Marissa Shephard, the 21-year-old Moncton woman accused of murdering teenager Baylee Wylie, has been sentenced to four months in jail for spitting in a jail guard's face.
Shephard was sentenced in Miramchi court this week after pleading guilty to assaulting an officer at the New Brunswick Women's Correctional Centre in the summer, the CBC reports.
The incident took place after four officers visited Shephard's jail cell, where Shephard was biting her own arm and banging her head on the wall, the court heard. As Shephard was being restrained and removed from her cell, she spit at a female guard, successfully targeting the guard's eye.
The guard was later tested for infections but did not have any.
Judge Kenneth Oliver called the spit attack "vile and disgusting." He noted the mental stress the officer went through, not knowing what was in the spit.
Both the Crown and Shephard's defence lawyer agreed a four-month sentence would be appropriate. It will be served in addition to any other jail time Shephard might receive.
Shephard reportedly said nothing at her sentencing hearing.
A preliminary hearing for Shephard's first-degree murder and arson trial will start in May. Fellow suspect Tyler Noel, 19, is also facing the same charges, while Devin Morningstar, 19, was sentenced to life in prison in January for murdering Wylie.
Wylie was found in December 2015 in a burned out triplex.
According to Morningstar's trial, Wylie was stabbed about 200 times and was tied to a chair, covered with bleached and saran wrapped before the building was set on fire.
Everything you need to know about the world this morning, curated by VICE.
US News
Several States Join Hawaii in Challenging Travel Ban Oregon, Washington, New York, Minnesota, and Massachusetts have all joined Hawaii in launching legal challenges against President Trump's latest travel ban. Washington attorney general Bob Ferguson said the revised order "has the same illegal motivations as the original." White House press secretary Sean Spicer, meanwhile, said the administration felt "very confident" in how the revised order was "crafted."—AP
Nude Photo Investigation Expands Across US Military A Pentagon investigation into the sharing of nude photographs by US Marines has expanded to cover all branches of the American military. Senior Master Sgt. Ronald Green said the "Marines United" Facebook group was just the "tip of the spear." The website Anon-IB has reportedly been used across the armed forces to share photos of female service personnel.—CBS News
Feds Set to Deploy 50 Judges to Immigration Centers, Report Says The Department of Justice is reportedly sending 50 judges to immigration detention centers across the US in an effort to clear a case backlog. Following President Trump's executive order urging the government to speed up deportations, the feds are considering asking judges to hear cases from 6 AM to 10 PM, according to anonymous sources.—Reuters
White House Denies Knowledge of Flynn's Lobbying Work President Trump was not aware that former national security advisor Michael Flynn carried out lobbying work on behalf of a company linked to Turkey's government during his presidential campaign, according to White House secretary Sean Spicer. Vice President Mike Pence said Flynn being a foreign agent was "affirmation" of Trump's decision to ask Flynn to resign.—The Guardian/ABC News
International News
South Korean President Removed After Court Ruling South Korea's president Park Geun-hye has been removed from office after the country's constitutional court upheld parliament's impeachment ruling. The judges said Park had allowed her friend Choi Soon-sil to influence state affairs. Two people died after Park supporters protesting the verdict clashed with police outside the court. A presidential election was expected to be held within 60 days.—BBC News
German Police Arrest Man Accused of Axe Attack German police have arrested one man accused of attacking at least nine people with an axe at Dusseldorf train station. Officers captured the 36-year-old suspect after he jumped from a bridge to try to escape arrest. Police said the suspect, who is from Kosovo and has mental health problems, may have been trying to kill himself.—AFP
Tibetans Mark Uprising Anniversary with Protests Tibetan activists are marking the anniversary of the 1959 uprising against Chinese rule at protests Friday in Sydney, London, and other major cities. But at the annual conference of Tibet's official delegation to China, also held Friday, Tibetan governor Che Dalha said the government would "resolutely strike against the Dalai clique's damaging and separatist activities."—Reuters
Archaeologists Discover Ramses II Statue in Egypt Archaeologists have uncovered two ancient pharaonic statues in a Cairo suburb, with one believed to represent Pharaoh Ramses II, who ruled from 1279 to 1213 BCE. The German-Egyptian team also found a statue that is believed to be of Ramses II's grandson, Pharaoh Seti II.—NPR News
Everything Else
Tom Hanks to Produce TV Drama on 2016 Election Actor Tom Hanks will be the executive producer for a new miniseries about the 2016 election campaign. HBO Films asked Mark Halperin and John Heilemann to adapt a drama based on their forthcoming inside account of the election, a project they undertook in 2008 and 2012 as well.—The Hollywood Reporter
'Game of Thrones' Season 7 Begins in July The penultimate season of Game of Thrones will premiere on July 16, HBO has announced. The channel revealed the details about the season after asking fans to watch a Facebook Live video that showed a block of melting ice.—VICE
Airbnb Raises $1 Billion in Investment Funding Airbnb raised $1 billion during its latest round of investment funding, the company revealed in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. It raises the value of the online rental company to around $31 billion.—CNBC News
Congressman Raps Notorious B.I.G. Lyrics on House Floor Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, a New York Democrat, recited lyrics to Notorious B.I.G.'s "Juicy" on the floor of the House Thursday night to mark the 20th anniversary of the rapper's death. Jeffries said Biggie Smalls was "the classic embodiment of the American dream."—Consequence of Sound
Lorde Drops Another New Track Lorde has released a second song from her upcoming album, a dark, minimal piano balled called "Liability." It comes with an announcement that the singer's second album Melodrama will be out on June 16.—Noisey
Canada Passes Genetic Discrimination Law Canada's parliament has passed a law making it illegal for employers or insurance companies to discriminate against people based on DNA. It stops firms requiring genetic testing as a precondition for employment or offering goods or services.—Motherboard
Hello and welcome to the blog post about the video of the Serious Korea Expert on the BBC being interrupted by his children, which has gone viral because it's great. You know what I'm talking about but here is the video again anyway:
To summarize what's going on here/help pad out a blog post that is mostly just a reason to embed this video: Robert Kelly, an expert on Korea, is discussing the impeachment of South Korean president Park Geun-hye with someone from the BBC. Then a child (presumably his) walks in. Then another child (again, presumably his) walks in. Then a woman barges in and quickly corrals the children. Throughout it all Kelly sort of tries to continue the interview, but sort of tries to deal with the kids, but doesn't do either, instead mildly chuckling as the woman drags the kids away. It's a Monty Python sketch come to life and the perfect antidote to a week that I don't know about you, but, kind of stressed me out.
In any case, there are some serious questions I have about this video, so let's go through them together.
How is the second kid moving around? The second, younger kid (a.k.a. the best part of the video) is apparently floating through space, which is confusing some people. "How can the second child even move independently?" is how my coworker put it. This actually has an answer: Check out these contraptions. They're great!
Did the first kid know her dad was on TV? If she did, was she trying to get on TV, as well? Or was it a more pure, I-want-to-watch-daddy-work sort of motivation?
Did the professor do an OK job of handling the situation? This issue has partisans on both sides: There is the He should have gently but firmly and quickly escorted the kid out as soon as she entered camp, and the No you don't want to interrupt a broadcast, just laugh it off camp. For the record, I'm in the You should have locked the door camp.
What is the deal with the woman/nanny/wife? Not sure what her role is but she's the one who stopped minding the kids and allowed them to run wild, right?
Why didn't he stand up? Kelly looks very well put-together on camera, but consider that he remains seated even when it seems like THE EASIEST AND BEST SOLUTION would be to stand up and shoo the kid(s) away. Here's one theory why he doesn't:
(In the UK "pants" means "underwear.")
"What will it mean for the wider region?" We never really get an answer to the interviewer's question, do we? I would like to know!
Is Kelly asleep while all this is going on? The professor lives in South Korea, where it is currently (googles) a bit after midnight. Is he aware that he is famous? I sort of hope he wakes up to a million notifications, texts, and interview requests. (We sent him a DM on Twitter, but he hadn't replied.)
Two attractive teenagers break into a high school after dark to explore the empty corridors and each other. One of them hears a sound, freaking the other one out. It's only two minutes into the first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and a teenager – or, more accurately, a 150-year-old dead one – has sunk their fangs into a neck.
I came to the show halfway through primary school, and immediately started saving up pocket money for the VHS boxsets. The vampires terrified me, but were magnetic, and I can remember the scenes featuring them above any others. Their willing victims always following them to an alleyway, ready to get to second base, but quickly finding themselves in a biting session. Their outfits were long PVC trenchcoats, chokers, lots of red and black, hair Brylcreemed back with the women walking around on six inch pinpoints. I especially remember Drusilla and Spike acting like the other was a cupcake; their orgasmic faces, fanged teeth bared, moving their open mouths in a mid-air love bite as if trying to breathe in the sex they were exuding. Drusilla with her pointed nails, drawing them across Spike's skin. These were two people operating under the kind of sexual charge I'd never witnessed before.
If I vaguely understood it while watching as a child, I definitely wouldn't have been able to articulate what I thought all this physical contact meant. But watching the whole seven series multiple times through as an adult fan, the message is clearer every time: the vampires are a metaphor for – and the total embodiment of – unbridled, kinky, sadomasochistic sex.
Spike and Drusilla (Photo via Wiki)
The way villains worked in Buffy was simple. Every season there'd be a "big bad" who dominates and threatens to end the world. Various supernatural baddies would exist within and across episodes. Besides fitting into both of those categories, vampires were ever present.
"There's a point, as a teenager, when you realise your parents don't know what they're talking about, teachers barely understand the subjects they're supposedly teaching you and the world is really messed up," says James Marsters, who played infamous vampire Spike, over the phone. "Baddies in Buffy were metaphors for all the things that you have to overcome, especially in adolescence."
You can see this in villains from the first series in particular – puberty that turns teenagers into wild, crude hyenas ("The Pack"); overbearing parents who have unrealistic expectations of their children ("Witch"); teachers who might prey on virginal, horny students ("Teacher's Pet"); and internet predators trying to catfish young women in chatrooms ("I Robot… You Jane"). Buffy is battling school, fitting in, applying for college and everything a teenager does – but all the while fighting supernatural demons. A lot of the humour in those initial seasons comes from when she can barely tell which is worse.
Vampires, though, are so much more than simple stand-in villains. Their cravings for blood have led to them being read as a metaphor for the temptations of drugs and the dangers of addiction. Trisha Pender, Buffy Studies scholar and author of I'm Buffy, You're History: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Contemporary Feminism highlights that vampires were the creatures who underestimated the women in Buffy.
"I think Joss Whedon [the series' creator] designed Buffy as a corrective to the dumb blonde in horror who goes down a dark alley and gets killed," she says. "The vampires are foiled by girls who are smart. Even if they're not book-smart they can kick arse and take care of themselves. I think vampires get even stronger in the final season, where the antagonist – the big bad of the series – was an out-and-out misogynist. It wasn't just subtext any more."
"The show never felt like a result of the male gaze. Buffy was independent, and when she has this relationship with Angel, we see it through her eyes, never through his." – Meghan Winchell, Buffy scholar
Ultimately, they're still just sex, though, aren't they? Biting is sexy, blood is sexy, hunting is sexy, power play is sexy, everything that happens at night is infinitely more sexy than anything that happens during the day.
None of this is original. Buffy pulled from vampire lore throughout popular culture: from Bram Stoker's Dracula living among his harem of female vampires; from Dracula vs. Frankenstein (1971), which took the creatures to a comparatively pornographic extreme; and from Anne Rice, who became the queen of sexy vamp fiction. Even in dream mythology, vampires symbolise sex and lust, a surprise to no one who has seen Spike in a leather jacket.
Meghan Winchell, Buffy scholar, agrees with me that Spike is "sex on a stick, basically". Significantly, she thinks that, in Buffy, the vampires represent female sexuality. "Angel and Spike – what they do is draw out Buffy's sexuality and draw out women's sexuality, and that's what makes them dangerous," she says. "Isn't Angel the ultimate bad boy?"
Angel and Buffy are the original Romeo and Juliet of the show. She's a vampire slayer, he's a vampire. But take away the supernatural element: she's a teenage girl, he's an older guy. When they first meet she's 16 and he looks about 25. Jodie Kreider, Buffy scholar and author of Buffy in the Classroom: Essays on Teaching with the Vampire Slayer, noted in our conversation that "one thing some feminists have opposed is an older man who is 200 and so years older, sleeping with what would, in some countries, be an underage girl". She is, however, a girl who has sexual desire and acts upon it very much of her own will.
Buffy and Angel in "Surprise" (Screengrab via YouTube)
Winchell says that agency is what makes sex in Buffy so revolutionary for its time: "The show never felt like a result of the male gaze. Buffy was independent, and when she has this relationship with Angel, we see it through her eyes, never through his." When they eventually get naked after endless episodes of courting, slaying and making out, the sex is so mind blowing that Angel experiences a moment of true happiness, causing him to turn back into his evil, soulless form, Angelus.
Spike – who is undoubtedly one of the greatest characters of the show – pushes all of this.
"For Joss, vampires were supposed to be ugly and very quickly killed off," explains Marsters. "He wanted it to be horrific. He used to say, 'I don't like that Anne Rice crap.' He got talked into one romantic vampire character, and that was Angel. It wasn't his idea. I remember Joss backed me up against the wall and said, 'I don't care how popular you think you are; you're dead, you hear me?'"
However, the heavily female and LGBTQ audience wanted more sexy vampire, so Spike played with the trope – blurring the lines between villain and hero, soulless and soulful.
"Vampires let you get away with all kinds of things with sex that they wouldn't have if we'd been humans. As early as season two we've got Drusilla and Spike appearing and chaining people up and being devious." – James Marsters, Spike
When Spike and Buffy have sex, it's inevitable (this scene is frequently voted one of the hottest sex scenes in TV of all time), and from that point in the show the sexual content only increases. The show changed networks from WB to UPN, and this – combined with the fact the characters are older and getting into darker storylines – meant more adult content and, thankfully, a lot of Spike walking around topless.
"Vampires let you get away with all kinds of things with sex that they wouldn't have if we'd been humans," explains Marsters. "As early as season two we've got Drusilla and Spike appearing and chaining people up and being devious – but Buffy was a show that wanted to push the envelope. Producers were always fighting people who were in standards practices. Those scenes are very tame compared to what is being shown on television these days, but at the time unheard of for a teen drama. I remember asking Joss, 'Why? Where are we going with this? It's kind of inappropriate.' And he said, 'That's how you learn, James; you watch inappropriate television.'"
Besides one misguided rape scene that caused a lot of distress and outrage at the time, Buffy always matches these vamps in her sexuality and desire. As Lorna Jowett, Buffy scholar and author of Sex and the Slayer,told me: "One of the things Buffy herself says is that she 'likes a little monster in her man', and that's justified in the narrative when you find out that the slayer was made from part-demon. It's a part of how vampire stories have always worked. There's always a monster and a hunter and a slightly intimate connection, and almost co-dependency, between them."
Spike and Buffy (Screengrab via YouTube)
The legacy of the vampires in Buffy is undeniable. Post-Buffy they became more a part of the pop cultural landscape than ever, from True Blood and The Vampire Diaries to Twilight and more. Maybe those shows and movies would have existed without Joss Whedon, but they certainly wouldn't have featured hot vampires, teens and sex in the way they now do. If anything, Twilight's Bella stripped the female role of any agency, and Edward – the vampire – was a complete sap, which many Buffy scholars see as a step backwards for feminism in pop culture.
The vampires of Buffy are also the perfect villain for the times we're living in. "Several years after the series has ended, and 20 years since its beginning, for the Buffy fandom, Buffy's vampires represent any retrograde arsehole we happen to be fighting now," says Pender. "Whether it's Trump or whatever power, the metaphor for the agent of darkness has a horribly wide range of applications."
"Vampires are just cool," shrugs Marsters. "They're a very seductive idea. The werewolf is a good person who is corrupted by the moon to do heinous acts. The Invisible Man or woman has to be a jerk, because only someone with no morals will do anything interesting. Frankenstein's childlike. These characters are very tightly constrained and you can't change them much, but the vampires you can update and you can radically change them to suit the times and what you want to say. They're very malleable that way."
"Plus, they're a lot sexier than Frankenstein," he adds. "He's not sexy at all. Wolf man, a little bit. Vampires, hell yeah."
The citizens of Flint, Michigan are in their third year without adequate drinking water, and it could be another two years or longer before it's safe to drink. But, as the woeful results of the American Society of Civil Engineers' 2017 Infrastructure Report Card show, Flint is not unique. Contamination and burst pipes across the US earned the country a 'D' grade on its water infrastructure. Overall infrastructure fared only slightly better, with a D+.
While President Trump has said he will ask Congress for a $1 trillion infrastructure bill, the report noted it will take that much just to meet and expand drinking water needs over the next 25 years.
"As watersheds continue to be impacted by shifting migration patterns, land use changes, consumption trends, and extreme weather, water infrastructure upgrades will be required to meet new demands," they wrote.
The Infrastructure Report Card analyzes the condition and performance of American infrastructure and doles out letter grades, focusing on a wide range of sectors, like roads, bridges, and waste removal. These all, in turn, contribute to the country's overall score. A committee of 28 volunteer civil engineers from the ASCE, the oldest engineering society in the country, issue the report card every four years.
So: you're heading to SXSW. Welcome to Austin! By the time you read this, you will be neck-deep in swag, your nostrils filled with the smell of slow-smoking beef brisket, and your belly full of Texas craft beer (or Shiner Bock and Lone Star, if you roll old-school). You will be assailed by many a mook bearing flyers to late-night events you will never want to attend—and most importantly, you will have been exposed to the great-tailed grackle, the prissy, hilarious and brash psychedelic blackbird that Texans have such a complex relationship with.
Those of you from more northern climes may think you know grackles, but you don't—not ours, anyway. What you're likely acquainted with are mere common grackles, but we do things big down here, and the great-tailed grackle is an entirely different beast. It's about twice the size of common grackles and is very much at home in urban areas; for Texans, it's a scourge of supermarket parking lots and college campuses, earning nicknames like "taco-raptor." The creatures congregate in Hitchcock-like flocks that easily reach the tens of thousands.
They can, on occasion, get downright confrontational over their young and food, and they aren't shy about dive-bombing those they perceive to be too close. When dining al fresco in Texas, it's best to keep a close eye on your plate; grackles have been known to steal sugar packets, take them to the nearest puddle or man-made water feature, soak them until they get a paste, and tuck in.
They'll take food right off your plate, too. "I had a grackle steal a french fry and mayonnaise packet from my table when I was sitting outside at Central Market one day," says Austin musician Steven Stubblefield. Former Austinite Mamie Joseph still recalls a certain limping grackle repeatedly hopping on her table at Central Market and helping itself to her fries while looking her in the eye. "It was unsettling," she says. "All my grackle stories involve French fries."
"Back in the day I was hanging at the Posse East and a kind of bro dude looking guy came out, set his burger down on the bench, and went back inside for a moment," recalls Houston musician Clint "Hydro" Heider. "Grackle flies down, casually flips the bun off the burger and pecks at the innards for a bit, then flies off just before the guy comes back. He angrily looks all around him to try to figure out who messed with his burger, no one says a damn thing, and he goes ahead and eats it."
You've never heard such a cacophony as grackle racket.
Male grackles are about 16 inches long from beak to end of vertically V-shaped tail; they're the purple-black color of deep space, or an oil-slick. Females are about two-thirds that size and sport a more muted chocolate-brown plumage. Dude grackles and lady grackles tend not to hang out much—except during mating season, when the males put on one of North American avian life's most amusing displays: they strut, preen, hulk, skulk, and bunch up their feathers to look more buff. Texas real estate developer Bob Schulz was amazed by their Mick Jagger-esque strutting and their "music," which he characterizes as "guttural exploding popcorn ending in a preposterous elevating tweet." "It took me a bit to realize that was his 'Check out how sexy / I'm the one for you' dance. Still makes me laugh every time."
Flex, grackle. Photo by Jay Lee.
And if the male grackles think that macho shit isn't getting them where they need to go, they stop, elevate their noses in the air, unpuff their chests, and strike a pose worthy of a sleek Brancusi sculpture.
And the noise—Good lord, the noise. Especially at night. You've never heard such a cacophony as grackle racket: from lewd whistles to robotic clicks to TV static-like nose-clearing snot explosions to actually pretty liquidy warbling whistles—the great-tailed grackle rocks them all, especially when you're trying to sleep.
And wherever they take a shit will make you want to hurl. They're not exactly the most fastidious eaters—they devour everything from every manner of insect to other birds (and their eggs) to whatever they can scavenge from parking lots and garbage cans—and you don't want that stuff coming out the other end of those birds and on to your car. Since they're flock birds, we're not just talking a splotch or two: after a decent-sized grackle baptism, you might have a hard time recognizing your ride.
"If you see some 'whitewash' on the street under a tree you might want to park somewhere else," says Richard Gibbons, conservation director at the Houston Audubon Society. "Unless you are in a rental, and in that case, who cares? And isn't everyone in a rental at South By, anyway?"
As with the breakfast taco, Austin likes to think it invented the grackle; because it's the first place many tourists meet it at, that story has started to become official, as the city has adopted it like no other. Before it made the Riverbat its official mascot, students of Austin Community College were known as grackles. A hipster bar bears the name of the noble bird, even though it uses a picture of the wrong (common) grackle instead of the big-city grackle on its Facebook page. (C'mon Grackle Bar! If you want to be ironic at least square your ornithology away!). And Austin grackles have their own Yelp page. (Two-and-a-half stars, pretty evenly divided between haters and fans.)
But Austin didn't invent the grackle, which has been in Texas a long time (despite those stories you might read declaring it as an "invasive" species). Gibbons says they've been in south Texas since prehistory and don't get enough credit for all the pest insects and litter they consume. "We'd have more rats eating all those fries and thrown-away bread if it weren't for the grackles," Gibbons says.
"'Invasive' is an ecological term and it tends to mean 'very successful,' and I would say that that is true," he says. After all, their numbers are increasing and their range is expanding, but they are not doing so with the direct aid of humans, unlike other species, such as house sparrows, pigeons, and starlings. "What it is not is an 'exotic invasive.' It's a native and a survivor. It's a black bird and it's very smart and I think people freak out because they make them uncomfortable. [Texas] Crows don't swarm in parking lots like they do."
Love the grackles or hate them, you can't argue they aren't a lot like us. They crave junk food. They will go to ridiculous lengths to get laid. They talk loud and say little. To love grackles is to love humanity, and to hate them is to be a misanthrope.
Season five of Buffy the Vampire Slayer begins not unlike former seasons. In episode one, Buffy vs Dracula, we see Buffy and the rest of the Scoobies wrapping up their summer after the previous season's conclusions. Following the Monster of the Week format, that episode's vampire (Dracula himself) disappears and in very last minute of the episode, we are introduced to Buffy's never-before-seen sister, Dawn.
For anyone who watched Buffy during its original airdate back in 2000 or for any first-time watchers, the moment was elicited an IRL Mr. Krabs meme reaction. With her out-of-nowhere introduction, immediately following a lacklustre season 4, Dawn is thrust upon us with no context. In Dawn's first scene, Buffy's mother suggests she take her to movies only for them to both whine, "Mom!" in a way anyone with a sister recognizes instantly. Without knowing what is going on at all, we're aware of one thing only: Buffy and Dawn do not like each other.
Ask any Buffy fan who the least liked character in the series is, and they will likely tell you it was Dawn (followed by Xander who is more or less useless most of the time). Frequently topping lists like, "most annoying television characters ever" the most shared opinion within the Buffy fandom is, "Dawn is the worst." Asking several die-hard Buffy fans I know, one explained it's pretty much canon to hate Dawn or at the very least find her extremely annoying. But when you ask why, most people stop at "she's just so annoying!"
In the following episodes, while we're still unsure as to exactly where the hell Dawn came from and why everyone is acting like she's always existed and the audience is expected to go along with the ride. The second episode of the season features Dawn's own perspective via diary entries and we're introduced to how she fits into Buffy's life as a slayer. She tags along reluctantly to the magic shop with an annoyed Buffy and Giles. She hates Buffy, she isn't impressed with anything to do with being a slayer. She somehow messes everything up throughout the episode by inviting a vampire inside their home and after hearing Buffy complain about her, she runs away and gets kidnapped by a vampire. (This becomes a pretty common theme for Dawn. In Season 6 her first kiss is with a vampire named Justin, but at least she stakes him herself.)
Yes, Dawn is annoying as hell, but how could she not be? Let's contextualize this—she is a pre-pubescent tween and her sister is a vampire slayer. Have you ever been a little sister? As a professional little sister, I can tell you it sucks a lot of the time, especially you're that age and my sisters weren't even slayers. You're trying to form an identity while constantly being reminded of what a grown woman should be. You're stuck in a place between feeling resentful and feeling admiration and all your feelings are amplified by a lot of hormones. She makes the same mistakes any young person would, only they're seen as bigger mistakes because they lead to putting her life and the life of others in danger. But despite all this, Dawn's defining trait is that SHE'S NOT EVEN SUPPOSED TO EXIST.
As we soon find out in episode five of the season, Dawn is actually an object called the Key that was transformed into a human being. A bunch of monks decided to transform the Key to several hellish dimensions into a person Buffy would protect from the demon (and the season's Big Bad) Glory. All of Dawn's memories, her existence—every single thing about her was fabricated by these monks. Not only does she find out she's not a real person (in the most traditional sense), she also has to deal with her mom's death shortly after. This is why season five is arguably one of the best of the series—it's complex and full of twists. We see a new side of Buffy and see her grow up in a way she hadn't in previous seasons.
Buffy is at times childish throughout the series, because she is a literal teenager, but she's still the hero. She saves the world (a lot), she's mature as hell—but when it comes to Dawn, she turns into a straight-up mean older sister. Their dynamic creates a perfect foil in Buffy, who up until then was more or less perfect and uncomplicated. After finding out Dawn's purpose and facing Joyce's death, Buffy has no choice but to take on the role of a mother. Her reluctant acceptance of Dawn transforms and her role as a protector completely. In the season five finale, Dawn realizes in order to save the world she must die. That's right, annoying ass Dawn opts to sacrifice her life to save the world. Of course, Buffy sacrifices her own life instead—but that is her literal job. Despite all of Dawn's shortcomings of being A PRE-TEEN GIRL, she is willing to die so others don't have to. Also, without Dawn we wouldn't have the single greatest moment in Buffy history.
The first time I watched the series all the way through, I was in my early twenties and just beginning to get out of my role of the whiny younger sister. Around the same time my oldest sister said to me after a late night discussion, "When did we start talking to each other like real adults?" As a character, Dawn's only real crime is acting her age while being thrust into a world full of demons, witches and vampires. Maybe I have a soft-spot for Dawn because her own progression to becoming an actual person mirrored mine (minus the vampires), but it's time fans lay off the collective Dawn hate.
The problem with throwing a lavish movie premiere with torch-wielding fire dancers and a simulated erupting volcano is that when the whole scene catches on fire, attendees may think it's part of the show. At least, that's what happened at the Vietnamese premiere of Kong: Skull Island in Ho Chi Minh City.
The decorations, which included an enormous statue of Kong, went ablaze while some dancers were performing with torches on a stage set up near the theater entrance.
AFP reports that the owners of the Vivo City shopping mall, where the event was held, believe the fire was started by a torch left behind by a dancer, but Sky News claims that the fake volcano sparked the blaze when fire shot out to dazzle attendees upon arrival.
Whatever the source, the fire quickly caught and spread to the gorilla sculpture and other parts of the mall. Initially, partygoers were wowed and watched amazed, but as the 16-foot statue was engulfed in flames, they ran for safety, staying just close enough to record the calamity on their phones.
Fire crews arrived on the scene and extinguished the flaming monster in about 15 minutes, which is a lot shorter than it takes for Tom Hiddleston, Brie Larson, and Samuel L. Jackson to defeat King Kong in the new movie, which was mostly filmed in Vietnam.
There were reportedly no injuries among attendees, which included representatives from the American consulate, as well as Vietnamese diplomats and celebrities.
(Top photo: A member of the Strike 4 Repeal campaign, demonstrating on Dublin's O'Connell Bridge. Photo: NurPhoto/SIPA USA/PA Images)
On Wednesday – International Women's Day – 5,000 striking Irish citizens congregated on Dublin's main bridge. Marchers held a banner which spanned the width of the river, reading "Strike 4 Repeal". After sundown a second gathering attracted around 10,000 people. They were there to demand that the government call a referendum on the eighth amendment to the constitution. They were there to demand, finally, that women in Ireland are granted basic bodily autonomy.
The eighth is the most immediate barrier to the establishment of the eventual demand: free, safe and legal abortion. It places the rights of the foetus from the time of conception as equal to those of the mother, in effect placing a constitutional ban on abortion. It still comes as a shock to quite a few people I speak to here that there is no grey area: if you get pregnant in Ireland you must have a baby, or leave the country.
Until 1992, the second option was also illegal. In that year, girl X was 14 and had become pregnant as a result of rape. When she and her parents planned to travel to England for an abortion, the question was asked of police whether the foetal remains could be tested to use as proof of the rapist's paternity. An injunction was then taken to stop the child leaving the country or seeking an abortion. A series of appeals resulted in the injunction being overturned on the grounds that she was suicidal, allowing her the right to travel.
That leaves us where we are today: exporting the problem to England at a rate of 12 women a day. The number of women unable to afford travelling to England and paying an average cost of between £600 and £2,000 is not known, but we can not neglect them in our considerations. The experience of being forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to full term is a grave and unsettling horror we should not be allowed to forget.
After several failed referendums in the early 1990s, the campaign to repeal lay largely dormant until 2012. I remember a conversation taking place around that time with my mother, an activist who had campaigned during the successful divorce referendum in 1995 and during each abortion referendum. She felt, she said, a sense of resignation. They had tried for so long – all of her adult life – and nothing had happened. No progress had been made. The same mealy-mouthed old boys in bad toupees were still calling the shots. It really felt then, to me as well as her, that nothing would ever change.
The death of Savita Halappanavar proved a turning point for the movement. Halappanavar died of a septic miscarriage on the 24th of October, 2012, 17 weeks into her pregnancy. She had asked for, and was denied, an abortion when it had become clear that a miscarriage was inevitable. In explaining that it was not possible, a hospital staff member told her "this is a Catholic country". Medical professionals pointed out that the lack of clear legislature in the matter prevents them from doing their job competently. Peter Boylan of the Irish Institute of Obstetricians and Gynecologists said, "The current situation is like a sword of Damocles hanging over us. If we do something with good intention but it turns out to be illegal, the consequences are extremely serious for medical practitioners."
Savita's husband, Praveen Halappanavar, successfully sued the HSE for medical negligence in 2016, having already emigrated away from Ireland two years earlier.
Mass outrage followed the Savita case. In November of 2012, 2,000 people gathered outside the Dail in Dublin in her memory, and 10,000 marched through the streets demanding changes to the law. No substantive change has taken place since then, but a hugely re-energised, active and dedicated pro-choice movement has emerged.
We have had the worst case outcomes. We have waited patiently for these to take effect and produce some basic empathy in our legislators. And we have not seen it.
Almost unheard of before, it is now fairly commonplace for pro-choice women to write about their abortion stories in the press or on social media. Actions like the X-ile Project, which presents portraits of Irish women who have travelled for abortions, aim to bring greater understanding to the wider public that the women affected are all around them. "Repeal" sweatshirts made by Anna Cosgrave constantly sell out, with all profits redirected to the Abortion Rights Campaign. Most importantly, a new generation of activists, like the organisers of Wednesday's march, are angry, radical and not going anywhere.
There was further controversy late last year, when Rory O'Neill (stage name Panti Bliss), who was instrumental in the campaign to successfully pass the 2015 referendum to legalise gay marriage, commented on the repeal movement: "It's very easy for passion to become anger, but that puts people off. There is a time and a place for righteous anger – and I am not saying everyone should be meek – but you need to think strategically when it comes to referendums."
O'Neill knows a thing or two about winning a referendum, but the crucial point he misses here is that women in Ireland have had every possible conversation and argument about abortion that there is. We have presented the "good victims" (there is perhaps no more straightforward clearcut moral argument for abortion than the X case scenario). We have had the worst case outcomes. We have waited patiently for these to take effect and produce some basic empathy in our legislators. And we have not seen it. Being nice, being patient, hasn't worked. Being open about our stories hasn't worked. Even being dead hasn't worked.
This is why it's galling to have centrist liberal discourse repeatedly bemoan us for not being neutral enough. I can't be neutral in a debate about what takes place inside my body, about a system that has made me want to kill myself, about people who were supposed to represent me in government who at best turn their backs and at worst throw me under the bus. The time for politely asking to be included in a conversation we will always be drowned out in is over. The UN told Ireland in 2016 that its lack of legislation was a human rights abuse – a referendum shouldn't even be necessary to address this issue.
These are the sort of bizarre absurdities you find yourself dealing with when forced to justify your rights to people who essentially have no interest in your wellbeing and health. They will not be reasoned with. Demand, anger and urgency are necessary now.
All we have available to us is direct action. We have been polite for a long time. We have been nice. We have made the arguments. I'm done with that. I think we all are. My body has been demeaned in Ireland. My body has been embarrassed in Ireland. My body has been raped in Ireland. It has been denied justice in Ireland. I'm sick of debate. I want my body to be my own. In my own country. At last.
The first Twilight movie came out in 2008. It was glittery, had almost no blood or gore, and featured Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart, two vampires our 45th president would later tweet about over a dozen times. That year also brought us True Blood, the HBO show that featured human breasts and a lot of vampires exploding into sacks of blood. There was no doubt about it: Vampires, asleep in their coffins for as long as we let them, were back. And they were different. They were younger, taller, brooding in a pop-punk kind of way, dressed in tight leather jackets, and a little hotter.
If you liked vampire shows before 2008, you were probably disappointed. These new guys were softer, almost kinder—they fell in love easy, they used a lot of pomade, and they rarely got staked. Where was the show that could stand up to Buffy? To Interview with a Vampire? Hell, at least to Blade?!
That next year, a show called The Vampire Diaries premiered. There are a lot of things that work against The Vampire Diaries, beginning with the title. Then there's the fact that it sounds like teen drama nonsense—a genre that's often maligned, though you're definitely missing out.
The show's plot, however, was not as easy to explain to critics. It's about a high school girl named Elena Gilbert (Nina Dobrev) who is caught in a love triangle with two vampire brothers: Stefan (Paul Wesley) and Damon Salvatore (Ian Somerhalder), which sound like two men I would encounter if I lived inside a Victorian-themed softcore porn. Elena lives in Mystic Falls, Virginia, a small town with one diner that is seemingly cool enough for every centuries-old vampire to want to hang out in. Her friends are Bonnie Bennett (Kat Graham), a witch, and Caroline Forbes (Candice King), a cheerleader. Just by describing this show, it seems like everything the new vampire shows were going to be: light, saccharine, and bereft of the violence and gore that made vampires so fun to watch in the first place. It seems predictable.
But it wasn't. It's nothing like the vampire shows you remember. It encapsulates all the complaints people would have about "new" vampires. But in its depth, its longevity, and its complete commitment to immerse you in its world, it's better than all of its television and film peers. After all, it ran for eight seasons. In fact, that is its core strength, the one thing that few modern vampire shows or franchises have been able to do: It lasted. It evolved past the constraints of a teen vampire craze, all while embracing the things that drew this generation's teens to vampires. In that way, it appeals to both the old and new vampire lovers.
The Vampire Diaries is filled with the mythology of how vampires came to exist, and there's plenty of folklore and fun supernatural stuff—the stuff that barely existed in Twilight, got too overwhelming in True Blood, and was perfectly executed in Buffy. It focuses mostly on the classic fight between werewolves and witches and vampires that's practically canon at this point. There are vampire hunters; there are hybrid vampire-werewolves. The show even introduces some new creatures to play with: doppelgängers that are connected over centuries under the guise that they look exactly alike (and hot!), vampire serial killers called rippers, and Klaus, the first vampire ever. (Klaus has a spinoff called The Original, a ridiculously fun show that you should only watch if you ever want to see a melodramatic man talk about how much he loves Bourbon Street.)
Of course, like most supernatural shows, The Vampire Diaries invents much of its own rules. Vampires can drink and eat—and they mostly drink bourbon from decanters. They can be in the sunlight if they wear gaudy rings forged from witches, which mostly look like the cheesy ones given to High School seniors. When they feed on human blood, their eyes turn black and their skin gets covered in veins.
And feed they do. There's plenty of violence, in case you were worried that you won't see hearts being ripped out of chests, innocent waiters being fed on, necks being snapped, or whole families being murdered. The fun part of this show is that plenty of people die, even if they are your beloved characters. Nobody is safe, something that even True Blood couldn't bring itself to do until the very end.
The reason is simple: The Vampire Diaries doesn't focus too much on the humans. It's about vampires first, and their relationships with humans. It focuses on a vampire's idea of humanity and how that affects the humans (and the audience) they interact with. It's the idea that you could like characters that are mass murderers, and that those characters can be somewhat good, or evil sometimes, or somewhere in between. Sometimes it means your favorite character is a vampire and a girl-next-door—which is most of the fun of watching. It focuses on the reasons we like vampires in the first place: They're immortal, they're a little evil, but they still could be redeemed. Can you imagine? A show about immortal vampires that doesn't really focus on how great it is to be a boring human?
The Vampire Diaries lasted a long time for a reason. Itembraces its silliness. It goes deeper, occasionally, but it certainly knew its audience. And because of that, it's sexy, a little campy, often ridiculous, and just the vampire show you didn't know you needed, right to the very end.
The way Jim Sipes figures it, Donald Trump owes a little something to Kansas farmers. Big cities, especially those on the coasts, voted for Hillary Clinton, so it was rural America—folks like Sipes, a fifth-generation farmer in western Kansas—who carried Trump to victory. Kansas, which Trump won by 20 points and has voted Republican in presidential elections for decades, was a part of that win.
So shortly after the election, Sipes sat down and wrote a "Christmas wish list" for Trump and published it in the local paper. "It is my hope that the new administration and new Congress will listen to the mandate provided by rural America during this election," Sipes warned.
One problem: Trump ran for the presidency on a platform of tearing up and rewriting America's trade agreements, consciously moving away from "free trade" to "fair trade." This, Trump has said, is to protect America's manufacturing workers. But Sipes—like a lot of Kansas farmers—loves the sort of globalism Trump threatens.
"A lot of agricultural market is an export market," Sipes told me. "We need free trade, particularly with the poor commodity prices right now."
Why? Put it this way: If you've ever eaten a steak, there's a pretty good chance it passed through Kansas. A piece of bread? The wheat was probably grown here. That airplane you flew on? At least some of the components were likely manufactured in Wichita. Agriculture and aviation are two of the state's biggest industries—and huge exporters as well.
"We're losing trade every day we're not included in TPP," Sipes said. "So we're very concerned about that loss."
The fears don't stop there. Some Kansas farmers worry that a decision to renegotiate NAFTA—and to build a border wall—could sour relations with Mexico and put a dent in wheat exports sent to that country. All this leaves the state's Republican politicians are left in the awkward position of backing their party leader and tending to the needs of the Kansas economy. It's not a simple task.
"We have our work cut out for us to make the Trump administration understand the value of agriculture trade," Senator Pat Roberts, a Republican who chairs the Senate Agriculture Committee, said in December.
If Kansas is so reliant on free trade, why did the state go so overwhelmingly for Trump?
Some of it was surely habit—Kansas last voted for a Democrat for president in 1964. The state's residents generally support Republicans, and liked Trump's promises to cut back on cumbersome regulations. Even if they had some doubts about Trump, Clinton was a nonstarter for a myriad of cultural and policy reasons.
"Trump may not exactly have fit with Kansas Republican voters ideas," Burdett Loomis, a political science professor at the University of Kansas, told me. "But HRC certainly didn't. So what were they to do?"
"I'm not sure he was my choice," Sipes said of Trump, who he voted for, albeit warily. "But of the two he was the better choice."
It's true that Trump has provided farmers and ranchers like Sipes some of the stuff on their wish list. He's taken action to eliminate the "Waters of the United States" rule that gave the EPA substantial power over clean water issues, part of a host of regulations Kansas agriculture professionals want undone. Trump's efforts at deregulation "are of huge benefit to agriculture," said Warren Parker, director of policy communication for the Kansas Farm Bureau.
But Karyn Page, president and CEO of Kansas Global Trade Services—a Wichita company that works with small- and medium-sized Kansas business to help them enter the export market—is more critical. Trump's rhetoric on trade, she said, has already caused problems for her clients.
"The worst thing you can do for a business is insert a level of uncertainty," she told me. "It's making it harder for them to do business, and we never want that."
Roberts brought his Senate Agriculture Committee to the state in February to hold a hearing on the upcoming Farm Bill, and worries about trade were palpable throughout the hearing.
Lynda Foster of Foster Dairy told the committee that "the equivalent of one day's milk production each week from the entire US dairy industry ultimately ends up overseas." Exports, she said, are "integral to the health of my farm."
She was far from alone. A parade of "agribusiness" professionals—in sectors ranging from beef to soybeans to wheat and more—testified to the importance of trade agreements. In 2015, one said, Kansas exported $800 million of wheat; only the state's aircraft industry beat that export number.
Ken Wood, a wheat farmer from Chapman and president of the Kansas Association of Wheat Growers, was explicit in his fears about what a protectionist Trumpian trade policy could do to him and his colleagues, saying he was "disappointed" by the cancellation of TPP. His organization remains a supporter of NAFTA, he said, which "created a duty-free wheat trade which moved Mexico into a top-five export market for US wheat."
Any time we have more protectionist behavior, it's not good for global trade and it's not good for American competitiveness.
"Half of the wheat grown in Kansas is exported, and without trade, the Kansas farmer will continue to struggle," Wood said. "If the US decided to leave NAFTA or extract painful concessions, it is likely that Mexico will target the most sensitive sectors, and agriculture in particular. Mexico has alternatives when it comes to wheat."
Parker, at the Kansas Farm Bureau, is cautious: "Regardless of who is in the White House," he said, "we'll try to work with them for the betterment of agriculture."
But it's apparent that the state's agriculture leaders are concerned that in renegotiating trade agreements, Trump will emphasize manufacturing jobs and forget about farmers. "Trade is incredibly important," Parker said. "We need and plan to keep the pressure on the administration to hold to [Trump's] word that agriculture will be at the table."
When asked whether Trump-loving Kansas can weather Donald Trump's rhetoric and policies, Page is careful not to take a shot directly at the president. "It's important to wait and see what happens before reacting," she said. She did, however, note that 17 percent of the state's economy relies on exports—a number that goes well above 20 percent for the economy of Wichita, the largest city in Kansas.
"Any time we have more protectionist behavior, it's not good for global trade and it's not good for American competitiveness," said Page. "Within the rule of law and fairness, we want to keep the borders open."
Kansas farmers and ranchers apparently agree. "The vast majority of my fellow livestock producers believe the livestock industry is best served by the process of free enterprise and free trade," David Clawson, and Englewood rancher and president of the Kansas Livestock Association, told the ag committee in February.
It is Senator Roberts who will be charged with carrying that message to the president. His job has been complicated by low prices in the farm economy and problems getting a confirmation hearing scheduled for Trump's Secretary of Agriculture nominee, Sonny Perdue. His office did not return my calls for comment, but Roberts—often an undyingly loyal party man—has been open about his concerns that President Trump will leave farmers behind.
The state's ag industry needs "a robust and aggressive and transparent trade policy, quickly. Quickly," he said at the February hearing. "It's time. It's time."
Sipes, meanwhile, has grown impatient. Trump, he believes, dragged his heels in nominating Perdue—the last cabinet member nominated—and the failure to get him confirmed is grating. It appears, Sipes said, that Trump sees other issues as a "higher priority."
And that's irritating. Without new trade agreements and an ag secretary to push them forward, Sipes believes, Kansas farmers will start to fall by the wayside. He represents 11 counties on the Kansas Farm Bureau.
""Nearly every county has the story of a longtime farmer that's given up," Sipes said. "Trade's a pretty big deal."
I haven't met many people who ship the Jughead-Betty kiss that took place at the end of the episode six of Riverdale.
IMO, it was a little forced and unnecessary—the two characters don't have much in the way of sexual chemistry. Beyond that, is it too much to ask that a guy and a girl just investigate a murder together as friends and nothing more?
But the asexual, or ace, community has a lot more riding on Jughead's arc. Jughead is canonically asexual—a revelation that was made in Jughead No. 4, released last February. The comic's co-creator Chip Zdarsky later told a New York Comic-Con panel, "People have asked me if there is going to be a romance if I'm writing Jughead, because I'm very romantic, and the answer is no, because there is enough of that in Archie. I think something like asexuality is underrepresented, and since we have a character who was asexual before people had the word for it, I'm continuing to write him that way." Even the actor who plays Jughead, Cole Sprouse, said he hopes his character's asexuality is explored.
Asexual or not, he's still more interesting than Archie. Photo via Facebook
But, at least for now, Jughead seems to be pretty into Betty. VICE reached out to a few people who identify as asexual to get their thoughts on this development.
One thing that's important to note is just because Jughead has romantic feelings for Betty, it doesn't mean he's not asexual. Asexual people aren't necessarily aromantic.
"You can basically define it as people who do not experience sexual attraction to others," said Sasha Kaye, 23, a UBC grad who lives in Vancouver. "It's very much a spectrum and there's a lot of diversity in the community in a number of different ways."
Kaye explained that within the group, there are those who don't experience any sexual attraction whatsoever, and "greysexuals" who may experience sexual attraction very rarely. She said she considers herself a virgin but isn't repulsed by sex—just indifferent to it.
Kaye said she always knew she was asexual but she didn't have a word for it. It's part of the reason she said she wants to see an asexual character like Jughead portrayed in the mainstream.
"I remember once in high school watching an intramural sports match and my friends were like 'Oh my god, he's the hottest.' I thought the guy in the sweater was, cause he was wearing long sleeves and I thought he must be sweating."
Then, in university, she saw someone use the term on social media.
"I read this definition and I thought 'Oh my god. That's me.' That moment was life changing."
Kaye said asexuals can crush on someone and desire emotional intimacy the same way as anyone else, and some asexuals are into kissing and cuddling.
That's why she said Jughead's behaviour so far doesn't necessarily rule out an asexual orientation.
"To sort of say he can't be asexual now kind of shows a lack of understanding towards asexuality more broadly."
But Fleurien Leth Graveson, 29, a Montreal-based photography student, told VICE she is flat out disappointed by the Jughead-Betty storyline.
"Pretty much the main reason I was interested in watching Riverdale was cause I wanted to see if they would follow that arc," said Graveson, who realized she was asexual three years ago.
"Representation for any oppressed or marginalized group is such a huge deal and I think it's really difficult for people who have representation to conceptualize what it's like to never see or very, very rarely see people like you in the media."
Both Graveson and Kaye both said they could count examples of asexual characters in the mainstream on one hand, including Todd on Netflix's Bojack Horseman and a nurse on the cancelled series Sirens. (Graveson additionally said Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games could be asexual, but that was never stated outright.)
Graveson said growing up she dated guys just to go through the motions—but it never felt natural for her.
"For me the relationship part was totally fine, it was just the sex part… It was feeling like everybody was kind of faking it, they couldn't possibly enjoy it as much as they claimed to be."
She said she's indifferent to sex but doesn't mind it.
"It's like eating a food that you don't particularly like but don't find disgusting. I'll eat it if it's right in front of me but I'm not going to go out of my way to get it."
Asexuals, she noted, can still have orgasms but they wouldn't necessarily turn to another person to relieve their arousal.
Graveson, who recently got out of a long-term open relationship, told VICE she wishes she realized she was asexual when she was younger—something that Riverdale has an opportunity to help its younger ace viewers with.
"When those things get taken away that are in the media, it becomes a lot harder for people to find their identity and to know that that identity is totally valid."
Graveson and Kaye have said the writers still have a chance to allow Jughead's asexuality to manifest.
"He's young and he's prob still trying to figure himself out," said Kaye. "If you don't see other asexuals in media, you don't learn about asexuality in school, you're not going to know until you try stuff and figure it out."
Mary Kate McAlpine, 24, of Arlington Heights, Illinois, told VICE she thinks so far there's been no indication that Jughead will be asexual, even aside from the kiss.
"The same way that gay characters can be coded a certain way before (or in the worst cases, in lieu of) being explicitly 'out,' as it were, ace characters can be as well. From the descriptions I've read, aside from him seeming to have a perspective no one else does…there isn't much. And the official character description calls him a 'heartthrob,' which puts him in the context of sex and romance," said McAlpine, who considers herself "solidly asexual."
While she concedes that writers could still be planning on making Jughead asexual, she said she is tired of the issue being "tiptoed around."
"Having no explicit confirmation from the writers that they will keep this canon ace character ace makes me feel uneasy and worried," she said.
Drug smugglers have gotten pretty savvy these days in terms of engineering complex methods to get drugs into the United States. But while disguising weed as fruits and vegetables and using underwater tunnels or medieval catapults may be worth a shot at getting drugs over the border, flying in drugs in via air travel can prove to be a little more risky.
Last week, a 28-year-old man traveling through JFK tipped off airport security for looking a little too nervous and wearing pants that were a little too tight. After pulling him aside, they took a closer look and discovered that the guy had about ten pounds of cocaine strapped to his legs, Customs and Border Patrol reports.
The man, Juan Carlos Galan Luperon, had just landed in New York City from the Dominican Republic when he was pulled aside for an inspection. Apparently, security agents felt that Luperon's nervous behavior and his pants—which CBP called "rather snug"—were cause for further investigation.
Officials escorted Luperon to a private search room where they performed several physical searches and eventually found his stash. Luperon had packages strapped to both of his legs containing ten pounds white powder, which police later found was an estimated $164,000 stash of cocaine.
Leon Hayward, acting director of CBP's New York Field Operations, touted the incident as another example of officers being "ever vigilant in protecting the United States from the distribution of these illicit drugs." What exactly happened that allowed this guy to get through the x-rays and onto the plane at Santo Domingo's Las Americas International Airport remains to be seen.
Luperon was arrested and now faces federal narcotics smuggling charges. If only he had worn a pair of JNCOs on the flight, this might never have happened.
In his seminal text The Society of the Spectacle, the French provocateur Guy Debord writes that, "in a world that has really been turned upside down, the true is a moment of the false." French director Olivier Assayas, an avowed devotee of Debord, believes in this understanding of the world. His attempts to peel back the superficial and convenient to reveal a brief moment of the genuine have come to define his career.
But while Debord's own filmmaking attempts are avant-garde (with names like On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time) and inaccessible by design, Assayas's are marked by a blend of art film interests and genre film aesthetics. His films feature coherent (even compelling) plots, international casts, and, often, liberal helpings of sex and violence. With this unique blend of gonzo cinema and theoretical underpinnings, Assayas has managed to build one of the most original, and interesting bodies of work in contemporary cinema. And yet, while his films have found a following among certain American niche, they largely remain overlooked and underseen by most audiences.
The son of the French screenwriter Jacques Rémy, Assayas got his start directing short films and writing for the influential Cahiers du Cinéma—the same magazine that fostered the vision of directors like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. He made his feature debut with 1986's Disorder, but it wasn't until his 1996 film Irma Vep that Assayas really arrived on the international scene. Looking back, his pre- Vep films were decidedly formative works—straightforward dramas mostly hampered by a lack of ambition and lack of a clear voice. But In Irma Vep, Assayas finally struck a balance between theory and practice, delivering the first uniquely Assayas movie.
In the film, the Hong Kong actresses Maggie Cheung plays a version of herself who has been cast in a remake of the classic French film serial, Les Vampires. The production is riddled with chaos and miscommunication. Defined by Cheung's difficulty communicating with the cast and crew, the film is about disorientation, and it can be a bit disorienting itself. After all, it features interspersed film-within-the-film scenes and seemingly-unrelated archival footage. But underneath its roving camera and dialogues about contemporary French cinema, Assayas's core themes reveal themselves: globalization, the convergence and collision of cultures, and France's place in the world. Funny and engaging, the film still serves a benchmark of Assayas's growing maturity as an artist, and like much of his work that would come after, it is both accessible and highly substantive. In fact, it remains one of his biggest hits (relatively speaking).
Over the course of the next 14 years, Assayas released a number of underloved films, including 2002's Demonlover and 2008's Boarding Gate, both of which continue Assayas's interest in cultural borders, as well as the relationship between politics, violence, and images. But these films lacked Irma Vep's prestige. Instead, they were seen as vulgar B-movies. During this period, Assayas also released some more-or-less straightforward films, like Summer Hours. But while there are some real gems in this stretch, none of them made much of a splash upon release. It wasn't until 2010's epic (in both length and scope) Carlos that Assayas's vision was finally legitimized by his peers. The five-and-a-half hour long film follows the life of the Venezuelan terrorist Carlos the Jackal, and it takes its audience to France, England, Holland, Jordan, the Sudan.
Kristen Stewart and Olivier Assayas on the set of Personal Shopper. Courtesy of IFC Films
A deeply cosmopolitan film, Carlos is enamored with Europe, with cities, and with the cultural mosaic those cities represent. Its philosophical dialogues and globetrotting is reminiscent of Steven Soderbergh's Che, but while Che is alternatively lush and sleek, Carlos is grimy and dirty and painful for its characters and its audiences. Most of Assayas's previous films—whether they were the gonzo ones or the lush provincial dramas—remained largely overlooked because for most audience members they were (rightly or wrongly) inaccessible. Carlos removes most of those hurdles, and, in many ways, it is Assayas's most mainstream film. It's thrilling and fun and grounded by terrific performances. And yet, with a massive running time and no bankable stars, it remained off most viewers' radars. Critics, however, recognized Carlos's quality, and the film was rightfully rewarded with two Golden Globe nominations, though it was ineligible for an Academy Award.
Since then, Assayas has once again retreated to more intimate, though no less passionate, affairs. He first released the minor Something in the Air. Then he followed that up with the Kristen Stewart-starring The Clouds of Sils Maria, a complex relationship drama about art, aging, identity, and how they all interweave in this age of global cultural rot. Like a number of his less generic post- Irma Vep films, The Clouds of Sils Maria was welcomed by high praise from critics, but it still remains underseen and under-discussed. (Though, it did score a spot in the prestigious Criterion Collection.)
A similar fate most likely awaits his latest film, Personal Shopper, which opens this week. In typical Assayas fashion, Kristen Stewart plays the titular role of a personal shopper. At once, she both exists at the highest peak of capitalist excess and alienation and also at its margins. Stewart also moonlights as a spiritual medium, attempting to communicate with her deceased twin brother—her double, her mirror—a her that exists elsewhere, outside of her material confines. Like Sils Maria, it blends the arthouse and the grindhouse in the peculiar way that only Assayas can: sleek and stylish, but not lacking in genre trappings or heady commentary. This is Assayas's schtick, and while appreciated by some, it doesn't seem to be finding a mainstream audience. But Assayas doesn't seem to care, and that's probably for the best.
Florida still doesn't know how to deal with its Burmese python problem. In 2013, the state launched a contest to see who could kill the most giant snakes, and last year, officials flew in two singing Irula tribesmen from India to slay the giant invasive predators. But now, it seems, the state is willing to try a third approach: The South Florida Water Management District just announced that it's accepting applications for full-time snake hunters in the region, no experience required.
The 25 people who make the cut will be paid a base rate of $8.10 an hour, although bonuses are given for productivity. For instance, hunters get an additional $25 for any snake corpse that's at least four feet long, as well as another $25 per foot after that. The biggest score of all is killing a snake guarding a nest of eggs, which will net the worker a hundo. If you've ever wished there was a video game version of the second Indiana Jones movie, this job—which runs from April to June—might be something to consider.
Keep in mind, though, that Burmese pythons aren't garden snakes that can be beheaded with a shovel. They can grow up to 23 feet long and weigh as much as 200 pounds. An FAQ on the website adds that no money will be awarded for snakes brought in alive, but says that it's fair game to shoot the snake with a gun.
Although a gun isn't required per se, one might do well to get a permit before applying for the job. After all, it's the preferred tool of Bobby Hill—the legendary 61-year-old who's used a 12-gauge shotgun to massacre more pythons than any human on Earth. He also has another thing going for him, though, that you can't obtain through any licensing agency: a native's grasp of the animal's behavior down to its patterns of movement and musky odor.
"Once you smell it, you don't forget it," he told the Tampa Bay Times in 2013.
Donald Trump's inauguration was on Casil McArthur's 18th birthday. He was home in Estes Park, Colorado, wishing he could be out on the streets protesting. "Denver was fucking amazing," he remembers. "Just peaceful protesting, and it was wonderful. I really wanted to be involved but I couldn't do it because of my top surgery." It's very Casil to see the unexpectedly bright side of that turbulent political moment. When we chat a few weeks later in New York, the young model is bursting with enthusiasms and obsessions: cosplay, fashion, the environment, and most of all, transgender activism.
"I want to help make progressive statements to try and change the world, change society," he tells me, playing with the hem of his pink t-shirt. "So, yes, it sucks being labeled a 'trans male model,' but at the same time if I wasn't, how would kids my age and younger or people older than me find me?"
Finding Casil is becoming a whole lot easier. Although he has understandably conflicted feelings about labels, he is fast becoming the first trans male supermodel (trans women like Hari Nef and Andreja Pejic are already well established). During fashion week in New York, he walked the Marc Jacobs runway in a powerful red tracksuit, and he has been captured by legendary photographers including Steven Meisel and Collier Schorr. Meisel spotted him and put him on a six-month exclusive, the fashion industry's equivalent of a Supreme Court clerkship. Guaranteed success.
I decided to give myself a reset with a day off the grid, which I would pack with enough relaxing activities to hopefully turn me into an anthropomorphic Xanny bar.
I worked with Sara Krisher, a Confidence Coach who teaches relaxation methods as part of her curriculum, to plan ("but not overplan") my day. She gave activity suggestions that corroborated and added to ideas I'd already begun culling from scientific studies and random lists around the web.
"It's going to come down to the details and the preparation you do before the day," she advised. "You don't want to be scrounging for a clean pair of socks or be low on gas while trying to relax."
Taking her advice to heart, I spent the night before my big day tidying up the apartment, and laying out my outfits and activities for the stress-free itinerary I'd meticulously plotted. To combat any excitement-induced insomnia and ensure I got as restful a night's sleep as possible, I drank a natural relaxant mixture of water and tart cherry juice and hit the hay.
My cat, mid-cuddle
I started my day of tranquility awoken (at a leisurely 9 AM) by the chirping bird alarm I'd downloaded for the occasion, rather than the usual battery of klaxons needed to wake me.
Picking up the schedule I'd left on the nightstand the night before, I saw my first order of the day was to cuddle my cat for 15 minutes. I pulled her up off the floor, smushed her into that Sphinx pose cats do, and we got down to business. Easy enough.
After that, I fired up a Tibetan singing bowl YouTube video and attempted 15 minutes of Transcendental Meditation (TM). As an atheist and general skeptic of mysticism, I was surprised to find that towards the end of my TM session, I'd lulled myself into an altered state of sorts by repeating my mantra ("shirim"). Maybe I was still a bit groggy from sleep, but, while I wasn't exactly astral projecting like Dr. Strange, I'd definitely tapped into something.
I put on the comfy clothes I'd laid out and went to the kitchen to make myself a relaxation-optimized breakfast: oatmeal with honey accompanied by a berry, banana, and yogurt smoothie. I was starting to become convinced that this day could change my life.
Next on the agenda was something I included because it's always made me feel relaxed in the past: getting high and playing video games. I took a few hits of a cannabis strain specifically marketed as "chill," and began tending to my crops in the tranquil farming sim, Stardew Valley.
Art
An hour flew by and it was time to paint. Using acrylic colors (heralded for their calming effects,) I brushed the canvas while whale songs droned in the background. I didn't have enough time allotted for something representational, so I took a more abstract expressionist approach, trying to convey the tranquility I was feeling.
Next, I jogged two miles to lunch, listening to a playlist of songs that a bunch of neuroscientists deemed the most relaxing. Lunch itself was a brown rice, salmon, and avocado poke bowl. I tried to eat as mindfully as I had during breakfast, but ennui was beginning to set in. I certainly didn't want to spend the day refreshing my Twitter feed like a junkie, but pangs of desire for news were starting to hit me.
Meal finished, I popped some mint gum in my mouth and began to walk back to my place calling my friend, Mike, for a chat along the way. Mike was on vacation, so I asked him to share his own day's relaxation agenda with me.
Once home, I rinsed off my running sweat using a lavender and olive oil bar of soap before attempted my second TM session. My mind still racing with questions about what was actually going on in the world and my yearning for human contact not sated by my brief interaction with Mike, the session was a bust and I moved on to the next item on my list, a nap.
If meditation in this mental state was a fool's errand, napping was a fool's unpaid internship. I skipped the nap once it was clear I wasn't getting to sleep and watched the above video, touted as "The World's Most Relaxing Film" because some Danish tourism board had people watch it connected to heart monitors. It was chill and all, but I bristle as spurious boasts like that, which is why I don't eat at any generic pizzerias claiming to be "world famous."
I headed to the kitchen to bakedark chocolate chip cookies. While mixing the batter, I accidentally skipped a step in the recipe that didn't ruin my cookie dough but made its formation a much more frustrating task than anticipated.
It was as good a time as any to bust out the de-stressing breathing exercise I'd practiced just for moments like this. Placing my hand on my abdomen, I inhaled deeply, filling my lungs with air. And because my life is apparently a sitcom, this shook some flour loose from my cheek, which I inhaled along with the oxygen, sending me into a coughing fit. Then, later, as I took the cookies out of the oven, I burned my hand on the tray.
Then I took an Uber to a scheduled yoga class.I played Gregorian monk chants in my earbuds during the ride in an attempt to mitigate the stress caused by the crawling rush hour LA traffic. I got there late, and had to rush in, telling the front desk I'd pay after.
I lucked out in that the class I'd happened into was entirely relaxation focused. I spent the majority of the hour supine, stretching subtly, or in a fetal position trying to lower my heart rate to the levels I'd experienced that morning.
Sore from miles of running and walking (but not really the low impact yoga), the expertly-administered Thai massage I'd booked after my class should have felt amazing. Unfortunately, I spent much of the experience in my head trying to guesstimate time and figure out which aspects of the rest of my night would need alteration.
I didn't have enough time for the fancy "leave everything to the chef" dinner that was on my schedule so I settled for the salad place next door and ordered a bowl that included arugala, sunflower seeds, grapefruit, and more avocado. I joylessly wolfed down the salad before Ubering to my next destination.
As I hadn't had it with my dinner as planned, I ran into a liquor store across the street to grab a single serving bottle of red wine to sneak into a sketch show.
Still behind on time, I rushed out of the show at intermission, my comedy and alcohol thirsts quenched. I chose to walk home in silence, rather than listening to the queued up audio of sizzling bacon, the sound some dumb survey had deemed the most relaxing noise in the world.
Back at home, I saw the scale of the mess my day had wreaked on the apartment. The painting and baking areas would have to be cleaned up by future me, of course. And I was still crawling out of my skin from the news blinders I'd had on all day. I had time for one final push, a relaxation last stand.
I drew a hot bath with Epson salt, lit aromatherapy candles, mixed some ashwaganda powder into a glass of warm milk, turned on this ASMR video with over 17 million views, put on a bougie snail slime face mask, grabbed a book and settled into the tub for my stress-free finale.
My bath was an unbelievable failure. In my efforts to capture my the absurd scene in a photo, I sloshed around the tub a lot spilling water everywhere, including on my book and in my drink. I'd flown too close to the sun.
Relaxation is about freedom. Freedom to not exert one's self, sure, but also freedom to do as one pleases. Better late than never, I would break the self-imposed shackles of my itinerary and end my night relaxing on my terms.
The list had me scheduled to fall asleep to a relaxing movie. I opted instead to return to the point where I'd felt most content all day, falling asleep after another round of pot and video games.
According to CBS News, there's new research on the horizon that suggests marijuana use might not be as safe as originally thought—the data suggests that smoking pot may put people at a higher risk for stroke and heart disease, adding to a number of conflicting studies about the safety of getting high.
Dr. Aditi Kalla, a cardiologist from Philadelphia's Einstein Medical Center, got a team together to analyze 20 million hospital records from people ages 18 to 55 who had been discharged from US hospitals in 2009 and 2010. The team looked at the number of people in those records who had admitted to smoking weed—only about 1.5 percent—and found that marijuana use was responsible for a 26 percent higher risk of stroke, and 10 percent higher risk of heart failure, compared to patients who did not smoke weed.
Although the study didn't allow the researchers to actually talk to the participants to find out how much they were smoking each day, or if they were smoking or eating edibles, Kalla still believes the findings indicate a general link between heart problems and marijuana use.
"Even when we corrected for known risk factors, we still found a higher rate of both stroke and heart failure in these patients, so that leads us to believe that there is something else going on besides just obesity or diet-related cardiovascular side effects," Kalla said in a press release. "More research will be needed to understand the pathophysiology behind this effect."
This is just the most recent in a number of studies that have found harmful effects of marijuana use, including diminished bone density, vision problems, psychosis, and paranoia. Earlier this year, a review of 10,000 studies about the medical effects of marijuana published by the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found that pot can affect memory, mental health, and respiratory functions, but won't cause cancer.
With medical or recreational marijuana use legal in more than half of the states in the country, doctors and the general public are going to be paying more attention to these studies to weigh the drug's benefits. The bottom line seems to be that without more inquiry, we can't be quite sure of the real risk marijuana can pose.
"Like all other drugs, whether they're prescribed or not prescribed, we want to know the effects and side effects of this drug," Kalla said. "It's important for physicians to know these effects so we can better educate patients, such as those who are inquiring about the safety of cannabis or even asking for a prescription for cannabis."
Kalla and her team plan to publish their findings at the annual American College of Cardiology meeting on March 18.
The accusations about the Trump team's ties to Russia are simultaneously alarming, confusing, unsubstantiated, and ever expanding. It feels like every damn day a new story about Donald Trump's connections to the Putin regime emerges. It's still unclear whether Jeff Sessions knowingly lied about his communications with the Russian ambassador during his confirmation hearings. We still don't know how significant Trump's meeting with the Russian ambassador was during the campaign, or what erstwhile Trump advisor Carter Page's role was in all this. Most of all, we don't know why Trump's people keep denying that they've had meetings with representatives of the Russian government—even when there are perfectly reasonable reasons for them to have those meetings.
We do know that in December the FBI and CIA agreed that Russia was trying to influence the election in favor of Trump. We know it took months for Trump to just concede that the Russians were responsible for the email hacks that targeted Democrats. (Trump eventually admitted Russia was behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee's emails.) We also know that Trump has been unusually pro-Putin and pro-Russia for a prominent US politician since the beginning of his campaign. For months, the media, liberals, and anti-Trump conservatives have made a lot of noise about what the president is hiding and why.
Trump's supporters, however, have looked at the same stories everyone else has and come to very different conclusions. Curious to see what the MAGA crowd thought of the sprawling Russia scandal, I asked six Trump supporters to explain to me why they weren't too concerned.
Since the evidence linking Trump and his team to Russia is unverified, many see the accusations as part of a larger "fake news" problem, an attack by the biased media to undermine the president. Even the notion that Russia interfered with the election didn't hold water for Trump fans I spoke to. "If you've ever visited grassroots America you'd know he'd never need to cheat," Spencer Raitt-Forest, a New York City–based Trump supporter, told me. He believes "the media" is pushing the narrative of Trump's connection with Russia because they don't "like to be wrong."
"What happened to innocent until proven guilty?" Raitt-Forest mused. "With the media, it seems like Trump is guilty until proven innocent."
A Mississippi Republican—who voted for Trump for the sake of getting another "conservative Supreme Court justice" and asked to remain anonymous because her job doesn't permit her to publicly express her political beliefs—explained that she believes the president's ties to Russia became a major issue because the media is lazy. "It is not my place to look into the motives or heart of others," she said, but added, "Media jobs are hard to come by. News outlets have cut staff and increased output expectations."
She also believes the stories about Trump's links to Russia would have more credibility had they also looked into "Clinton's issues, such as the pay to play as secretary of state or the sale of US uranium to Russia."
Conservative talking head and Twitter celebrity Bill Mitchell echoed a similar sentiment, mentioning the same uranium deal. "People involved in that deal, people benefiting from that deal donated $140 million to the Clinton Foundation," he told me over the phone. "It looks like pay for play took place here. That's why I'm surprised the Democrats even brought this Russia thing because they are so deeply implicated in doing some corruption with Russia themselves."
(The story of Clinton's approving a shady uranium deal, widely circulated on conservative media, was dismissed by fact-checkers like Snopes that noted the former secretary of state played a minor role at best in allowing a Russian state-owned company to take 51 percent ownership of a company called Uranium One in 2010. )
More broadly, Trump supporters reject the notion that their man would ever collude with the Russian government. "The Russians had no real reason to want Trump and Republicans in power," Michael Warner, a Trump-supporting college student from Indiana, told me.
Almost every Trump supporter I spoke to asked this question—how would a Trump presidency benefit Russia? As Mitchell told me, "Russia doesn't want Trump to be president. Trump has just announced he's going to increase military spending by $54 billion. He is going to dramatically increase our readiness, dramatically strengthen us, strengthen our navy, strengthen our air force, save money. Why does Russia benefit from a stronger American military? They don't."
Still, not every Trump supporter I spoke to dismissed the Russia thing. A 30-year-old Alabama college professor—who asked to remain anonymous for professional reasons and voted for Jeb Bush in the primaries but Trump in the general—told me, "The administration needs to take the questions of the Russian connections more seriously than they are."
"They have a responsibility to the country, Republican and Democrat, to explain and to alleviate those fears, or if there are deeper more problematic connections, they need to have a transparent investigation and take care of whatever the issues are," he explained. However, he doesn't think Sessions intentionally misled Congress during his confirmation hearing, and he finds the nature of the allegations questionable. He said he had a hard time believing how genuine the Democrats' concern is regarding the claims. Referencing an Obama quote from the 2012 election, the professor told me, "The 1980s called. They want their foreign policy back." In other words, cut the Cold War scare tactics.
As for the liberal fantasy that has Trump being impeached for some as-of-yet-undefined transgression, Michael Warner figured it wouldn't matter too much: "The thing they don't understand is if it is found true, we still win. Pence will be the president of the United States, and I don't think there's any reasonable Republican who will be upset about it."
At one point early on in Julia Ducournau's debut feature film, Raw (a French film in select American theaters today), Justine (Garance Marillier) chomps into a large piece of salmon. Innocuous enough. But the intensity with which she does so is frightening and thrilling, and soon develops into a nearly loving, passionate relationship with every piece of meat she bites into. Eventually, she graduates from fish to human flesh, as one does.
Justine grows up in a strict vegetarian household, but after her first introduction to meat, through hazing at her veterinary school, it quickly evolves from something she eats into a medium by which to explore who she is. Ducournau's film impressively lays bare the alienation one can feel when realizing there's something about oneself that's not like many others—in this case, cannibalism—but through it, Justine also explores her own femininity and what it means to fight to become yourself.
Ducournau spoke with VICE about techniques she used to humanize a cannibal, early reactions to her film, and why the most disturbing part of it is far from the consumption of human flesh.
Interview has been condensed and edited.
VICE: You've talked about how you wanted to put the audience in the shoes of a monster. Who's the monster in this film? Justine Ducournau: Well, clearly Justine. But she's also not. That's the point—that she's not a monster. The idea initially came from the fact that most cannibals in cannibal movies are portrayed as othered, like they're an anonymous group that comes to assault people. They're like creatures from outer space or a herd of zombies. It's a bit paradoxical, because cannibals are human beings, and it actually comes from a real thing that actually exists.
I wanted to use this film to make the audience look at what it really means to be human. Since cannibals are human beings, and since we call them inhuman, we're repressing this part of humanity. We don't want to see it. I really wanted to question that.
Justine's whole journey is to fit in with society, and then she discovers something within her that's completely unfit for society. But what does she ultimately want to fit into? She wants to fit into this society with these absurd rules, with things like hazing that are actually monstrous if you think about it, the way people can treat each other like animals. And so who's the real monsters? It's by experimenting with her own animality, her own impulses and needs that make her so unfit for this world, that she can, for the first time in her life, be confronted with the only moral choice that would define her: meaning that she can kill, but she won't. She does not want to. Which is when she becomes a human being, because she is able to make the difference between right and wrong.
In the process of writing this and exploring what it means to be human, what were your methods of humanizing Justine? In order for the audience not to reject her when she eats flesh for the first time, I had to build up empathy for her from the beginning of the story. So I built up this context of hazing and the establishment and these rules that are very diminishing, and I knew instinctively the audience would rebel against it and root for her.
The second thing was in portraying a female body that was not sexualized nor glamorized—I managed to take the female body outside of its niche and make it universal. You don't need to be female to understand that what Justine goes through is really, really painful. But it's a very endearing grossness—sometimes, the body is gross and funny—and I do think you can build up the audience's empathy for her through it.
I like the way that animality and carnality manifests in this film. How do you think it manifests in yourself? I think it manifests in myself as much as it manifests in everyone. That's what I talk about in my movie, and that's what I think is relatable to anyone—because, somehow, when you live in a society, everyone tends to repress parts of ourselves, parts that will make you unfit, that aren't appropriate.
But I'm very afraid of boxes. I'm very claustrophobic, so maybe my relationship with my animality is just the fact that I don't want to be where I'm expected. I believe in my instincts.
What have you learned about other people's fears since debuting this film, and how has it impacted your approach to fear and horror? The main thing is that people do like to see genre movies that make you think. It seems completely mundane, and I don't know about here in America, but genre is often a niche that's made to make money, that just aims to shock and provoke. The fact that some people who don't necessarily like horror movies have appreciated this movie and told me, "Oh my God, I did not expect to laugh, I did not expect to cry"—or the opposite, how horror buffs have told me, "Oh my God, that's so squeamish, and yet it's more than that"—all this makes me think that people do not want prepackaged food in their genre films. And I've learned that the closer your film is to the audience and to life, the more you talk about humanity, the scarier it is for people. Talking about those things is very disturbing. At same time, I'm happy to see that people want to feel that. Because I feel like it's a part of us that we tend to deny, that we push the desensitize button on in order to breathe a bit. But sometimes it's good to have a wakeup call.
