sleep and if you don’t take your medication, they jump you and give you an injection,” he said. He told me one nurse asked him to act like he was OK and that the meds were working so that they could release him. David claims that he didn’t actually take the meds—he was spitting them out because they knocked him out cold. One month later he was let out, and says he kept pushing on; or rather, pushing up. 

By December 2004 his mania continued, and while he was at a Santa Claus parade he realized that if he put on a Santa hat, more people would pay attention to his antics. Zanta was born. “I took my shirt off in the middle of winter and I thought more people would watch me then, too… and then I thought Zanta would be a way to make it!”   

A short time later, he lost custody of his two-year-old daughter (he wore a Santa hat to the custody hearing) and then became Zanta 24 hours a day, seven days a week. “I never stopped being the character for two years, every hour, every day. I wanted to be famous and I wanted people to know what had happened with my daughter and at the nuthouse.”  

His campaign of awareness worked. Thanks to his nearly omnipresent status in the downtown core—doing pushups in fountains, flexing and screaming in front of the CHUM building, working out on top of police cars, and showing off in the TTC—by 2005 Zanta had become a phenomenon in the city. You could sit on Zanta’s back while he did push-ups, and he was constantly giving money to the homeless. Such an animated and extroverted character was so rare for “Toronto the Good” that Zanta soon became a local celebrity. There were several independent documentaries made about him (like this one), a fairly detailed Wikipedia page, and an appearance on Kenny vs. Spenny.  

In the previously mentioned short doc, there’s a scene where Zanta is relaxing on a bench while fans approach him. One guy shakes his hand and calls him “Toronto’s finest,” then a retired mall Santa comes up and and says Zanta’s look is “right on.” Later, a woman approached him on the sidewalk and announced proudly they were Facebook friends while hugging him. One guy recalls working at a Korean BBQ restaurant, when Zanta walked in and started flexing while saying. “Yes! Yes! Yes!” Mr. Korean BBQ thought that was hilarious: “I was working a long shift and it was exactly what I needed to see: something funny.” 

His fans loved him, no question. The authorities, however, did not.  

“I was out there everyday making people smile, doing something no one else has done before. I’ve never bummed a penny off anyone for two years,” said Zanta. “But every time I went down to the corner, I was getting hassled. They’d give me tickets for things like interfering with traffic.” Zanta recalls once running and jumping into a garbage can to hide. “I wasn’t hurting anybody.” 

Photo of a page in the "Zanta: The Living Legend" graphic novel, via Angela Hennessy.

Regular street performers are allowed to perform with a proper license, and there are by-laws that protect them, but Zanta isn’t a regular performer. He’s never collected any money—nor is there any City Hall paperwork that could legalize his specific brand of performance art, if you can call it that.  

According to Zanta, the “aggressiveness” or “mischief” he was charged with by police was simply a way to bring some energy into the city: “So many people are stressed out. Working their asses off for nothing. Everyone is depressed, walking around like zombies. Nobody is smiling. No one is talking. When I do Zanta I leave an impression, and I guarantee that they are going to see me and tell someone else. And in that moment when they see me they are not thinking about anything else. And they don’t think about anything bad, like lost loved ones or other problems.”

But these run-ins with the law further underline the growing trend to push people like Zanta, or to use Jason’s term, “eccentrics,” out of Toronto’s downtown and how quickly people with mental health issues are being shunted into the criminal justice system instead of getting the help they need.  

“Jail isn’t the right place for Zanta or for anyone like that. But the criminal justice system is flooded with these kinds of people and only a small amount of the problem is being addressed,” said Paul Druxerman, a lawyer who offered to help Zanta pro-bono after seeing him walking into court with “Vote Zanta” written in marker on his chest and back. He recalls another time in court where Zanta showed up in pajamas (and a Santa hat, of course) and started doing handstand pushups at the courtroom door, which prevented anyone from entering. “I told him he couldn’t do that kind of thing because the guards would be only too happy to take him away.” 

It has been roughly seven years since Zanta has performed, but he’s now talking about making a comeback. After seeing the show Jason had done at Jet Fuel, he became inspired to see his fans again. “It was incredible to see. It’s unbelievable how famous I am.” He recently had a Santa hat delivered to his mother’s house and has started working out again. His Zanta hiatus caused him to gain some weight and now he’s got a bit of a gut—but he’s on the Jenny Craig program, and says he wants to get fit for his fans. He’s also talked about possibly opening a Zanta museum inside of a pub in Mimico where his fans could come to him. He’s not sure he’d come back downtown to perform, but he’d like to walk around with his hat and see what happens.  

Zanta is still in close contact with his three other children. One of them, 21-year old Nathan Zancai, reached out to me when he heard I was writing this story to share his thoughts on the Zanta issue: “It’s just not that crazy. We even have the Brampton Batman out there. If they aren’t harming anyone, leave them alone… If there’s a naked cowboy in New York, why can’t Toronto have Zanta?”  


@angelamaries

José, a.k.a. "the Snail," a.k.a. the "king of the pickpockets," stands near the soup kitchen where he now works. Photos by Alejandro Bringas

The Snail is the best pickpocket in Ciudad Juárez. He's stealthily snatched wallets and cash from politicians in Sonora, federal police officers in Durango, and undercover cops in Mexicali tasked with his arrest. If half his stories are true, he's the best in Mexico, but that's hard to say for certain. There's no way to quantify achievements in petty theft, no Pickpocket Hall of Fame, but there was a time—if you believe him—when the Snail was so respected by the police that they let him go about his business undisturbed.

I found out about the Snail after I became interested in pickpockets—their stories, their ethics, their art of nonviolent robbery. I started asking people with ties to the criminal world whom I should talk to, and everyone from former beat cops to the pirated-DVD vendors on the street told me I needed to find the Snail, who they referred to as the "king of the pickpockets."

I tracked him down and discovered he's retired now, a dark-skinned man in his mid-50s running a soup kitchen on the El Paso border. He still receives gifts from old friends— cops and gangsters both—and a handful of glommers-on are always around to rub shoulders with greatness and pick up tips and tricks. One recent afternoon, I drove out to the kitchen to meet him. 

We sat at a long plastic table, the only furniture in the soup kitchen's dining room. The place barely gets by on donations and what it can salvage from the trash, and its poverty shows everywhere—it smells of rancid food, and the front door is rotting away. In the winter, they cover the door with blankets to keep the cold out. As the Snail talked to me, a handful of men sitting at the table leaned in, cautiously eavesdropping.

The Snail's real name is José (he talked to me on the condition I withhold his last name). His nickname was handed down from his father, another curly-haired thief with a mop like a heap of snails. José inherited his old man's hairdo and a talent for nimbly lifting valuables out of people's coats and purses.

José said he started robbing people as a teenager in the mid-70s, often working with a team. "Sometimes we worked alone, in couples, or even in fours, depending on the job that had to get done," he told me. "One of us would be the distraction, the person who strategically deceives the [target]. Another person is the shadow—he's in charge of covering the operation, so police can't see the action. The other person is in charge of the direct action, robbing. The remaining person is a support for the group and the operation."

He told me that he could steal 10,000 pesos (about $775) in a day, but he didn't use the money to celebrate his scores—bottles of whiskey or electronics could easily be stolen too, and pretty much everything is free when you have quick hands. On the occasions he was caught, José would return his victim's money or valuables and flee before the cops could be summoned.

There's no honor among thieves, or at least the ones José ran with. If given the opportunity, José would pocket more than half his cut from the wallets of victims and then downplay the score to his team when it was time to pay up. "There is no honesty among us," he said. "We trick each other; that's why we fight and kill each other."

José reveals the contents of his wallet, which he keeps securely in the right rear pocket of his pants.

A group of eavesdroppers, Snails in training, approached us as José was reminiscing. He told them to scram, but one of them asked him to tell the "story of the four buttons."

José chuckled a bit. "One time in a bus terminal, I had to open a man's coat, slide my hand inside the coat into his sweater, unbutton four buttons from his pocket, and take out the money." He told me that he got away with the cash, of course—he gets away in all of his stories.

Another time he was detained for allegedly stealing a Juárez police captain's firearm, and the officer asked him how he did it. "I said, 'I can't tell you.' He then tried to cuff me. I slipped away, and I had his wallet in my hand. I told him, 'Commander, here is your wallet. This is how we do it, there is no way to explain it to you.'"

José always had a symbiotic relationship with the police. They would arrest him occasionally—he's lost count of the number of times he's been in jail—but once they got to know him he could buy his freedom for a gold bracelet or watch. The local police were likely more concerned with Juárez's astronomical murder rate, violent wars between the drug cartels, and the epidemic of kidnappings than petty theft.

José's base of operations was Juárez, but he traveled all over Mexico for work—the thieves who don't get caught tend to move around a lot.

"We'd go from here to Chihuahua, we'd be out there for two days, from there to Durango and from there to Mazatlán, from Mazatlán to Guadalajara," he said. "Then we'd go to Mexicali—we'd stay there for a week, making good money stealing passports."

His wife accompanied him on these trips. She was a thief, too; they'd go into stores and raid the shelves, hiding the stolen items under her skirt. Once, they were on a spree in Mexicali when they noticed a young man following them. When he followed them onto a public bus, José said his wife suggested they steal his wallet to see if he was a cop.

José and his gang got into position. They pretended to pickpocket another passenger, and when the agent moved to catch them, José nipped his wallet instead. "Poor pig. He was confused, waiting for us to do something, but we already had him, and he didn't even notice. He tried to stand up and take out his badge, but he couldn't find it. He ran off the bus, embarrassed."

José's talents have made him a rich man. He owned property in Juárez and hired servants to attend to his every need, but he wasn't happy. He became a drug addict and susceptible to violent swings during which he'd try to stab his wife with "whatever was at hand. Forks, knives, pencils. Poor woman, but it was my messy life," he told me, looking at his shoes like a repentant child.

In the late 80s he hit rock bottom. "One day she just left me, and I lost everything: my wife, my two houses, and my daughter. I ended up sleeping in the streets, didn't even have the strength to pickpocket again. I was living on drugs—heroin, to be specific." José lived on the streets for about a decade, until he met the priest who owns the local soup kitchen. "He saved my life," José said. "He gave me Jesus."

Now José is reformed, a legendary lawbreaker who's found the Lord, a cautionary tale turned into something straight out of a Sunday-school lecture on God's forgiveness. Which isn't to say that he doesn't get a certain gleam in his eye when he talks about the bad old days.

"Did I tell you I also pickpocketed a city councilman in a political rally," he said, "along with about ten other people who were there as well? I didn't need backup or help. It's easier to do when there are a lot of people around. The councilman only had a 50-peso bill in between a bunch of credit cards and IDs. All that work for nothing! I approached him [with the wallet] and told him, 'Is this yours?' He said yes, and I told him, 'Please put more money in it.' He didn't say anything to me, man." 

Image by Marta Parszeniew

In the theater, the parts an actor plays mark out his life. Today’s fresh-faced Hamlet will be tomorrow’s age-ravaged Lear. If old thesps are fond of telling stories, well, it’s because it all goes by so fast. Philip Seymour Hoffman, who was found dead at his home yesterday in New York following a suspected heroin overdose, was an actor grounded in the theater, a man who could move an audience, who could show them something real. He would have acted the shit out of Lear.

Seymour Hoffman came to prominence at a time when it seemed obligatory to have three names in order to be a truly promising character actor. Along with John C Reilly and William H Macy, he featured in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1997 film Boogie Nights, playing Scotty J, the unhip boy unhappily in love with Dirk Diggler, the python-penis pornstar played by Mark Wahlberg. It was an early indication that here was an actor who could show us, to an uncomfortable and at times almost unbearable degree, what it was to be innately human while also being an outsider, what it was to struggle with the problem of communication and the inability to find happiness. In this scene, Scotty brings Dirk out to show him his new car, which he has bought purely to impress him. He shows Dirk the car and then throws himself at him.

Speaking too fast, stumbling over his words, in those moments before he is politely rejected, Seymour Hoffman manages to embody everyone who has ever loved someone without that love being returned. He is drunk and desperate and then blames the lunge on being drunk and desperate, as if it didn’t mean anything when in fact it means the world. More than this, it’s his character’s sexuality—a difficult and lonely secret—and the fear and fantasy that comes from that, which Seymour Hoffman shows us as he sits alone in his car, his chin bunched up, snivelling and pushing the words, “I’m an idiot” out, over and over. We’re all idiots, trying to show the people we love what we feel, and no one could show us that like Philip Seymour Hoffman.

A year later, in Todd Solondz’s Happiness, he played Allen, who was like his Boogie Nights character but more of a pervert. Allen phones women—one, in particular—obsessively, while jerking off in a lonely pantomime of self-hatred. This character is as sad and cut-off from happiness as Scotty J, but he is creepy and sinister as well as desperate. They say that actors should use the tools they are given, and Seymour Hoffman—with his pale skin, puppy fat, and vaguely ginger side parting—could use these physical characteristics like no other. He seems to be permanently sweating and breathing heavily throughout Happiness. In this scene, the woman he has been bothering calls his bluff and invites him over to her apartment, only to tell him that he’s not her type after she’s watched his hand travel, at an agonising pace, across the sofa towards her.

Seymour Hoffman neatly flips the almost unimaginable frustration he embodied in Happiness on its head in his portrayal of the uptight personal assistant, Brandt, in The Big Lebowski. Here, he is showing the Dude around the real Big Lebowski’s house, just emitting lines like, “Without the necessary means for a necessary means,” from his furiously clenched ass cheeks like it ain’t no thing. In The Talented Mr Ripley, he did a louche, patrician spin on this as the party guy snob, Freddie Miles. Here, he catches Matt Damon spying on Jude Law going to town on Gwyneth on their boat. What’s brilliant is that for half a second, there’s a look of concern on his face. Then, he’s off, like a Harvard guy pouncing on some community college bum, spurting out a laugh before drawling, “Tommy, how’s the peeping?” then repeating it and raising his glass as the final humiliation to Damon’s thwarted outsider. It’s the kind of thing that makes you squirm with joy.

From the beginning, PSH could be as funny as he could be affecting. Say what you want about the “great men” of acting, but can any of them bring the LOLs like the Lonely Man's Brando? Robert De Niro likes to ham it up to 11 but there isn’t a single Meet the Parents / Fockers film in which he’s able to successfully entertain you while Ben Stiller burbles on in the foreground. He should’ve taken a leaf out of Phil’s book. Here he is in Along Came Polly, hollering “Raindance!”, “White chocolate!”, and “Let it rain!” before panting furiously for a Time Out in one of cinema’s great basketball scenes. Along Came Polly may not feature heavily in any appreciations of Seymour Hoffman’s brilliant and varied career but it’s a testament to the fact that any film out there will be greatly improved—and in this case, dragged into the realms of entertainment—by big man Hoffman.

As he got older, Seymour Hoffman was given bigger roles that showed more of him. In The Master, he got to chew up the scenery, bringing the theater to the screen as the L. Ron Hubbard-inspired Lancaster Dodd. In this scene, he channels some Stanley Kubrick vibes as he performs “Go No More A-Roving” in the commanding, camp manner of an old music hall star. That same commanding theatricality is present here in Charlie Wilson’s War, in which he tells his boss he knows he’s been “dignifying” another man’s wife “in the ass,” before breaking his office window and storming out. In Synecdoche, New York, Seymour Hoffman carried a long, meandering, occasionally brilliant and frequently baffling film from start to finish, putting it on his shoulders and carrying it as Atlas carries the world.

Though he was known for being overweight, Seymour Hoffman had a gift few actors possess. He was able to almost magically change his body to fit a part. Not through Oscar-winning crash diets, but through acting. A couple of years ago—watching the small, slight actor Mark Rylance in the brilliant play Jerusalem—I wondered how it was that he managed to puff himself up so that it seemed as though he were the biggest man on the whole stage. So it was with the big Seymour Hoffman, who won an Oscar for playing the tiny, waspish Truman Capote with such emotional and physical skill that you’d think he were a twink, not a bear.

Playing the great rock critic Lester Bangs, in Almost Famous, Seymour Hoffman remarks that: “Great art is about guilt and longing.” So often, that was what Seymour Hoffman’s acting was about. “Truth” is a word that’s thrown around a lot in the theatre; it’s a hazy concept that encompasses a lot of things, including not being hammy, or affected or self-conscious. It’s hard to pin down but easier to see when it’s right in front of you. When you watch Philip Seymour Hoffman act, you are watching something true. He once said of his career: "I just thought I'd ride my bike to the theater. That's what was romantic to me." It’s a line that sums up the possibility of creation, the optimism of making something artistic happen. To think that he’ll never do that again is almost too sad.

Philip Seymour Hoffman is survived by longtime girlfriend Mimi O'Donnell and their three children, Tallulah, Willa, and Cooper. He was 46.

@oscarrickettnow

Header image contains elements from here.

Photos by Roc Morin

Davecat was at the door before the postman even had a chance to knock. He dragged the massive wooden crate into his living room and drew the blinds. “She was everything I dreamed of,” he recalled, of the moment when he first glimpsed his wife through the slats of the crate. She was sitting, staring at him with the infinite patience of a statue. “Her skin was so lifelike, and her eyes—I could have stared into them forever.” He had a name picked out already: Sidore. As so often happens these days, Davecat and Sidore’s relationship began online. After a series of bad relationships with humans, Davecat ordered her for $5,000 from love doll manufacturer Abyss Creations.

Davecat, who is 41 years old and prefers to go by an old online nickname, met me at his home in suburban Detroit where he lives with his silicone wife of 13 years. The two sported matching wedding bands engraved with the words, “SYNTHETIK LOVE LASTS FOREVER.” Davecat shook my hand enthusiastically before introducing his bride. He called her Shi-chan—a term of endearment. The love doll sat silently on the couch, gazing off into the distance. I wondered if I should reach down, pick up her hand, and shake it too, but I decided on a polite nod instead.

The proud husband offered me a chair and took a seat on the couch beside his wife. He wrapped an arm around her shoulder, placed her hand flirtatiously on his thigh, and kissed her pale cheek. The interview began.

VICE: Why did you choose to marry a synthetic woman?
Davecat: First of all, it’s very freeing. If you want to be alone, you can be alone. If you want company, you can have it. Whatever you want, whenever you want, you can have it. Human relationships can be great, but they can also be very messy.

Messy how?
When you love an organic, you’re really loving two people: there’s the idea of the person that you fall with love with and then there’s the actual person—and at some point, the idea is going to disappear and you are going to bump straight into the actual person. You have to come to terms with the discrepancy between those two people. And for that matter, they’re doing the same thing with you too.

So, with a synthetic, the fantasy and the reality are identical.
Exactly.

What have your romantic relationships with humans been like?
That’s the thing, I’ve never really had what you would call a legitimate relationship. I’ve had many affairs with organic women, but I’ve always been the other man.

Do you think there could have been an organic woman who would have been right for you?
It’s possible, but how long am I expected to wait until I find the right person? In the meantime, I’m getting old. There’s a phrase in the iDollitor community that I love, crude as it may sound, “Losers whine about not having a girlfriend. Winners go home and fuck a doll.” There’s a point at which you say: I don’t want to be lonely anymore and I’m going to do something about it. There’s also the fact that I’ve always found the idea of gynoids and synthetic women attractive.

Do you remember your first sexual thoughts about that?
It happened around second grade, I think. I had a French teacher. She would be writing something on the blackboard and I would just be staring at her, imagining that there was machinery inside of her—making her arms move, making her speak, that sort of thing.

Why was that thought appealing to you?
I think it’s kind of a mockery. No, not so much a mockery, but a simulation. The whole idea of having this thing that looks like a human, walks, talks, and acts like a human, but is not a human. It’s kind of—I don’t want to say deceptive. It’s kind of…

Subversive?
Exactly. I mean, what makes us human? Is it our spirit, our soul? But, if you take something that is not a living thing and you give it a soul—then what? We are supposed to be special.

I’m sure that’s something we’ll have to confront in the future once artificial intelligence begins to challenge our own.
That scares a lot of people.

Do you imagine a future where love dolls have artificial intelligence?
Absolutely. There’s a great book called Love and Sex with Robots. The author proposes that everything that attracts one person to another can be easily replicated with the right synthetic imitation. I believe that in the future, there will be synthetic robots with human flesh, and they’ll be so real it’ll actually take you a couple of minutes to realize they’re not human.

Would you want Sidore to have artificial intelligence?
I think that would really be fascinating. Like if she could teach me Japanese, that would be fantastic. If she could teach me anything, that would be fantastic. But, the one thing I don’t want her doing is finding someone she would perceive as being better than I am. “It’s been a great run, Davecat, but I’ve got to go.”

Would you reprogram her at that point?
Come here a minute, Sidore. Oops, I accidentally pressed your reboot button. Don’t know how that happened…

With that kind of creative power at our disposal, it’ll be really revealing to see what forms our ideal love objects take.
Are you familiar with objectum sexuals?

Like the woman who married the Eiffel tower?
Right, Erica Eiffel. You have a woman who is married to a tower that is several hundred miles away and she’s having an affair with the Berlin wall which is another several hundred miles away. She’s madly in love with them both. That is incredible.

Did she ever consummate her marriage?
You know, I’ve heard people say, “It’s not a real marriage because they can’t consummate it.” For one, that’s stupid. For another, I don’t know how she would physically couple with a tower. But, I’m sure in her mind, there is consummation. The way I look at it, maybe she’s not attracted to the wall so much as the soul that the wall embodies. In her mind, she has consummated with the soul of the tower. I don’t know if that’s how she actually thinks though.

What do you mean when you use the word “soul?”
I am an atheist but I’m like 99.999 percent atheist. There’s that little point where I believe in spirits. I couldn’t treat a doll like a person without believing that there is that little point - that Japanese Shintoism mindset—that everything has a spirit inside. That’s why Sidore is a Shintoist.

The two of you have different beliefs?
She is more Shintoist than I am. She’s like 98% atheist. The rest is Shinto.

Why the difference?
Basically, she says there is no reason for herself—a doll with a spirit—to be against Shinto. It’s self-denial.

I remember being in Japan and seeing people worshipping at shrines dedicated to the spirits of kitchen knives and eyeglasses…
Right. Even in the west, people anthropomorphize inanimate objects all the time. You’ll hear someone say, “I have to sell my boat. She’s been hitting rough seas lately.” She? And yet, people find it odd to have a love doll as a partner. I don’t see how calling something that looks like a human a “she” is strange. I think it’s more strange to call something shaped like a human an “it.”

If Sidore has a soul, where does it come from?
It may sound superficial, but I provide her with a soul, a personality. I am incredibly grateful for the love that I get from Shi-chan. She’ll never lie or cheat or turn out to be a cokehead. My love flows through her and she in turn, in her own way, is appreciative that I am a doll owner who treats her like a person. I won’t shove her in a closet right after having sex with her. I’m willing to say, yes, we are married. Without Sidore, I wouldn’t be a well-known iDollitor. I never would have met the people I’ve met in the doll community, or be on TV, or be interviewed. I would honestly say that having her in my life has opened me up in ways that never would have happened otherwise.

Davecat's silicon mistress.

That’s what great relationships do, isn’t it? They make you a better person.
Yes, the ideal person should bring something new to the table and make you evolve.

How do you two communicate? Do you have conversations?
In a way. I mean, it’s not like I say something and sit there waiting for a response, because that would be lunatic—in a bad way. We communicate, I guess, in our minds. I communicate with her soul—like Erica Eiffel communicates with Mr. Eiffel. I might come home from work and just say something like, “There was this one guy today who kept saying ‘axe’ instead of ‘ask.’”

And what would Sidore say?
She’d say, “That’s terrible! Speak proper English.”

She has a British accent?
Oh God, yes.

Is it hard to see sometimes where you end and Sidore begins?
It can be, especially because I’ve essentially constructed her life out of parts of myself. For example, I love Japan and I love England. So, she’s half Japanese and half English. That is why there is such a bond with us. I have a mistress doll, Elena—she’s in the bedroom—and there is not so much of a bond. She’s Russian—from a company in Vladivostok called Anatomical Doll. Anyway, I know nothing about Russia. Pretty much all the best characteristics have gone to Shi-chan. The only thing that I can come up with for Elena is that she’s fascinated with the space program.

What was missing in your relationship with Sidore that made you feel like you needed a mistress?
Well, in a fictional sense at least, I wanted someone around so that Sidore wouldn’t get lonely when I was at work.

When you talk about these aspects of yourself that go into Sidore’s personality, it reminds of a dream I once had. I fell in love with a woman and when I woke up I felt rather heartbroken that she wasn’t real.
I’ve heard of things like that happening.

It made me think, though, what am I actually mourning? If I created her, I’m really only mourning myself, right?
It’s like a mirror almost.

Right, like a mirror reflecting my own love back at myself. And that idea suggests that we all actually have everything we need inside of ourselves already, but through some strange design flaw, we’re made to miss something that we already possess.
I know exactly what you mean.

Getting back to Sidore—when does your relationship feel the most real?
It’s most real when I’m in bed with the missus—those moments of waking up and being able to spend several minutes without having to get out of bed. We use an electric blanket because I don’t want cold silicone. It’s just being able to hug her, kiss her, that sort of thing. Especially, in the morning—I get to stare into her eyes. She’s got these beautiful eyes, which I could gaze into forever. Short of being able to walk and talk, this is my ideal.

In that particular moment, there is nothing more that a human woman could offer.
Exactly.

How is the sex?
It’s pretty damn fantastic. Technically speaking, love dolls are all anatomically correct: vagina, anus, mouth. I don’t have oral sex though because I don’t want to tear the corners of her mouth. But, with the vagina and anus, it’s just a single passage. It’s pretty tight. There’s a suction that’s created that’s just mind-blowing.

How does it compare to sex with a human?
That is the question—because it’s been so long since I’ve had organic sex. Organic sex is fantastic. It’s beautiful. It’s an amazing bond. It’s just everything that’s associated with it that’s not always so great.

Do your dolls ever surprise you?
Sometimes they do. Sometimes I do see something that approximates a smile on Shi-chan’s face. I know it doesn’t physically exist. I don’t see her mouth moving, but there are those moments where there is this imperceptible smile. It’s incredible. I know it’s purely in my mind, but it’s so powerfully in my mind that it seems real.

How does it feel to know that Sidore is essentially immortal—that she’ll outlive you? Have you thought about what will happen when you die?
Originally, the plan was for both of us to be cremated and the ashes mixed together. Then we’d have an airplane pour one half over England and one half over Japan. Anyway, legalities and practicalities make that rather difficult. So, what I want to do now is have myself cremated and to have my ashes put into her head. She’ll be dressed in a black funeral kimono. She is always on my mind in life. I will be always on her mind in death.

Roc’s new book, And, was released recently. You can find more information on his website.

Elizabeth Warren at a campaign rally in Auburn, Massachusetts, in November 2012. Photo via Flickr user Tim Pierce

On its surface, the scene resembled an evangelical rally, the pews loaded with elderly white women letting out occasional chants of "Uh huh!" and "Yeah!" But standing at the lectern in place of a wild-eyed pastor was a wild-eyed Elizabeth Warren, the consumer advocate-turned-Massachusetts senator, urging her flock toward political salvation.

"Have we built a system where the rich and the powerful get all the attention they need?" she asked the 250 or so liberal activists who were crowded into St. Peter's Church in Midtown Manhattan on a bitterly cold Thursday evening in late January. "They get the rules they need, from the very biggest to the very smallest, the ones that always tilt in their direction, the ones that ultimately rig the game? Or are we an America that builds a better government that works for all of us? That’s the question people ask. And I think the answer right now is not a happy answer. We’ve got a government that works all too well for the rich and the powerful, and all too little for everyone else. We're here tonight because we're going to change that."

Warren wasn't saying anything new—American politics are pretty depressing these days. It’s still early in Barack Obama’s second term, but he’s so far found himself utterly unable to advance his agenda thanks to legislative gridlock—caused mostly by a House majority of stubborn, Tea Party-infused conservative Republicans—and the seemingly never-ending NSA scandal. Meanwhile, the money coursing through the political system with close to zero regulation is the core problem with our democracy right now, effectively wiping away the prospect of middle class prosperity for many Americans by placing corporate interests ahead of their own. Or at least that’s the story embraced by Warren and other left-wing Democrats who see the reform of campaign finance laws as the most important cause no one else is talking about.

The Supreme Court's famous Citizens United decision that brought unlimited money into elections isn’t getting reversed any time soon, so Warren seems to think state-by-state grassroots action represents the best hope for change. She may have been inspired by her old pal at Harvard, Larry Lessig, who spearheaded the New Hampshire Rebellion, a group that just staged a 185-mile march across the state intended to draw attention to corruption and honor the memory of Lessig's friend, hacktivist Aaron Swartz. The idea is to get state legislators to spend less of their time soliciting donations from shady local business titans and more of it at potluck dinners, perhaps thereby making them more attuned to the needs of the lower classes. Not groundbreaking stuff, as far as plans to change the system go, but after the orgy of spending in the 2012 election—the campaigns and outside groups combined to shell out $6.3 billion on state, federal, and local races—reformers are learning from previous failed attempts at instituting statewide public financing (Arizona is one disastrous example) to make sure this time is different.

So upon arriving to see the church bustling with lefty activist types that night, including some Occupy Wall Street veterans, I couldn't help but feel an inkling of optimism. One of the more popular—and potent—critiques of contemporary left-wing activist politics is that participants don’t engage with the electoral system enough, but actions like the New Hampshire rebellion seem to represent an answer: focus on local and state elected officials, and maybe the national pols in DC will have no choice but to take notice.

Unlike many other freshman lawmakers who keep their heads down when they get to Washington (looking at you, Hillary Clinton!), Warren has been making noise in committee hearings, defying decorum in order to tweak cozy elites ranging from Federal Reserve officials to banking regulators. But she hasn’t been reveling in her star power. In fact, during the warm-up section of the program, we were told that this was Warren's first public appearance in New York City.

She’s choosing an opportune moment to make her national turn given the desire of pundits in Washington to declare Wall Street vanquished by our heroic leaders. But as Mike Konczal points out at the New Republic, there's still a lot of work to be done before American economic policy stands a chance of being safe from the whims of financial giants. Warren drove that point home.

"People need to understand: too big to fail is still out there, and we are here to fight back," Warren roared at the meeting.

The big step toward fighting back that the New York state legislature is considering is a small-dollar matching system where contributions would be capped at a few thousand dollars and the first $175 of each donation would be matched at a 6-to-1 ratio, providing some underdog candidates a puncher’s chance against opponents relying on support from a few mega-donors and PACs. Such a system is already in place in New York City (and probably helped lefty Democrat Bill de Blasio win the mayoral race), which illustrates how these reforms are supposed to be enacted—first at the local level, then the state level, then who knows?

“This would be the first really substantive response by a state to the Citizens United decision,” said Lawrence Norden, the deputy director of the Democracy Program at NYU's Brennan Center for Justice, which has been involved in the reform campaign. “As you saw with gay marriage, when New York does something, it gets national attention.”

Norden gets at the most compelling element to the Empire State’s campaign finance reform push: if New York can level the playing field somewhat even with Wall Street banks breathing down lawmakers’ collective neck, why can’t the nation as a whole?

“I love being in this room and I love being part of a movement,” Warren gushed to her throngs of progressive admirers. The question going forward is how hard she can push this cause in state capitols across America. For a woman who tends to be discussed either as a pesky financial scold or a liberal savior, Warren seems determined to strike the middle ground, leveraging her star power while remaining a policy innovator at her core. If in the process of doing so she emerges as an appealing alternative to Clinton among Democratic primary voters ready for the post-Obama era, so be it.

“It's hard to imagine somebody who's more plausible for the left wing of the party than Warren,” says Todd Gitlin, a social movement historian at Columbia University. “She must be intensely aware that she’s been anointed as the reform exemplar, the lady on the horse with the spear, leading the troops into battle. It suits her to remind people that she represents the larger world.”

Matt Taylor is a Brooklyn-based writer whose reporting about politics has appeared in Slate, Salon, the Daily Beast, the Atlantic, the New Republic, and New York. You can follow him on Twitter: @matthewt_ny

Image via

There have been seven fatal shark attacks in Western Australia over the past three years. That's a sizable increase on previous years—two, rather than one per year—and a lot of people think something needs to be done.

So what is it that drives sharks into beaches to chomp on that most protected and defenseless species, humans? Is it the taste? If they were feeding on our more rotund members then that would make sense. They might even mistake them for a juicy seal. But the people attacked in the past few years have been surfers with barely an ounce of fat.

The nutritional value? Humans are the equivalent of hormone-pumped stressed out cage chickens—surely a last resort if you're deprived of vitamins.

Convenience? Possibly. We as humans know all too well the value of drive-through, food that's easy and cheap and makes you feel not hungry anymore but leaves you with regret. We can't swim away and we can't fight back—it's a cheap, easy meal for a Great White.

Or are we at war? We consider ourselves the dominant species, but maybe that's only on land. And land only makes up 30 percent of the Earth. In the ocean, innocent, magnificent creatures like seals and fish, even dolphins and whales, are being massacred and eaten every day by the humans of the sea—sharks. Are they coming after us now?

Maybe sharks are challenging our position as Super Predator. If so, we don't need to worry—Western Australia's Premier Colin Barnett is all over it. He's hired a crack team of fishermen with orders to kill sharks on sight. The people of that state have contributed more than $20 million for patrol boats and baited hooks. Last week they got one—a female tiger shark left hanging by the mouth on a hook for up to 12 hours before being shot in the head four times by a fisherman, the first trophy in Barnett's revenge killing spree. But the sharks are still up, 7 to 1.

To make matters more annoying for the Premier, the sharks have a huge campaign team here on land in the form of conservationists, people who love sharks so much they'd probably be honored to be eaten by one. Some of them are even diving into the ocean and stealing bait from the hooks. 

Last week the fishermen who were supposed to be the frontline soldiers quit, thanks at least partly to Team Shark's PR department. That hasn't swayed General Barnett—he's sending his own public servants, fisheries staff, out on boats instead.

The premier has been given crucial support for his plan from Australia's Federal Government. We have domestic laws here, and have signed international conventions that forbid the killing of protected species. However, the environment minister, Greg Hunt, has lifted a ban on killing certain protected species of shark because it's in the national interest to get rid of them, since sharks make people afraid to go in the water, or as he puts it, engage in "water-based activities." And that means they won't come from all over the globe to spend hundreds of dollars a night in Western Australia's hotels and buy $11 milkshakes and $19 sausage rolls from their cafes. (By the way, tourists, you're getting ripped off. Even Sydney's cheaper.)

But back to sharks: maybe we've got it wrong and this isn't a new war, but one that's been raging for centuries, and one which we're on the brink of winning. After all, humans manage to kill somewhere between 30 and 70 million sharks every year, and sharks only off a handful of people.

We're already doing a pretty good job of consolidating our position at the top of the food chain here in Australia. We've managed to eliminate 54 animal species in the country since white people arrived, including 27 mammals—a third of what the entire world has managed to do, and many of them animals that could only be found here—so we know what we're doing. Commercial fishing vessels come pretty close to sweeping up entire species every day—factory fishing boats literally suck them out of the sea with vacuums. Trawlers trap not just the fish we eat, but everything else as well. The toxic waste we produce that makes its way to the ocean has seen the life expectancy of orca whales halved, and mammals like dolphins, whales, and seals getting cancer in high numbers. Pumping gases into the atmosphere has caused the temperature of the top 700 meters of ocean to rise faster than any species can adapt to it.

In the end, we might be the sharks' biggest problem, but they're not ours. Pet dogs manage to kill as many humans as sharks, and inanimate objects like walls, roofs, and ladders are responsible for 1000 times more fatalities each year. Greg Hunt's beloved water-based activities led to at least 48 drownings last year.  

The chances of getting killed by a shark are estimated at 1 in 292,525. You're more likely to get struck and killed by lightning.

This cull is overkill and, quite frankly, stupid.

Follow Carly on Twitter: @carlylearson

Women are the only group expected to totter around in shoes with pointy sticks affixed to the bottom, literally just waiting to break our necks. Photo via.

Breaking news: if you’re the proud possessor of a vagina in this world, you have a hell of a laundry list of obstacles to face. And, chances are, much of your agenda is thoroughly cockblocked because, even still, all things are not equal between men and women.

I’ll state first and foremost that I’m not a man hater—because I know you’re already wondering. You could actually say I love men a little too much and a little excessively, like a pet dog (often to my own detriment). I write to you because I, like every woman, have suffered my fair share of abuse, embarrassment, and silencing at the hands of patriarchy. So I have cleared the dust away from this previously quiet corner of the internet to discuss lady business in this brand new column for VICE.  

By lady business, I mean the political, social, and environmental standing of we, the ladies. (To those of you expressing consternation at being called a lady, I understand your pain, but I also quote Shoshanna: “Yes you are, you’re the ladies.”) I have a particular interest in how women are treated under the justice system, so there will be a focus on law and order, especially in Canada and the US. I will also gripe about insane cultural restraints, like the aggressive suggestions that women shave their armpits or feel guilty for eating cake.

So here, a brief sampling of the stuff we can’t afford to ignore this week:

A screencap of the cover of the horrid book Amazon was selling last week.

Date Rape Is Permissible to Someone at Amazon

This week in “don’t worry, women are not human they’re just walking cum receptacles,” a date rape guide written by some unfortunate, sick fuck named Vincent Vinturi (who is sad about never getting laid) made its way to Amazon and right back off again. The book is called LMR Exposed: How to Overcome Her Last Minute Resistance To Sex, Turn ‘No’ Into “Yes” And Get The Lay!

Get. The. Lay. Are you fucking serious?

The intro promises: “With the knowledge you’ll gain in this course, you’re going to learn how to turn “no” into “yes” and bang a lot more (attractive) girls who initially seem opposed to the idea for having sex with you for whatever reasons.” Um, because you are a filthy cretin intent on jamming your dick inside an unwilling person’s body? I curse your very DNA, Vincent Vinturi.

Calgary West Conservative MP, Rob Anders. Photo via Facebook.

Conservative MP tries to protect women fill more jails

Parliament heard the first reading of Bill C-570, a private member’s bill, on Wednesday calling for the reinstatement of the word “rape” in Canada’s criminal code. What’s fishy is that the bill comes from Conservative MP Rob Anders. Ostensibly, he wants to bring the word rape back into the equation because rapists should be held accountable, and they should be given longer sentences than someone guilty of, say, “groping,” as he told The Current's Anna Maria Tremonti. The word got scrapped 30 years ago, because to charge offenders with ‘sexual assault” could cover so many other abuses other than just penetrative ones. The thing is, the only one who can say for sure how heinous an assault was is the person who experienced it, not Rob Anders.

Anders said he wants the so-called “victims” to be at least somewhat vindicated by seeing their attackers face longer incarceration times. Essentially, though, he admitted he actually just wants to fill up dem jails. He said rapists should do more time and rehabilitation and that, currently, as a result of the overarching “sexual assault” charge, 98 percent of the very slender percentage of those who are convicted, weasel away with “watered down charges.”

Feminist writer, scholar, and activist Jane Doe, was raped in Toronto by a serial rapist, caught her own rapist by issuing warnings the police refused to issue, and then sued the police for negligence. She says Anders’s claims are utter bullshit and not to be trusted.

“This needs discussion and consultation. It doesn’t need Rob Anders, whatsoever. He needs experts to advise him on the intricacies of the matter.”

While many women on the receiving end of sexual violence don’t want to see their partners locked away for years because they love them or are just financially dependant on them, I have to say I think this is a discussion worth having. While all forms of sexual assault can be traumatic, if we don’t define rape and shame those who commit it, it’s as if that rape doesn’t exist. We erase it from our vocabulary and our minds, when what we need to combat the crime is the exact opposite. 

Photo via.

That Woody Allen Child Molester Story

Woody Allen’s adopted daughter Dylan Farrow spoke out in an open letter Saturday outlining the pain and fear caused by Allen allegedly sexually abusing her when she was seven years old. Woody himself has called these claims “untrue and disgraceful.”

I obviously don’t know what happened, but I do know people tend to disbelieve women who make these claims, dismissing them as hysterical or conniving. Especially when the alleged abuser is wealthy and powerful. “Well, maybe he did it, and maybe he didn’t. But like, he made Annie Hall, so…” While I wasn’t there and can’t verify Farrow’s claims, I can confirm that, contrary to popular belief, women don’t make up stories of rape and sexual assault as a fun pastime.

This debacle has caused cinema fans the world over to question whether or not it’s okay to like Woody Allen. Are we comfortable sanctioning an alleged child molester’s actions, excusing him on the basis of artistic merit? The internet’s angry reaction points to a resounding “no,” but the Golden Globes suggest otherwise.

A celebratory Terri Jean Bradford at a press conference after the superior court struck down laws regulating sex work in Canada, via Facebook. 

Long live sex workers’ safety/down with prostitutes!

Despite the recent superior court strike-down of laws regulating sex work in Canada, municipalities are still working to ensure any professional sexy times are literally pushed to the fringes of society. Members of Regina’s planning commission just approved by-law amendments to keep strip clubs restricted to industrial areas. They must be separated 182.8 metres from residences, schools, and parks in order to keep respectable folks protected from filthy prostitute germification. And in Toronto, licenses for body rub parlours insist that the businesses operate in industrial areas, too. There are plenty of unofficial, unregulated ones, but the 25 with official city licenses must operate in industrial zones, no questions asked.

In order for sex workers to operate in a way that makes them feel safe, all levels of government have to agree to “permit” them to organize their businesses as they see fit. Sex workers themselves are the ones who know how they feel safest, not elderly, white male politicians.

Are we going to treat sex work like a legit business whose practitioners deserve safety and respect? Or not? One level of government can’t leap ahead to better the situation while the others balk and reverse any progress. Legislative overlap like this just makes for the most humiliatingly ineffective political teeter tottering. Perhaps our various levels of government would do well to consult with one another and with a few people in the industry to come to a conclusive answer, because pushing people who have sex for money into the bowels of industrial areas is cruel, discriminatory behaviour, not to mention ridiculously prudish.  Chanelle Gallant, a spokeswomen for the Toronto sex workers action project Maggie’s, says the laws and ghettoization are essentially dehumanizing: “Treat sex workers like humans deserving of protection,” she says, “not a dirty secret.”

It really is repulsive to hide human beings away like this because we inject their means of earning a livelihood with our own moral compunction. Pushing sex workers to secluded areas makes their work unsafe by nature. Let’s hope the feds are listening and make a better decision than those our cities are making—though Justice Minister Peter Mackay sounds very eager to unveil his government’s new sex work bill. 


@sarratch

War in Syria is dragging neighboring Lebanon to the edge of the abyss. Nowhere is the growing chaos more stark than in the second city of Tripoli. Sunni militants aligned with the Syrian rebels clash with fighters from the city's encircled Alawite minority—who support the Assad regime—in bitter street fighting that the country's weak government seems powerless to stop.

With the rule of law no longer in effect in Tripoli, warlords like Sunni commander Ziad Allouki are now the city's real rulers. VICE News hung out with him and his fighters for a week to discover why they're fighting and if the country really is on the brink of civil war.

Photo via Flickr user Karen Neoh

When people talk about ending the drug war, they usually mean “no one should go to prison for marijuana.” There's no doubt the public has shifted its collective opinion on pot—currently, a majority of Americans believe it should be as legal, regulated, and taxed as tobacco and alcohol—and naturally, politicians are beginning to sense the way the wind is blowing. But elected officials, like people at large, are less gun-ho about legalizing the harder drugs.

First, let's clarify that no one is recommending that we all follow Philip Seymour Hoffman’s example and start shooting up. Heroin is awful. Don't do heroin. It fucks up your life. But as the case of the fentanyl-cut heroin that has killed 22 people in Pittsburgh illustrates, the only thing worse than legal heroin is illegal heroin.

In the aftermath of Hoffman’s death, Jeff Deeney, a former drug addict who now works as a social worker, wrote a piece in the Atlantic that calls for treating heroin like a health issue, not a criminal act. All the nasty effects of this drug—and all the reasons not to do it—are magnified by the threat of prison, the stigma that leads to shame and secrecy, and the increased of HIV and infection that comes with sharing needles. According to Deeney, if Hoffman had access to a space where it was legal to shoot heroin and where doctors could supervise users, he might still be alive. Why doesn’t the US have any such sites, though Vancouver, Canada, does? Why the hell isn’t Naloxone, the much-touted miracle drug that stops opioid overdoses, not available over the counter? Why isn’t it passed out in urban health clinics like candy? Out of the 1.5 million people arrested for drug crimes in 2012, 82 percent were for possession, and 16.5 percent of those were for cocaine, heroin, or associated drugs. Did those arrests do anyone any good?

One reason legalizing pot is more popular than legalizing heroin is that far more people smoke than shoot. At least 100 million people in the US have done marijuana, while the number of frequent heroin users has stayed under half a million for decades. But use (which isn’t necessarily addiction) has nearly doubled since 2007—one survey calculated that 669,000 Americans had done heroin in 2012, compared with 373,000 in 2007. (This may be because some former pill addicts move on to heroin, as Hoffman did).

That’s what prohibition (which includes policies that levy draconian punishments for pill possession) does—it causes rippling effects in human behavior. It does not stop drug use, though it may change a user’s drug of choice. Rgardless, it’s time to give up trying to scare addicts into getting healthy and do what Portugal did in 2001 and decriminalize all drugs. Laws can’t stop people from using drugs, they can only make drug use a more harrowing experience for addicts who have to deal with jail time and police harassment and products that, thanks to a lack of oversight, may contain dangerous chemicals.

This country needs to grow up and realize that the legal system is a hammer, and drug users and addicts are not nails. End the drug war. End it all.

On to some bad cops of the week:

-Last week, POLITICO magazine ran a fascinating piece by Jason Edward Harrington, a writer who worked for years as a Transportation Security Agency (TSA) agent at O’Hare Airport in Chicago. Harrington, who blogged anonymously during the last six months of his stint, reveals some nasty details about life in the TSA, including the staggeringly low morale, the fact that the agents themselves think that much of what they do is bunk, and that they also fear radiation from the full-body scanners. He also writes that passengers from certain nations are profiled—you know which ones—and that agents pay special attention to attractive passengers and mock the ugly ones. The whole thing is well worth a read, and quite disturbing.

-On January 13, the city of Deming, New Mexico, settled with David Eckert for $1.3 million over a January 2013 incident during which he was subjected to hours of body cavity searches, enemas, and even a colonoscopy because the cops thought he was carrying drugs after they pulled him over for a traffic violation. (A lawsuit against the hospital and doctors involved is still ongoing.) Another lawsuit, this one filed on January 29 in Albuquerque District Court in Hidalgo County (which includes Deming), suggests that authorities in the area have a serious addiction to reaching inside suspects’ most intimate crevices. The plaintiff, 54-year-old Lori Ford, alleges that she was driving with a friend in March 2012 when Lordsburg police officers pulled her over for speeding. According to the suit, Ford refused to let cops search the vehicle without a warrant so officers brought out drug-sniffing dogs, then seized the car after they acquired a search warrant. When Ford later went to pick up the car, she was arrested, then taken to the Hidalgo County Detention Center. She claims that after she refused to answer questions a female officer made her bend over so that she could visually search Ford’s vagina and anus. Allegedly, marijuana and drug paraphernalia was found in Ford’s vehicle, but the charges were dropped when the evidence vanished. In the lawsuit, Ford asks for unspecified damages.

-A former Mesa, Arizona, cop injured her knee and back 14 years ago, put in for medical retirement in 2008, and is now set to receive workman’s comp for life, even though she has apparently been able to compete in ten triathlons since first being injured. Sergeant Audrey Glemba, 49, applied for medical retirement in 2007 while being investigated by internal affairs over incidents that involved the members of the bicycle squad she supervised taking pictures of themselves with homeless and disabled people and mocking them. Glemba was fired in 2008, reinstated after an appeal, and then soon retired with benefits after approval by a pension board who were well aware of her current athletic abilities. Nice work if you can get it.

-Fears about a terrorist attack of the Super Bowl resulted in millions of dollars in security measures, including a no-fly zone around the stadium, Blackhawk helicopters, snipers’ nests, hundreds of TSA agents, and several checkpoints for fans entering the stadium. Obviously big events bring beefed-up security with them, but the authorities' decision to force fans to take public transportation to the stadium by limiting parking spaces and not allowing anyone to get dropped off created predictable chaos. And it arguably didn’t even make the stadium that much safer, since Matthew Mills, a 9/11 truther, was able to sneak into the stadium and crash a post-game press conference.

-On the cusp of yesterday’s Super Bowl, the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) staged “Operation Team Player,” a months-long sting that lead to 50 arrests and the seizure of $21.6 million worth of counterfeit NFL goods. ICE’s acting director John Sandweg grandly declared that any counterfeit goods “undermine our economy and take jobs away from Americans,” but it seems a little petty to have federal agents spend months building a case against counterfeiters whose crime hurts the NFL more than it does anyone else.

-On Thursday, a Pittsburgh police dog named Rocco died after being stabbed by a violent suspect while protecting a human officer. Naturally, the police department was in mourning—but it seems like it’s a bit much for Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto to release a statement and for flags at city buildings being flown at half mast. Human beings—and dogs—are shot by cops all around the country every day, and those deaths aren’t any less tragic than Rocco’s.

-For our Good Cop of the Week, we have to go with Columbia, Pennsylvania, officer Austin Miller, who was on patrol on Tuesday night when he smelled smoke and heard calls of “fire” from bystanders, and responded by hurriedly escorting two families out of their homes. Not many people can say they’ve saved families from burning buildings, but Miller now can—good job, officer.

Lucy Steigerwald is a freelance writer and photographer. Read her blog here and follow her on Twitter: @lucystag

On the eve of Thailand’s general election, a firefight broke out between government supporters and anti-government protesters at an intersection not far from the city centre. It involved handguns, homemade explosives and assault riffles. It was, by far, the most violent episode in the series of demos that have engulfed Bangkok for months.

In the middle of the fight sat the police (who did very little), the army (who did even less) and masses of international press (including American photojournalist James Natchwey, who was shot through the leg). It was, many thought, the start of a new stage in the conflict. A return perhaps to the level of violence seen in 2010, when scores of people were killed.

But it seems they may have been mistaken. On election day itself, the widespread violence that had been predicted for Bangkok was nowhere to be seen. Instead, the day passed with relative ease. Yes, in Bangkok, "relative ease" means guns being fired at people and cars and thousands being unable to vote due to ongoing anti-government protests, but it wasn't the orgy of society-collapsing unrest that many had feared.

The events on the eve of the election unfolded near a shopping centre in Lak Si district, about 30 minutes' drive from the centre of Bangkok and a stone's throw from Don Muang, one of its two international airports. A group of anti-government protesters were camping outside a polling distribution centre in the area, determined to wake up the next day and disrupt the vote. Five minutes down the road, a group of pro-government "red-shirts" had assembled in a temple, listening to speeches by hardline red-shirt leaders.

At the anti-government site, protesters were building barricades around their position, using trucks, buses and tyres to block the roads, telling journalists that they expected a move by the red-shirts at any moment. On the barricades, men with full-face masks and helmets kept a close eye on whoever approached.

Over the road, in the red-shirt temple, the group had concluded its talks and had decided to make the short march towards their anti-government adversaries. The red-shirt group (wearing white, just to confuse things) chanted slogans and waved sticks in the air but they were relatively small in number and the police, who are widely seen as sympathetic to the government and its supporters, were able to convince them to back off.

Yet just as it looked as if the situation might be calming, a car driving through the intersection was attacked by the red-shirts who beat it with sticks, smashing the front window before it was able to drive away. Two firecrackers were then thrown and the crowd dispersed.

Shortly after, things started to get really bad. Freelance photojournalist Adam Gynch, who had been following the red-shirt march, spent the next few hours pinned down by gunfire. He describes what happened next: "After the car was smashed up, a group of PDRC [anti-government] turned up in a truck and got into a confrontation with the red-shirts. They seemed to have come out of nowhere and all of a sudden they were behind us and it took everybody by surprise.

"Initially it seemed very tense and everyone expected a clash straight away," Gynch continues, "but for a period of ten to 15 minutes nobody actually did anything. Someone was on a megaphone trying to calm things down but then a rock was thrown, a slingshot was fired and fireworks were used and things escalated from there. I couldn’t say who threw the first rock."

Gynch says that it quickly became apparent that among the PDRC group was a more hardcore contingent: "As things escalated, the normal protesters apparently decided it had become too much and they move up into a safer area, using their trucks as cover." Gunshots were fired but again, Gynch says, he couldn’t say which side shot first.

Things escalated dramatically when these more hardcore protesters, wearing combat fatigues and balaclavas, were the only ones left on the scene. "The rate of fire increased dramatically," says Gynch. "I saw pistols being used, a gun barrel coming out the end of a popcorn sack and being fired towards suspected red-shirt gunmen... I saw an AK-47 later on, as the gunmen became more brazen. They were using the sacks to conceal the weapons, probably from the press."

Evidently, this plan wasn't a total success.

"We were on a highway, so when [the firing] started we took cover straight away behind concrete barriers," continues Gynch. "The teams of PDRC guys were moving around us and shooting very close to us towards the red-shirt positions.

"When we thought there was a lull, we spotted an area that we thought would be safer, in a ditch off the highway. We ran for cover, at which point the gunfire grew heavier again."

It seems that Gynch wasn't the only journalist caught up in the street battle: "We managed to find a sort of shanty town beyond the ditch and some other journalist who had taken shelter there," he says. "Locals were hiding in their homes. One old guy, who was crouched down taking cover with his wife and three dogs, turned to me and said in broken English, ‘This is like Syria.’ Shortly after that, another photographer turned to me and shouted, ‘Fucking run!’ as we realised how exposed we were. We all scrambled for cover up an alley."

Gynch says that, at this point, he couldn't tell which of the two sides was responsible for most of the gunfire.

"In a moment of absurdity, as we were trying to flee the area, we came to a small bridge and were trying to signal to the PDRC gunmen that we were press, and for them not to shoot, at which point a young girl came skipping over the bridge, seemingly oblivious to the chaos around her. 

"While the shooting was going on everything else was very quiet," he says, "there was none of the usual blaring music and megaphones. Gradually people started to get back on the megaphones, as the firing seemed to stop from both sides but the occasional single shot meant people were still running for cover. 

"The firefight started around mid-afternoon and didn’t finish until dusk. I expected more incidents during the night and for it to start up again on dawn of election day but, for some reason, this never happened.”

In fact, voting proceeded in peace at 90 percent of polling stations. Which isn't to say that Thailand's political crisis is over – the small but vocal opposition, which includes in its ranks many influential royalists and business people, has vowed to fight to annul the election results. Its quest to unseat the current government – which it sees as intrinsically corrupt – continues, and for as long as it does, so will the chaos on Bangkok's streets.

Follow George on Twitter: @georgehenton

More from Thailand's anti-government protests:

Is Thailand Heading for a Coup This Week?

Thailand's Anti-Government Protests Turned Deadly This Weekend

Thai Politics Are Paralysed and Nobody Knows What to Do

Doritos - “Finger Cleaner”

The tank of creativity that traditionally fuels Super Bowl ads was running on fumes last night. The lazy, unimaginative spots were too numerous to delve into here, so let's focus on the one commercial that got it right: Doritos' "Finger Cleaner." A finger glory hole—brilliant! It is a fresh as fuck idea. It is perfectly cast. It is forever memorable. It makes me want to eat Doritos (something I don’t do). It was one of five finalists in Doritos’ eighth annual Crash the Super Bowl contest. The commercial was created by Australian director Tom Noakes and has over three million YouTube views.

But it didn’t air last night.

Frito-Lay said it would air two Doritos spots from their contest: the winner of an online poll and another picked by them. They stated that the “consumer-created ad with the highest number of total fan votes […] will win its creator […] $1 million, and the runner-up, selected by the Doritos brand, will receive $50,000 (U.S.).”

The two winning spots that aired during the game were both made by Americans: “Time Machine,” by Ryan Andersenfrom Scottsdale, Arizona, and "Cowboy Kid,” by Amber Gill of Ladera Ranch, California. Anderson won the million bucks.

Doritos - “Time Machine”

Doritos - “Cowboy Kid”

Time Machine is a pretty good spot, but nowhere near as original as “Finger Cleaner.” It finished second in USA Today’s Ad Meter. “Cowboy Kid” is decent for an amateur commercial, but nothing at all special—the kid/dog thing has been done to death.

Here’s the official statement from yesterday about the contest’s conclusion, via Ram Krishnan, vice president of marketing for Frito-Lay:

"There has been tremendous enthusiasm around the world for all five of our finalists and we couldn't be more thrilled with how consumers have rallied behind their favorites during the voting process. While fan votes picked one winner, the Doritos brand had a tough time picking our second winner, so we ultimately decided to go with the ad that generated the second highest votes. We're extremely proud of our two winners and look forward to revealing who will win the $1 million grand prize."

But “Finger Cleaner,” as of this morning, has over 600,000 more YouTube views than the two winners, combined. Frito-Lay, very conveniently, hasn’t published the tally from their supposed online poll.

Which will be #1? Watch all of the #Doritos Crash the Super Bowl spots at http://t.co/DOKjYZwGsK & vote, vote, vote! pic.twitter.com/bMaCwhgKVT

— Doritos (@Doritos) January 28, 2014

Doritos tweeted this update—featuring a still from “Finger Cleaner”—last Tuesday, January 28.

In my humble opinion, the results of this contest are complete and utter bullshit. I think what happened here is “Finger Cleaner,” and its admittedly creepy premise, scared the living shit out of top brass, and they decided to put the kibosh on the idea of airing it. That’s what great advertising has always done to marketing MBAs—scared the shit out of them. See “1984.”

I emailed Frito-Lay and tweeted at Doritos, seeking comment. Not a fucking peep, so far. I also emailed Noakes. Nothing yet, but it’s the middle of the night Down Under. I will update if I receive new information.

@copyranter

Screencap from a supposedly serious assembly, via.

Quebec’s notorious Charter of Values just finished up its third week in the wrestling ring of the National Assembly, where public hearings have been turning heads from MTL to Val d’Or. While some people were able to argue their pro-charter case with class and style, most of the attention has been focused on the more ridiculous witnesses that have passed by to champion the cause. For example, watch this absurd woman defend the charter by way of her terrifying run-in during Paris’ zombie parade where she felt deeply shaken by a bunch of undead-aficionados in horror make-up. Then there’s the couple who testified on January 16 about their experiences travelling in the predominantly Muslim countries of Turkey and Morocco. According to them, their horror at the prayer habits of Muslims is somehow relevant to the Charter of Values—so they took the opportunity to air their views before a host of lawmakers and many offended citizens. 

With an incredulity that has to be seen to be believed, Genevieve Caron describes her dismay at seeing, “men praying on all fours on little carpets. I remain marked by this [experience]” she said. While it’s debatable if she actually meant “scarred” rather than “marked”, what’s clear was that the people she met had different ways of praying, and that frightened the bejeesus out of her. So much so that she had to bring it to the National Assembly, under the benevolent gaze of the crucifix.

But Mme. Caron is far from the only one with outrageous testimony. Here’s a collection of five pro-Charter activists that took our concern about some of Quebec’s xenophobia to new levels of WTF.

• “We ban advertising aimed at children because, supposedly, they are susceptible,” said Michelle Blanc, “and yet there are some who would be ready to leave veiled women with our children all day long. Before you know it, the children will be asking if they too can wear a veil. Is that what we want for Quebec? I’m far from certain of that.”

When I was little, I remember asking for every kind of clothing from princess dresses to a Vancouver Grizzlies jersey. At six years old I hadn’t the faintest idea who the Grizzlies were (or how bad they were at basketball) but I liked the turquoise and I liked the tough looking bear on the front. If a child is asking to wear a veil, it’s much more likely that they’re thinking it looks pretty than expressing a deep-seated desire to follow the laws of Islam. This seems to me as ridiculous as claiming that gender-specific clothing will stop a child from “becoming gay."

• “I’ll give you an example of the effect conspicuous symbols can have. Personally, I went to Staples four years ago, and there was a woman  with a veil at the cash, and I changed cashiers because I felt ill at ease. I did not want to know her religion.”

Andrea Richard, a former nun who now considers all religions “lies,” seems to have missed the point. Yes, an argument can be made (and is being made) that in the name of secularity, government employees should not represent religion in the workplace. But here, Richard is obviously railing against veiled women in everyday life. This has nothing to do with the separation of church and state, seeing as there’s nothing state-run about Staples, and everything to do with racism. If she’s uncomfortable with a cashier, she should maybe consider leaving Canada because she’s giving us a bad name.

• “So I picked up my daughter at [the daycare]. I was talking to the teacher, and I heard a cry, a child’s cry and it was really intriguing. I asked, ‘what’s happening?’ She said, ‘it’s an application with the call to prayer that I just installed on my computer…’ I found it appalling. So you see, I’ve experienced situations which are very, very disagreeable.”

Radia Kichou gave this anecdote, describing her shock at finding that Quebec is apparently not nearly as secular as she imagined it would be as an immigrant. It’s kind of the same as Michelle Blanc’s protests against veiled daycare workers; how does a call to prayer recording harm children who haven’t an earthly clue what they’re hearing anyways? What’s the worst case scenario here? That the kids will ask the teacher what the noise is and maybe learn a little bit about another culture?

• “[Here is] an example, a gay Muslim boy who has been shunned from his community because of his sexual orientation, and that is faced with a veiled nurse or psychologist who is bearing the same sign as the religious community that rejected him and he feels thereby rejected… Can you understand that the religious symbol can sometimes be a message of rejection for those who see it?”

M. Drainville himself tried in vain to bring forward an example of real people who would benefit from the Charter. He might be finding this difficult, as multiple groups have come forward saying that the “problem” addressed by the law doesn’t actually exist. Besides, rejection is not exclusive to the religious community; in a more extreme example, women who have been raped sometimes have difficulty being around large groups of men. As a society, we provide help for this woman with trigger-free spaces, counseling services and trauma groups. We don’t ban men from the streets.

• “…getting your prostate examined by rectal examination is a little disorienting at the beginning or, at least, the first time. This could only be worse if, in addition, you had to deal with a veiled doctor with burqa or the niqab, this obviously would not do.”

Um…  Okay? This one takes the cake. How exactly does a burqa make getting your butt examined more difficult? In fact, a male friend of mine is of the opinion that a burqa-sporting doctor would make him feel even more comfortable, what with the whole face covering making potentially awkward eye contact less of an issue.

It’s not like this host of quotable people are in the majority at the hearings.  We’ve so far heard from the likes of Michel Gauthier, former Bloc Quebecois leader, members of feminist group les Janettes, and Rene Tawani, an Egyptian-born professor at the University of Montreal, all of whom managed to present thoughtful arguments. It is entirely possible to have a fair, educated discussion about secularity in a multi-cultural society, but many of the citizens who have been on the stand so far obviously aren’t a part of that kind of discussion.

With the new level of WTF these quotes reach, you would think that the hearings aren’t exactly going the way the PQ planned. But in reality, polls have shown that support for the Charter is up, sitting at about 60 percent. This is an all time high and shows that maybe Pauline Marois is getting what she wants out of her wedge issue—a shot at a majority government.

This spike in the polls despite (or maybe because of) this parade of ignorant opinions is seriously worrisome.  When the future of Quebec stands to be significantly influenced by Bill 60, it’s scary that this is the kind of commentary being taken into account.

In the fourth part of Apocalypse, Man, we talk about climate change, industrial farming, GMOs, Monsanto, and finding a new way to live in the face of the end of the world.

Warning: Contains images that may be distressing.

Most people were first exposed to Michael C. Ruppert through the 2009 documentary, Collapse, directed by Chris Smith. Collapse was one of the scariest documentaries about our world and the fragile the state of our planet. It was also one of VICE's favorite films from the past ten years.

Michael was forced to leave the LAPD after claiming that the CIA was complicit in selling drugs across America, and he quickly became one of the most original and strident voices to talk about climate change, government corruption, and peak oil through his website, “From the Wilderness.”

Following the release of Collapse, Michael’s personal life underwent something of a collapse itself and he paid off all his debts, left behind all his friends, and moved with his dog Rags to Colorado, planning to commit suicide.

VICE caught up with Michael in the middle of the epic beauty of the Rocky Mountains at the end of last year. We found a man undergoing a spiritual rebirth—still passionate about the world and with a whole new set of apocalyptic issues to talk about.

Apocalypse, Man is an intimate portrait of a man convinced of the imminent collapse of the world, but with answers to how the human spirit can survive the impending apocalypse.

Apocalypse, Man is a feature-length documentary to be released over the next few weeks. 

Soundtrack by Sunn O))), Flaming Lips, Interpol, Michael C. Ruppert, and more.

Directed by Andy Capper.