Vegan Oktoberfest in Santa Monica. Photo by the author

On October 4, Vegan Oktoberfest came to the Santa Monica, California waterfront. It had all the traditional elements of the German festival—lederhosen, sausage, beer, musical performances—but the meat didn’t contain animal products and one of the musicians was the activist rapper Vegan Boss. A little nontraditional, sure, but those touches were only fitting given that all the proceeds went to Jill Ryther’s nonprofit Expand Animal Rights Now (EARN).

Ryther has an impressive activist resume—a stint working in Los Angeles’s Hardcore Gang Division, some time alongside renowned dolphin activist Ric O’Barry in Japan, lawsuits against corporate giants Costco and PetSmart—but mostly, she’s known for trying to curb the Los Angeles Police Department’s tendency to shoot dogs.

It’s difficult to estimate how many canines get shot by the cops—partly because police departments aren’t interested in publicizing that information—but it happens often enough that there have been calls to train officers to better deal with pets they encounter, and to penalize cops who kill animals for little reason.   

I caught up with Ryther the day after Vegan Oktoberfest on the phone to learn more about the festival and her experience in dealing with the LAPD.

VICE: So, how did Vegan Oktoberfest come to be?
Jill Ryther: It was my partner David [Edward Burke’s] idea, actually.  We had been having a discussion about how in the vegan community it's like there are two types of events: events that cater so much toward vegans that non-vegans don't want to come, and events that are so meat-heavy—like traditional Oktoberfest—that vegans are discouraged from coming.  So we were like, "Let's bring them together. Let's have a Vegan Oktoberfest to make it really lively and accessible and authentic, so that everybody wants to come. Let's make sure we have good food to get the best of both worlds and have a good time and have a clear conscience."

How did you stumble upon some of the cases involving police brutality against animals?
They really found me. I am the leading animal rights attorney in LA right now, so if anyone looks up "animal rights attorney," it's going to be my office. And so I started getting phone calls from people who had their dogs shot by police.

So I looked into it a little further and I was horrified at the numbers, how often it happens, and I was contacted by the guardian of Chico Blue—which was a pretty notable case we just settled—and that case got a lot of attention and really put us on the map for handling these types of cases. My office is just inundated with people who who have animals who have been shot by police. We just took on another case where this woman’s two dogs—one of them was only 35 pounds—were both shot in her front yard. It's horrible. It's a huge problem and there aren’t a lot of attorneys fighting it and the police are getting away with it, so we are making that our top priority right now.

Like this dog, Chico Blue was a pit bull. Photo via Flickr user blgrssby

So how do the police handle this internally?
It's always the same story. It's always, "The dog was aggressive and the officer was in fear for his life." It doesn't matter if they were on a leash, it doesn't matter if they were in a fenced-in yard. It's always the same story. We have been lucky to work with, recently, some officers and some precincts who are interested in making some positive changes. I think a lot of it is because of the media attention it's getting.

In the most recent case, we actually worked with the officers and had them undergo training. We flew in a trainer and spent a half a day with them and had them work with the dog expert in an effort to teach them dog behavior. We've been well-received by some, but for the most part I think internally it's sort of like, "Oh, it's just a dog. The dog was aggressive. Too bad." The officer gets a slap on the wrist and there's not much more than that. Sometimes I don't even think they get a slap on the wrist, to be honest.

With Chico Blue, what happened with the officer?
He didn't lose pay as far as I know. I mean, he was forced to undergo the training that we made him go through, but we forced him to do that as a part of the case. I don't even think he would have had to do that. I mean I know he didn't lose his job.

Have you faced any pushback from the precincts?
Yeah. Tons. Officers for the most part don't want you to tell them how to do their jobs, and they're certainly not quick to stand up and say, "We made a mistake." Some officers have been willing to work with us, because they see that we really are trying to give them tools so that this doesn't keep happening. Like, it doesn't look good for you to keep shooting dogs. If the officers give us a chance, we end up building a good relationship, but usually it's like door slams. They don't want to touch it. They don't want to even admit that they shoot dogs.

Do you think widespread access to technology—like video cameras—has helped address this problem?
Yes. I think cops are realizing that what they are doing is going to be recorded. I think that's helped us in our cases to put pressure on different precincts to say, "Look: Work with us, because we want to give you training so this doesn't keep happening."

To learn more, visit the Expand Animal Rights Now website here.

Illinois Governor Pat Quinn delivers a victory speech after winning reelection by 1 percentage point in 2010. Photo by Clayton Hauck for Pat Quinn for Illinois

It was August 2010, and Chicago was in the middle of a bloody summer that had some state lawmakers calling for the National Guard to come in and patrol the streets. By August, the homicide count topped 270; by the end of month, another 58 people had been killed. Locked in a tight reelection campaign, and facing national pressure to do something about the city’s stubbornly high crime rates, Illinois’s Democratic Governor Pat Quinn responded to the crisis that fall, launching a major million anti-violence initiative that would invest in Chicago’s most ravaged neighborhoods.  

The $54.5 million, taxpayer-funded Neighborhood Recovery Initiative aimed to tackle the root causes of violence in Chicago’s urban neighborhoods, giving grants through the Illinois Violence Prevention Authority to social welfare organizations that in turn contracted with community groups to provide a variety of services, including job training, youth mentoring, parenting classes, and part-time jobs, in 23 Chicago neighborhoods.

The initiative was rolled out quickly – too quickly, it turns out, according to a state audit of the NRI released earlier this year. The scathing report found that the program was disorganized and severely mismanaged, suggesting that as much as 40 percent of the funds for the initiative were wasted.

“The NRI program was hastily implemented, which limited the time [the Illinois Violence Prevention Authority] had to adequately plan for and implement the program,” Illinois Auditor General William Holland wrote in the report. “No documentation existed showing how IVPA selected the NRI communities, and not all the most violent Chicago communities were included in the program.”

Using the word “failed” more than 100 times, Holland questioned the patronage inherent in the program: Instead of choosing grantees through an objective analysis, Chicago aldermen were allowed to recommend and select lead agencies to receive NRI cash. According to the report, this system resulted in some strange funding choices, with seven of the city’s 20 most violent communities excluded from receiving NRI grant funds.

The audit, commissioned in 2012 by state lawmakers from both parties, echoed years of media investigations and political criticism raising questions about NRI’s financial mismanagement and lack of oversight of grantees. A Chicago Sun-Times report found that one nonprofit was given $15,770 in anti-violence funds to run a reentry program for young former inmates—but the program never existed. Another investigation, by the Chicago Tribune, found that an economic development group hired to help finance to small businesses never made a single loan, but was nevertheless allowed to keep more than $150,000 when its contract was slashed.

To compound all of this, the NRI failed to achieve it’s primary objective: Within two years of the program’s rollout, Chicago’s murder rate had increased by 20 percent. Amid these issues, Quinn disbanded the Illinois Violence Prevention Authority at the end of 2012, folding a scaled-down version of the NRI into another state agency.

Now, as Quinn faces another tight re-election race against Republican Bruce Rauner, the problems that plagued the NRI have come back to haunt the governor’s reelection campaign. Two federal investigations into fraud and misspending at the NRI are underway and the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office has also issued subpoenas. Last week, the state Legislative Audit Commission held its own hearings into the NRI, hearing two days of testimony in an effort to determine whether Quinn’s office improperly cherry-picked the communities and agencies that received NRI funds.

“Here we have tens of millions of dollars that have been spent with little accountability,” said Illinois Republican Sen. Jason Barickman, who serves as co-chair of the Legislative Audit Commission. “To date, we don’t know that they’ve had any meaningful impact to combat violence in the city of Chicago.”

Eager to shatter Quinn’s reputation as an honest public servant, Republicans have pounced on the NRI scandal, characterizing the program as a “political slush fund” that the governor used to “buy votes” from black communities in Chicago during his 2010 reelection campaign. “This isn’t a partisan issue,” Rauner said in a press release earlier this month calling for an independent investigation of Quinn’s alleged slush fund. “This is about transparency and accountability.”

Last week’s hearings provided little evidence to prove that Quinn used the NRI as a political tool. Although emails released before the hearings indicate that Quinn’s campaign hoped to get a political boost from the program, Quinn’s former aides, including the former head of the now-defunct violence prevention authority, said nothing to indicate that the governor’s office was improperly directing funds to political allies. Instead, the testimony underscored what everyone has always known about the anti-violence initiative: That it was a well intentioned but poorly managed effort that wasted millions of taxpayer dollars in attempt to solve Chicago’s very pressing violence problem.

“The auditor general’s report makes it clear that much of the money from it was virtually thrown to the wind,” said Matthew Dietrich, executive editor of Reboot Illinois, a nonpartisan group that engages citizens through digital and social media. “There’s been a lot of legitimate criticism of how paying teenagers to hand out flyers on street corners will reduce violence.”

Despite these problems, Dietrich added, there is no evidence that Quinn used the NRI as a political slush fund, as Republicans have alleged.

Over the course of the politically charged investigation, Democrats have defended Quinn. While conceding that the NRI was rife with problems, they argue that the initiative was a necessary intervention at the time it was implemented. And they’ve accused Rauner of failing to offer solutions to deal with epidemic violence in Chicago. 

“Governor Quinn has continued to demonstrate that he’s willing to make the tough decisions to invest in communities that need the most help,” said Illinois Democratic state Senator Dan Kotowski. “The people who are criticizing this investment in these high-crime, high-poverty communities that are suffering are not offering any alternatives.”

Weeks away from the election, the scandal appears not to have been a death knell for Quinn, with polls showing him leading Rauner by 2.7 points, according to RealClearPolitics . But for some, the NRI scandal has gone well beyond partisan bickering, confirming suspicions that when it comes to Illinois politics, corruption is never far away. And so far, neither Quinn nor Rauner has offered an enduring policy solution to abate Chicago’s persistent violence. 

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Snövit Hedstierna. Photo by the author

Swedish artist Snövit (which means "Snow White") Hedstierna, always seems to make art that is both funny and thoughtful, whether that means creating life-sized statues out of the jelly used to manufacture dildos or having an orgasm onstage. She's currently exhibiting a piece at Skövde Konsthall in Sweden called The Greater Harm, a video that features women describing their experiences as victims of sexual violence. 

During a break from traveling around the world with her art, Snövit stopped by Stockholm this summer and I chatted with about her work and why she thinks it’s important to know your vagina. 

VICE: What are you working on right now?
Snövit Hedstierna: Well, I usually have about ten to 15 pieces going on at the same time. So right now I’m working on photo, film, sound, and performance projects. One of the projects I’m doing is an interactive sound piece with about 200 female voices discussing gender issues. Another thing I do is that I’m sketching people at strip clubs—people who are masturbating, looking away, standing up, or covering their faces. All kinds of characters. Then I make life-sized statues in, you know, the jelly stuff they make dildos out of. I produce them in China to really get the mass-produced aspect of industrialized sex as a part of the statues. 

Why statues?
Knights and kings and other men who’ve done “amazing things” like winning wars have historically got to be the statues. I think there are other subject matters and acts throughout history that deserve to be remembered. Like the people staring at you in the subway, or the drunk ogling characters you meet at night. Those guys are people who my generation has been talking about. I want to make a cultural impression where the [public masturbator] is represented as a memory of our time.

Will that be exhibited?
This is going to be an exhibition in Montreal in 2015, and I’m sure I will show them at other places as well. 

Are your pieces as straightforward in terms of concept from the beginning as the finished products seem to be?
For me, context is key. The content should really be the narrative, and not just the visual elements. Although that process is the fun part, just dressing everything up and getting it all glittery, I try to look at my artistry in a more philosophical way, with a clear narrative. Art can sometimes become a bit vague when there are too many props and complicated titles. I might have gotten the idea of a more clear or simple communication from working as an art director, where you actually need to talk in terms of pitching.

Yeah, you used to work in advertising.
Well, I’ve been through a mixture of things, but I worked with advertising, perhaps with a focus on communication rather than commercials, for a few years. I’m not sure that’s the reason my art is the way it is, but it’s certainly made me aware of how easy it is for people to misunderstand things. So if you’ve got an idea or a message that you’re trying to communicate, you must be very clear, at least to yourself. What the audience thinks, feels, or how they react in the end, is not something you can control. 

'To Give and to Hold'

You got a lot of attention last year with one of your exhibitions, what was all that about?
Well, in one of them called To Give and to Hold, I invited the audience to spoon for 48 hours. The performance was streamed online. I did it as an act for peace with the statement that, “I would rather spoon someone than shoot someone,” which I think is becoming more and more relevant.

Another one that got some attention in the media was a series of photos of people looking at their genitals in a mirror called Practices of Looking. That started out when I noticed, as a foreigner in Canada, that looking at your genitals is kind of—not shameful really, but that people are like, disgusted…  Looking at your genitals is something that your partner does. Not you. In Sweden it’s more common to at least have a peek from your point of view. But I’ve experienced that in many countries that’s kind of taboo.

Do you feel that this is a question of age?  
Compared to like, my mom, who gave birth while watching a giant mirror of her vagina and taking photos at the same time, and their generation, who in the 70s just sat in a ring comparing each other’s genitals, my generation seems kind of shy and prudish. In a way the project is striving for a kind of de-sexualization of the vagina, but also to create a photographic-based archive by [documenting] an act that that is part of our daily life and that can be very sexual. 

And people got offended?
No the beef was more with my curator, who wanted me to photoshop and crop the images, which would turn the piece into some completely different. What’s interesting is that all of these people had so different approaches and postures when they held the mirrors, so I’ve also made it into a choreography called Another View which was the third work of mine that got a lot of attention.

Of people mirroring their genitals?
Ha, yeah. It goes on for 90 minutes and almost looks like a Bikram yoga session but with different postures. 

'Practices of Looking'

A lot of your art deals with what you might call queer or gender issues, where do you think that comes from?
I guess my life experience in general. I grew up in a very queer culture. Many people say that I’m very girly, and that’s not because I’ve had a lot of role models who were women and girly, but rather a lot of transvestites who were very girly and who I looked up to and thought were so pretty and cool. 

How did these people enter your l life?
My dad, who’s a musician, was touring during a big part of my childhood. I guess I created my own father figures around me. My uncle, who is gay, kind of became my father figure. Him and his boyfriends—there were five of them over the years—became kind of step-dads. None of them are transvestites, but I met several though them and I was always very amazed.  

You’re still in contact with them?
Yeah, I’m still in contact with all of them. Then my mother had a boyfriend who was bisexual, which kind of normalized all of those aspects of life for me. 

Snövit in her studio. Photo by Angela Blumen

I guess your name, Snow White, must have had some impact on you childhood. Have you been called Snow White from birth?
My dad is from Peru and my mum’s from Sweden, and they both kind of liked it, so within my home I’ve always been called Snövit. Although I've also used my other names officially.

Do you always introduce yourself as Snow White?
No, sometimes I introduce myself with one of my middle names, Linda or Mina. Like, if I’m ordering a taxi I don’t usually get into it. When I grew up I remember that I used to think that it would be so much easier with a regular name. Growing up in this kind of artsy not-very-nuclear family, bringing two dads to parent-teacher night, and being vegan, I used to feel like there was something wrong with me. But as I grew older, the name kind of grew on me and became more of a statement, both privately and in my art. 

So what would you say your statement as an artist is?
I believe we should talk about stuff we don’t really talk about. There’s this idea that it’s impossible to change the world, and I don’t think that’s the way it is. There’s a myth around it, like if you don’t do anything practical or physical it can’t be done. But if I tell or listen to a story that’s been an experience of a passion or a pain, you can pay it forward and also make it part of your own life. I believe that people can connect and become part of the same reality through talking and listening to each other, if you do it in a mindful, heartfelt, and truthful way.

Snövit Hedstierna's The Greater Harm is part of the group exhibition Norm.Alt at Skövde Konsthall, Sweden, which runs until November 23. She will be hosting artist talks at Lokstallet in Strömstad on October 29, and at Atelante in Gothenburg on October 30. See upcoming shows and more of Snövit's work here and here.

Follow Carl-Johan Ulvenäs on Twitter.

A PTP helipad high in the mountains. All photos via the author.
Following a logging road along the Kitimat River through rolling, avalanche-prone valleys, I saw a grizzly bear for the first time in my life. Construction has severed a landscape of glaciers, young and old growth forests, wild berries, mountainside waterfalls, and habitat for animals like the grizzly and their exceptional cousin the spirit bear. A long, narrow pipeline corridor—which could eventually be leased by multiple corporations—has already been clear-cut. Heaps of discarded trees, stacked in burn piles, await incineration by Chevron’s contractors.

With preliminary clearing underway, Chevron’s Pacific Trails Pipeline (PTP) is the furthest along of more than a dozen hydraulically fractured (fracked) gas and diluted bitumen (dilbit) pipelines proposed to push through BC’s north. Collectively, the pipelines intend to weave over and bore through mountains, cross thousands of waterways, and carve through rainforests en route to the coast.

The majority of these pipelines are proposed to service a new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export industry that BC’s premiere Christy Clark, who has populated her cabinet with former Enbridge lobbyists, has promoted at great expense.

If built, LNG projects would necessitate the construction of tens of thousands of new fracking wells, up to 11 new gas pipelines, a contentious hydroelectric dam called Site C, and up to 18 coastal gas liquefaction and export facilities.

Just part of this infrastructure could more than double BC’s carbon emissions, disrupt vital salmon-spawning estuaries, jam the coast with thousands of super-tankers, generate emissions worse than coal, flood vital agricultural lands, and permanently remove hundreds of billions of litres of freshwater from the hydrological cycle.

Additionally, Enbridge Northern Gateway proposes dual pipelines to the Pacific—one to export diluted bitumen from the tar sands and another to import the diluent used to make bitumen flow in pipes. From the coast, Enbridge plans to move dilbit in very large crude carriers (VLCCs), which can carry up to 2.2 million barrels (349.6 million litres) of oil.

LNG and bitumen supertankers would exit the coast through channels like the Hecate Straight, which Environment Canada notes is “the fourth most dangerous body of water in the world.” A 2011 report on Enbridge’s project warns that “between 1999 and 2009, there were 1,275 marine vessel incidents along Canada’s Pacific coast, including collisions, explosions, groundings, and sinkings.”



A right of way is cleared for PTP through this valley
“There is a barrage of oil and gas developments being proposed in this whole North West and if they were successful we would see a wasteland development. We wouldn’t see a build-up of community development,” argues Mel Bazil, a resident of Hazelton and long-term supporter of the Unist’ot’en Camp blockade. “It comes with forms of violence: domestic violence, a large influx of drugs, missing and murdered women, and pollution.”

Although tar sands infrastructure—like Northern Gateway—has attracted far more attention and public vitriol than any LNG project, a recently leaked document shows that the furthest developed piece of ‘LNG’ infrastructure, Chevron’s Pacific Trails Pipeline, could be used to export diluted bitumen from the tar sands instead of gas.

In a letter penned by Chevron VP Rod Maier and leaked from the Moricetown band, the company seeks permission in negotiations with Moricetown First Nation to sell their pipeline “to any company constructing or actively seeking permits for an oil or bitumen pipeline along the corridor occupied by the PTP pipeline” after “a period of five years.” At 42 inches in diameter, PTP dwarfs Northern Gateway, Keystone XL, and Line 9 in size, making it one of the largest potential bitumen pipelines in North America.

After multiple, unsuccessful attempts to reach Chevron and Moricetown’s Chief Barry Nikal, I spoke to former Liberal Party of Canada leader Bob Rae about the letter. Rae is overseeing negotiations between First Nations and Chevron in an agreement called the First Nations Limited Partnership (FNLP).

“We have no intention of ever allowing the natural gas pipeline to be used for export or used by any other product, including oil, including bitumen,” Rae assured me. “This is not an oil pipeline; it’s a natural gas pipeline.”

The leaked letter contradicts Rae’s guarantee, unambiguously seeking provisions to transport diluted bitumen through PTP. The letter, however, outlines the company’s “current understanding of the proposed terms” and has not yet been formally agreed upon by the Moricetown band.

If these terms are realized, Chevron’s PTP would follow TransCanada’s Energy East project, which proposes to use a four decade old natural gas pipeline to carry dilbit—a substance more acidic, viscous, corrosive, and more difficult to clean up than conventional crude.

“Their plan all along was to build LNG pipelines and to sell them as bitumen pipelines to these companies that are having a hard time getting tar sands to the coast,” argues Toghestiy, a hereditary chief of the Likhts'amisyu clan. “If I was an investor… that’s what I would be thinking about—I’d make sure there was a backup plan.”

PTP would also create access to massive shale deposits along its route, enabling fracking near towns like Houston and Smithers and throughout pristine areas of the coastal mountain ranges and interior. With a reversal in the line, fracked gas could be shipped east to fuel bitumen extraction in Alberta’s tar sands.

“If you’re against Enbridge, if you’re against the Kinder Morgan, if you’re against the KXL pipeline, if you’re against the Line 9 project, if you’re against the Mackenzie pipeline that’s going up north, why aren’t you standing up against the LNG pipelines?” Toghestiy asked.

Toghestiy
Land is already cleared for export facilities, pipe yards, and worker camps in communities like Kitimat and Terrace, while helicopter traffic has become ceaseless along the proposed pipeline right of ways. Increasingly, crews are surveying land and conducting preliminary fieldwork for new pipelines, in many cases prior to having their projects approved.

“When I moved here two-three years ago there was only 2 or 3 proposed pipelines—now, I’ve even lost count how many. More than 10 for sure,” a resident of Hazelton, Darko Košćal, told me. We spoke in his backyard and our conversation was drowned out by a helicopter. “Since last spring it’s started being very noisy and every day it’s becoming noisier and noisier,” he shouted. “More helicopters than in Vancouver some days.”

For Chevron’s PTP, enormous clearings await workers and construction materials at the entrances of the Clore and Kitimat River logging roads. For months, however, these have sat empty as “the pipeline company itself has not yet made any final investment decisions,” Bob Rae said. Chevron, which seeks to connect their fracking fields in northeastern BC to the Pacific, has been unable to secure any international customers for their gas.

More broadly, the LNG market appears shaky and even speculative, adding incentive for corporations to ship dilbit. Natural gas prices have recently plunged while BC lags behind the US and Australia in establishing their LNG industry.

China, Canada’s most sought after customer, has begun to develop the largest gas reserves on the planet, and recently signed the largest gas deal in history—valued at $400 billion—with Russia. BC’s Minister of Natural Gas Development Rich Coleman downplayed this deal in a comment to media: “We beat the Russians at hockey and we’ll beat them at liquefied natural gas.”

Adding to this uncertainty, the federal government has issued permits to export an impossible amount of gas. According to a study by geocscientist David Hughes, meeting existing approvals would “require increasing BC’s gas production to nearly 50 percent more than all of Canada currently produces—within less than a decade” and fracking “more than three times BC gas reserves.”

Petronas, a Malaysian oil giant, is threatening to cancel its $10 billion LNG investment or to postpone its project for over a decade, citing downward trends in the market, a “slow regulatory pace,” BC’s LNG tax, “marginal” profits, and “a high cost environment.”

Similarly, the Apache Corporation abandoned their 50 percent stake in the PTP and Kitimat LNG projects this summer, becoming the third major investor to do so.

“This is not a feasible project. There’s too much opposition to it and we’re really not willing to risk our territories, our waters, for projects that aren’t even economically sound,” argues Freda Huson, a chief of the Unist’ot’en clan. She lives with Toghestiy at the Unist’ot’en Camp, a community established to blockade PTP, Northern Gateway, and TransCanada’s Coastal Gaslink.

“All of the original players, Apache, EOG and EnCana, all walked away from [PTP]. EOG and EnCana sold their shares for the pipeline to Chevron,” noted Toghestiy.

“Chevron has one of the worst histories on the planet when it comes to dealing with individuals and communities that they’re impacting,” Toghestiy said, highlighting the company’s alleged orchestration of murder in Nigeria and the “environmental catastrophe” they left behind in Ecuador.



An empty clearing awaits workers and materials for PTP
“That’s who’s in charge of their shares now and that’s who we’re up against,” Toghestiy said. “Chevron’s the last man standing.”

The “high cost environment” of BC’s oil and gas sector is compounded by the province’s unique land-rights situation. Most of the province is unceded indigenous land, meaning it was never absorbed into Canada through treaties, bills of sale, surrender, or war. Accordingly, the federal and provincial governments lack clear legal authority to build any of these projects without consent from affected indigenous peoples.

Nations like the Gitxsan and the Wet’suwet’en, which journalist and filmmaker Damien Gillis notes “form a 500 km-long vertical wall, smack in the middle of every major pipeline route proposed across northern BC,” have banned all pipelines from crossing their territories under a system of governance that long predates Canada. To bolster their law, they have reoccupied their traditional territories, repeatedly evicted work crews and surveyors, and established permanent communities and structures directly in the paths of pipelines. This casts watchful eyes upon remote territories, physically inhibits construction, and creates a stronger case for aboriginal title under existing Canadian laws.

The Gitxsan Luutkudziiwus clan has recently constructed a cabin to blockade TransCanada’s Prince Rupert Gas Transmission line, while the Unist’ot’en are positioned to thwart the construction of three major projects.

To build through this area, government and industry would likely have to use force.

“They’re going to have to try and slay us, but they’re not going to do it. We’re too big and we’re too powerful. Our ancestors are with us,” Toghestiy said.

Accordingly, Chevron intends to disregard aboriginal rights and title in pursuing PTP, stating that any agreement they sign with Moricetown does not “affirm, recognize, abrogate or derogate from any asserted or determined aboriginal rights, including aboriginal title.”

In other words, Bob Rae explained, the deal “has nothing to do with aboriginal rights or title.”

A sign in the community of Hazleton
Following instruction from the province, the project is wrongly treating band councils created by the Government of Canada through the Indian Act, who only govern small reservations, as having the ability to make decisions over vast, unsurrendered territories that are managed by traditional, hereditary leaders.

FNLP has signed deals with fifteen band councils and is still hoping to secure support from Moricetown. Significantly, the leaked document notes, the PTP pipeline can’t be converted to carry oil “without the consent of FNLP members”—all of whom are band councils who have no jurisdiction in the area these decisions are affecting.

“These people have been so oppressed and now they’re given the opportunity to make decisions outside their own borders, outside the reserves,” said Ambrose Williams, a Gitxsan supporter of the Unist’ot’en. “When you give that much power to an oppressed people, they’ll start signing deals.”

When asked why PTP is consulting with band councils instead of the hereditary leaders the Supreme Court of Canada recognized as having jurisdiction over Wet’suwet’en and Gitxsan, FNLP chairman Bob Rae deflected responsibility. “There are issues of internal governance that are really up to the First Nations to sort out. We’re being very respectful of the jurisdiction of the First Nations,” he said.

The leak also reveals Chevron’s plan to install a security gate at the Morice River bridge, which is treated by the Unist’ot’en as a sovereign border. The security gate would block Unist’ot’en clan members from entering their homes and territories, while attempting to ensure that “PTP and its contractors will have unrestricted access to the area.”



The Morice River bridge
Currently, only clan-approved hunting, logging, and tree-planting operations, known Unist’ot’en supporters, and those who pass through a protocol of free, prior, and informed consent, are permitted to cross the bridge.

The leak also outlines the financial benefits offered to Moricetown for their support of PTP. Notably, they are promised “preferred access to employment opportunities,” training incentives, contracts for aboriginal businesses, and $20.4 million paid out to the band over 35 years.

After a $1.1 million signing bonus, payments amount to just over $550,000 per year or approximately $286 per band member. Having formerly worked as the band’s Economic Development Officer, Freda Huson warns that under the government’s current policies every additional dollar the band makes from PTP could cause the government to withdraw a dollar of funding.

“The crumbs they’re throwing at band councils are going to come and go and the people that are going to suffer the most are the children,” Huson said. “They’re the ones that are going to suffer when there’s no clean water. They’re the ones that are going to suffer when there’s no fish, no moose.”

“We’re doing everything in our part to ensure that doesn’t happen here.”
 

@m_tol

Photos by Ryan Carmody

Dan Harmon is the creator of Channel 101, the cult legend Heat Vision and Jack, and the TV show Community. After being fired as the latter’s showrunner, he started a weekly live show/podcast/town hall called Harmontown. He and his co-host Jeff Davis have alternatively stated that the goal of the show is to “improve humanity,” “to turn a passive community into an active one,” and showcase “a fat guy drinking vodka until he blacks out.”

The show quickly garnered a cult following. After roughly a year, Harmon felt they’d reached what Joseph Campbell would call “Meeting with the Goddess”: They had overcome the threshold guardians and gotten what they wanted. But what were they to do with it?

Harmon and Davis chose to embark on a 23-day, 20-city tour, bringing with them Harmon’s girlfriend, Erin McGathy; their fan-turned-onstage-dungeon-master, Spencer Crittendon; and documentary filmmaker Neil Berkeley. The resulting documentary is also called Harmontown.

VICE: When there’s no one around, do you talk to yourself?
Dan Harmon: I don’t. I wish I could because I think I would get more done, because I think with my mouth. I’m a very verbal thinker, but I can’t bring myself to talk to myself when I’m alone.

I wonder if that has an effect on the way you structure your show.
Yeah, the way I structure it is, I come out and I start talking. That’s why I think the show is so comfortable for me. And I think it’s why the people who like it like it: If there’s a wreck… you’re gonna be there for it. It’s not gonna get edited out.

It occurs to me when you ask that that I should actually try to start talking to myself. The funny thing about the idea of talking to myself is that the thing that scares you is that someone would overhear it, but then you wouldn’t be talking to yourself.

Do you get high every day?
Every day? No. I should, because I drink too much. If got high…

You want to offset it.
Getting high’s better for you, isn’t it? It’s not gonna kill your liver. I suppose if you get high every day, it might have an effect on your edge. I know different people who handle it differently.

Do you think of yourself as an addict?
An addict?

Yeah. You joke a lot about alcoholism.
What I know about conversations about addiction is that if you deny it, then that’s when the real high-maintenance conversations start. Because people who bring it up to you, they’re not really trying to help you most of the time. So if you just say, “Yes, I’m an alcoholic,” it makes the conversation as short as it should be. Because nobody should be talking to you about what you do for longer than, like, five seconds before tending their own garden.

So if someone says, “Are you an alcoholic?” I go “yes.” If someone says, “Are you racist?” I usually go “yes." If someone says “Are you sexist“...?

They don’t usually ask those questions as yes or no questions [laughs] but when the topic comes up, I find it’s a shorter path to people tending their own garden to go “yep!” Because then they either have to help you or move on.

Whatever the ultimate goal of Harmontown is, you seem to strive to accomplish it through the tool of direct honesty, of the show’s confessional nature. What hinders that?
Having too much to say about other people. Because I don’t think that there’s very much that I could say about myself that I would hesitate to say. But I’ve learned through a couple of mishaps that, if I’m talking about other people, my right to swing my fist ends at the end of their nose. I should let them have their privacy and publicity protocols on their own, whether it’s my lover or Chevy Chase or a company that I work for.

I’m like, “Oh crap, now I’m talking about a company I work for. I gotta steer this back out into safer waters because I don’t have a right to talk about them.” That gets in the way of free flow.

There is that part of the movie where, onstage, you picked apart a fight that you and your girlfriend had gotten into. What made you decide that that was worth rehashing?
The director backstage asked the question, “Do you think there’s anything you could tell the audience that would make them stop liking you?” So I went out that night and I tried everything I could think of. [laughs] As an experiment!

[The night of the fight] was also a night when there was a very confessional tone to the show. There was just a lot of crazy stuff happening, and Erin was offended by some of it. So then I just kept moving in that direction.

Erin came out and wanted to talk about it, so we kept talking about it. I brought Erin out for a show (she was brought out for all of the shows) and she came out and said, “Is it wrong of me to feel bad about that thing you said earlier?” So we talked about it. I guess the short answer is that it was her idea.

Have you always been such an open book?
Probably more so than other people, but I definitely brought it up a notch in my 20s. When the blogging culture started to happen, I noticed when I typed things that made me feel bad about myself, and hit submit, and put them out on the public record—whether or not I had five readers on my MySpace blog didn’t really matter—what mattered was that I had divested myself of these cathexes.

I remember, one morning, opening my refrigerator and seeing a mustard bottle. I have no idea why I made the association, but the mustard bottle reminded me of the time I tried to be funny on Ben Stiller’s answering machine and made a complete ass of myself and probably made him hate me forever. I noticed that this was happening all the time. I’m by myself. I’m trying to function as a human being. I’m making a sandwich and I’m thinking about this thing that makes me a bad person. Why am I thinking about it? Why am I feeling bad about it? It already happened.

So I experimented with just going over to my computer and typing, “This is something that makes me ashamed of myself. I once tried to be funny on Ben Stiller’s answering machine. This is the context, this is the story, this is exactly what I did.” And then I just hit enter and it was like I entered a world where I could now look at that mustard bottle. The power of it was so un-ignorable that I kept moving in that direction for the rest of my life.

Do you feel like you are, block-by-block, removing the power these regrets have over you?
Yeah. I made quick work of all the backlog. And then I just adopted a policy of  “If something comes into my life that’s making me feel like I have to think one thing and say another, I’m getting rid of it, I’m walking away from it, or I’m talking about it."

Do you think that that has made you a more actualized person or do you think it has only given you a way to deal with the same problems as they happen?
Definitely probably the latter. I know it doesn’t make me an actualized person, so whatever the latter is, it’s that. I’m finding out in couples therapy—Erin and I just started going to a couples therapist to prepare for marriage—I’m finding out that I’ve had an irrational phobia of therapists for a while. And that you need to actually learn tools from people who study this stuff to actually change your behavior, and it’ll actually change the way you think.

Had you not been in therapy before this?
I’d been to so many therapists; that’s why I lost faith in them. I’d been to like eight in my lifetime, and none of them were getting under the hood and helping me.

I think that the device of looking at things through the eyes of your relationship with another human being, I think that was the big missing component. I want to stay with this woman forever. That’s something I can understand. It’s harder to go into an office and say “Make me sane. Make me a better person.” How do you know how to start? How do you know when you’re finished? And how do you do that without telling someone to change?

It’s got to also be easier to put things in practical terms when you’re talking about your relationship to a different person rather than the way you treat yourself.
Yeah. I think the Midwestern kicks in and you go “I don’t deserve certain things” or “I have to go to a dark place when I write, so I’m not getting rid of this dumbass part of my personality.” But if your go “Oh, it hurts your girlfriend when you do this. It makes you feel better when you do that.” It’s like, “Oh, easy peasy.”

Do you think there is value to the idea that “I need to be depressed to be funny, to be creative”?
I think that’s a lie. I’ve met too many very happy, very ingenious people to believe in that. People have different personalities; they have different crutches; they have different processes. I think there are people that go to a dark place when they create. I don’t think that creation requires darkness.

In the movie, you say that Spencer is the actual hero of the film. I think you call him an “incorruptible spirit." You seem to be positing him against yourself. “I’m flawed and the only thing I can do is try to help and love as many other people to make up for that. Meanwhile, Spencer is this incorruptible spirit.” What is the thing in him that is different from you?
He’s younger. We look at children, we get really mad when one of them gets run over because they haven’t even had a chance to fail yet. When Spencer’s 40, he might have made all the same mistakes I have. First of all, he’s like half my age. That’s one thing right there.

I also think he is different from me. I think he’s got more integrity. He’s less defined by other people’s perceptions. And he’s come into the world and has acquired an actual, standalone, self-contained personality.

You talk a little in the movie about your mom being somewhat physically abusive.
Yeah. It was the 70s.  I always cringe at that part of the movie because I feel like my parents have just about paid enough of a price for anything that they did to me. And they must be so sick of it by now [laughs] because as early as 17 years old I was exploiting their abuse of me onstage.

Do you think that that is a kernel, psychologically, of the thing of which you are attempting to divest yourself, with this ongoing process?
Of course! Yeah. I’m not a blame-your-parents kind of guy, I don’t want to be, but of course. You know, the first relationships that you have with the people that can either give you unconditional love or very conditional love, as most of us get…

Yeah, definitely.  [laughs] That’s the first warpage of your personally, for sure.

I remember you saying on the podcast that you diagnosed yourself as autistic based on an online quiz.
While I was researching autism, I was taking these quizzes. And I was like “Oh, I have something in common with this character that I’m trying to get accurate.”

I definitely don’t think that an online quiz or someone’s gut feeling should be the tool used for diagnosis. [laughs]

You do have a fairly large number of fans with Asperger’s. But what attracts you to that kind of character?
I relate to them. Whether or not I actually have [Asperger’s], the shape of my personality, the condition that I’m in in my life, I relate to people who feel alienated. I relate to people who feel like they’re somehow fundamentally cut off from people on a level that “normal” people take for granted. When I found out that there was such a thing as that, I was like “I know how this feels, looking at the world through Plexiglas, hands up against it, not able to feel on a primal level what other people are feeling.”

Is it anything about the way they communicate? Is there an element of that as well?
I think they’re verbal thinkers. When I have conversations with my fans, we don’t mind staring at the corner of the table and just saying what we mean. It’s like communicating through one channel.

I like fans that are able to just be sincere and say what they’re feeling, because I don’t have that filter, so it’s nice to be able to just talk back and forth with people.

Harmontown, the documentary, is currently touring select cities, often followed by a Q and A. It is available via digital download on November 7. In the meantime, you can listen to the podcast.

Follow Nat Towsen on Twitter.

For the last 20 years, Sook-Yin Lee has been one of Canada's most fascinating and multi-faceted creatives. She got her first big break in 1995 when she was cast as a VJ on Much Music, most notably as the longtime host of the network’s cult alternative music show the Wedge. In recent years, she's best known for being the host of CBC Radio's DNTO, acting in critically-acclaimed features like Shortbus, her performance art, starring in and writing plays.

Her longtime collaborator and friend John Cameron Mitchell directed her in Shortbus, but is perhaps best known for writing and starring in the stage production of avant-garde classic, Hedwig and the Angry Inch in 1998, then directing and starring in Hedwig’s feature film in 2001. In recent years, Mitchell is known for directing Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart in the critically-acclaimed Rabbit Hole, or for his role actting on seasons 3 and 4 of Girls as Hannah Horvath’s zany literary agent.

For the latest episode of The Director’s Canvas, we captured John and Sook-Yin talking shop on a porch in Montreal, where they discussed the differences in the arts landscape now vs when they started, the innovative and non-traditional manner in which they scripted and filmed Shortbus, and the multiple forms for creative expression in 2014.

An Ebola isolation ward in Lagos, Nigeria. Image via Flickr Creative Commons user CDC Global

Medicine has a huge problem, and it’s this: A whole bunch of things exist that simply shouldn’t exist. For example, children in Western schools sick with the measles, or polio in Pakistan, which has seen more than 200 people affected this year alone. The latest and scariest is the large-scale Ebola epidemic still raging in Western Africa.

None of these things should be happening. We have mass immunization programs, and safe and effective vaccines for measles. The same goes for polio, which at one point looked unlikely to survive into the 21st century. Ebola cases are to be expected, but this isn’t a virus that’s really capable of world domination—there’s just no good reason why an epidemic on this scale should ever have happened.

But it did. So why?

In a word: people.

The spread of the Ebola virus in West Africa isn’t a medical problem so much as a social or a governmental problem. There may not be a proven cure for Ebola yet, but as I've written previously, the virus isn’t great at spreading in the first place. As long as you have a well-functioning health system, trained staff, antiseptic environments to work in, basic medical supplies, and a good set of procedures in place, any outbreak can be swiftly contained.

The trouble is, the parts of West Africa where this outbreak flared up have almost none of these things. In fact, you’d struggle to find a worse place for an outbreak to happen if you tried. The virus appeared on the border between Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea—countries ranked 163rd, 183rd, and 179th richest in the world by the IMF, out of 187. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, consider this: In 2006, recovering from a brutal civil war that destroyed most of its hospitals and clinics, Liberia had a grand total of roughly 50 doctors in the entire country. And now they’re dying of Ebola, too.

Aid agencies like Doctors Without Borders aren’t just pottering around offering help and blankets, they’re trying to act as a national health service on a budget of just a few tens of millions of dollars, and the job is basically impossible.

As if that weren’t bad enough, conspiracy theories abound. In August, a clinic in Liberia was attacked by an angry mob chanting, "There’s no Ebola!" echoing a widespread belief that the disease is a hoax. Last week, Newsweek reported that "in September, an article published in the Daily Observer, a major Liberian newspaper, called the Ebola virus a 'genetically modified organism' that was tested on Africans by aid agencies at the behest of the Western governments.”

Sound silly to you? It’s no worse than some of the theories being aired in the West. Rush Limbaugh suggested that Obama wants the virus to kill Americans as "revenge for slavery," while former public figure Chris Brown told his Twitter followers that the virus was a form of "population control."

The factors here are eerily similar to what we saw with polio in Nigeria. A vaccination drive working its way across Africa had left the continent almost polio-free by 2003, until medical staff met resistance in several northern states of Nigeria with large Muslim populations. Officials there had convinced themselves that the vaccine was part of a Western plot to spread AIDS and cancer, their fears not exactly eased by the growing war on terror. The attempt to eradicate the virus failed and Nigeria went on to become an exporter of the disease.   

So are these people crazy? Well, think of it this way: Imagine you’re sitting in your living room and a group of doctors with strange accents and uniforms knock on your door and start waving a needle around. What do you do? Let them in and offer your arm up for a jab, or go and hide your kids under the bed? Exactly. 

That’s before you even consider the history of West Africa. Sierra Leone, where health officials have admitted defeat in the face of the epidemic, has a past that’s basically a five-century catalogue of violence, rape, slavery, and oppression.

The other easy thing to blame is education: "If only that ignorant lot were better educated, they’d understand the error of their ways and accept the vaccine." This type of argument is called the "deficit model," a largely discredited theory that “attributes public scepticism or hostility to a lack of understanding, resulting from a lack of information."

Response volunteers in Nigeria. Photo via CDC Global's Flickr

The problem is, giving people more information hardly ever works. We’ve talked about this in this column before. Last year, the Royal Statistical Society ran a survey in which they found out that the British public is basically wrong about everything. Worse than that, even when they were given the correct answer to questions like, "How many immigrants are there?" they simply refused to believe it. In fact, as the MMR vaccine panic showed, more knowledge can even have the opposite effect: The parents who stopped their children from getting their shots during the scare of the late-90s and early-00s were more likely to be university-educated and to read up about the vaccine from a wide variety of sources. 

In all of these cases—MMR, polio, Ebola—we’ve effectively reached the limit of what modern medicine can ever hope to achieve. You can create the most sophisticated medicines and vaccines in the universe, but none of that matters if most countries can’t afford them—or even afford to train doctors in the first place. (Or, of course, if parents refuse to allow their kids to take them.)

This isn’t a remote problem, either. You can set up all the screening programs you like, but sooner or later some of these plagues will make their way here. Diseases more contagious than Ebola (like malaria) used to be common on our shores and could easily return in my lifetime. Viruses and bacteria don’t really care about human borders. We’re all part of the same global system, and if we don’t work to eradicate these enemies abroad, we can’t be surprised when they eventually find us at home.

The panic in the West isn't proportional to the tiny threat the virus poses here. Still, it’s an important reminder that however well defended we think we are by our medicines, vaccines, antiseptics, and hazmat suits, we will never be safe until we deal with the failings of people. Ebola may not be the Big One, but the next disease could be.

Folllow Martin Robbins on Twitter.

Previously: Did the British Really Spend $7 Billion on Prostitutes Last Year?

Divya Anantharaman at the Rogue Taxidermy Fair. Photo by the author.

When taxidermy became popular during the Victorian era, it was mostly men who hunted, skinned, fleshed, and stuffed the animals. History’s roster of well-known taxidermists include guys like John Hancock (not the American revolutionary), Charles Waterton, Carl Akeley, William Hornaday, and John James Audubon. Few women make the list, the most famous being Martha Ann Maxwell, who is generally recognized as the first female field naturalist.

Unsurprisingly, if you enter your local traditional taxidermy shop today, chances are it’s run by a professionally trained old dude whose family has been in the business for generations. But taxidermy really isn’t the boys’ club it used to be. The number of ladies embracing the art are increasing thanks to the growing genre of alternative—or “rogue”—taxidermy in the past decade.

The term was coined in 2004 by artists Sarina Brewer and Scott Bibus, co-founders of the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists (MART), the only official organization of its kind. “Rogue taxidermy is a pop-surrealist genre of sculpture that uses taxidermy materials, traditional materials, in an unconventional manner,” Robert Marbury, MART’s third co-founder told me. “The attempt is to be as ethical, to reduce and reuse as much as we can of the animal so there’s no waste, feeding back to stewardship and conservation.”

Instead of focusing on pure, perfect mimesis of specimens, rogue taxidermists create abstract works that deliver a more emotional narrative than the true-to-life trophies displayed in hunting lodges or the mounts found in natural history museums. (Some prefer to identify as artists working with taxidermy-related material rather than taxidermists.) Using ethically-sourced materials—i.e., they don't hunt—the genre has adopted a creative, DIY-esque aesthetic. Its methods are easily self-taught or demonstrated in classroom settings, exemplified by the emergence of taxidermy lessons in places like Brooklyn, London, Los Angeles, and Baltimore. Rogue taxidermy is highly accessible to the public—and curiously, it is dominated by women.

“Alternative taxidermy is very female-oriented,” Marbury said. “It tends to be 80/20 in classes.” Marbury has spoken with many international artists working with taxidermy for his new book, Taxidermy Art: A Rogue’s Guide to the Work, the Culture, and How to Do It Yourself. I met Marbury at his book's release party, which was held in conjunction with the Rogue Taxidermy Fair in Brooklyn. Most of the taxidermists selling their hand-made pieces at the fair were women, including Divya Anantharaman, who was previously featured in VICE's documentary Taxidermy Babe.

Amber Maykut, a self-taught taxidermy artist who was selling her work at the fair, told me she converted her Williamsburg apartment’s second bedroom into her “taxidermying room.” A former taxidermy instructor at the Morbid Anatomy Library (now Museum), she recalls having “20 students in the class, and maybe one would be a man.” The Museum’s current teachers, Katie Innamorato and Anantharaman (both also at the Fair), report similar numbers. Innamorato describes welcoming more and more women to her workshops each year and Anantharaman places her average class gender distribution at “95 to 99 percent women.”

Meanwhile, in classic taxidermy the gender makeup remains static. I asked Richard Santomauro, who’s owned a traditional taxidermy shop in New Jersey for 48 years, how many male taxidermists he knows. “Hundreds and hundreds,” he responded. And what about females?

“I know a girl in Philadelphia,” he said. “That’s about the only one I really know of.”

It’s tough to pinpoint the reasons why rogue taxidermy in particular draws more women than men, but its participants have their theories. “It’s probably that there’s no hunting involved, and it’s crafty,” Maykut said. “It’s more like an Etsy-store phenomenon than it is a manly, hunting thing.”

Others attribute the disparity to gender-specific behavioral tendencies: “If you talk to these traditional guys, they all say women have a better attention for detail,” Innamorato said. “And you have to have a lot of patience, and women tend to have a lot more patience than guys.”

Brewer, the co-founder of MART, posits that the reason lies in human evolution carving out established roles rooted in our biological makeup. “Nature has programmed females with the drive to nurture, and programmed males with the drive to kill,” she said. “I believe that’s why we see an overwhelming female demographic within the genre of rogue taxidermy, and mostly men in the world of sportsman’s mounts.”

But even as a few women working within taxidermy gain prominence, their broader contribution to the art form has yet to garner the respect it deserves. According to Marbury, women who share their taxidermy online sometimes receive “rape-y responses” while “men traditionally don’t.”

“Even Scott [Bibus], who does bloody and zombie-type stuff, does not get disregarded in the same way that some of the women are,” Marbury said.

'Mother's Little Helper Monkey' by Sarina Brewer

That stigma against women, however, doesn’t really exist within the real-world business of taxidermy, as competitive as it is. Many female rogue taxidermists who reached out to traditional male taxidermists to learn their skills describe their experiences with them as very positive.

“I think they’re more interested than anything,” Anantharaman told me. “For the most part, people I know who are traditionalists love it because they see it as a new generation of people interpreting this age-old art form in a different way.”

Below, meet some of the women working in alternative taxidermy. For more of their work, check out Marbury’s Taxidermy Art.

Photo by Adam Murphy, Deep Grey Photography

Lisa Black, 32, Brisbane, Australia

VICE: Can you tell me about your work?
It's a reflection of our undeniable technological progression. Seeing animals with carefully integrated mechanical additions encourages us to reassess how we define "natural." By creating beauty within this supposed paradox, I aim to challenge the concept of a world separated into the "sacrosanct" natural and "vulgar" industrial.

What's the coolest thing you've made?
I created a mechanical crocodile some years back and incorporated an antique clock movement inside the body. You could wind the movement up and watch the gears turn, giving it a lifelike quality. It also apparently reminded a lot of people of the crocodile in Peter Pan.

What's it like working in taxidermy as a woman?
I've had my fair share of negative and sexist comments and emails over the years, although it was definitely more at the start of my career. Really early on, I remember someone sent me a photo of my face photoshopped onto this weird baby mechanical body, using the mechanical parts of my sculptures. Although it was intended to be aggressive, it was so badly photoshopped and ridiculous that it made me laugh.

Photo by Charles Howells

Sarina Brewer, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Can you tell me about your work?
Sarina Brewer: When creating my taxidermy sculptures, folklore, mythology, and anomalies of nature are all an influence. Cryptozoology and even urban myths creep into these works. Since my animal materials are recycled, they generally have some sort of imperfection. Often the skins can't be used in one piece because a section is damaged, so I end up with a variety of mismatched leftover bits. This forces me to come up with all sorts of unlikely animal combinations drawn from my own imagination—these are among my favorite works. My materials include discarded livestock remnants, pet trade casualties, naturally deceased animals, donated nuisance animals, and legally collected roadkill.

What's the coolest thing you've ever made?
That would be Mother's Little Helper Monkey [below]: A tongue-in-cheek, autobiographical piece that consists of a winged monkey wearing a fez and guarding a martini. The title is a play on words, a combination of The Rolling Stones’ song "Mother's Little Helper" (about mama needing a little something to relax) and service animals called "helper monkeys," which are trained to be live-in care providers for quadriplegic people. People always ask me if it has anything to do with The Wizard of Oz... No, I just really like monkeys, and I really like vodka.

What's it like working in taxidermy as a woman?
It's true that men working in this realm don’t experience a reaction to their work in the same manner a woman does. Woman are expected to nurture. A woman doing something "disrespectful" to the dead body of some poor, innocent animal flies in the face of social expectations and people (usually other women) blow a gasket. I have received enough hate mail over the years that at one point I joked I would turn them into a book... My all-time favorite was "I'm gonna hang you from a meat hook you shit-bitch." Someone else threatened to run over me and my entire family with her Harley.

But in all seriousness, pioneers like myself who have been at this for many years have taken the brunt of this type of abuse and paved the way for the younger women who are only recently entering the field. It's not anywhere as bad as it used to be, and it's on a noticeable decrease... I think I might be going for a world record right now; I haven’t had any hate mail in almost a year.

Katie Innamorato, 24, New Jersey

Can you tell me about your work?
Katie Innamorato: My work focuses a lot on the cyclical connection between life and death, and growth and decomposition. I have been fascinated by decomposition for a while now. I also look at the idea of remembrance and different ways of creating homage to fallen animals. Right now my work is becoming more story- or fairy tale–like, more narrative than my past works.

What's the coolest thing you've made, or your favorite work?
My favorite piece is my most well known one, my Moss Fox. I have a lot of visions of pieces in my head, and that one seems to have set my mind in motion. I visualized a dead fox seemingly growing mosses and lichen from the inside-out. Everyone says the eyes in that piece really speaks to them and stays in their minds.

What's it like working as a woman in taxidermy?
I have only had one case of harassment and it was actually when I was working on my thesis in college. Some jackass school cop had a stick up his ass about me doing this kind of work at school and actually cornered me in my studio one day, talking down to me about how he did not think I should be doing any of that. He then called in the [Department of Environmental Conservation] and Health and Safety, who all cleared what I was doing as legal and safe... I reported him for harassment, and so did a few other students who overheard the whole thing. Besides that one idiot, I have been lucky.

'Moss Fox' by Katie Innamorato

Kate Clark, Brooklyn, New York

Can you tell me about your work?
Kate Clark: I make conceptual sculptures, fusing the human face and animal body in a lifelike way. My work uses taxidermy as a stepping-stone to start a conversation, but instead of presenting the "hierarchy" of man over animal, as traditional taxidermy does, the viewer sees a balance between man and animal, causing a primal reaction, and forcing the viewer to reconsider our relationship.

What's the coolest thing you've made?
One of my favorite pieces is a black bear I made for a solo gallery show in New York. My sister was the model. I was under the gun to finish the piece. The bear was on a tall pedestal looking down, and when I put the final pin in and looked up at her, it was a magical moment—she had a life-like presence beyond any I’d made before. I wasn’t sure I’d even made her. That piece was a turning point in my confidence and my goals as an artist. It sold, before the show even opened, to a great collection in Switzerland.

What's it like working as a woman in taxidermy?
To be honest, I am a woman working in the field of contemporary art—museums, galleries, and collectors. This field is exceptionally male-dominated also. When I present my work in a museum or gallery I commonly hear viewers talking about the artist as a "he" even though my name is plastered on the wall. But I don’t mind the element of surprise I see when a collector meets me. It’s just one more layer of the "rethinking" that’s part of appreciating my work.

Kate Clark, 'Black Bear,' from 'Taxidermy Art 'by Robert Marbury (Artisan Books). Copyright © 2014. Photo courtesy of the artist

Photo by Jared Joslin

Jessica Joslin, 43, Chicago, Illinois

Can you tell me about your work?
Jessica Joslin: I make hybrid species, integrating skulls and bones with metalwork.

What's the coolest thing you've made?
I'm a huge David Lynch fan. A few years ago, I was invited to participate in an art exhibition to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Twin Peaks. David Lynch and an extraordinary group of other contemporary artists were represented. For that show, I made a great horned owl named Cooper... It has huge silver wings, with brass feathers and menacing cast metal talons. He's crowned with a silver filigree helmet, wrought in the distinctive shape of the great horned owl's ear tufts, which give it its name. His gaze is intense, and it looks as if he is swooping in to capture his prey... if you are the viewer, that would be you.

What's it like working as a woman in taxidermy?
I guess I've been lucky. I do encounter the occasional troll, but for the most part, my interactions have been positive. I'm very grateful for that.

Amber Maykut, 33, Brooklyn, New York

Can you tell me about your work?
Amber Maykut: I make anthropomorphic taxidermy—particularly mice and butterfly mounts. I use repurposed vintage pieces, roadkill, discarded livestock, nuisance animals, feeder animals, pet trade casualties, and donations.

What's the coolest thing you've made? 
I made an anthropomorphic taxidermy piece of a ferret wearing a military outfit, complete with combat boots, beret, and weaponry. The ferret was donated to me as a deceased pet. I’m not sure why I, and many others, are obsessed with him. I guess he just has that certain je ne se quoi. He weaseled his way into my heart.

What's it like working as a woman in taxidermy?
My work has been called cute, adorable, and whimsical just as much as it’s been called sick, immoral, and wrong. Often people assume that I killed the animals, which is where I believe most of the backlash comes from. For me, I always try to take it with a grain of salt. It’s part of the territory of being a female: getting unsolicited praise and criticism. I think a big part of my personal development over the years has stemmed from learning to be brave enough to do whatever the hell I want because I’ll be criticized either way. At least then I know that one person is happy.

Photo by Del Almeida

Hari Nef

Walter Pearce is a photographer who flits around the periphery of high-fashion events, but rarely chooses to take pictures of the fashions on display. At Paris Fashion Week, for example, he took photos of broken ceiling tiles and abandoned champagne bottles with straws in them, and at New York Fashion Week he photographed dirty socks and a footstool. We figured he should catalog his whole life this way, so we asked him to submit a monthly photo collection, which we are calling Walter Pearce Photo Diary, or WPPD (not to be confused with World Peace and Prayer Day). 

This column will include some fashion content, because the kid hangs around fashionable people. But it will also include a lot of pictures of ladders, walls, shoes, and construction sites. Think of this column as a look into the private life of the average American 20-year-old, if the average American 20-year-old lived in New York, hung out almost exclusively with models, and had a dry, constructivist aesthetic to his photography that whiffs of Moholy-Nagy.

Ishmel Brown

David Moses (below)

Spencer Cherasia

Ishmel Brown (below)

Heron Preston

For the next installment of this column, Walter will be traveling to Salem, Massachusetts to shoot photos on Halloween night. SpoOOoooOOoky. 

Follow Walter on Instagram for more dry moments from exciting places, and plenty of selfies. 

Ben Gurion International Airport, Tel Aviv. Photo via Flickr user llee_wu

Turning a corner in the back of an Israeli police van, Michael Bublè’s “Home” began to blare out of the speakers. “Let me go home / I’ve had my run / Baby, I’m done / I gotta go home,” he crooned.

We both wanted to go home, Michael and I, but I’m guessing he was in a slightly better place. I was being driven against my will—along with a bunch of illegal workers from eastern Europe—to the removal center at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport, all for the abominable error of writing about Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territory.

It was a few hours earlier that I’d been told I was persona non grata in Israel. A stern, hard-boiled female officer had tapped her polished red nails on a keyboard in search of incriminating cyber-evidence against me. “What is this?” she barked, turning the screen in my direction. I was sure she could see a manga-style sweat drop falling from my forehead as I read the title of the article she was pointing at.

“The dangers of stone throwing,” it read, my name clearly and undeniably pixelated right there, at the top of a story I’d written about Israel charging some Palestinian teenagers with attempted murder for throwing stones at a settler. My mind raced to make up a credible cover story. A namesake? A childhood mistake? A false step on my way to embracing Judaism? My cover story of spending a third holiday at my (fake) Italian cousin’s place in Haifa was beginning to unravel like the bullshit it was.

“Did you ever write something good on Israel?”

I raced through my brief journalistic career as a freelancer in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, attempting to find a foothold that would save my ship from wreckage.

“Uhm. No.”

With that, I’d won a one-way ticket back home, as well as a three-day stay with Israel’s undesirables in the Ben Gurion removal center. Only back home in Milan did I discover that I’m now banned from entering Israel until 2019.

That latter stipulation is a convenient one for the Israeli government; banning witnesses to the occupation makes it tricky for them to come back and update their international audience on the plight of the Palestinian people. And while every country holds the right to refuse access to foreign nationals, it seems that Israel is extending the concept of “security threat” to anyone expressing oppositional political views. For example, Noam Chomsky—a longtime critic of Israeli policy—was denied access to Israeli-controlled territory in the West Bank a few years ago for what he believed to be political reasons.

A similar thing happened to the former UN special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories Richard Falk, who was denied entry at Ben Gurion airport before being put in a holding room and treated as “some sort of security threat, subjected to an inch-by-inch body search and the most meticulous luggage inspection I have ever witnessed.”

The author's passport and the "Entry Denied" stamp she received

From the moment I was told about my impending deportation, I entered a “security procedure," meaning I was stalked by a border officer who’d presumably been tasked with making sure I didn’t speak to anyone, either in person or on the phone. All requests to call my country's embassy were rejected, and I only had a couple of seconds to let a friend know that I’d been seized before my phone was confiscated.

In a back room of the airport, all my personal belongings were scattered on a metal countertop and examined one by one with what looked like a toilet brush. Needless to say, they did not find any explosive devices. They did, however, come across a very intimidating set of digital cameras and microphones.

All of those belongings were taken from me before I was locked up, only adding to the boredom inherent in spending three days in the same room. Mind you, while staring at the dark, my sweaty back sticking to the plastic bed, I found something to keep my mind alive. Written or carved on the wooden board of the top bed were the testimonials of those who, like me, had been denied entrance because of their sympathy to the Palestinian cause.

Below I’ve paraphrased what I can remember of the markings:

“Jo LT. Here to make theatre w/Palestinians”

“For every ISM [International Solidarity Movement] you send back home, ten more will come tonight”

“Back with Free Gaza. 21 people”

“Israel is very bed”

“I miss the homemade hummus, I miss the way Palestinians use too much plastic, I miss the trip from Nablus to Ramallah enjoying the amazing landscape, I miss the way Palestinians make jokes about their situation and call each other habibi [love]. Ana bahibbak ya Falasteen [I love you Palestine].”

One thing I learned from the experience, beside the fact that Palestinians apparently use far too much plastic, was how little many in Tel Aviv wish to be made aware of what’s happening some 25 miles from their beaches. One of the guards who was hanging around to light cigarettes (lighters are too dangerous a tool to be handed to illegal workers and journalists), raised an eyebrow when I told him why I was being deported.

“We don’t like to think about Palestine,” he admitted. “Israelis living near the border with the West Bank and Gaza feel the situation, but in the north we don’t. I come from Netanya; the beaches there are amazing, and even this summer, during the war, life went on as usual.”

The only advantage of being deported, I discovered, is avoiding the check-in lines. The mini-van from the removal center stopped right under my plane and a border police officer handed my passport to the plane crew, bewildered at the sight of a young, harmless-looking Italian girl being escorted out of the country like a mobster.

Before heading to my seat, I turned to my guard and, raising my hand dejectedly—aware that his mind was already made up—muttered, “Free Palestine.”

Follow Federica Marsi on Twitter

Photos by Natalie Shmuel

We were practicing Capoeira—or perhaps, more precisely, Harrison Tesoura Schultz, the founder of the 420 Fight Club, was practicing Vapoeira. I was kind of flailing around helplessly like a desperate drowning fish. It wasn't just that I lack coordination or a sense of timing. I had come to this martial arts event and public smoke-out wearing heavy jeans that simply couldn't stretch the way Harrison was stretching—unless I pulled them way, way up, Steve Urkel–style. I was also high as fuck, which surely didn't help. 

The first few lessons were easy, the techniques resembling dance moves. I was still pretty bad (I'm a terrible dancer) but Harrison was positive and supportive. He soon had me feeling like I wasn't totally inept, no small feat by any means. It was only when we started with the high leg kicks and sudden ducks that I found myself getting more and more lost.

"All right," Harrison told me. "So next, I'm going to kick and you're going to duck."

Every impulse in my body was telling me to call it quits and fire up another blunt. The weed in my system was making everything happen way too quickly, our limbs flying through the air faster than I could control, or even properly comprehend. A deep, abiding fear—both of getting kicked in the face and of looking like an idiot in front of all these people—was the only thing helping me coordinate my movements. After he'd done the nearly-kick-my-head move a few times from the left and then the right, and instructed me to return the favor, I begged off for a short break. 

My mouth was dry, and I was out of breath. I desperately needed a rest, so I told him I wanted to write down a few ideas. It was a lame excuse he surely saw through (and it was belied by my immediate trip to a nearby hotdog cart to buy a water bottle). I sat on a bench nearby and took a few notes, highdeas all of them, and drank frantically from the water bottle. Was I really supposed to go back to fighting? I was too high for this shit. 

Nearby, an artist named Eve Lesov played an acoustic dub/reggae song that was wonderful and far, far too appropriate, given the circumstances. 

I'd met Harrison a few weeks back, at the Flood Wall Street protests. Funny and easygoing, Harrison is a natural leader, and that morning he was happily hawking his 420 Fight Club to the environmentalists waiting for the march to begin. We didn't talk long—there were a lot of other people angling for his attention—but he told me about a public smoke-out/martial arts class that he conducts every Tuesday night at 6 PM in Washington Square Park. I was immediately interested: the strange incongruence seemed too interesting to pass up. I offered to come by and check it out, and he warned me it was mostly BYO weed. I told him that wouldn't be a problem.

420 Fight Club and its umbrella organization Occupy Weed Street is the project of a few deeply committed individuals with ideas that can sound like a blend of Ron Paul and New Age philosophy. Take, for instance, a pamphlet they pass out that's adorned with a photoshopped black-and-white image of a ripped dollar bill and demands that we "Federalize the Federal Reserve" to "Fix our nation's broken privatized money system." Many of their ideas would be more at home on a Free Republic forum thread than at a pro-weed rally in Washington Square Park.

Finally, after all that (for we arrived at the main event, the Toke of the Day. We stood in a circle, the default weed-smoker formation, while Harrison held a bag of dank bud, a home-grown strain smuggled direct from Chicago. It was really good weed, and soon my hanging-out-and-eating-potato-chips instinct won out as more and more joints were sparked and passed around. 

Then Harrison hurriedly called the group of 20-plus smokers back together. A police van had just rolled up nearby, he warned us. The energy shifted as paranoia set in, but Harrison took back control, and articulated a course of action. The whole point of this gathering was smoking publicly, after all, and running at the first sign of trouble would undermine that goal. 

But as he spoke, I snuck off to a nearby bush to hide the jar of weed I'd brought. I was supportive of their mission, sure, but I wasn't about to get arrested for it. When I got back to the group, Harrison was announcing that we would do one more round of Capoeira, all together this time, before moving somewhere else where we could smoke in peace.

Once the Capoeira started back up, the group's paranoia quickly faded. Our confidence swelled. Coordinated physical activity quickly provided a remedy to the paranoia—at least, until we got to the last part of the lesson, my dreaded kick-and-duck move. 

"Pair off into groups," Harrison instructed us. I really didn't want to do that, but peer pressure compelled everyone around me to pair off, and suddenly there were just two of us left, looking at one another awkwardly.

"So," I asked my new partner, "Do you want to start by kicking, or should I?" He looked at me through squinting, bleary, bloodshot eyes. "Yeah, sure." The guy who'd be swinging his foot at my head was too damn high to comprehend why we might want to decide in advance who would kick and who would duck. "I'll start," I offered.

Whatever marginal skills at Capoeira I'd gained from Harrison earlier in the evening were long gone. I was also way too high to really commit to kicking this total stranger. If I'd been sparring with Harrison again, self-consciousness and embarrassment likely would have inspired some real effort. As it stood, I was far more concerned with avoiding the swinging legs of the stoned participants energetically kicking all around me. Maybe this is why there aren't more 420 Fight Clubs, I mused. After I'd done my kicks, I made some lame excuse and faked taking blurry pictures of the group to escape the trajectory of his shoe. Call me a coward, if you must.

However awkward I felt, the commitment and dedication the group brings to bear is admirable. For people who were this high, they really knew the issues and were able to articulate them clearly, particularly when it came to the Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act (MRTA), the holy grail of the legalization cause in New York that is expected to be put to a vote early next year. (During the event, Harrison dedicated a sizable joint to State Senator Liz Krueger, the MRTA's sponsor, before sparking up.)

Harrison told me that at its core, the project is meant to "dispel myths" about lazy, unmotivated stoners and encourage smokers to "come out of the closet" about their habits. 

Smoking weed in a park isn't much of a politically subversive activity, but the 420 Fight Club isn't really about politics; it's about dismantling the behind-closed-doors marijuana culture we've internalized and accepted. Maybe it seems odd to suck down a few spliffs and practice martial arts in public, but the alternative—smoking weed until you sink into your couch amidst a soundtrack of Phish live albums—isn't just a stereotype, it's boring.

Follow Tim Donovan on Twitter.

Larchmont Village, Los Angeles, CA 2014

If you're like me and enjoy roaming the streets photographing strange and wonderful people, then Los Angeles is heaven. The Grove, Larchmont Village, Santa Monica, Hollywood Boulevard, Beverly Hills, the Valley. It's a suburban wonderland, and I'm in love. You hate open air malls, big hair, bling? That's cool. We have just about everything and everyone else, too. No other city has surprised me on a daily basis as much as this one. It's a street photographer's paradise.

Here are some of my favorite shots of people in LA from the last little while:

Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles, 2014

The Grove, Los Angeles, 2014

Venice Beach, 2014

Seal Beach, 2014

West Hollywood, Los Angeles, 2014

Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles, 2014

Venice Beach, Los Angeles, 2014

Larchmont Village, Los Angeles, 2014

Santa Monica, 2014

Larchmont Village, Los Angeles, 2014

The Grove, Los Angeles, 2014

Larchmont Village, Los Angeles, 2014

The Grove, Los Angeles, 2014

Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles, 2014

The Valley, 2014

The Angeles National Forest, 2014

Hollywood, Los Angeles, 2014

The Grove, Los Angeles, 2014

Santa Monica, 2014

Santa Monica, 2014

Venice Beach, 2014

Santa Monica, 2014

Hollywood, Los Angeles, 2014

Larchmont Village, Los Angeles, 2014

Larchmont Village, Los Angeles, 2014

Santa Monica, 2014

Larchmont Village, Los Angeles, 2014

The Valley, 2014

Seal Beach, 2014

In the first episode of Tripping Out, we take Mac DeMarco to Dawson City, Yukon. If you've never been to Dawson City, picture yourself on the set of an imaginary movie about the Klondike gold rush, flanked by gorgeous scenery and a spectacular river. Everyone is super friendly, they drink their booze with human toes inside the glass, and it's got the same vibe as an adult summer camp. Naturally, Mac fit right in, so watch as he checks out a farm, visits the art school, sucks back a human toe/whiskey cocktail, and plays an amazing acoustic show in one of Dawson's finest venues.

All photos courtesy of Skid Robot

Los Angeles’s Skid Row is littered with cardboard boxes, sleeping bags, and weathered tents that serve as makeshift shelters for the thousands of homeless people who live on the streets. But on a particularly auspicious day on Skid Row, if you find yourself on just the right block, you can sometimes see the Taj Mahal.

That's the work of graffiti artist Skid Robot. His artwork creates a frame around homeless people throughout Los Angeles: a dream bubble emerging from a person passed out in a sleeping bag, a throne behind a man in a wheelchair, a camping scene surrounding a man who lives in a tent. He's painted just over a hundred of these dreamscapes, which he chronicles on his Instagram. I caught up with him to ask about the ethics of using homeless people to make art and what he's trying to achieve with his work.

VICE: How did you come up with the idea to spray paint these scenes around homeless people?
Skid Robot: My roots are in graffiti and I wanted to do something different other than, you know, write my crew or write my name. I was cruising around Skid Row one night with my girlfriend. In all honesty, she was the one who suggested I go out and paint it. After the first one, which was the woman dreaming of the dollar signs, it was like a fire [in me]. So that night, I probably did about four or five.

Did you feel bad about it at all?
At first I felt like a dick doing it—because, you know, I'm somewhat using them as props. But then I realized I should be doing more while I'm out here doing this. So the next day, I went to the 99-cent store and bought snacks and toiletries and made care packages for these people. That way, when I do roll up, I have something to give them.

When you draw around someone, do you talk to them first and ask them about their lives and aspirations to figure out what to paint? And do you get their permission?
It depends on the kind of state they're in. If they're not completely passed out, intoxicated, sleeping in their own urine—then yeah, I'll talk to them. Some are friendly, some aren't. But if someone won't wake up, I'll just go ahead and do the art over them and leave them with a care package. If someone does wake up, I usually talk to them, introduce myself, show them some of the art that I do, and offer them a little bit of money, and of course a care package. And normally they're OK with it, but there's been times when they haven't.

Oh?
I had a woman pull a shank on me, so that got kind of real. I had another guy chase me down the street.

Oh shit. What are the reactions that you normally get to your art?
Most people enjoy it. It's something to be amused by, but at the same time, something to make you think of an issue that you wouldn't normally think of. The reception by most people has been positive, and not many people view it negatively, except for the fact that it's like destruction of somebody else's property.

What about the homeless people? How do they react?
When I offer food and money, they’re usually hella down with it, and cool to participate. Birdman (the homeless man in the above photo), for example—we got him Chick-fil-A that night, and he’d never had it, so to him it was an extraordinary treat. We talked to him, and he shared with us some of his Hollywood stories. It got real personal with Birdman. We came back to talk to him after the first night. We asked if there was anything we could bring him. And what he requested was a lobster. He said he hadn’t had lobster in over 25 years. So me and my [art] partner—his name is Captain Save-a-Homeless—we went to get a lobster for him, came back, and documented the whole thing on film.

And then you just hung out and talked with him?
Yeah, we did. It gets deep. Sometimes people aren’t really looking for money; they’re looking for compassion. That’s the main basis for what I’m doing. This is art for compassion; it's saying that if we can care about those who are around us who are in need, [we should] help our neighbor, help our fellow man.

How do you choose what to paint around someone? I mean, some of the art is as simple as a thought bubble and some of the other ones are these really elaborate dreamscapes.
On rare occasions, someone will have a request. But most people that I do art around are happy just to get food and money to participate. With something more elaborate, it's more from personal ambition. As an artist [I want] to see how much I can pull off in this guerilla art form.

At the same time, you are essentially using homeless people as a prop for your art. How do you respond to criticism that this project is exploitative?
The bigger issue is: Why is this person sleeping there? There’s a bigger injustice taking place there that I’m addressing. I’m painting an image that makes people reflect upon things; makes people stop and look at the homeless person that they’ve walked by a thousand times, and probably never bothered to lend a helping hand.

So you want to physically change the context in which people look at homelessness?
It’s taking something that is nothing and making it something that people enjoy. Not only changing the context in which people look at the issue of homelessness, but also changing how people feel within themselves. By taking something heartbreaking that is overlooked as nothing of importance and artistically transforming it into something with meaning that people can enjoy and be inspired by. Plus, Birdman probably makes like $50 or $60 a day off of people trying to take a picture with the art.

Have you done this kind of art outside of Los Angeles? 
I’ve done some in New York, I’ve done some in Miami, and I’ve done some in Baltimore. That’s part of a new project I’m working on, to try to get around the US and deliver the message.

The medium for your art—street graffiti—is technically illegal. How do you work around that?
This is living art. The art is only there for a matter of a few hours, depending on what time the person wakes up and when they put their tent down. Fortunately for Birdman, the city doesn’t really go there often and buff out the art. But I’d imagine they’ll be there in a week or two. Birdman said that the cops went up to him and told him, “Whoever is doing this, tell him that if we catch him he’s going to jail.” That’s not going to stop me from doing what I’m doing. I doubt that they’re going to set up a sting operation and wait for me.

See more of Skid Robot's artwork here.

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.