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VICE Special: VICE and the Criterion Collection Presents: Christopher Nolan on 'Following'

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Always interested in crime and justice, Christopher Nolan’s first film (a whole seven years before he made Batman Begins) is a curious black and white head-scratcher about a writer who, obsessed with following people, subsequently gets caught up in a life of crime.

In this interview, Nolan explains his key to success and ends up revealing many of the DIY filmmaking techniques he used to make Following.

More on Following here.

 

 

 

 

 


Weed Pizza and AK-47s: My Summer Vacation in Cambodia

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All photos by Karl Hess

The man offering me the rocket-propelled grenade launcher was nodding and smiling broadly, waiting for my reply.

“Wait. What?” I said, wanting to make sure I had not misheard.

“$250. You take RPG, shoot cow. Very fun.” He proffered the weapon again.

Yes, there was no mistake here. This man was, in fact, offering to me the opportunity to shoot an unsuspecting bovine with an RPG for 250 American dollars. And from what I had seen so far in Cambodia, I guess I shouldn’t have been very surprised. This, after all, was a country that had no shortage of weapon stockpiles, a great need of foreign capital, and a somewhat laissez-faire approach to personal safety. I looked at the weapon, its wooden stock stained and worn smooth from years of use, then turned toward the jungle and made eye contact with the cow in question. He didn’t look pumped.

I had come into Cambodia overland from Thailand, which involved a long bus ride from Bangkok during which I tried in vain to take enough knock-off Thai valium to pass out, but ended up just vacantly watching Bollywood musicals and Thai action movies on the grainy bus TV for hours, until we had to transfer to a car at the frontier to continue the journey. The bus could go no further because the roads in this area were, to put it charitably, non-existent. After a few hours in the back seat of a car that might have been in its prime during the Nixon administration, being jostled relentlessly on an aggressively dusty and deeply rutted dirt track while trying to chat with the seemingly very drunk and very Danish couple I had piled in with, we had arrived.

The border official eyed me warily, possibly because many single white males come to this part of the world to avail themselves of the services of teenage prostitutes, or maybe due to that fact I was sweating rather profusely in the tiny, sweltering border hut and had removed my shirt, attempting to fan myself with it. Either way, this steely-eyed guardian of the land seemed none too pleased and took his time giving me the forms I needed. Eventually, though, with a brisk and officious stamp of my passport, I was granted entry to the Kingdom of Cambodia.

One of the first things I noticed was that everyone seemed very young. It looked like a nation of twentysomethings. Of the few older people I saw out on the street, most were part of the contingent of severely maimed old men who would go around on crutches, begging for change. Many were missing limbs, and others were horribly scarred, burned, or disfigured. I soon began to realize that the reason you didn’t see many older people here was because they were all dead.

What I was experiencing was the living legacy of a regime that had murdered an estimated two million people. The Khmer Rouge were gone, but their heinous rule would forever be a bloody, indelible mark on the past, psyche, and population of this country. And in a very real way, that past was still here, in the ground. Cambodia was heavily mined during the years of armed conflict and there are an estimated four to six million landmines still buried in rural areas throughout the country. It has the highest per-capita percentage of mine amputees in the world, with one in every 236 Cambodians living with one or more lost limbs. As a result, it probably also has the highest per-capita rate of foreign backpackers who have never seen a minefield wearing t-shirts that have a skull and cross-bones and say “Danger: Mines” in Khmer.

Right next to these ghostly old men in the street, stooped under the press of unknowable hardships and visions of the bloody madness of the past, though, there was a whole other Cambodia—one composed of smiling and enthusiastic young people, most under 25. They are the children of a generation decimated by war, eager to leave the bad old times far behind and to face toward a future filled with foreign dollars flowing in.

The owners of the guesthouse I walked into seemed to embody this positive, youthful energy. They were both 21-year-old guys, spoke English well enough to hold a conversation, and were exceedingly friendly. Especially when they found out I lived in California.

“You live California? You are surfer! Malibu!”

“Well, actually, I don’t surf. But there definitely are surfers there. That is a thing.”

“California dude! Surf’s up! You surfer!”

“...Yes, I am a surfer.”

Their enthusiasm and excitement was infectious, so I figured I’d just go with it. And it extended well past just their initial greeting. After I had dropped off my bag, taken a shower, and settled in to a hammock, they were by my side again, smiling and giving thumbs up.

“You want pizza?”

“I would love some pizza, that sounds great.”

“You want regular pizza, or special pizza?”

Despite having just arrived in Cambodia, I had been traveling in Southeast Asia for a while, so I wasn’t really going out on a limb when I asked, “Is the special pizza… drugs?”

They found that very amusing. “Special pizza is weed pizza! Very good!”

“Yes, I will have one special pizza, thank you.”

They high-fived me and were off to the kitchen, but after a few minutes, one had come back and stood next to me. Smiling widely he produced from his pocket a very large bag of weed and threw it casually down onto my lap.

“Welcome present. For you.”

It seemed like an excessive amount of marijuana for a gift.

“This is like a lot. Let me pay you,” I said, reaching for my pocket.

“No, no. Gift. You enjoy.” Another grin, and he was gone.

There was no arguing with Cambodian hospitality. So I dutifully rolled up a joint of the dry, brownish herb and shared it with some obligatory Germans who were sitting nearby, watching an X-Men movie on a portable DVD player.

Soon after, the weed pizza came and it was large, greasy, and delicious. Not incredibly strong in the “special” department, but the weed in Southeast Asia was pretty bad overall and I had paid approximately $1.37 for the whole thing, so I was happy with my investment. Plus, I found myself increasingly interested in the Germans’ conversation about geodesic domes, so I must have been feeling it at least a little bit. After multiple beers, another round of high-fives with the owners, and an all-around group agreement with the Germans that Buckminster Fuller was, in fact, the man, I headed off to my tiny room and mosquito net to sleep. I needed my rest, as the next day I was going to get up early and find someone I could give money to in exchange for an opportunity to live out a lifelong dream I had entertained ever since my days as a young boy watching endless action movies and filling my youthful hours with GI Joes and Nerf guns: I was going to shoot an AK-47.

Not that it was going to be that much of an effort, really. You don’t have to try too hard to find guns in Cambodia. Walking around the streets of the capital, Phnom Penh, I saw giant billboards with colorfully drawn scenes of smiling citizens handing over armloads of handguns, rifles, and grenades to men in official dress. The writing was in Cambodian, but the message was clear: “Hey guys, let’s all hand in our arsenals and maybe take it easy with this whole 'everyone being armed to the teeth' thing, OK?” But I don’t think anyone was in a rush to do that, as the massive weapon stockpiles leftover from the bloody bygone days served not only to protect against any re-emergence of Communist guerillas, but had also given rise to a new use for all this firepower: shooting ranges for foreign backpackers with money to spare.

Care to shoot an anti-aircraft gun into the jungle and chop down some local flora with waves of flak? No problem. Want to live out your ‘Nam door-gunner fantasy and let loose with an M-60 belt fed machine gun, laughing maniacally as brass shell casings rain down around you? Right this way. But it will cost you. To put it in perspective, shooting an M-60 with one ammo belt of around 100 rounds would run you $175. In a country where you can get a beer for less than a buck and room for $3, that is quite an expenditure. Yet, despite charging amounts that could equal another month or two of travel for some backpackers, the men who ran these ranges were doing quite a business.

After taking a long drive sitting on the back of a hired moto where I mainly focused on hugging the shit out of the guy driving as he whipped excessively fast in and out of hundreds of other motos and brutal, career-ending potholes, I arrived at one of these makeshift gun ranges outside the city. It was little more than a cinder block building with a green plastic corrugated roof, surrounded by an area that had been cut (shot?) out of the surrounding jungle. One part of the structure was where you would stand to shoot rifles at targets set up outside, but the other was a room completely full of weapons.

Kalashnikovs, mortars, 30mm cannons, grenades, rockets, even an old flame-thrower—it was basically Hoarders: Collapse of the Soviet Union Edition. One got the sense that, for enough money, you could pretty much use whatever you wanted. Mainly because the dude in charge said, “Enough money, you use whatever you want.”

But I was just there for the AK, and I stayed focused. Plus, I had been spending too much on this trip anyway, although I did firmly stand by my purchase of throwing stars on Khao San Road in Bangkok. The Kalashnikov cost $30 to fire, plus $1 for each round in the clip. If the United States could just take a tip from unregulated Cambodian jungle weapon ranges and charge a dollar per bullet, we probably could radically reduce gun deaths in America, I thought, as I handed over my damp, crumpled bills to the shirtless man in the bush hat. He slipped the clip into the rifle and was about to pull back the bolt to rack the first round into the chamber when I stopped him. “Please,” I said, laying a hand on the gun. “Allow me.”

The actual shooting was much like losing my virginity: tentative at first, then loud, awesome, and over far too quickly. I had fired guns plenty of times before, but this was my first time with a fully automatic assault rifle, and let me tell you, it did not disappoint. Despite going through rounds so fast that I was tempted to buy another 30, the Kalashnikov had all the power and violence befitting such an iconic weapon, and was eminently satisfying to shoot. Flame and vengeance spit from its barrel at a ferocious rate, the heavy rounds ripping massive, jagged chunks from tree, stone, and earth alike. As I finished the clip and lowered it from my shoulder, I turned back toward the guy with a huge smile on my face. I think that’s when his savvy business mind kicked in, and he saw his opportunity to make some more cash and busted out the RPG.

“You shoot cow, no problem.”

Despite it looking miserable enough that an explosive rocket blast might have vastly improved its day, I wasn’t about to shoot that cow. I am not a monster. I may be a decadent youth of the West, but I draw the line at blowing up undeserving livestock.

It was definitely time to head back into Phnom Penh and continue my Cambodian adventure, so I politely declined the man’s offer and was on my way. Although, if you are really looking for a reason to leave an angry comment, I did eat a dog in Vietnam like three weeks later.

Follow Karl Hess on Twitter.

The Film That Made Me... : 'Peeping Tom' Was the Film That Made Me Crush On a Serial Killer

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Still via Wiki Commons

Let’s preface this with something that shouldn’t need stating: Violence—especially against women—is neither sexy nor alluring. In real life, I find it a total turn-off. On the screen, however, it’s a different matter. Think Warren Beatty in Bonnie and Clyde, Martin Sheen in Badlands (multiple homicide never looked so sexy), or even Nicolas Cage in Wild at Heart (OK, maybe it was just that jacket). You wouldn’t want to date them, but on film they look glamorous.

Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom was released in 1960, the same year as Hitchcock’s Psycho—another film about a troubled man who kills women due to psychosexual issues with his parents. The critical reception to the two films varied wildly, however, after an initial wave of disapproval, Hitchcock went back to being a national treasure, albeit one with a frankly problematic relationship with women IRL.

Powell’s film was also greeted with shock and dismay, but this shock and dismay continued unabated for decades. The actresses involved distanced themselves from the project and refused to speak to Powell again. Powell’s career—after the astonishing run of films he made with Emeric Pressburger (Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes, A Matter of Life and Death)—was pulverized. He fled to Australia, struggled to find work, and was slowly forgotten.

Basically, life was shitty for him, until Powell and Pressburger mega-fan Martin Scorsese came along in the late 1970s. He rediscovered the film and, struck by its blend of Freud and psychopathy, vocally championed it back from oblivion. (In his words: “Peeping Tom and  say everything that can be said about filmmaking.”) Film critics, by then slightly more forward-thinking than their 1960s' peers, reappraised the film as a masterpiece.

Scorsese on "Peeping Tom"

But what was it that so appalled people in the first place? The answer is probably its leading man, Karlheinz Böhm—all chiseled features and boyish good looks. A few years before Peeping Tom he had played Prince Charming in Sissi, the mawkish, melodramatic trilogy about the Austrian “tragic empress.” Peeping Tom was a drastic career change for him—the modern equivalent might be Zac Efron being pissed on by Nicole Kidman in The Paperboy after the Shiny Happy People act he'd kept up previously.

In the film, Böhm plays Mark Lewis, a focus-puller on film sets who makes private movies in his spare time, as well as a bit of naughty photography above a seedy shop in Soho (best line of the film: “You don’t get that in Sight & Sound”). He has no trouble attracting girls, but when it gets to the interesting part he whips out his camera and stabs them to death with a spike. Sure enough, he had a troubled childhood; we later find out that his father used to psychologically torture him by dropping lizards in his bed and filming him so that he could capture the look of fear on his son’s face. What a dick.

I could go on about how the film being shot from the protagonist's POV imbricates the viewer in the killer’s culpability, or its eerily distinctive color palette, or the links made between filmmaking and Mark’s obsessive behavior, or the discussion about how his scopophilia (or voyeurism) is linked to a wider malaise in society and the male gaze and blah, blah, blah. But here, I want instead to talk about how HOT Mark is, with his shiny blond hair and well-tailored mac.

To my teenage self he was the perfect man: kind, sensitive, handsome, conflicted, creative, interested in film—all the things people pretend to be on internet dating profiles. If only it weren’t for all the woman-killing he’d be a surefire ten out of ten. But hey, it’s just a film. And the fact that there is an explanation for his actions, if not exactly a justification, gave me a get-out-of-jail card for wanting to bone him. At the end, there’s also the possibility of Redemption Through the Love of a Good Woman, so he’s not all bad. Forget his massive death-spike; he’s just a damaged puppy.

Still via

Viewers are actively encouraged to like Mark, with his matinée idol looks, sympathetic past, and endearing but never-explained Austrian accent. This depiction of a deranged, dangerous murderer as someone not so different from the boy next door must have caused conflicting and not wholly pleasant feelings to flow through the hearts and underwear of viewers. Now that we are surrounded by anti-heroes and their 50 shades of moral grayness, this is no longer a problem.

Watching the film again now, Mark isn’t quite as handsome or as charming as I remembered, but the lure remains. I get the feeling that in different circumstances, with a different upbringing, he’d probably have been a nice guy. But if he had been, Peeping Tom would have been one hell of a boring movie.

Follow Kathryn on Twitter.

VICE News: Russian Roulette: The Invasion of Ukraine - Part 70

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Last week, a VICE News crew traveled to the Rostov Region in Russia, which is on the border of Ukraine, to investigate Moscow's involvement in the conflict. We visit a hospital where injured rebel fighters were brought by Russian forces to be treated for their injuries, and speak to them about their take on the current crises in Eastern Ukraine.

Recently, Russia has engaged in a campaign of sending over humanitarian convoys over to Ukraine by day. But under the darkness of night, it is rumored that Russia has been sending weaponized columns over the border to aid the rebels.

Things You Never Knew About Carnival, London's Best Street Party

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Doctor Rat was a former leader of the notorious Renegades, one of the oldest steel bands in Trinidad. He came to England and helped to establish a chapter of the band alongside his longtime associate Darcus Howe. 1977. (Photo courtesy of Norman Reid/David Hoffman Photo Library)

There’s plenty of folklore surrounding London's Notting Hill Carnival. Arguments over who’s truly responsible for founding it; stories about Pink Floyd playing in a church hall its first year; mixed reports on how many jaws were accidentally broken that time "Next Hype" came on at Rampage. But for whatever reason, nobody's ever tried to sift through the history and figure out a proper timeline of events. So Ishmahil Blagrove Jr.—writer, founder of Rice N Peas Films, and a regular face at Speaker's Corner—and publisher Margaret Busby took it upon themselves to do just that.

Their new book, Carnival: A Photographic and Testimonial History of the Notting Hill Carnival, dives into the history of the biggest street party England, with help (and photographs) from people who've lived in the community since its inception. Hoping to find out a bit more about that history, I spoke to Ishmahil about the Notting Hill race riots, the early days of Carnival, and how he and Margaret put the book together. 

Notting Hill Carnival, August 1979 (Photo courtesy of the David Hoffman Photo Library)

VICE: Hi, Ishmahil. Let’s start at the beginning: What are your earliest memories of Carnival?
Ishmahil Blagrove: My earliest memories are probably of going with my family around 1974. I remember, as a young kid, seeing the parades and all the bright costumes. I wasn’t as focused on the sound systems.

They had systems at that point?
They introduced the sound systems in 1973. It started off as an ordinary parade—steel bands and stuff like that—then Leslie Palmer introduced the systems because she wanted the carnival to encompass young people. The reggae music that was coming up was very strong, but there wasn’t any representation of it at Carnival because the event was primarily dominated by the traditional Trinidadian procession.

Let’s talk about those early days of Carnival, which you discuss in the book.
Yeah, the book isn’t one of bright colors and costumes; it really takes you through the history, from 1958 up to the early 80s, and looks at the Notting Hill race riots, the murder of Kelso Cochrane, and the groups that then came out as a result. There was a communist party, for example, that would parade throughout Notting Hill; placards challenging racial discrimination. This was the time of Oswald Mosley, and there were groups coming out to raise awareness of these racial tensions.

How successful were those early years in settling the tensions?
Very successful, I think. The murder of Kelso Cochrane had pricked the community at that time; it was a sort of marker—a reaching of a high point, if you like—in the racial violence and tensions. There was a sense of, “It’s gone too far now; someone has been killed.” At that funeral there were over 1,200 people, both black and white. There was more solidarity with the black community and immigrants in the area. You started to see graffiti going up that countered the racism of Mosley and his group, who were very prominent in Notting Hill at that time.

You also mention that Carnival became more militant a few years into its inception.
Well, there were a lot of pressures being placed upon the black community: stop-and-search, police harassment, arrests… There was a legendary policeman in the area who would often plant drugs on people. In fact, there was a protest in 1969 where they made an effigy of him and paraded him through the carnival. Then, from July of 1969 to July of 1970, there were 12 or 13 police raids on the Mangrove restaurant, which had just been opened by [Trinidadian civil rights campaigner] Frank Crichlow.

The black community saw that as an attack. There was a protest as a result of that in August, just before the carnival was due to start, which broke out into civil disobedience. Rhaune Laslett sort of withdrew from organizing the carnival after that, and it took on much more militant connotations in terms of Black Pride, black identity, and black resistance, if you like.

Notting Hill Carnival, 1979; the people sitting on top of the soundsystem van are members of the reggae band Aswad. (Photo courtesy of Vernon St Hilaire/David Hoffman Photo Library)

How has the police resistance varied over the years?
Initially, the police and the council were quite supportive of the carnival. However, they became much more concerned when they started to see real growth. There were just a couple of hundred people in '65, '66; by 1969, there were around 10,000. What changed it forever was in 1975, when Capital Radio, broadcasting to millions of Londoners, said, “Get down to Carnival.” Then there were the riots of '76, which put Carnival on the map internationally in the same way Brixton was put on the map by the 1981 riots, and that led to increased policing.

What do you think of the state’s attitude toward Carnival these days?
I think the state is quite threatened by it—that they’ve gone about their handling of it in a way that’s counterproductive for the black experience and incorporating the black identity into the British landscape. It’s the same for the media; whenever they report on Carnival, they report on crime statistics. It’s almost like a scoreboard at the end of those two days. Does the media report on the spectacle of multiculturalism, of bringing people together, of the dance, the music, the great works that people have slaved over? They don’t focus on that. They report on how many people were arrested for drugs.

Forcing a negative dialog out of it.
Exactly. At Glastonbury last year there were 170 arrests out of nearly 250,000 people. You look at Carnival last year—a million, a million and a half people—and there were around 300 arrests. But they don’t report on crime at Glastonbury; they report on the sense of unity and enthusiasm.

Notting Hill Carnival, August 1979 (Photo courtesy of the David Hoffman Photo Library)

Don’t you think the reporting’s becoming more balanced?
The reporting is certainly changing. Whether it’s changing fast enough is something I’m concerned about, because it’s something that should be embraced; Rhaune Laslett started the festival to bring people out onto the streets, celebrate their differences and recognize what they had in common. I think that’s a great and beautiful thing, and it really does beg the question as to why it’s not endorsed further by the state. Why the people who put on the carnival are struggling on a peppercorn budget—£250,000 ($415,000) for a spectacle for over a million people.

What are your thoughts on the gentrification of Notting Hill and how that’s played into Carnival?
People move into the area because they’ve seen the film Notting Hill, or because it’s become a trendy area. And then when Carnival comes they start complaining about the noise. I wouldn’t buy a house next to a football stadium and then complain about football every Saturday, you know? People know this is a part of the area for two days a year, and it’s what’s branded the people of Notting Hill. It wasn’t the movie that made the area; it was Carnival. It was the bohemian characters and rebels of the community who created that identity that everyone wanted to buy into.

And now most of them are gone.
Yeah, a lot of people have been pushed out. Most of the cottage industries have gone. And they’ve got dog spas there now—places where your dog can get a massage. Of course, these changes have been happening everywhere, and it’s good in one sense, but it also marginalizes people in the community who can’t afford to engage in it.

Notting Hill Carnival, 2013 (Photo by Chris Bethell, not from Ishmahil's book)

What are the positives?
That provisions the council provides now are massively improved compared to what they were. I lived here during the 80s and there were four crack houses on my square. Now, they’ve been pushed out. I’ve got street sweepers coming once every couple of days. My children can now play in a park without graffiti or broken swings. We’re reaping the benefits of the borough catering to a more well-heeled community, but we have to ask ourselves, “Where were these provisions before? Why weren’t they catering for this community in this way beforehand?”

Perhaps if they do have this sort of social vision and the ability to care for a community in this way, they could use it to help communities that are blighted by poverty. Why not start providing the sort of social provisions these communities need?

You write in the book that Carnival was created by members of the community, that you just organized it.
I lived in the community of Notting Hill and knew the characters, knew the stories, knew the rumors, knew the sort of camps people were in, and so it was all about reconciling these different narratives that existed. We had an open-door policy, and people could come in and present their story, look at the images, identify the characters, and then you can start to piece everything together.

There were highly political groups—like “Mangrove,” for example—that would come out in costumes relating to all sorts of mass themes. In 1978, for instance, they brought out “The Life and Times of Emiliano Zapata,” in homage to the life of the Mexican revolutionary. But they didn’t know which years they did all these costumes—if it was the early 70s or the late 70s—so it helped to create one definitive archival document.

Notting Hill Carnival, 2013 (Photo by Chris Bethell, not from Ishmahil's book)

You mentioned that there were several camps among the community. What were they?
There was Rhaune Laslett camp, and the camp for [Trinidadian-born journalist and political activist] Claudia Jones, who organized an indoor event after the Notting Hill race riots and murder of Kelso Cochrane. People said that her event, in 1959, was the real beginning of Carnival, but it had nothing to do with the carnival we know today. I believe the issue there is that Rhaune Laslett [who organized the Notting Hill Festival, which evolved into Carnival] is a white woman, and Carnival is seen as a black Caribbean and West Indian event. It was that issue that was very controversial. You know, I had one person say to me, “How could one little white woman who couldn’t even dance conceive of the idea of a carnival?"

Right. And the project is also going back into the community?
Yes. We decided that 20 percent of the proceeds would be reinvested back into a community group that’s dedicated to carnival arts, and 25 percent would go to the people whose photos we used—we want to give them a sort of ongoing revenue stake in the production. The community had a big stake in it, and the way in which it was produced—the experimental manner in which we approached the construction and editorial policy of the book—is certainly the thing I’m most proud of.

Follow Jamie on Twitter.

RCMP Won’t Disclose Where First Nation Females Are More Likely to Be Murdered

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Photo from the Tina Fontaine memorial via Greg Gallinger.
There are ten places in Canada that are the most dangerous for indigenous women and girls, but the RCMP won't publicly say where they are. “We certainly wouldn’t want to cause offence to anyone residing or leadership within those communities,” says RCMP Supt. Tyler Bates, who also serves as the Director of National Aboriginal Policing and Crime Prevention Services. But in those ten communities, indigenous women and girls are more vulnerable to becoming victims of homicides or to go missing than anywhere else in the country. Bates says the RCMP won't name the communities because the force doesn't want to stigmatize them, but adds that work will begin in those ten communities to reduce the dangers. 

“There’s certainly an increased vulnerability that needs to be considered when we look at the statistical rate of violence perpetuated against women,” Bates says. 

Recently the RCMP launched a poster campaign against domestic violence and missing and murdered indigenous women and girls. Three posters were developed with the Native Women’s Association of Canada and the Assembly of First Nations. The posters will be disseminated across the country and in First Nation communities.

Wherever those ten high-risk communities are, Bates says the RCMP will focus on prevention and reduction. Things like anti-alcohol and drug campaigns or teaching people to recognize when someone has the potential to be victimized or sexually exploited are all a part of their strategy. The RCMP knows the risks indigenous women and girls face. In an operational review released earlier this year, the research identified 1,181 missing and murdered indigenous women in Canada over the past 30 years. The review highlighted the dangers indigenous women and girls may encounter and what needs to happen to prevent it. Much of the work the RCMP wants to do will be focused on the most vulnerable—the youth.

Maryanne Pearce, an Ottawa-based researcher on the issue of missing and murdered indigenous woman and girls thinks this targeted prevention is a good step for the RCMP. Pearce compiled a database of the names of indigenous women and girls who have gone missing or were murdered. She handed her research over to the RCMP to help them with their own analysis. “Certainly this is not a First Nations community or on-reserve issue at all,” Pearce says. “Not all aboriginal women face the same dangers. There’s going to be differences whether you’re in the city, or PEI, or Regina, versus on reserve in northern Alberta versus Nunavut.”

As of January 2014, the RCMP will have a better idea if that's true or not. For the first time in the force's history, they'll now know whether a victim of a crime was indigenous, and report that data to Statistics Canada. “Our biased-free policing historically forbade us from collecting [racial] information on our surveys,” says Bates. Laurie Odjick says she's happy the RCMP are finally doing this.

Whether it's on the RCMP's list or not, the Kitigan Zibi First Nation in western Quebec has seen many tragedies. In just a few weeks, what's sadly become an annual vigil for lost aboriginal girls and women will be held in the community, located 130 kilometres north of Ottawa. It's been almost six years since two Anishinabe girls, Maisy Odjick, 16, and Shannon Alexander, 17, went missing from the neighbouring town of Maniwaki, Quebec. The two girls were heading to a dance and planned to sleep at Alexander’s house. Neither returned home. Maisy's mother Laurie Odjick said she knows someday her daughter’s disappearance will become a cold case. “How long is that going to take?” Odjick asks. “I know it will be sad when that time happens.”

Also from Kitigan Zibi, Bridget Tolley, 54, mourns her mother. Gladys Tolley was struck and killed by a Sûreté du Québec police vehicle in 2001, on a road right in the community.

The gruesome death of Tina Fontaine, 15, from Sagkeeng First Nation in Manitoba has caused a renewed outcry for justice for indigenous women and girls. Fontaine was last seen on Aug. 8 and just over one week later her body was found wrapped in a bag, dumped in Manitoba’s Red River.

With more indigenous women and girls going missing or murdered, the call for a national inquiry into this epidemic is stronger than ever. Odjick said she is on the fence over whether to support a national inquiry or not. Action is needed, not more research, says Odjick.

But what is clear is that the number of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls is continually rising.


@marthamaiingan

For Once, a War Game That's Not All About Head Shots and Explosions

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For Once, a War Game That's Not All About Head Shots and Explosions

The Life of Seismic Gas Explorers in Canada’s Wilderness

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Slogging through the mud and muskeg. All photos via the author.
Tyler Hicks had been avoiding the water all summer, despite understanding that he should barrel through anything in his path. He figured if he could walk around the water, he’d walk around—he didn’t need to work the rest of the day soaking wet. But the Calgarian was down to his last few days of a seismic job in southern Alberta and he thought: Fuck it. If they want me to go through the water, I’ll go through the water.

“I’ve got this one,” he told the other guys in the crew, and waded in. When he was up to his waist, the water turned deep crimson. Thin flakes of flesh emerged from the murky depths and he suddenly noticed a fetid cow carcass complete with head, hooves, and legs half-floating on the bank of the pond. Jesus Christ, I’ve got my junk in this thing. Gotta get the fuck out of this water quick!

Hicks jumped on a barbed-wire property fence. He shimmied along until getting out, boots full of red-tinted swamp water. “It was fucking nasty," he said. 

Seismic surveying hovers around the outer frontiers of the oil and gas industry. The whole oil patch wouldn’t be anywhere without the exploration conducted by geophysical land acquisition companies. You barely need a pulse to get a seismic job, as long as you are physically capable of the work. Many say the job is the closest you can get to the military without picking up a gun. Ex-cons, high school drop-outs, and plenty of guys looking for the fastest way to dock enough full-time hours to claim employment insurance in their respective provinces are prime candidates for jughounds—the line workers who do the basic grunt work that keep the spokes of the machine spinning.

The point of the work is to discover oil and gas deposits under the earth using seismic vibrations. On land, companies do this by setting off explosive charges underground or using seismic vibrators—trucks that pummel the earth with hydraulic plates. It all starts with crews who use GPS satellite data to map straight lines through the bush, with little respect for geographic abnormalities such as cliffs or swift-flowing rivers. Slashers cut paths through the bush, and then drillers are sent in to bury dynamite at even intervals. Jughounds follow with kilometres of cable, planting geophones into the ground at regular intervals, seven days a week. When enough of the bush has been wired, the dynamite is set off by shooters and the geophones read the resulting vibrations, transmitting the earth’s darkest secrets back to a data truck. They return to collect the trash, and pick up the cable and geophones. When the jobs are deep in the bush, the gear is usually dropped off in bright, pumpkin-looking bags by helicopters.

A river at least 1.5 metres deep entirely covered in muskeg. The vegetation was thick enough to support human weight.

Working on the line crew, you carry as much as 70 lbs of gear on your back, plus food and water—and with 12 hours of strenuous activity, you better bring a lot. Then there are the million different possible forms of bullshit that rarely work out in the crew’s favour. The pumpkins could be caught high up in a tree, or you might have to thrash around in thick bush looking for lost equipment. You could be forced to wade through swamps, across rivers, and scramble up mountainsides to lay your cable. Climbers are sometimes called in to handle the difficult parts, but behind all the safety meeting bullshit is the understanding that a good jughound sucks it up and deals with it.

Adventure

It was around -35 C before the wind chill on the side of a 75-metre cliff 60 kilometres south of Nahanni Butte, NWT—and the wind chill was substantial. Flurries seemed to blow right through Tyrone Burke’s clothing. He was a 1.5-kilometre slog through knee-deep snow on rough terrain to the nearest helipad, and with the light quickly fading, he had ended up in the better of two bad choices.

The first involved staying in the woods overnight. It was late November 1999 in the Northwest Territories, and he was already clocking in at around 20 hours without a sleeping bag. The good news with that one was it came with the general understanding that if he survived the cold and the wolves, Burke would be packed off to Fort Nelson for a three-day all-you-can-drink trip on the company’s expense.

The second option was a little less adventurous depending on the way you looked at it. It involved jumping from the side of the cliff onto the 8-10 centimetre-wide skid of a hovering helicopter in climbing boots prone to slipping on metal.

The latter option was approved after a radio discussion, but the wind made the approach shaky enough that it took two attempts for the chopper to get close enough. “If the blades had hit anything, they would have destabilized the helicopter, sending it spinning into the cliff and crashing into the trees below,” Burke said.

But on the third try, the chopper “wasn’t much of a leap” away, and once the pilot saw Burke was on board, it banked away with the six-foot-three New Brunswick man hanging onto the outside and hovered at a distance far enough from the cliff and trees for Burke to climb into the cockpit before it flew off.



View from a helicopter.

It was the summer of 2007 in my case, and field briefing had been brief. There was a lot of stern finger-wagging about wearing hardhats, reflector vests, and safety glasses in the bush. There was a crash-course on the perils of swamp gas—the deadly hydrogen sulfide that sometimes wafted from old gas wells or elsewhere in fossil fuel-rich areas. The bosses tried to convince us the local cops would bust anyone caught outside the vicinity of our alcohol-free camp. They’d charge us with some obscure criminal offence that involved hefty fines and a few months of jail time. They told us there were an estimated 200 grizzlies in the area, and there was a rumour that the government bagged all the problem bears from national parks and dropped them off in the mountains near town. We then spent an uneasy hour watching videos of bear bloopers.

The next day we were up at 7 AM. On the way to helicopter staging, we heard someone yelling about a grizzly sow with two cubs chasing him down over the radio—the coordinator said he’d send a chopper to try to scare it away. Soon I was jumping out of the first helicopter I’d ever set foot in, hovering a few meters above the side of a steep mountain. I spent the rest of the day wondering over the poor bastard’s fate while I picked up trash from a previous job.

Drugs and ex-cons

But bears, swamp gas, falling trees or helicopters and the elusive threat of cougars aside, the largest danger a jughound faces sometimes comes from himself or other jughounds.

A ‘recovering’ crack addict named Spider once disappeared from Hicks’s crew completely. His hotel room was broken into a few days later, and his stuff was stolen. He finally reappeared after four days and told the bosses he’d met a girl in a bar and gone on a three-day crack bender. They didn’t even fire him—they told him to get himself cleaned up and come back to work. 

“The seismic industry is the most forgiving industry that I’ve seen,” Hicks says in regards to the kind of characters they sometimes hire. “There’s got to be somebody better, you know, somebody more reliable. Sometimes I’m shocked to think How the fuck are you back here? They know you’re going to fuck off again as soon as you get paid.” 

But things have changed a little over the years from the wilder days, and some companies tout a zero tolerance for drug use.

“Because it’s a safety-sensitive environment—we work with lots of heavy equipment and we work around helicopters and that kind of stuff—we really just can’t have people that aren’t fully coherent working for us,” said the general manager of a multinational company who requested to remain anonymous. He said the company did random drug testing pre-screening before hiring people and didn’t see a lot of failures.

But if there’s one thing a jughound does well, it’s getting around obstacles. You could get a solution to drink from bong shops in Calgary a few hours before a drug test that would produce clean results. One guy apparently even walked around with a spare bag of clean piss in his jacket in case the bosses sprung a random test on him.

A guy I worked with on a winter tour in 2010 in the northern prairies named G had just got out of jail in the east, where he’d done a year and a half for attempted murder—something involving vengeance for money owed on a coke deal. When he was released, he came out west to work seismic. He told us about stealing telephone cables for the copper wire. “You can get $1,800 for a line between two poles…” He joked about walking into random weddings and pocketing gift cards full of cash. He was a decent guy to work with, but you didn’t want to get on his bad side.

Camp at Tumbler Ridge, BC.

G only lasted a couple of weeks on that crew in any case. I’m not even sure whether he had enough hours to claim EI at that point. It was a hotel job—meaning we were given hotel rooms—so they didn’t feed us. Without a dollar, he’d partly fed himself up to that point by locking himself in the hotel pantry at night and stuffing himself with pre-cooked bacon and sausages. At the hotel’s free morning breakfast, he filled up his pockets and ate the hellish stuff for the rest of the day. After 10 days we finally received our first dose of hot shot—the daily $40 the company paid out to fund groceries. The $400 cash and the money we made from our regular shift combined to nearly two grand by that point. G immediately hopped on a bus back to Calgary.

There was no shortage of characters in seismic surveying. One of my helicopter pilots was supposedly an ex-Belgian secret service pilot, while one of Burke’s crews had a retired ex-wrestler, as well as a Swiss doctor who’d lost his practicing licence for undisclosed reasons. There were Sudanese pastoralists recently immigrated to Canada, who spoke of hunting lions, and I heard of a massive guy who used to be a child soldier in Africa. He would throw his 30-kilogram pack over his head and power through a river up to his chest like it was nothing. My first line boss on the job was a guy just out of rehab, who liked to abandon naked girls on hotel balconies, and once stole a girl’s car and credit card the morning after her birthday. He chewed on match heads because he’d heard from his friend in the army that the sulfur in your blood kept the mozzies—mosquitos—away.

Most guys heard about the job through word of mouth, though some companies will run advertising campaigns when they are desperate for employees to fill a big project. Some of the major ones are Sourcex, SAExploration, CGG Veritas, and Eagle Canada Inc., though their names change and rearrange into obscure acronyms as they merge or split off. These days some of them send you through a physical to make sure you can hack it—there’s a huge wasted expense if the company has to ship you back to Calgary from god knows where after a few days in the field.

But the need for people with enough adventure—or desperation—to keep vast projects rolling can result in a lack of hiring standards.

The Wild West

Drugs weren’t always an issue. When the camp was too remote to sustain a steady supply of drugs, there was always foot hockey. With a lack of anything else to do, Burke and some of the others made an improvised ball, set up a couple of nets and kicked it around in the heated trailer with full contact. After weeks or months in isolation from society and its booze, women, and other aids for sanity, everyone was in varying levels of being bushwhacked. Foot hockey was a great way to release some tension.

“The guys just wanted to tear each other apart,” Burke said, but in some sense the relatively clean fun was a relief. As for the trailer, it was fucked.

“Absolutely everything got trashed in that place,” Burke said. The TV got smashed, the pool table ended up with a bloodstain and a couple windows even got broken—a grave situation at -45 C. “We ended up with a ‘No Foot Hockey’ rule.”

Jughounds don’t have a reputation any better than the rest of the oil patch for fighting. When I worked, there was an old adage that if you got in a fight, you’d better win—because the loser would get sent home or transferred to another crew. It happened often enough that the company I worked for felt a need to give prospective employees a test during the hiring session that basically amounted to a bunch of ways of asking whether or not you were prone to settling your quarrels with your fists. But even the dumbest jughound realized he had to play pacifist in a situation like that.

“Seems like half these guys scrap every time they go to a bar,” said Kim Marks, a Greenland-raised man from British Columbia. “They’ve done it for years, they know what they are doing.”

“Sometimes your crew is really awesome and sometimes they’re a bunch of dickheads,” Hicks noted.

Marks narrowly missed a massive brawl once in a town near Sparwood, BC, by staying in to avoid having to do 12 gruelling hours climbing mountains with a hangover. Around 15 crew members went out to a bar in a nearby town and caused an ensuing rumble; while the details weren’t entirely clear, it was likely over a girl. The fight was so big, it ended up spilling out on the streets where passing locals jumped in to help defend against the unwelcome invaders and eventually greatly outnumbered the juggies.

“You know how bad of a reputation seismic has with locals, trying to pick up local women,” Marks said.

If the regular bush was bad, sometimes they would skid half the crew onto the night shift. It tended to screw up the whole rhythm. Nights were colder, and the work went slowly in the darkness.

“I hated working in the dark for hours,” said Hicks. His eyes would adjust to the skull beam on his helmet so that everything outside of his tunnel vision was pitch black. Sometimes he’d even hear wolves howling. “You’re trying to walk and you’re stumbling and the bosses are putting pressure on you to finish. That’s when people get hurt.”

Once they even made him do a 22-hour shift, and on another occasion a jughound fell through the ice up to her knees near the end of a shift on a -15 C night. They radioed in to have her picked up on a nearby road. But the bosses ordered her to finish with her crew, laying out a couple more helibags worth of gear, soaking wet, before anyone would get picked up. “They didn’t care. They thought: if there’s a problem, she’ll quit and we’ll get someone else on the bus to replace her.

Reset

A lot of the guys don’t really know what to do with the kind of cash you make in the bush. After four weeks you can sometimes get a reset, which usually amounts to a three- or four-day vacation in a hotel in some patch town in northern Alberta. Fort McMurray and Grande Prairie are almost like Vegas. They are rife with casinos, drugs, prostitution, and department stores full of electronics—everything a jughound missed most about civilization.

Burke said some guys did enough coke on their seven-day resets back to Calgary that they would come back with nothing more than a bottle of whisky and five or six bucks left from the 10 grand they earned over months of going crazy slogging through the bush.

Troubleshooting near Tumbler Ridge.

“There were guys who would take a three-day reset, get driven into town, and go on a bender,” Hicks says. “They would blow their whole check.”

“Casinos or getting hand jobs,” said Nick, a guy I met on a job north of Fort Mac two years ago. “One guy got three hookers in one night.” Others would get hammered in the middle of the day, go to the shopping mall and buy $800 watches and $200 sunglasses. “They’d call it accessorizing.”

Unless you played poker, money was no good back in the bush, after all.

“In that kind of job you don’t really have a life back home—life is basically seismic,” Hicks said.

Hicks finally swore off seismic in stages. The lure of decent money and expense-free living is hard to forget when you need to earn a dollar, and he had to swear off winter seismic on three separate occasions before it actually stuck. The first time had been a safety matter. The dumbest man he’d ever met—a massive Newfoundlander who reminded him of Sloth from The Goonies, but with a short fuse and a penchant for heaving a metre-and-a-half metal stomping pole at people’s heads—pushed him backwards and nearly impaled him on a slashed sapling.

Three years later, a sandwich was the deciding factor. The VEGETABLES on it were frost-burned by the time he sat down to eat his lunch, and he figured he wasn’t getting paid enough for this shit.

Back for a third bout in 2006 with a modest raise, he managed to last it out until his face got frostbitten. Two days later, his cheeks scarred black, he made his resolution—winter seismic was a thing of the past.

He did a few lighter summer seasons, but hasn’t worked the job for a few years—he’s now an archaeologist.

But once the spring ends every year, the companies begin calling old employees they laid off during downtime and the seismic machine starts rolling once again. If you’re looking for a quick buck and a spring layoff rife with employment insurance checks, you should give them a call. 


@joshualearn1


Reasons Why Las Vegas Is the Worst Place Ever

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Everyone has an opinion the second I mention that I’m from Las Vegas. People feel like it’s appropriate to ask: Was your mother a stripper? Where do you people really live? Do you know where I can get blow? It’s fairly offensive. For the record: My mother was never a stripper, I live in a pretty cool 1940s house, and I can only find you cocaine in Los Angeles. Sorry.

This is the city where I was raised. It’s a charmless place full of strippers, gambling, and alcoholism. If every Beavis and Butthead era Mike Judge character sprang to life in all of their drooling, nasty, shaky-lined glory, I imagine they would all come here and fit right in. Here’s why:

Photo by Megan Koester

Everyone Is Drunk 

Vegas is a 24-hour liquor town. I’ve been wasted before 9 AM too many times to remember. There are so few restrictions regarding alcohol consumption in Nevada that being drunk in public is basically a way of life.

Most of my friends were problem drinkers by the time they turned 18, myself included. I would give a lot of rides during high school—not because I was being nice, but because so many of my friends lost their licenses by almost killing themselves or someone else while operating a vehicle under the influence. Las Vegas’ roads are filled with drunk drivers. The light poles on certain valley streets are bent or knocked down every few miles like matchbook prongs. These are large physical reminders that drinking plus driving equals bad.

But never fear, dears. This place has just as many ambulance-chasing lawyers as it does drunk teenagers. In a wreck? Need a check? Call up your ‘roided out ex-sports star of choice. There are plenty who live here and own law offices that specialize in suing the living shit out of people.

Women Dress Terribly

Grown ass women of Las Vegas look like wanna-be Kim Kardashian duplicates most of the time. When they aren’t singlehandedly supporting the spray tan industry, ladies of Vegas like to impersonate overweight Bettie Page. No one looks normal. How do men respond to these idealized versions of sexpots? As it happens, not very well. In 2011, Nevada had the highest rate of domestic violence murders by men against women in all of the US.

This attitude drips down to a street level. Catcalling happens everywhere, but there is a huge difference between leering and hollering like a heina. Every dude who comes here seems to think it’s okay to act like a royal douche to everyone he encounters, women especially. More than once, I’ve been asked, “Oh, you’re from Las Vegas? Were you on a stripper scholarship?” Because so many girls living in this shitty excuse of a city actually strip to pay tuition. As a kid, I remember driving past billboards featuring vacant-eyed, bobble-headed women with advertising copy that read: “OUR GIRLS DO IT ALL” and “LOOSEST SLOTS AND SLUTS IN TOWN.”

As you can imagine, dating is a nightmare. I recently moved back home after a stint in NYC, and my pool of options shrank considerably. It’s a major dumpster-diving-for-dick situation for all the straight ladies. Please send help.

At Home I Feel Like a Tourist 

If you think your small town bar scene sucks at home, you’ve very obviously never spent time in this glitter gulch. The amount of bars not chock full of tourists or video poker machines can be counted on one hand. Casinos own absolutely everything in sight. If something even remotely cool pops up, we have to enjoy it while it lasts because chances are it will be gobbled up by one of those cheesy and generic institutions or some E to F-list celebrity.

Case in point: one of my favorite local bars was recently bought by Darin Feinstein—owner of the extremely uncool Viper Room in LA, and Corey Harrison—a cast member on Pawn Stars. Only the old guy from Duck Dynasty or Guy Fieri would have been more eye-roll-inducing investors. At least Guy graduated from the University of Nevada. Bars that were once not-that-bad are now filled with monster truck bros. The countdown to Vince Neil karaoke and TGI Friday’s-style bar food starts now.

If anyone knows of a Vegas bar that isn’t overrun with mouth-breathing What Not To Wear candidates, please tell me about it. I have come to enjoy hanging out in old man bars just to avoid the sheen of hair gel and Britney Spears’ signature perfume.

Photo by Megan Koester

The “Vegas” You Think You Know Isn’t Even In Las Vegas 

That’s right, folks. The only part of Vegas that people ever see—the Strip—is actually located south of the city limits, in the unincorporated towns of Paradise and Winchester. These areas don’t actually have a municipal authority, which gave developers free reign to build up the exorbitant hotels and casinos along the Strip. Las Vegas proper, to the north, is where most of the people live—in dusty desert communities devoid of all the glamour of the hotels and casinos. That said, you’d never know that the Strip isn’t technically “Vegas.” Even the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign is located half a mile south of the Mandalay Bay entrance because apparently Paradise, Nevada is the only version of Vegas that matters.

Downtown Is a Joke Downtown 

In the past few years, a sudden change has occurred in this neighborhood. Gone are the shoddy 7-11s we used to loiter near while bumming for cigarettes, and the bombed-out hooker coffin motels. These dusty gems have been replaced with concert halls that look like the backstage scene in Wayne’s World and brunch restaurants. Oh yes, the brunch phenomenon has finally hit the Las Vegas Valley. We are pretty much Los Angeles’ ugly little poseur stepsister who was left in the desert to rot and also be completely behind in everything from fashion to craft beer and cocktail worship.

So the city is rapidly gentrifying, but much like the rest of this corporate-spawned wasteland, our sad little downtown is being snatched up and bought by an “entrepreneur.” In a real estate fever only a dot-com dweeb could catch, Zappos darling Tony Hsieh has purchased most of the buildings and abandoned lots in this pocket of the ‘burg. So far, I’ve seen a park built entirely of storage containers go up that hosted a $50-a-head Sheryl Crow concert. This kind of development will push out the below-poverty-line residents from their weekly motel rooms to make space for specialty candle shops and more brunch spots.

There are a handful of people who want to make a difference downtown—as in make a huge profit on businesses that are such long-term gambles it’s insane. I can hear the board meetings now: “Instead of funding arts or helping the homeless in this area, we should totally parking lot the shit out of it! Art is hard! Building a shoddy version of Downtown Disney is way easier!”

High Schools Look Like Prisons 

Nevada has the 13th highest incarceration rate in the US. This is probably because Vegas schools are windowless, cinderblock buildings that alternate between freezing and sweltering temperatures. I remember going to school and feeling like I was definitely being prepped for prison. Sure, plenty of people felt like this in high school, but did the architecture resemble an actual cellblock? The classrooms in my school district were so overcrowded that we’d have certain classes in non air-conditioned trailers in the parking lot. Some days, our dress code was waived because otherwise kids would pass out due to heat exhaustion during remedial geometry.

At least a quarter of my asshole schoolmates did end up in the clink. That is, if they didn't drop out first. Las Vegas' graduation rate is the worst in the nation at 63 percent, which means that not only are we surrounded by future criminals, but they are future criminals who can't read.

“Classy” Doesn’t Exist Here 

I went to a sex club in a strip mall a few days ago. Mainly just to have the experience, possibly write a Yelp review, and to feel a bit better about myself. My partner and I walked in on what I could only interpret as Martin Luther King’s dream come to life. Two gigantic black women were in a dungeon-themed room, one in chains while the other went to town on her junk. Twenty or so various men of different ages, races, and walks of life were sitting or standing around jacking off over the scene. As I lost a little bit of respect for everyone involved (including myself), a part of Dr. King’s dreamy speech echoed in my inebriated mind. “And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.”

On the way bright side, weed is finally being legalized. Maybe I will just become a stripper after all, buy a house, and see how it all pans out. That’s classy, right?

What Happens in Vegas Stays In Vegas

Whether it’s for a bachelor party or some kid’s 21st birthday, everyone comes here to lose their inhibitions and go fucking crazy. It’s called Sin City for a reason. People often forget that there are still laws here, like this asshole who beheaded a guinea fowl at the Flamingo’s Wildlife Habitat for sheer amusement. As the saying goes, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas—but when live here, you’re stuck cleaning up after all the other people who treat the city like a toilet.

Follow Joie Pena on Twitter.

Our Man in San Fran: How to Break into the San Francisco Giants' Baseball Stadium

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This is the fourth in a four-part series on housing the substantial homeless population in San Francisco, featuring stories from the people living on the margins of life in one of America's richest cities. Click to read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

Randy loves two things: the San Francisco Giants, and Tom Waits. “I have like ten of his discs and sometimes it’s just me and him hanging out,” he said. A four-year resident of an SRO off Market Street, I’d met Randy on his way to a Giants game, decked out from top-to-bottom in black and orange.

Before we could learn each other’s names, he’d invited me into his small, overflowing room, surrounded by trash bags full of dirty laundry, dog-eared baseball season tickets pinned above the doorway, and loose-leaf English teas in green translucent marijuana containers peppered throughout the room. Everything seemed to have its own informal organization, but really it was just a mess.

VICE: Do you know the people in the building?
Randy:
 I don’t really like to meet too many new people.

When did you come to San Francisco?
About five years ago. I’d just ended a relationship with my girl. We were together for almost about ten years, in Riverside, [California]. Just decided we weren’t going to do it anymore. Seems strange down there now. I can’t believe I lived there for so many years. Just weird. You don’t see nobody walking down the sidewalks or nothing.

It’s desolate.
The Santa Anas have got this haunting breeze to them, the heavy smoggy air, all of it. When I moved up here I found the center of my universe.

What keeps you in this SRO?
I dunno, being lazy I guess. I don’t work right now. Welfare pays my rent, basically. But if I had a job I could still live here, because they’d only take like a third of my income.

How did you get a spot?
When I was in the shelter, this woman put up a flyer that said this building was going to open and they were looking for candidates that could move in. What they were basically looking for was somebody with some kind of a background of mental illness. Those people were gonna be at the top of the list to move into this building. So I signed up because I have a background of that, in my adolescence. I had this 5150 thing happening with me.

5150?
Yeah, like its code for “danger to yourself and others." "Mental with delusions," they said. So, I’ve been through that wringer for several years, and I'm taking all kinds of medications. Mostly Haldol.

Are they helping?
I would stop taking them sometimes, and would feel a lot better, but then all of a sudden, I’d start getting paranoid again, and people would tell me like, “No, they know what’s best for you, you’re supposed to take them.” I would take them again and it’d be huge swings. Sometimes I felt like I was gonna pull myself up by the bootstraps, and I wasn’t gonna take them anymore. I just didn’t really know how I was supposed to feel. And all these different struggles with trying to stop taking it and so forth, they tried all different kinds on me and after a while I just stopped taking them. It took me a long time to sort of get out of that rut.

How are you doing now?
Good! Doing really good! At first, a lot of my problems were centered around religion. That’s where most of my delusions stemmed from in the beginning. I had a car accident before this started, and I was on meth. I was making a U-turn in front of my friend’s house and grabbing a tape on the floorboard in the middle of the passenger seat, and it happened to be a Slayer tape too, right? There was already Slayer in there, and I wanted to hear the other one, you know, the South of Heaven one. And so anyway, I stepped on the gas a little bit more and let my foot off the clutch a little bit while I was leaning down, and as soon as I came up, I slow motion crashed into my windshield, and my knees went into my dashboard, and I just saw my whole car crinkle up and the little cracks spider-webbing on the glass.

What did you hit? Another car?
No, a lamppost. But I was comforted. I wasn’t in any pain at all, and I felt like I was being saved by an angel, and it had taken up my space. So my knees were bleeding, and my forehead was bleeding, and I felt fine. It wasn’t long after that that I started getting weird.

When was that?
I was about 18. And since I had that sort of thing in my background, they were able to use it to place me in here.

So a person can’t move in here if they just want to?
I don’t think so. There’s sort of a process, but they’re pretty fair, I think. They see people taking advantage over and over again, with no respect for others, and so forth, but you gotta be pretty darn bad—like that guy downstairs—to be thrown out. He just gets hammered and yells at everybody all the time. He has conniptions. You can actually get away with a lot around here without getting kicked out.

Do you think most people in this building have a drug or alcohol problem?
Probably, at least half or more. My first couple of years, I was pretty aloof. Having my more current issues since I moved here—being brokenhearted about my ex relationship and filled with regret and all these memories and things that I did, and things I shoulda done—those were the blues, you know. I was probably getting drunk about half the time, and periodically smoking meth or something. Smoked a little crack here and there. That right there would get a lot of people in trouble. Crack, that’s kind of a problem around here. People just get so caught up in it, I think it’s just ridiculous. It’s stupid.

Why were you doing it?
Because it was free. I used to go score for people sometimes. One guy would cough up the money and he’d give me a little bit of it.  I turned him down sometimes, I coulda got shafted or busted. But mostly I didn’t have nothing better to do anyway. And if I wasn’t drunk, I wanted to be something else.

Are you still using?
No no, not like that at all. One time I got caught, years ago. I had just been fishing down at the pier, and I was riding my bike down at Mission and 9th, right by that donut shop. I’d just bought a pizza at 6th Street, an extra large from Chico’s, and I was on my bicycle, and I had like these two dimes I scored, when out of nowhere I got tackled by a cop! He drags me off my bike and slams me into a gate. He ripped my ear off almost entirely, on the gate padlock. So they took me down to jail, and my ear was dangling off, and they look at me and say, “Well, you’re free to go" after they did this to me. They had an ambulance come, and they said I could leave my bike with them, or get on my bike and go to the hospital myself. So I got on my bike, got another pizza at Chico’s, ear hanging off, bleeding everywhere, went home, enjoyed a little of the pizza, watched some TV, and later on that night I rode my bike to the hospital. They patched me up.

What’s the worst thing you’ve seen in an SRO?
You know, people just die. This old guy named Jack, he lived around the corner, real sweet. But he was struggling, you know, on dialysis and stuff. He really liked music, right up my alley. He had a really modern stereo and liked to crank it up sometimes. He said “I’ll give you four packs of cigarettes if you just wash two bowls, two plates, a couple of knives, a fork, and a spoon” and I said, “I’ll do it for two packs of cigarettes.”

That's kind of you.
I asked him once, “For relief, what helps you get by? What makes you take your mind off all this dialysis stuff?” He tells me, “Meth!” I go, “Wow, meth makes you feel better?” He goes, “Yeah, but it’s terrible on your body”. I was like, “Wow." He’s about ready to die, and he still seeks some kind of pleasure that he gets out of meth. And then one day, the ambulance came.

When did Jack die?
About a year ago, at least. There’s been a bunch of other people that died who I haven’t known very well. But other than that, there are people who just think they can live how they’re living and do as they please. You know, shit all over the bathroom floor, leave trash everywhere, spit loogies right in the middle of the carpet. You just kinda gotta shake your head and not get too mad about it.

Have you been to jail?
Yeah, just a couple times. I used to be legendary for sneaking into AT&T Park, I brought friends in with me to football games and concerts. I probably snuck in there over 40 or 50 times.

What’s one of the ways you’d sneak in?
Well, they have these gates surrounding the whole place, and so if there was a fire or something, they’re not allowed to keep ‘em locked. So on the bottom they have these slide bars, and they’re slid into the lock position. And right underneath there’s a padlock with a hole right there, but the padlock is unlocked, you just have to turn the padlock, push it up, get it out of that hole, then you gotta slide the bar over without making a big clanging noise, then you have to reach in between the bars to the other side of the gate and press that button, and just push it open. In a real small moment, second, a window of opportunity, you either go for it or you chicken out. I got popped for it a few times though. They took me to jail.

For sneaking in?
Yeah! The cops said, “It’s not up to me, man! You’re getting arrested by the San Francisco Giants!” I’m like “Fuck, they’re arresting me? I’m a big fan!” They told me I’d be out in a few hours, so by 9:00PM I was worried I’d miss Dancing with the Stars, but they never let anybody out till about 4:30 in the morning.

At least you got out.
Yeah, I’ve been lucky. I got caught stealing a case of beer from Foods Co one time, and they put me in jail, but they let me out in the morning because they didn’t book me all the way in. I’m lucky I got away with what I did, and I’ve mellowed out a lot. I’m not doing any of my scams anymore. I’m pretty much back to normal. Now when I get broke I don’t worry about it because that’s normal for me.

Follow Jules Suzdaltsev on Twitter.

Watch THUMP's Documentary on Guy Gerber and Puff Daddy's '11:11' Album

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Watch THUMP's Documentary on Guy Gerber and Puff Daddy's '11:11' Album

Austria Has No Problems Whatsoever (According to Its Newspapers)

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Kronen Zeitung's front page on December 5th, 2013. The main headline writes 'Schnuffi Returns Home Safely After Odyssey', while the small box on the left features the news of Nelson Mandela's death.

According to the Global Peace Index, Austria is the third most peaceful country in the world. Which is kinda bad for Austrians like me because we really enjoy complaining about stuff. On top of this, as you can probably imagine, living in one of the safest countries in the world doesn’t make your life particularly exciting either. Safety is just another word for boredom.

Which I guess is how Austrian Problems came into existence—a Facebook page devoted to the most boring, news-devoid headlines in Austrian newspapers. The thinking behind it seems to be that since we don’t have any real problems in Austria, our press is just creating new ones out of thin air.

The day after Nelson Mandela died for instance, the front page of Austria’s most read newspaper, Kronen Zeitung, was taken over by the breaking news story of a dog named Schnuffi that had gotten lost but was now found. According to KZ, his owners were very worried but only Schnuffi knows what happened when he disappeared. Because this is not a real article, KZ speculated that he was taken from his owners' garden. A few days later, he was found in an animal shelter a few miles away from home and brought back.

Other headlines featured in Austrian Problems include: 'Cat Blacky ‘Marks’ Cellphone'– an interview with the 15-year-old owner of the cat and the (now broken) phone the cat pissed on; 'Brutal Beaver Attacks Family'—the story of a family who decided to go swimming in a pond because in the summer open-air pools are too crowded. While in the pond, they where attacked by a beaver. “He really threatened us,” the mother says; and 'Tragedy at Oktoberfest: Drunk Kills Bird With Own Vomit'—Some drunk, whose whereabouts the police cannot disclose, vomited on a little bird and the little bird died. Nobody knows if the guy killed the bird on purpose or by accident. Animal rescue could not save the bird's life.

"Brutal Beaver Attacks Family"

Besides the strange obsession with animals, the obvious thing here is that Austrians love to whine but seem unable to separate the issues that are worth whining about from those that are not. There is as much wrong and evil being done over here as anywhere on the planet: After all, Austria is still the home of the far-right Freedom Party (or FPÖ) which regularly gets between 20 and 30 percent of the public vote; a 47 percent of the Austrian population who don't really know what parties are in government at the moment; and men who think it's okay to attend balls in blackface and attack reality TV starlets.

But I guess these issues make for innapropriate conversation fodder, because they require a certain level of self-awareness from participants – along with the examination of social inequalities and confronting our own willful ignorance. Maybe, after all, the real reason why Austria is one of the safest places on Earth is because we are too stuck up to challenge the law whan it is outdated. To endure life in such an uneventful place without having to face ourselves, we make up problems where there are none. Maybe this article is an example of that.

But still, we’re glad Schnuffi made it back home safely.

Robin Williams’ Suicide Meant Something, Right?

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Image via Flickr user Hot Gossip Italia 

There are still some details emerging about Robin Williams’ death. Opinions about his choices and facts about his habits are both being dumped into the same case folder. Details can be a comfort. They make us think we have the full picture. We have to assign something to the void he left behind, don’t we? Or else there is dark matter in the universe, threatening to cancel us out.

I ran a “Dealing with Death” workshop for teenagers for nine years. Suicide was a heavy thing to talk to 14-18 year olds about, but I was very happy to do it, and I did so on a volunteer basis out of an alcohol and drug prevention program at my old high school. I’d started there as volunteer support staff in the program in 1996, hoping to give back to a program that had helped me when I was an alternately manic and withdrawn teenager. But then in 2001 my brother committed suicide, and my function at the program became a little more specific. I don’t know if I was any good at it, but I armed myself with comforting books about the Buddhist concepts of grief and permanence and I listened to kids talk about suicide a whole lot. And I would try and say things that made sense about the psychic wound that suicide carves.

Being dead is not a good thing. Suffering is also not a good thing. So what are we supposed to choose when it’s got to be one or the other? The secret is that being alive is a flawed concept that is absolutely terrifying. There is so much of it to observe, but none of it is ours for long. 

I would say that to teenagers, hoping I was right. Yes, there was some stuff about drugs and alcohol going on in the program, but this was my niche within it. 

Only a month before his death, Robin Williams checked into an addiction treatment center to help him focus on his sobriety. His representative made it publicly known. But forget the stigmas of drugs and alcohol use for a second. Can you? I recommend it, because not judging people for doing drugs makes you surprisingly more fun for everyone to be around.

Treatment centers are places where people listen to you talk. You are given rituals and routines and structure to combat the chaotic impulses that would draw you into the abyss. Going to this center is not a sign that Robin Williams was falling apart; it was a sign that he was attempting to take control of his life. If you use the term addict to describe Robin Williams, you minimize the larger theme of his life: he had mastered control.

Due to my offstage social awkwardness I used to frequent online message boards about comedy.  Back in 2001 the anonymity of the internet made it possible for some of those in the community to take cheap shots at those who had died in those terrorist attacks. Yes, most of the community rallied around it. But then there were these particularly uninspiring bottom-of-the-barrel jokes, jokes solely for the sake of being dark.  I’m willing to admit that jokes about death and destruction can bring an amazing amount of levity.  But these were the sort of hollow, mad-grab attempts at attention that one sees now on social media and YouTube comments. Only they were on message boards, so way way longer (Thanks for giving some ritualistic guidelines to your bleakness, Twitter. It’s like an addiction clinic within an addiction). 

Given that Robin Williams had collected headlines for his drug use, nobody should be surprised that there are cheap, coke-dusted punches being thrown at him. People can, so they do. This is what happens when celebrities die. The impulse isn’t exclusively online, either. Stand-up comedy open mics become wastelands of morbid low-blows taking eager advantage of the fact that every stranger in the audience shares a precious shred of knowledge: That celebrity is dead now. It almost doesn’t matter who a celebrity is when they die, their release from this plane of existence nearly guarantees a sideshow of puns and free-associations at dingy bars in every major city. If you follow a comedian on social media, you have either seen them make these jokes themselves, or you have seen them lament, “Oh no, the open mics are going to be a shitshow for a month.” 

So maybe when Robin Williams is being reduced to a punchline, he is just being eased back into the collective subconscious. The joke teller is now a joke to some people. Perhaps that is the natural order of things, and legacy is always destined to focus on controversy.

But let’s be honest, lots of people do drugs. Is doing them even remarkable? People who run media do drugs. Anti-drug politicians constantly do drugs. Robin Williams wrote into his live performance rider that every event must also hire homeless labor. Those homeless people almost for sure did some drugs. The people who organized the event did. But Robin Williams was sober for a long time. In fact, due to the fact that I have been aware of my own intense depression and anxiety since I was a child, I’ve never done a drug outside of cigarettes, alcohol, or caffeine. And I had to quit caffeine after once going over 24 hours without ingesting anything but energy drinks. I had a three-hour panic attack, thinking it was a heart attack because my arm had gone numb. I’m glad there are people who talk about their personal brain chemistry not being good for certain things, or else I might have tried some really weak weed and bummed some people out with my reaction.

We know that Robin Williams was suffering from anxiety, depression, and chillingly enough he had Parkinson’s disease as well. There are rumors that comedians need to suffer to fuel their craft. But Robin Williams lived and worked in spite of all of these things. He managed himself. He was not a victim of his addiction; he was a human being who had a powerful army of gears turning inside of him. If you call him weak or a coward, you’ve forgotten what it took him to get this far.

He was likely taking medications prescribed by legal doctors who didn’t hang out in cartoon alleys. And these kinds of medications may have had frightening effects on a person’s mood. Parkinson’s itself is directly linked to depression because of the effects it has on the brain. He’d had heart surgery in 2009, which is often said to lead to hormone changes and depression. And Robin Williams was not ready to talk about his Parkinson’s diagnosis yet, likely so he would not have to read the sort of dumb speculative bullshit being strewn across the web. Sure, he had somewhere between zero and twelve layers of intense sadness to live through. This was perhaps because he was composed of blood, and bones, and had a complicated system of dendrites and synapses to manage, the smaller parts of a larger working brain of someone you might have related to as a person. If we’d really known him.

Robin Williams had appeared to conquer his anxiety and ride it like a bucking dragon-steed. And for all the cliches of sad comedians, Robin Williams took on dark and frightening acting roles as often as he could. There are suddenly a lot of articles lamenting Robin Williams as tragic, but he is not. He is gone, and if he had stayed it would have been crushingly hard for him. That is how life works. 

If one looks past headlines and status updates, this death takes on the quiet and disturbing intimacy of any crime scene. That is because Robin Williams was real. He was what forensic scientists and police detectives sometimes refer to as a human fucking person. 

I did not know Robin Williams. But one time I had to follow him in a stand-up comedy show where he did a drop-in set. Walking onstage felt like being a nuclear engineer who had to enter a reactor core post-meltdown. I’d missed the big event and was expected to contain the energy as much as I could before the radiation poisoning took its toll on me. I could not assign any meaning to what hung in the air on that stage. The jokes had simply been written upon the molecules of the soil.

Follow Dan Telfer on Twitter

Henry Rollins Says 'Fuck Suicide,' Internet Says 'Fuck Henry Rollins'

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Henry Rollins Says 'Fuck Suicide,' Internet Says 'Fuck Henry Rollins'

People Are Blocking Cargo Ships to Protest Israel

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A sign at the August 16 protest at the Port of Oakland. Photo by Daniel Arauz

The Israeli Zim Piraeus cargo ship arrived at the port in Oakland, California for its usual weekly offloading last Saturday—but it was unable to unload any of its cargo. The ship’s crew had to wait four days at sea before faking a departure and then sneaking back into a new terminal to evade hundreds of activists who had created a picket line the longshoremen's union wouldn't cross. Even when the ship finally left, many believe it still had most of its cargo.

The ship’s acrobatics were induced by a coalition of Palestine solidarity activists and organized labor, with activists originally intending to delay it for just a day as a way to send a message that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians should make it an international pariah.

The Zim Integrated Shipping Services is Israel’s largest shipping company, but its appeal as a target for the growing Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement goes beyond its mere financial value. With Israel’s ability to drop thousands of tons of explosives on the captivated and densely packed population of Gaza and then sail into international ports without consequence, Zim vessels embody Israel's enduring impunity.

Hundreds of people marched to block the Zim Piraeus from unloading its cargo. Photo by Alex Chis

According to a source in the local International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU), the longshoremen who were finally forced to offload the cargo at around 10:30 PM on Tuesday were reluctant to do so. In fact, they apparently proceeded with deliberate slowness; by the next evening, the ship was only partially unloaded and still anchored in the middle of the San Francisco Bay, a day after it was originally slated to depart.

Lara Kiswani, executive director of the San Francisco-based Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC), told me the protest was aimed at exposing “Israeli apartheid and San Francisco’s complicity in it.” According to Kiswani, “The Zim Line reflects the huge flow of capital from Israel into the Bay Area and it is an opportunity for building a relationship between workers and Palestine solidarity activists.”

This week’s shutdown of the Oakland port marks the second time the Zim ship was selected as a target for BDS since the movement began in 2005. Both protests were mobilized in response to an appeal made by the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions for worker solidarity in the United States. In a historic first for the US, the Oakland port was closed to the Israeli ship in June 2010, after Israel attacked and killed nine people aboard the Mavi Marmara, which had been part of a fleet carrying humanitarian aid to the embargoed Gaza Strip.

This time, AROC was a leading voice among a loose coalition of organizations identifying themselves as “Block the Boat.” Organizers with AROC spent three weeks in the lead-up to the action diligently handing out flyers outside union meetings and talking to workers about the significance of the action.

Kiswani stressed that her organization was at mosques to solidify support for the action among the Palestinian solidarity community, but also passed out flyers on Bay Area street corners to reach beyond the traditional audience.

“We wanted to respond to what was happening in Palestine, but also build a long-term movement,” Kiswani told me. “So we decided to give ourselves a few weeks to build from the ground up; build alliances with workers and communities that are on the receiving end of over-policing, militarization and poverty so that we would create a cross-class movement.”

When the ship finally came, thousands of protesters assembled to greet it. Kiswani, who has been organizing for Palestine in the Bay Area for most of her life, noted that the crowd that gathered together was a reflection of the outreach they had conducted: “It was a real representation of a community. We had members of the Chicano, Black, Indigenous, Asian Pacific Islander communities; workers, youth. It didn’t look like a group of activists asking for something, but a community demanding it.”

Police hold the line at the Port of Oakand. Photo by Daniel Arauz

Faced with meeting thousands of protesters at Oakland’s port, the Zim Piraeus avoided Oakland altogether on Saturday, August 16. While the day was deemed a resounding victory, the fact that the Zim ship had remained in waters south of the port meant that workers in Oakland had not actually been asked to make a decision to honor the call for a picket.

Then something unexpected happened. After witnessing the remarkable turnout at the protest, according to Kiswani, members of the ILWU began calling her and others at AROC with questions. Their perception of the action had changed once they saw the broad support it generated from the community.

ILWU Local 10 has a long history of lending their union power to causes that concern human right. So while their sympathy to Palestine was not surprising, Kiswani said she and the coalition wanted to be sensitive and not ask too much from the workers, who would be making personal financial sacrifices to honor this picket line.

Local 10 has been in protracted negotiations since their contract expired on July 1, complicating the internal dynamics of respecting a picket. Normally, if a protest is deemed by a port arbitrator (a position that is unaffiliated with the union) to pose a risk to workers’ health and safety, the union calls off work and the workers still get paid. That’s what happened in 2010. Without a contract, however, that mechanism does not exist.

“But we sensed there was a shift,” said Kiswani. “We felt like the workers were on our side and so we wanted to give them that opportunity to honor the community picket that they didn’t get the chance to do on Saturday.” So they returned to the port the next day and again the Zim line remained untouched. The next two days, AROC stepped back while other individuals independent of any organization sprung to positions of leadership, maintaining a picket line that the workers continued to respect.

Photo by Daniel Arauz

While official statements written by the ILWU have maintained neutrality on the picket line, stating only that the protests created unsafe working environments, the groundswell of support within the rank and file is no doubt responsible for the union’s refusal to cross the rapidly-mobilized picket lines, day after day. Kiswani and other organizers told me that workers independently contacted them to give them information about the ship’s movements and the port’s plans.

The Zim Piraeus is now on its way to Siberia, but other Zim Lines are scheduled to dock in ports throughout America, and this week’s success in Oakland is prompting other cities to follow suit. Long Beach, California as well as Tacoma and Seattle, Washington all have actions planned at their ports on the days the Zim Line is scheduled to arrive.

“We are excited about the model that Oakland has created around the world,” said Kiswani.

Follow Charlotte Silver on Twitter.


We Talked to the Colander-Wearing Pastafarian Who's Been Refused a BC Drivers License

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Obi Canuel. Photo via YouTube.
Last November, Obi Canuel, a resident of Surrey, BC, went to renew his driver’s license at the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia (ICBC). He was wearing a colander on his head. For those who don’t know, a colander is not only used for separating water from solids, but it’s also considered to be religious headgear for practicing Pastafarians, a satirical religion created in 2005 by Bobby Henderson that preaches the tale of a Flying Spaghetti Monster, who created the world while drunk.

Some of their beliefs—like the one that states changes in Earth’s temperature are caused by a decrease in pirates—may sound sort of far fetched, until you think about how some Christians believe that climate change is actually the will of Jesus. Canual argues that by wearing a colander on his head, he’s practicing his right to religious expression and should be allowed to have his ID photo taken with it on, similar to how Jews are allowed to wear yarmulkes in their IDs (if only you were able to buy yarmulkes in the kitchen aisle of a Canadian Tire).

Last July, the ICBC sent Obi a letter denying him the right to his license since Pastafarianism does not mandate its followers to wear colanders. Obi, with the power of His Noodliness to guide him, has not given up on his right to religious expression. It’s worth noting that some other countries, including the US, allow driver’s license photos with colanders.

So, to some degree, Pastafarianism is a recognized religion that—although it may seem condescending and insulting to other spiritualties—is pretty much the least judgmental religion I can think of. So when Obi released a YouTube video documenting the process and illustrating how little acceptance the ICBC had for his religion and his religious freedoms, I couldn’t help but feel for the guy. Sure, it’s clear that he doesn’t really believe in a Flying Spaghetti Monster, but the message that the government should be accepting of all religions, no matter how bat-shit crazy they sound, is a valuable one.

VICE sat down with Obi—an ordained minister of Pastafarianism who remained in noodle-worshipping character throughout our entire conversation—to talk religion and what it means to be Pastafarian.

VICE: First off, how the hell did this become an honest-to-God religion?
Obi Canuel: According to writings, pirates practiced Pastafarianism for hundreds of thousands of years. It was only in 2005 that Bobby Henderson exposed it publicly.

Ooooooook. So is Bobby Henderson your Jesus?
[Laughs] Oh no, we reject all forms of hierarchy and authority. I don’t think we feel comfortable with those kinds of things. Bobby was simply someone who was touched by His noodly appendage and he was able to bring these kinds of ideas to a greater public awareness.

When did you get into Pastafarianism?
It must’ve been sometime last year. I’ve been asked this before and I can’t seem to nail down exactly when it was. I had a vision and it’s strange but it’s been quite powerful.

Do Pastafarians attend church or something like it?
Yeah, we have informal meetings. We try to keep quiet, we’re not evangelical about it but we get together and try to have fun and practice the book [Henderson’s The Flying Spaghetti Monster].

The website for the Chuch of the Flying Spaghetti Monster claims that only some people consider it satirical, but how seriously do some people take it?
There’s an infinite rule and I wish I could remember what it was. It’s something like, “For any given idea, there is sufficient diversity among human opinion and ideas that somebody out there in the world really does believe it.” Right? So yeah, that’s true of any belief.

Do you feel that you’re making a mockery out of creationism?
I really like to distance myself from words like mockery or offensiveness. I really, really don’t want anybody to feel bad about themselves or what they’re doing. I try to spread the words of His Noodliness and make people happy.

This may sound stupid, but why is a pasta strainer your yarmulke?
Well, the colander is a reminder that in life water may pass through, but noodles remain.

Let’s talk about the ICBC. Have they changed their mind about giving you your driver’s license?
No, and I haven’t even received any response.

A shot of Obi's tattered interim licence. Image via Obi Canuel.

Are you surprised that this is happening to you in so-called tolerant Canada?
It’s a strange thing that Texas is somehow more liberal than the west coast of Canada. There’s a person in Texas with a driver’s license with a colander.

That has to be frustrating.
It’s true, but His Noodliness has granted, in all of us I think, the ability to have control over our mood and our attitude and I have been practicing patience.

Tell me about that YouTube video you released, it’s quite the documentation of your ordeal.
There’s a lot in that video that I wanted to have in there, but it seems that the YouTube generation is afraid of ten minute videos, and that conversation has various things in it that I wanted to show. Including conversations that would go on after they thought I had hung up. I could hear the people laughing about me and telling each other they’ll get into trouble if they look up my name and other things going on.

What’s the worst criticism you’ve heard since all of the media ran the story?
The worst that I’ve heard is really hurtful things about other cultures. I really don’t want anyone to think that what I’m doing is belittling other cultures. That’s absolutely not what I’m doing, and I want the culture bashing to stop. That’s what hurts me the most. Some of my supporters misinterpret my whole thing. I’m simply expressing the love and the goodness of the Flying Spaghetti Monster but they mistakenly think I’m attacking other people that wear religious headgear.

Has anything positive come from your experience?
What I’m really happy about is there are a lot of people getting in on the discussion about religious freedom and about rights in general. The philosopher in me is happiest when I hear someone say: “I think this fellow is doing something completely bonkers but he has every right to do it."

Thanks Obi, all praise be to the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
May the sauce be upon you.

 

@jesskenwood

Baseball Erotica #4: Joe DiMaggio and the Worst Dinner Party Ever

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Baseball Erotica #4: Joe DiMaggio and the Worst Dinner Party Ever

MUNCHIES Guide to Scotland - Part 5

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MUNCHIES Guide to Scotland - Part 5

VICE Special: Japan's Innocent on Death Row

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On march 27th 2014, Iwao Hakamada was finally released from Death Row, having served a record breaking 47 years behind bars for a crime he didn't commit. While there was a media frenzy in Japan over this exceptional case, few delved deeper into the story to find out why and how a man could be subjected to such injustice in, by all accounts, such a civilised country.

Vice spoke to the people connected to Iwao Hakamada's story as well as Sakae Menda (the first person ever, and one of only a few in Japan's history, to be acquitted of murder) to find out the reality and disturbing truth behind death row and the criminal justice system in Japan.

 

Kids Telling Dirty Jokes: David

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It's here—the final episode of Kids Telling Dirty Jokes. For our series finale, we had David come by the studio to let loose with some of our favorite jokes.

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