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Meeting Hong Kong's Obnoxious iPhone Scalpers

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iPhone scalpers outside the Apple store in Hong Kong's Causeway Bay district. Photos by Michael Grothaus and Jose Farinha

There's a street in Hong Kong that's so packed with people it’s hard to move. Not the areas overtaken by pro-democracy protesters—which are, admittedly, also very busy (though still vaguely navigable)—but Kai Chiu Road, the street just outside the Apple store in the Causeway Bay district.

Here, the walkways are rammed with people camping out from early morning until late at night. But unlike the protesters a 20-minute walk away—who, this weekend, canceled a referendum on what the next step in their campaign should be—they're not here to demand free and open elections. Instead, they're here to make a quick buck flogging brand-new iPhones. In fact, Kai Chiu Road is so full of iPhone scalpers I'd go so far as to say it's the ground zero of Asia's Apple gray market.

When I arrive I spot a mix of Chinese capitalists, some Apple employees in denial, and a number of locals scalping to keep their families fed. “I got a 128 gold six plus for you,” says one of the scalpers within seconds of my arrival. I try to squeeze by him. “Just ten thousand dollars [$1,300].”

“Ten thousand is a rip off,” I say, pointing to the Apple Store not even five feet away: “I can buy it there for eight.”

The scalper just laughs. “Apple is out. We buy them all.”

The woman next to him, another scalper with less inventory, waves her hand in front of me as I pass the first scalper by. She’s got seven iPhones packed into a small plastic crate. She doesn’t speak English, but she knows the price her neighbor quoted me and shows me a calculator that reads “9700."

I smile politely and walk past, spending the next several minutes strolling around Kai Chiu Road in front of the flagship Apple store, watching thousands of dollars being exchanged between scalpers and buyers. Most of the buyers are affluent mainland Chinese tourists in town for some shopping who can’t wait to get the iPhone. In Hong Kong, the new handsets were released on September 21, almost a month before they hit the shops in mainland China—and even then they would be nearly impossible to get for another few weeks.

As I take my own iPhone out to photograph the only single-product street market I’ve ever seen, I wonder how much the whole thing bugs the bosses in the Apple store just a few feet away.

I get my answer pretty quickly.

Until now the black-shirted Apple security guards—likely from a third-party firm—have been passively watching the scalpers from their positions behind the store’s glass facade. But the moment I take my phone out and start photographing what’s in front of me, the guards leave the store and approach me on the street. They stop and stand in front of me to block my photos, as if I’m the one doing something wrong.

I spend a few awkward seconds facing off against the human shield that is the five security guards, before placing my phone back in my pocket and walking into the store, their eyes on me the entire time.

An iPhone scalper standing outside the Apple store

Inside, an Apple employee greets me, and I point through the glass walls to all the iPhone scalpers on the street. “So, that’s a crazy marketplace going on out there,” I say.

“What do you mean?” he replies, staring out the glass walls with me.

“Well, all the people selling iPhones from suitcases,” I say. “There are hundreds of them.”

“We can’t confirm what people sell out of the suitcases,” he says, in plain view of luggage overflowing with iPhones. Suddenly I feel like I’m talking to the Beijing official who, earlier that week, had denied that the number of protesters in Hong Kong were anything more than “a handful."

I have more luck with a second employee, who admits that while Apple is angry about the scalpers and wishes it could do something, “There’s nothing we can do about it—not even remove them from the street—because it's a free market.”

He explains that, for the last several years, Apple has tried to counter the scalpers by instigating an “iReserve” system, which requires Hong Kong customers to reserve their iPhones online before they come into the store to buy them. Each customer must provide both a Hong Kong phone number and government-issued ID, which are entered into a database, allowing them to buy only two phones each.

“The reason so many scalpers have suitcases full of hundreds of iPhones,” the less defensive Apple employee says, “is because they pay their friends, or even hire migrant workers, to register to buy two iPhones.”

Hearing our conversation, another customer interjects, saying Apple needs to do more about the “opportunists” on the street. He says it’s not right that the scalpers are allowed to abuse the iReserve system, while he’s had to wait. Then he asks how long until the gold iPhones are in stock again.

It’s getting late and I want to make it back to the main protest area in time to see the rumored address by Joshua Wong, the 18-year-old student activist who’s credited with starting the Hong Kong protests. Walking past Kai Chiu's endless scalpers, I notice a small yellow ribbon pinned to a woman’s shirt collar. She’s near the end of the street and has only one iPhone to sell, a silver 16GB iPhone 6.

The yellow ribbon is a widely recognized symbol of supporters of the pro-democracy movement. I ask her what she’s doing here; doesn’t she know Joshua Wong is supposed to be addressing the protesters tonight?

She seems apprehensive, then smiles at me.

“I know,” she says.

So I ask her why she’s here trying to sell the lowest-end iPhone model—one that no one really wants—instead of going to hear Wong. Is it the end of a long day of scalping? Is this the last phone she has left to flip?

She explains that not all the scalpers here are simple capitalists. Some, like her, have saved money all year to buy a single iPhone that—if you time it right—can get you double the money you paid for it. That doubling of your money could be worth almost a month’s salary to some in Hong Kong, a city that’s struggling with not only autonomous democracy but a massive inequality gap, where almost 20 percent of the population live below the poverty line.

The 16GB iPhone is the only model she could afford, and I can’t help worrying—with all the other scalpers offering their various higher-end handsets—that she won’t end up making the profit she’s hoping for.

“It’s a gamble,” she says, “but, for now, I need to feed my family.”

Then she peers down the street at all the scalpers with their dozens of iPhones. “My heart is with the protesters, though. I would much rather be with them than here.”

Her frown turns to a smile. “But if I can’t sell it in a few days, at least I kept my receipt.”

Follow Michael Grothaus and Jose Farinha on Twitter. 


Bad Cop Blotter: California Officers Steal Suspects' Nude Photos as a 'Game'

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California Highway Patrol officers are into the whole stealing-nude-photos thing, too. Photo via Flickr user Calvin Fleming

A California Highway Patrol officer has admitted to sending nude or semi-clad photos from suspects’ phones to other officers. It's OK, though, because Sean Harrington, 35, swears that everybody does it. He said this was a game between him and two other CHP officers, and there were apparently “leering texts” between the men in reference to this activity, one Harrington engaged in at least six times.

Several of the owners of these phones were DUI suspects. One was hospitalized when Harrington took bikini photos from her phone, and another gave permission to search her device after a DUI arrest, which was apparently interpreted as a green light for shady behavior.

Harrington is based in Dublin, CA, but reportedly claimed to have “learned” how to snag these photos during his time in Los Angeles. CHP Commissioner Joe Harrow says this is being taken very seriously, a sentiment that was echoed by district chief Avery Browne. This sordid stuff may be just isolated as Browne claims, but then again, if the National Security Agency is looking at your nudes, why wouldn’t cops do the same on occasion?  

Journalist Matthias Gafni with the Contra Costa Times found similar incidents of cops forwarding and saving photos from private phones. In one incident, a woman received a $75,000 settlement after police uploaded a semi-nude photo of her to Facebook, and deleted a photo she had taken of an improperly parked patrol car. None of the incidents resulted in criminal charges, though severals officers were fired (one even later sued in protest).

At the very least, these invasions of privacy cannot be dismissed as legitimate police activity. At worst, they suggest cops are just as creepy as the internet denizens behind the Fappening.

For now, Harrington is on administrative duty, though he confessed to the crimes. Officer Robert Hazelwood, who was also playing “the game,” is not allowed to come back to work. No charges have been filed against either man, but if they are, let’s hope the police union doesn’t rally the usual troops to be outraged on their brave officers’ behalf. And let’s hope they never get work in law enforcement ever again.

On to the rest of this week’s bad cops:

–The Federal Bureau of Investigation claims that Joel Robinson, 32, was making PCP as a narcotics task force burst into his place on October 20. The thing is, the Columbia, South Carolina, raid took place at six in the morning. Is that a reasonable time to be making drugs? Probably not so much. What is not in dispute is that Robinson is in some serious trouble, since he allegedly shot Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent Barry Wilson during the raid. It’s difficult to understane why someone would shoot wildly knowing law enforcement was at their door and then surrender after only one officer went down. But 6 AM raids just keep right on going, no matter the cost to police or homeowners.

–Speaking of early-morning raids, Shane Bauer at Mother Jones recently compared the cases of Marvin Guy and Henry Magee, both recipients of police wake-up calls in the last year—each resulting in dead cops. Magee, a white man, still has drug charges hanging over him, but a grand jury declined to indict him for causing the death of Deputy Adam Sowders last December. Meanwhile, Guy, a black man who endured a narcotics raid by Killeen, Texas police, has a potentially fatal capital murder charge waiting for him. There may well be other factors here, but Bauer correctly notes cops kicked in two different doors at about 5:30 AM, and it sure as hell seems like only the white guy got to successfully plead self defense after feeling threatened.

–At some point in October, deputies in Stettin, Wisconsin—population 2550—dispatched 24 heavily armed police in an armored military vehicle to enforce a fine owed by a 75-year-old man. According to Roger Hoeppner’s attorney, roadblocks were put up that prevented him from reaching his client. Hoeppner was cuffed and taken by Marathon County deputies to the bank, where he agreed to pay the $80,000 he owed to the city because of zoning and other nonsense fines. OK, so he was a cranky old man who was supposed to pay up. But this was overkill, right? No way, according to Sheriff's Captain Greg Bean. The 24 deputies were there to haul away some of the stuff Hoeppner was going to sell to pay his fines, and using the military vehicle is standard procedure. Best of all, Hoeppner was known to be “argumentative." Just another day at the office for American law enforcement.

–Police in Tracy, California, tried to take away Troy Stevenson's phone on October 17 when he filmed a SWAT training operation going on across the street. Officers Ramirez and Officer Sisneros also tried to pat down Stevenson, attempted to seize his pocketknife, and basically threatened him with arrest.

–The two-month-old manhunt in eastern Pennsylvania for accused cop-killer and survivalist Eric Frein is starting to annoy some people, even politicians. Reportedly, the roadblocks, evacuations, and other dramatics in response to the September 12 incident during which Frein allegedly killed one Pennsylvania state trooper and injured another is costing at least a million bucks a week. Halloween has been canceled for the kids of Barrett township. Worse still, Fox News reported on October 18 that Frein was probably spotted by a woman outside the road-block perimeter. Innocent people are being harassed, police are flipping out, and their man still slipped away. This could go on a while.

–According to a lawsuit filed last Monday, in October 2013 an Austin police officer fired four shots at a woman as she was being chased by a drunken crowd. Gwendolyn Daniels says she was just getting off late from her job as a waitress when a bunch of douchebags from another bar followed her to her car. She made enough noise that she attracted the attention of Austin Police Officer Robert Krummel, but instead of helping her, he decided to open fire. Daniels was then tackled by the APD, arrested and cuffed and interrogated for hours. Her car was impounded for 10 months. No charges were filed, and Daniels is—quite rightly, if these ridiculous allegations are true—suing Krummel, as well as the city of Austin.

–On October 15, a "conservative activist” was booted off of Broward College after she tried to talk to students about how “Big Government Sucks.” The security guard at Broward—which was hosting an awkward Florida gubernatorial debate— told 22-year-old Lauren Cooley she needed to go to the “free-speech zone” or else produce identification. Cooley, filming all the while, decided she would rather leave, but as she was doing so, two police officers showed up to demand that she show ID (which she claimed to have left in her car). The cops reiterated that she couldn’t talk to students. The off-limits youth had just been watching a political debate on their campus, yet security and police threatened this woman with arrest because she dared to talk politics.

–VICE’s good Cop of the Week is so very retro. Famed New York Police Department (NYPD) whistle-blower and guy who got shot by a drug dealer in real life Frank Serpico—portrayed by Al Pacino in the 1973 film—had an essay in last week’s Politico Magazine. His headline is “The Police Are Still Out of Control," which sounds about right. Since his own saga led to a commision on corruption in NYC law enforcement, Serpico says “too little has really changed." Given the wave of brutality we've seen these past few months and the lack of accountability for cops in New York and elsewhere, it's hard to argue with the guy.

Follow Lucy Steigerwald on Twitter

I Was a Psychologist at an Ebola Treatment Center in Liberia

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Aid workers preparing to enter Ebola treatment unit (Image via CDC Global)

Dr Theresa Jones, 26, a clinical psychologist from Bristol, has just spent a month working in Medecins Sans Frontieres’s Ebola treatment center in Monrovia, Liberia. She was already living in Liberia when the Ebola outbreak began. While working for MSF she managed a psychosocial team of three who were dedicated to looking after MSF’s team of national and international staff. We spoke to her about her typical day at the center.

As you can imagine, working with Ebola and its victims is incredibly tough. As yet there is no cure for the virus and around 70 percent of those who catch it will die. All MSF’s medical team can do is provide supportive care to give people the best possible chance of beating the virus—the hard work is mostly done by a patient’s own immune system.

It’s so easy for incredibly skilled doctors and nurses, who are used to being able to perform miracles, to start seeing their work as futile. A big part of my job is to give people working on the outbreak positive reinforcement about their work. Doctors need to know that every time they do something that may seem small, like giving a patient a cup of water, a reassuring word or taking the time to ask questions, it is valuable. I see my job as helping my colleagues—from HR staff to the burial team—to find what it is they need to keep on going.

Every day is full-on. We have a morning meeting at 7 AM and I tend to wear the same type of clothes every day, as dictated by MSF’s strict hygiene rules. I usually wear jeans, because you have to wear tight trousers that don’t touch the floor of the site, and then long socks, because when you’re wearing the regulation Wellingtons MSF gives out you can’t let your socks roll down. If you work in the high-risk zone with patients who have Ebola, you have to wear personal protective equipment (PPE), including a “spaceman” suit, which makes it much more intense. You work in a buddy system, and have to watch each other dress and undress, and keep a constant eye on your partner to make sure nothing happens that could put them in danger.

Ebola aid workers in their PPE gearing up to enter an Ebola isolation ward. Image via CDC Global

The team has breakfast during the meeting and we talk about what happened in the center yesterday: how many people were discharged, how many died, how many beds we have today and how many patients we will let in.

After the morning meeting, I take the minibus to the hospital site. The hospital is an outdoors complex and the patients and activities are held in a series of tents. We’re expanding the hospital all the time to let more people in, so the teams are constantly trying to build new tents and create more space.

The center is divided into high- and low-risk zones. There are different levels of hygiene as you go through each stage, and you have to regularly wash your hands and feet and clean your boots as you move around the site. I don’t go into the high-risk zone, though my colleagues who provide psychological care to the patients do. I tend to walk around the low-risk zone as my workstation is on the edge of the site. I wash my hands in chlorine more than 30 times a day.

My staff psychosocial support team is based in a tent on the site so that people can easily drop in for a session. If there is a particularly difficult incident that day, we can have a group session afterwards. During the day there are always meetings with other supervisors where staff wellbeing issues are raised. We have found that many of our national staff are facing problems back home: Some have been evicted from their houses, some even outright rejected by their communities because they are health workers. So, my team also runs workshops where we invite community and family members in to talk about the center and the safety procedures we have in place for our staff.

We all go back to our base for lunch. I make sure I keep eating as I’m running around all day. Lunch is usually local-style fish and green vegetables. Usually I have meetings with HR and admin to make sure I’m addressing any issues with staff. My focus tends to be around anything that can increase optimism, hope, humanity and dignity in the center.

The symptoms of Ebola include vomiting, diarrhea, and sometimes bleeding. It is a disease that can so easily take away a person’s dignity, which is something our wider psychological team is always trying hard to reinstate.

As my job is pastoral, I have to be “on” all the time. At the end of the day, lots of people feel guilty about leaving the site, but in some way I can escape this by being available in the evening if people want to come and speak to me about anything that is bothering them.

I went from living in Liberia earlier this year, feeling very frustrated by the lack of action, to coming to the treatment center where there is such a dynamic atmosphere. People are working so hard—it’s very inspiring to see. But the flipside of that is the incredible pressure of MSF being among the only organizations working on the outbreak. For some time this meant that we had to turn people who we suspected of having Ebola away from our treatment center. Although we were running our biggest-ever Ebola center, we simply didn’t have enough space for everyone that needed it. We were and still are expanding as fast as possible, but we can’t go any quicker without making the conditions inside dangerous for our staff.

To have to turn people, who are often unwell and desperate, away from the treatment center is terrible. The only thing we can give those people is a family protection and home disinfection kit—which contains chlorine, soap, two buckets, gloves, a gown, and a sprayer—so at least their family can have some protection from also catching Ebola. But it is in no way a perfect solution and does not allow them to care for their family member at home. In total, we have 50,000 of these kits to give out to high-risk groups and communities in Monrovia.

Ebola virus budding from a cell. Image via the NIAID.

There are around 60 international workers and 600 Liberian staff at the center. When I talk to the national staff, they say that they want to do something for their country. We have one young man who drives our survivors home. His shift starts at 2 PM because we don’t tend to discharge anybody in the morning. Even so, he always comes in at 9 AM just to help out, even though he isn’t being paid—he just wants to be a part of the response, to feel like he is helping.

To cope with situations that seem quite hopeless you need a voice of hope and humanity. Medics can be reminded that, in the face of a situation that looks hopeless, small acts of kindness mean a great deal. Remembering that a decent proportion of our patients do survive can also help our medics. To give patients and staff a visual reminder of this, we set up a whiteboard where survivors can leave a colorful handprint as they leave the hospital. For me, handprints are amazing things, because in Liberia people are constantly being told to wash their hands or not to touch anyone, so it’s a powerful symbol. Some of our teams, like the burial team, only deal with the victims of Ebola. They only see death and dying—not our victories and those who survive. They especially need to see that we are making an impact.

Shaking hands is of huge importance in Liberia. Friendships are formed between the doctors and patients, and when a patient that they got on with particularly well is discharged, you see the medical staff running over to shake their hand. It really creates a wave of positive feelings when you see this.

There is definitely still a stigma around being a survivor. People who live often go home to an empty house because everybody else in their family has died. Communities are often suspicious of them and don’t believe they have recovered from the virus.

We usually leave the site about 6:30 PM, and then we have a number of meetings that are usually finished by about 7:30 PM—not too late, but by then your day has been very full. Generally, people are very close. In the evening, we sit together, chatting to one another, having a beer, and eating. At the end of the day most people are so tired that they want a shower, to chat with a friend on Skype, and just go to bed.

I’ve been back in the UK for two weeks and it’s been great seeing my friends and parents—they’ve been so supportive and though they’re obviously worried, I believe they trust me to look after myself and that they’re proud of me. 

I wouldn’t say I was brave. Or, maybe it is bravery, but the most important thing in my mind is to look objectively at the risks and decide whether or not you think you could help. But going back to Liberia doesn’t scare me—I hope I can make a difference. I definitely want to try.

Follow Helen Nianias on Twitter

In Defense of 'The Death of Klinghoffer' and Art That Takes Risks

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Its not easy to get New Yorkers to care about the opera.

On October 20, though, 400 people gathered outside the Metropolitan Opera in Manhattan to protest the opening of John Adams's The Death of Klinghoffer. The opera is based on the brutal murder of Leon Klinghoffer, who in 1985 was shot and thrown overboard in his wheelchair by Palestinian Liberation Front members who had hijacked the cruise ship upon which Klinghoffer and his wife were celebrating their 36th wedding anniversary.

Since it first opened in 1991, the opera has drawn charges of anti-Semitism. But this week's protests looked more like attempts at censorship. At a rally several weeks before opening night, City University of New York trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld said protesters would keep returning “until the set is burned to the ground.”

Last Monday, protesters sat in donated wheelchairs in reference to the title character's disability. They shouted “shame!” and waved signs announcing “Ebola 'Art' is Deadly” and asking if Peter Gelb, the Met's general manager, was taking “Terror $$$.” Another sign absurdly compared the PLO, the umbrella organization to which the Marxist PLF belonged, to the Islamic State. The militant, far-right Jewish Defense League passed out recruitment flyers.

Former mayor Rudy Giuliani led the protest, which is unsurprising given his record of attempting to censor art. In 1999 he threatened to cut $7 million in subsidies to the Brooklyn Museum unless it canceled an exhibit of young British artists. He called the work “sick stuff” and told the press, “You don't have a right to government subsidy for desecrating somebody else's religion.”

Despite protests, the production of Klinghoffer goes on. But the Met dropped plans to show the opera in movie theaters worldwide as it usually does with its operas—a decision Gelb said was made to avoid inciting anti-Semitism in Europe. 

According to Michael Tracey, a journalist (and VICE contributor) present on opening night, no protesters he spoke to had seen Klinghoffer, and I must admit I'm in the same boat. My gnat-like attention span keeps me from appreciating opera. But the rhetoric at the protests reminds me of reactions against another famous and scandalous work of art: The Satanic Verses.

In 1988, before the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa forced author Salman Rushdie into nine years of living under police protection, before the attacks on those involved in the book's publication and sale, British Muslim groups protested The Satanic Versesburning copies of it in the towns of Bradford and Bolton. Like the protesters at Monday's opera, most had never read it.

Some of the language used at protests against that novel and the protests against Klinghoffer was identical. Rushdie was denounced as an apostate; Wiesenfeld denounced to the opera's librettist, Alice Goodman, as an “apostate.” Opponents of the respective works also make the mistake of ascribing statements made by characters to the authors themselves. “Death of Klinghoffer contains outrageous libels stating that Jews cheat, exploit, pollute virgins, defame, break laws, are idolaters, and get fat from the poor.” says the website of the STOP (Stop Terrorist Opera) Coalition, an organization co-founded by Wiesenfeld. These lines are in fact spoken by Klinghoffer's murderers. Similarly, in denouncing the Satanic Verses, critics took lines spoken by unsympathetic characters who persecute early Muslims and assumed they reflected Rushdie's own beliefs. You might as well protest George Lucas for his pro-Empire views.

Neither The Death of Klinghoffer nor The Satanic Verses is a simple work. They offer no pat lessons. They choose humanism over ideology. This may be what most enrages those who want to erase them. Along with their fury that Klinghoffer acknowledges Israel's 1948 expulsion of Palestinians, the STOP Coalition is inflamed that the opera shows the “humanity of the terrorists,” To them, this is romantic glorification, propaganda for head-choppers, not an attempt to understand.

Britain's early protests against Rushdie's work took place against a backdrop of brutal anti-immigrant racism—racism that Rusdhie himself worked to organize against. This summer, some Europeans used pro-Palestinian protests as a pretext for vile anti-Semitic attacks. But the actions of racists can't be used as excuses to censor unrelated art.

I asked Rushdie about the protests against The Death of Klinghoffer, and he told me, “It should not be necessary in the land of the First Amendment to defend the right to free speech of people who say things you don't like, or who say things in a way you find objectionable. This is a serious work by serious people and it must have the right to be heard.

“There is indeed a rising tide of anti-Semitism in the world today and it is right to draw attention to that and to protest against it. The Metropolitan Opera, however, is not the enemy, nothing like the enemy. These efforts are not only misdirected. They do a disservice to the cause they claim to be defending.”

A glance at the organizations behind STOP Coalition show groups that are hardly marginal, including The Zionist Organization of America and the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Groups like these enforce a sort of unofficial censorship policy against critics of Israel in the US, as Wiesenfeld did in 2011 when he got the City University of New York (where he is a trustee) to deny the award-winning playwright Tony Kushner an honorary degree because of his pro-Palestinian views. Such people think that it's perfectly fine for Wiesenfeld to tell the New York Times that Palestinians are "not human" because they "worship death for their children," but that attempts to humanize Palestinians—as Klinghoffer does—are beyond the pale.

Use such language for long enough, and it manifests in reality. It's not surprising that, this summer, some Israelis threw picnics to watch bombs fall on the trapped population of Gaza.

At its best, art counters this dehumanization, reminding us of the people behind the names and numbers of the dead. Leon Klinghoffer's murder was an atrocity, and Adams's opera is an attempt to grapple with that atrocity. It honors Klinghoffer as an individual. 

Now, art does not exist in a realm of pure spirit. We artists are shaped by the world in which we live, and despite our best efforts, we're left with the residue of its preconceptions, privilege, and fear. Art is not exempt from political critique.

But what sort of politics does one have, and what sort of world will they make, if they demand that their beliefs consume everything? We must leave space for irreverence, for non-didacticism, for hard questions, for the humanity of everyone —especially those we hate, and those we think hate us back. If art is not allowed to explore the complexity of killers, it is little more than a moralistic cartoon of the kind forced on children. And even children reject that shit.

The STOP Coalition's website's header graphic is the silhouette of a man in a wheelchair, splattered in blood. “After the ISIS beheaded American journalists, we should not let the Met humanize and glorify the Palestinian terrorist killers of disabled American Leon Klinghoffer!” their site says. The group reportedly plans to keep protesting.

Let them. The streets belong to everyone, even censorious assholes. But their statements must be called out for what they are. They are reflexive. They are ugly. They are anti-art. Most insultingly, they don't trust the audience. If art is not longer allowed to explore darkness, we have nothing left but commercials and propaganda. Art that risks nothing isn't worth the name.

Follow Molly Crabapple on Twitter.

Unearthing Jill Reiter's Lost Riot Grrrl Film

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Kathleen Hanna and Jill Reiter in In 'Search of Margo-Go'

The birth of the riot grrrl movement in the 1990s saw an uprising of politically charged punk bands like Bikini Kill, Huggy Bear, and Bratmobile, who addressed issues like sexuality, domestic abuse, and female empowerment within a previously male-dominated scene with a DIY, fuck-you fashion. The movement largely took shape on the West Coast, exploding out of cities like Olympia and Seattle, but soon found its NYC incarnation, with burgeoning filmmaker Jill Reiter there to document it all. 

Reiter made a name for herself with early films like Birthday Party and Frenzy, which made the rounds on the underground and queer film festival circuits in 1993. Her next project was to be In Search of Margo-Go, a vibrant, improv feature film starring herself and Bikini Kill frontwoman Kathleen Hanna, complete with a cameo from Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon.

The film was never finished, and as such has become a lost riot grrrl gem—that is, until now. I recently had the honor of teaming up with filmmaker Kanchi Wichmann as well as ex-riot grrrl and journalist Val Phoenix to unearth what remains of Jill's film and to show it for the first time ever at this year's Fringe! Film Festival, alongside Abby Moser's Grrrl Love and Revolution and Michael Lucid's Dirty Girls

I caught up with Jill ahead of the screening to talk about her memories of the time and her influences in filmmaking.

VICE: Hey, Jill. How did you become a filmmaker? What was your impetus? 
Jill Reiter: It was definitely in the spirit of punk: just pick up an instrument or a camera and make a film without any real training. I was never really into video—more into the look of film. I was intrigued with that format, so I bought a little Super-8 camera at a flea market.

At first I was just documenting friends and bands, but then started making weird little queer films starring all of my friends. I took classes here and there at places like the Millennium Film workshop in NYC. I loved the indie/no-wave NYC filmmakers of the 70s and 80s and the new queer cinema of the early 90s. Isaac Julian'sYoung Soul Rebels, with its punk/soul/queer themes, was just fucking brilliant. 

A scene from Frenzy

You're probably best known for your short film, Frenzy. Can you tell us about that?

Frenzy is a great time capsule of the people and energy happening in the NYC quee/rpunk/riot grrrl scene in the early 90s. It was supposed to be a funny take on the rock 'n' roll groupie phenomenon, turning the Rolling Stones' film Cocksucker Blues on its head, with women throwing bras and rushing the stage for other women and culminating in various seedy aftershow moments.  

Everyone involved in the movie was in riot grrrl NYC at the time. The cinematography in the movie is largely by Alex Sichel, who had come to riot grrrl originally to research and write for her feature film All Over Me, but stayed and became a good friend and mentor of mine. Alex died this year of breast cancer, which is just absolutely terrible. She was a rarity in the film world—kind, non-competitive, and super encouraging. 

The funniest screening of Frenzy was when a few of us in riot grrrl were invited to Princeton to show our films. The audience was so staid and retrograde, they literally couldn't handle what feels like a pretty mild film by today's standards. A woman came up to me after the film, spluttering, and said, "It was so… violent!" I think she was talking about a ridiculous throwaway scene I used for the credits, where a few of the cast members are fake sawing at a male mannequin where his genitals would be.

Oh, dear. How did the project In Search of Margo-Go come about? 
Kathleen Hanna was visiting NYC and staying with me in my East Village sloping-floor, roach motel pad. I had met Kathleen in ‘92 at a Bikini Kill gig in NYC, and hung out with her that summer at the Riot Grrrl Convention in DC. We kept in touch via letters and she would crash with me sometimes when she passed through New York, which was fairly often.

We started talking and bonding about our new wave pasts, how it was this incredible lifeline to another world if you were isolated in a small town back in the 80s. Just for fun we decided to dress up "new romantic," take some photos, and go out dressed like that to see what reactions we would get.

I think one day we were talking about how weird it was that one of my iconic heroes, Margo-Go—the original bass player from the punk era Go-Go's (who started the band in 1978)—was living a few blocks from me in a legal squat. She got kicked out of the band because she wanted to stay more true to their roots and their original sound. She started to symbolize something for me, so the film really just started with that title.

Who else was involved in its making?
We had a large swath of people involved in the queer punk scene of the time cast in the movie as extras or helping in production. It started with Kathleen and me. Then I asked Iraya Robles (who had done a zine called Marks in Time: The Very Early Go-Go's 78-'80 with Eden Felt, and was in the queercore band Sta-Prest) to co-write the script with me. It became a San Francisco–NYC production and we shot on both coasts.

Kathleen and Jill in In Search of Margo-Go

Why did you decide to set the film in the 80s new wave scene, as opposed to the 90s riot grrrl here and now?
I had a strong attachment. I'm always grateful that I caught the tail end of NYC's golden era of nightlife, when 14-year-olds could get into DanceteriaAnn Magnuson, John Sex, Klaus Nomi—those people were hugely inspiring to me, and I was heartbroken that that era had ended.

I think the aesthetic, and the fact that the lead characters get stuck in the early 80s, was a desire for those of us working on the film to go back to a time we were really excited by. I was sick of how monochrome punk had become, I missed the fucking color of the late 70s/early 80s. The original, woefully undocumented punk scene of the West Coast was super weird, colorful, and arty.

There was also a crazy amount of androgynous genderfuckery happening in the new romantic scenes and new wave in general. Many queer people, women, and non-white people were heavily involved. When I was in high school and coming out as queer, there were all these brilliant new wave artists who were making these super anthemic queer manifesto albums, like Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Soft Cell, the Smiths, and Bronski Beat. Then things changed with the advent of hardcore punk, and that's more the milieu I grew up in—very macho with a regimented punk uniform and less playful.

What were your filmic influences? 
I was massively influenced by the film Liquid Sky, which created its own completely stylized universe and musical world. I had seen it when it first opened in NYC in '83 as a teen, and it became my Rocky Horror Picture Show—watched and memorized. I loved the deadpan, droll delivery, and, of course, the insanely colorful fashion and airbrushed new wave makeup.

Many films of the same era—Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains, Smithereens, Times Square—had women as writers or directors. We felt lucky that all these underground films, most of which hadn't had a major release in the US, had ended up being shown on late night TV when we were teens on a show called Night Flight, which also showed clips from bizarro West Coast bands on the LA show New Wave Theatre. We wanted to create a cult film for our generation, to document and leave something behind for the next set of weirdos to find. 

What were your biggest challenges in making In Search of…? 
Making it in a punk rock fashion, with many people with no film experience, seems a tad crazy in retrospect. A whole day was recorded on the Nagra sound recorder at the wrong speed—chipmunk voices! It was also stressful with a lot of women going through a carnival ride of mood swings. We had no money to pay anyone, and, eventually, just no money to finish what had started as a teeny Super-8 (then 16mm project), which was blown up into an underground feature film. 

The film was never finished, but we're showing some of it now. What does that mean to you?
It's great that what was shot so long ago is resurrected after all this time. So many people helped on this film, and Kathleen was a total trooper through several long shoots and helped get some early funding to develop all the pricey 16mm. I'm glad that this is getting a special screening and also excited that some bits from the feature script that has languished for 20 years will get a night out! It's a time capsule of the queerpunk 90s, one that pays homage to the queer underground 80s.

Thanks, Jill.

Frenzy and In Search of Margo-Go will both show at Fringe! Film Fest in London on the November 8 as part of A Dyke in the Pit: A Day of Queer Grrrl Power.'The event will feature a Q&A with Jill Reiter and some of her contemporary riot grrrls, as well as live music from London three-piece Skinny Girl Diet. 

For tickets, visit the Fringe! Film Festival website

Follow Milly Abraham on Twitter.

Check Out the Trailer for 'A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night'

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Writer and director Ana Lily Amirpour's debut feature film, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, just premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and it's without a doubt the best Iranian vampire noir you'll see all year. The film, which VICE Films is helping to distribute worldwide, is a brooding, minimalist twist on the classic vampire flick—Amirpour's bloodsuckers comb their hair back with Pomade, drive muscle cars, and wander Iranian streets at night.

Wanting to shoot an Iranian film but knowing the near-impossible hoops a filmmaker has to jump through in Iran, Amirpour found a desolate oil town in California, transformed it into a fictional Iranian locale called Dark City, and got to writing. As she began to flesh out the script, Amirpour started imagining backstories for her vampires and their world that she knew would never make the cut. Those stories became Death Is the Answer, a graphic novel companion that was released concurrently with the film's premiere.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night opened to overwhelming critical praise. The New York Times's resident movie buff, A.O. Scott, called it a "rock 'n' roll Persian feminist fable," and the Hollywood Reporter fawned over the "moody and gorgeous" film.

The movie feels like what would happen if Iranian New Wave director Abbas Kiarostami decided to remake a spaghetti Western but got bored during pre-production and opted to shoot the whole thing like a hardboiled detective film. And then threw in some vampires. It's fantastic.

We're really excited to share the trailer with you—check it out above.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is out in theaters on November 21. Check out the official website or follow the film's Twitter and Facebook for more info and updates.

Quebec Is Also Wrestling with Police Violence and Impunity

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Hood of a police vehicle in Montreal. Photo via the author.
Last week, as tension mounted in Ferguson, Missouri over a recently leaked autopsy that supported the police account of the shooting of Michael Brown, Montreal was also coming to grips with issues of police violence and impunity as developments in two recent police-related deaths in Quebec thrust the issue back into the spotlight.

The Justice for Victims of Police Killings Coalition held its fifth Annual October 22 Commemorative Gathering & Vigil. The Coalition Against Repression and Police Abuse—created in the wake of the death of 18-year old Fredy Villanueva in 2008—has documented hundreds of people killed in police-related incidents in Canada since 1987. Two of the most recent additions are Alain Magloire and Guy Blouin, whose cases sparked controversy for the questionable handling by police.

On October 16, Radio-Canada released video footage obtained from surveillance cameras showing the last minutes of Alain Magloire's life. Magloire was in the throes of a mental health crisis when he was shot to death by a Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) officer on the morning of February 3, 2014.

The last segment of the footage shows an erratic Magloire surrounded by at least four SPVM officers—three of which are holding him at gunpoint—on a street in downtown Montreal, where he was finally shot down.

Police had been called to the scene because Magloire was being aggressive and was armed with a hammer. Radio-Canada also released a recording of police radio communications, where you can hear the cops calling for a Taser.

Asked if the officers involved had tried to call one of the units that specialize in mental health interventions in Montreal such as Urgence Psychosociale-Justice (UPS-J), SPVM communications officer Mélanie Lajoie said she couldn’t comment on specifics of the case as a coroner's public investigation has been ordered.

To shoot or not to shoot?

The tragic shooting is not the first time the Quebec’s coroner’s office has ordered a public investigation into the police-related deaths of people with mental health issues, the past results of which have indicated a serious need for better handling of similar situations. In a December 4, 2012 report about the death of Mario Hamel and Patrick Limoges, coroner Jean Brochu noted: “Several events in recent years indicate that a major effort is needed to avoid a situation like that of June 7, 2011 deteriorating to the point where there is no alternative left but to use a firearm against a person who is visibly in an unstable mental state.”

The coroner recommended that more mobile specialized intervention teams—like UPS-J which is trained to intervene in emergency mental health crisis situations—be deployed to support police officers in dealing with homeless people and people with mental health issues or drug addiction.

“Firing at a criminal who is himself firing at the police or another person is one thing. Firing a gun at a person who is obviously mentally unstable is something else,” the coroner states in that report, which recommends, amongst other things, that more officers and patrol cars be equipped with non-lethal weapons such as Tasers.

Even so, the non-lethal nature of Taser guns—or similar stun guns—remains debatable. Truth not Tasers has listed over 850 cases of Taser-related deaths in North America, a list which “does not include persons who also were shot; or where a gun was mistaken for a Taser; or where a shock weapon was used by a criminal during commission of a lethal crime.”

The 2012 coroner's report also pointed to internal police firearm qualification documents that show that Montreal police officers had the worst results in firearm aptitude, despite the fact they're involved in the greatest number of shootings. According to the report, "The [SPVM firearm] certification rate has dropped from about 98 percent in the early 2000s to 43 percent and 56 percent in the last two years of the decade… In addition, the absenteeism rate for target training sessions...is around 20 percent. And since lack of shooting qualification doesn't seem to produce any effect internally, some officers...may be tempted to take things lightly."

For the public, the consequences of this lack of small firearms qualification can be fatal, as in the case of Hamel and Limoges, where the latter was hit and killed by a stray bullet that had missed Hamel and ricocheted against a wall. The cop who killed Magloire shot no less than four bullets. Any one of those could have missed and hit the officer who at the time was on the ground dangerously positioned at Magloire's feet—or even ricocheted against the wall behind Magloire, possibly hitting a passer by.

The footage from the events that cost Magloire his life further raises serious questions about tactical aspects of the operation. Police analyst and former cop, Stéphane Berthomet, says there was no immediate threat to the officers when backup arrived on the scene: “Magloire was backing away from the officers, he was going back towards the sidewalk.”

“There were two bad decisions made in a two-second timeframe,” he says. First, the driver of a police car decided to run strait into Magloire. Second, an officer ran towards Magloire and tried to grab him off the hood of the moving car, making himself vulnerable and isolated.

According to Berthomet, “those were two bad operational decisions.” When the officer fell to the ground—at that point within reach of Magloire's hammer—one of his colleagues decided to fire his gun. It could reasonably be argued that the officer shot Magloire to protect his colleague, but the decision of the driver, which created the whole situation, remains questionable. “I don't understand why he had to use his car under those circumstances.”

But car-related incidents involving police are all too common: no less than 90 events have been investigated since 1999 across Quebec where people have been killed or seriously injured following a police car chase, according to official Public Safety Ministry statistics.

The latest case was that of Guy Blouin, a cyclist who died after being hit by a police cruiser in Quebec city last month.

Guy Blouin’s death: an “accident”

Speaking on Blouin’s death, SPVQ police chief Michel Desgagné told Le Devoir, “It's an accident,” even though the case is still under an independent investigation by the Quebec provincial police, Sûreté du Québec (SQ). A few days later, a journalist from a major daily newspaper confirmed the “accident” might have been due to a defective ABS breaking system on the police cruiser—and then broke the story that the officer who had been driving the car has been promoted to investigator status.

“We didn't make that information public. We know nothing,” SPVQ communications officer François Moisan told VICE about the SQ investigation.

He did confirm that some journalists know the identity of the officers involved in Blouin's death, although he says that the SPVQ has never “disclosed nor confirmed” the information. Moisan could only confirm that “one of the officers involved had been temporarily assigned to Investigations.”

SQ spokesperson, Sergeant Ann Mathieu, said she would neither confirm nor deny information published by the press about the investigation into Blouin's Death. Such a non-denial statement—seemingly inspired by Cold War CIA rhetoric—will do little to reassure the people who are seeking answers as to how and why Guy Blouin died.

This elusive attitude is something families, friends, and allies of the Justice for Victims of Police Killings Coalition know all too well.

“It’s the same bullshit once again,” Josiane Millette told VICE about the public relations campaign surrounding Blouin’s death.

She remembers how police and the media had depicted her boyfriend, Jean-François Nadreau—who was shot to death on February 16, 2012 by SPVM officers—as a mad man, to justify the killing. “They [manipulate] facts against the victim so that people keep trusting the police,” Millette said.

According to their website, the Annual Commemorative Gathering & Vigil held on October 22 is meant “to remember those who have lost their lives at the hands of the police” and to show support for the families “who face an uphill battle in uncovering the truth and obtaining justice for their loved ones.” Some of those families have been fighting this fight for decades, they still wonder what happened, and why the officers responsible for their loss were not held accountable.

This year’s vigil was held in conjunction with the 19th edition of the October 22 Coalition to Stop Police Brutality, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation National Day of Protest which rallied people from across the US to “challenge the on-going [police] violence against the people” and to “express our collective outrage, creativity, and resistance in response to the crimes of this system.” Whether anyone will listen—in Missouri or Montreal—remains to be seen. 


@mais893

Narcomania: No, Drug Addicts Won't Be Spiking Candy This Halloween

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Image via Wikimedia Commons user Pato Garzo

As usual, this coming Halloween drug users will be ruining everything for everyone. Police in Colorado, where cannabis is now legal, have released a video warning parents that idiotic weed fiends might put cannabis-laced gummy bears into children's trick-or-treat bags. They advise parents to sift through all their kids’ Halloween candy and to discard any that look sketchy.

The video acts as both a fresh spin on the “razor blade in the apple” urban myth and a neat way for police and the media to cast stoners as potential child poisoners. The story’s gone global, but this isn’t the first time police in the US have issued warnings over the possibility of people dishing out cannabis-spiked sweets at Halloween. (Appropriately, it’s a seasonal scare story.) Yet, apart from the time a Californian dentist handed out candy-coated laxative pills to trick-or-treaters in 1959, there are no documented cases of kids being handed drugs disguised as treats at Halloween.

Unless you live in Oldham, England, that is. On Halloween night in 2012, Donald Junior Green horrified himself after he failed to give a group of young trick-or-treaters the contents of his left pocket (small bags of candy) and instead dropped into their upturned witches' hat the contents of his right pocket (small bags of cocaine). When he shut the door and realized his mistake he leapt into the night to try to find the kids but to no avail. The children got home and handed over the strange powder to their dad, who happened to be a police officer, and Green was found guilty of possession.

Fortunately, for the curtain-twitchers of the world, the lack of true stories about "child catcher" types giving kids drugged candy is more than compensated for by the made-up ones. The classic of the genre is the Blue Star Tattoo myth.

Between the 1980s and mid-2000s, a memo in the form of a flyer, and later an email, was widely circulated in the UK and US warning parents about lick-and-stick kids' tattoos soaked in LSD. The memo said that the tattoos—of a blue star or Mickey Mouse—were being handed out at school gates by dealers hoping to get kids "hooked" on acid.

Even though the story has been debunked more times than a 9/11 conspiracy theory, hundreds of police departments, community groups, and publications around the world issued the bullshit warnings. Eventually, the scare story was traced to a flyer distributed way back in 1980 by confused members of a Seventh Day Adventist church community in New Jersey, who misunderstood a police report on LSD blotter images.

After the Blue Star Tattoo myth came the one about "Strawberry Quik meth." In 2007, a warning began to spread about pink, strawberry-scented crystal meth that was apparently being sold to kids as popping candy by dealers eager to corner the middle school market. Health services, youth groups, local papers and schools were all shocked into circulating the email about Strawberry Quik. Oxfordshire police alerted 80 schools. But the story was a myth. Even so, the panic that ensued in the US led senators to draw up a new bill, the Saving Kids from Dangerous Drugs Act, which would have jail sentences for people caught making or selling drugs designed to look like sweets (it died in committee).

British journalists had always been desperate to find the school-gate drug peddler. Fewer have actually managed to do it. In 2003, under the headline "On Sale at School Gates—Kiddie Coke at 50p a Go," The People newspaper revealed in a series of snaps how “a surly 19-year-old dressed in ripped jeans and a leather jacket” was “cynically targeting youngsters with pills.” But it turned out that the "dealer" in the pictures was in fact the teenage son of the newspaper’s photographer who had been press-ganged into posing for the story by his dad. The scam was exposed by the boy’s angry mother, who called the paper to complain. Unsurprisingly, the two hacks involved were fired.

Turning swarthy druggies into predators driven not by money but by a dark desire to ensnare rosy-cheeked innocents is an easy plotline to follow for newspapers, because it’s always been the story. A century ago the alleged corruptors were Chinamen, Negroes, and Mexicans. Things haven’t changed much. From crack-addicted squirrels and dealers putting brick dust in heroin, to cannabis being as addictive as heroin, to meth-fuelled cannibals, drug scare stories have helped sell newspapers around the world for decades.

American sociologists Craig Reinarman and Ceres Duskin looked into this phenomenon and concluded that lurid tales of evil drug-world denizens were what people wanted to believe. What is more, they conveniently camouflaged the root cause of the drug problem: inequality.

In 1981, "Jimmy’s World", a hard-hitting Washington Post investigation into parents injecting their kids with heroin in rundown housing projects, won a Pulitzer Prize. Then it was found to be a pack of lies. The fantasy sailed past respected editors like Bob Woodward and the other Pulitzer judges because, say Reinarman and Duskin, “They were rendered incapable of differentiating the truth from the myths and scare stories that had been built around the drug trade—by the media."

The classic 'Brass Eye' "cake" sketch

The satirist Chris Morris proved the UK is equally stupid in 1997, when he persuaded public figures and politicians to get involved in a campaign against his ridiculous made-up drug, "cake." Despite its absurd street names ("Joss Ackland’s Spunky Backpack," "Chronic Basildon Donut"), these people believed every word because they were blinded by their own ignorance. “Cake stimulates the part of the brain called Shatner's Bassoon,” Noel Edmonds told the camera. “A second feels like a month. It almost sounds like fun—unless you're the Prague schoolboy who walked out into the street straight in front of a tram. He thought he'd got a month to cross the street.”

Coincidentally, those papers with the most scare stories about vampiric dealers eager to corrupt little innocents are also the ones with the oldest readerships. And while this means they also tend to have the largest political clout, the mainstream media has surrendered its mandate to talk to young people about drugs.

In my personal experience, the internet and the changing face of drug use mean young people have the knowledge to call bullshit on tabloid hype. They know that ecstasy and cocaine aren't as dangerous as heroin, that one puff of weed won't turn you insane, and that drug dealers aren't necessarily evil. As such, these kinds of stories will likely soon die out—which, in one sense, is a bit of a shame, as many of them are hilarious.

Follow Max Daly on Twitter


A Beat by Beat Review of the Unholy Aphex Twin/Taylor Swift Mashup Album

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A Beat by Beat Review of the Unholy Aphex Twin/Taylor Swift Mashup Album

The True Story Behind 'Monster Mash'

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The True Story Behind 'Monster Mash'

VICE Vs Video Games: Video Games Are Far More Terrifying Than Horror Movies

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Image via DesktopExtreme.com

To me, horror movies are about as terrifying as a hamster with a hat on. The act of changing where the camera is looking explicitly to get a “scare” often feels shallow and manipulative; what is seen and what's not seen often seems too deliberate. The only horror movie that remotely nears scaring me is the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and even then it’s just the hollowness, the lack of humanity, the acute and rasping nihilism that creates the looming dread. And I’m not even sure that’s scary—it’s more like someone just puking half-digested rare steak on you for an hour.

But horror video games? They create a hostile space for the player to exist in and move around in. The player is in control of how they negotiate the environment, making any identification with the character on screen necessarily intense. It’s your job to choose how to negotiate the horror.

This relationship you have to your character becomes demanding. The “manipulation” that happens is often not connected to what the camera is forcing you to see, but comes from what happens in the space where your character is situated—the sounds and scripted events, such as things orchestrated to drop from shelves. Spatial awareness becomes paramount, whereas, in horror films, the viewer is often confused about the characters’ location in space.

In the virtual video game environment, your ability to control your character actively and responsively is your only hope of surviving anything that happens to him or her: You have to pay attention. And the explicit threat of the video game, that you might end your entertainment by “dying," becomes a real thing—like it does in paintball. That’s where the rush comes from: from escaping “death.” And not just a movie death, but a video game death, where you have to negotiate the horror again and again. That’s where the real strength of video game horror lies, in the promise of another ritual rinsing of all your nerves.

Here are some the video games that taught me exactly how virtual reality can terrify a person.

GRANNY'S GARDEN

A screenshot from Granny’s Garden (1993) for the BBC Micro

Both my dad and uncle are tech fetishists, and just after I was born their newest obsession was with computers. A BBC Micro—an early home computer—resided in both my and my cousin’s bedrooms while we were growing up, which we mostly used to play Chuckie Egg, a platformer about a man in a triangle hat stealing ostrich eggs. But sometimes we’d load up the other games, just to see what we were missing.

Granny’s Garden is a children’s educational game made in 1983, and must be one of the first survival horror games, ideally suited to frightening kids out of their small minds. Based on math puzzles and logic, it was the first thing to highlight the true terrors of mental arithmetic. It’s a parser-based thing, where you mostly just type Y/N, a number, or a short word, and it opens with an absolutely horrifically loud, beeping rendition of something approximating a medieval dirge.

In the beginning, it asks you to choose a magic tree from a grid; then there are some more jarring beeps and a white pixel hill appears before you. Apparently this is the Kingdom of the Mountains and you want to go in it. When you get in the secret cave you find out that an evil witch has imprisoned the king and queen and abducted their six children, which even when I was ten indicated that the king and queen must have been extremely sexually active.

The king and queen’s magic raven takes you to a cottage, and there you steal an apple and then go into the house. You see a red broomstick, and in true adventure game style, you swipe it. A message comes up:

“Silly! Silly! Silly!”

And then the most TERRIFYING NIGHTMARE OF A TEN-YEAR-OLD’S LIFE APPEARS BEFORE YOU WITH HORRIBLE NOISES. There is no way to stop the horrible music and the jaw on the old witch’s face waggling. She stares out at you with her one violent eye, and when I was little this was a signal to run out of the room and pretend I had other things to do.

Here are some people shouting at Granny’s Garden.


TOMB RAIDER

Tomb Raider (1996) for PC

I was mostly a PC gamer when I was small because we didn’t have gaming consoles in our house until we saved up for an N64. For that reason, I will forever be nostalgic about the time I used to put CDs in things and wait for the drive to rev before something would happen. Usually, that something would be the game in question crashing.

Consoles seemed a very social experience. Whenever I went to my friend’s place to play games like Gauntlet II or Street Fighter II, it was a case of everyone gathering in the living room and passing the controller around, discussing tactics, and arguing about almost everything. The fact that I was good at Chun-Li never helped in this arena, and my determination to “win” Lemmings made me a very selfish player.

On the other hand, PC gaming was a very solitary experience, a realization of who I was and what my tastes were. These tastes in games were certainly shaped by my friend’s older brother, who passed on bootlegged floppy disks full of stuff like Sam & Max Hit the Road and SimCity 2000—my favorites. Dungeon Keeper came bootlegged, too. I created my own dungeons, murdered heroes gleefully, and stared at the Mistresses, slightly aware that these black-strapped female characters were probably related to sex in some way (but I wasn’t yet deviant enough to find out how on our crappy modem internet).

My uncle left us Tomb Raider one day in the tiny stuffy computer room at the top of our old granite house. I put it in the CD drive and it revved beautifully, the spinning whirring noise indicating the beginning of a lifelong joy. It was exciting to look at the jewel case. A woman was on the front. She seemed to know what she was doing. She was holding guns. Perhaps this was a game for me?

I had to fiddle around with the settings to make it work on our terrible computer. It had an ATI Rage graphics card that didn’t work with any game it had shipped with—P.O.D. and MechWarrior 2 both completely malfunctioned and refused to run properly on it. Twelve-year-old me became tech-savvy out of need. I eventually ran Tomb Raider in “software mode” (which made no sense to me because isn’t a game software?), and it worked.

Tomb Raider, at the very beginning

It kicked me into a dark cave. Things were 3-D. I had never played a 3-D game properly before. It seemed… well, it seemed amazing. Even the brownness and the gray tones weren’t enough to put me off, and they still aren’t. The atmosphere, standing there, a woman in shorts, a T-shirt, some boots, staring out into the vast dark cave system, clasping two pistols, wolf tracks in the snow leading into the gloom. That sums up everything I think is wonderful about Tomb Raider now, and everything that was so seductive about it then. It was her against the dark. What a wonderful way to spend a childhood: in the dark, exploring for treasure.

But the noises—the hollow-sounding noises—made me afraid. And like Resident Evil, which also came out in 1996, the ways you controlled your character’s body were difficult. You fought Lara Croft every way you could, the keyboard controls mangling your fingers. The criticisms of Tomb Raider’s control systems are obvious, but people recognize Resident Evil’s obtuse character responses as a tool to create a sense of vulnerability and helplessness.

But I didn’t miss Tomb Raider’s nuance when I was a kid. Part of its success was its survival horror quality. Lara’s chilly appearance and awkward controls made her seem vulnerable in the dark to all kinds of ambushes and traps, even if often you could survive a bat attack or a dart or two and keep running. I never once felt anger at Lara, but I felt angry at myself for not fighting the control system well enough. When you ran into the dark to shoot wolves, you knew the only thing between Lara and death was your ability to use the environment to your advantage.

The Tomb Raider T. rex, as seen in the anniversary remake

Tomb Raider’s atmospheric, echoing soundtrack, and sudden cut-to-black CD revving was often heart-stoppingly scary for me as a tween. It took me a good half-hour to decide to take those first steps into the first level.

So it’s probably not a surprise that, when I did venture forth—when a bear jumped out and mauled me—I screamed blue murder and my mother came all the way up the stairs to check I hadn’t stapled my own hand to the desk. This would repeat itself later when a Tyrannosaurus rex loomed out of the mist in the Lost Valley and I scrambled for the inventory screen.


RESIDENT EVIL

The Resident Evil remake (2002) for the GameCube

Horror games can bring you closer to the people you love. Resident Evil certainly did that for me.

It's a classic third-person zombie survival horror game that involves the investigation of what is really a haunted house/laboratory complex. It does four different things that help the player feel completely vulnerable, which is the key to a terrifying game.

First: It uses what are called “pre-rendered backgrounds," where the camera is in a fixed position so that it looks like the player-character is on a stage, rather than following the character as is now usual in third-person games. This allows the character to get further away from the camera, making them harder to see and hazards harder to identify. As a result, the player feels very vulnerable and detached from his or her avatar.

Second: Characters in Resident Evil deliberately handle like sluggish tanks in the mud. They are slow and very difficult to maneuver. Sometimes, it’s hard to see which way they're facing, due to the fixed camera, and there are only three different places the two characters, Chris and Jill, can aim their guns—in front of them, at the ceiling, or at their shoes. Only one of these is actually useful, and it’s already hard enough to ascertain where you’re shooting as it is.

Third: loading screens. Due to the capabilities of the original PlayStation, when navigating the haunted house it was necessary to load often in between areas. The way the creators used this to their advantage—to build the tension—was to make short cut scenes with a door opening, agonizingly, achingly slowly. This allowed new environments to load in. Some of the door opening screens focused on the door handle. Some of them had a little delay before they began to open. Some of them opened loudly. Some of them opened almost noiselessly. They made you wait, in dread, at what you would find each time on the other side of the door.

Here's someone on YouTube jumping at a game

Fourth: silence. Resident Evil often had periods of no atmospheric music or soundtrack, just the sound of your own footsteps pounding on floorboards or on concrete outside. Sometimes incidental sounds, like a clock ticking or a tap dripping, were used. This all made you uncertain, unsettled. Again, it made the player tense with expectation. And when zombies did jump out, or if a loud noise suddenly blared, it would scare the shit out of you.

All of this adds up to an extremely tense game that required you to solve puzzles and open doors in an incredibly hostile, creepy, decrepit environment. You could only save so many times due to typewriter ribbons being scarce. All four of these elements place you in the sort of silent fear where all your muscles start aching after a while, because they can’t stop winding themselves up like guitar strings.

At one point in the Resident Evil remake—and in the original too—you go to open a door and then a cut scene happens from a monster’s POV. At first you’re like, “Oh, it’s pretty far away—haha, monster, why would we care?” But then you realize that, in five seconds, it has arrived at the other side of the door you are standing right next to and now you’re definitely dead and oh dear God this is the least fair thing a game has ever done... before it kindly drops the control back to you, the player, and has you deal with the consequences.

Resident Evil Code: Veronica (2000) on a hacked PlayStation 2

At college, my friends and I had a bit of an obsession with Resident Evil games. Despite the shitty, tiny TV our rooms in dorms came with, we managed to play through quite a few games together, lights off, all our friends sitting in the dark eating Skittles and drinking soda. We managed to get Resident Evil Code: Veronica for Iain’s PS2, but his PS2 was a janky, hacked thing that was supposed to have been modded to be region-free. I think Iain said his stoner brother had actually never got it to play Japanese games, so the hack was completely fucked up.

Resident Evil Code: Veronica was OK—I mean, not a masterpiece like the original, but tolerable and the plot was just ridiculous enough to keep us going. But due to our PS2 being hacked, textures would sometimes go very, very wrong. Sometimes the walls would have the checkered floor-tile texture on them. Sometimes the room would go all psychedelic disco colors. Sometimes a zombie would resemble a wooden bench. It was actually scarier and more confusing than the normal version.

One thing really scared us, though.

We were meandering Claire Redfield through a concrete parking lot in the game, outside the main building—which is always a relief in Resident Evil games, because even though zombie dogs are often out there, there’s less of a sense of claustrophobia, a sense that even if you do die out in the open, at least someone might find your remains eventually. We were just minding our own business, getting Claire Redfield from A to B, when we all got this magnificent fright.

There was a HUGE FLESH TANK parked in the driveway. It was just this huge Sherman-type military tank covered in the texture of mottled, gross, marbled pink flesh that the PS2 had loaded in by accident, the tank gun long and veiny and massive, like an angry erection. It was like looking at a vehicle made of Spam. A Spam tank.

“Oh my God,” I said. And my friends agreed, staring in horror at the thing. We wandered Claire around it a while, poking at it with the butt of our gun.

“I think this PS2 is broken,” I remember my boyfriend saying, helplessly.

“This is terrifying,” I concluded. “This is one of the worst things I’ve ever seen in a game. Let’s get away from it.”

The flesh tank was unusable, a sort of sheepish prop. We tried not to go back there again.


VAMPIRE: THE MASQUERADE – BLOODLINES 

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines (2004) for PC

I guess one of the most daunting things about this 2004-released broken beauty of a game is how you have to patch the shit out of it for it to actually work. But it also has one of the most terrifying missions to come out of any game: the Ocean House Hotel.

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines is an incredible work of character and atmosphere. Beginning in a dank, dark, rainy Santa Monica where the sun never comes up, you roleplay a newborn vampire who stalks the night craving blood, cash, and more blood. It’s pleasingly 90s goth in aesthetic, the women you can bite in the Asylum nightclub are all wearing crop tops and chokers, and the dialogue is clearly written by someone who has had conversations with other interesting human beings, which is unusual to find in video games.

In fact, V:TM-B is one of the only games in which anyone has attempted with any success to employ seduction mechanics that don’t just feel like robotically, cynically pressing buttons on a person’s “fuck me” control panel. V:TM-B is sleazy and dark with adult themes of mental illness, abuse, neglect, sex, and violence.

Some vampires in the club, having what looks like the worst night out ever

This also means that it has a licence to scare the crap out of you. The Ocean House Hotel mission is given to you by a pale, glamorous vampire named Therese, who owns the Asylum. The club has a very good goth electronic track playing in it, and you enjoy your time there. So when Therese asks you to go and pick up some item of jewelry from the abandoned hotel, you agree.

As soon as you get there you know it was a bad idea. Grabbing the key from the hut outside, you head into the creepy, abandoned hotel. The chandelier above starts to shake—farther away a lamp smashes on the floor. Edge towards the newspaper on the table in the hallway and a vase flies at your head, hurting you. Somewhere, a grandfather clock strikes out of tune. You try to go upstairs, but the stairs fall through and you are stuck in a pitch-black basement.

The figure of a girl runs crying down a corridor.

You follow tentatively, things flinging themselves at you, hurting.

Deeper in the basement, the sound of crying echoes through corridors. Red lights flash from the boiler. A newspaper says a child’s severed head was found in a dryer, and you then immediately find yourself in a laundry room.

Slowly, you search the dryers. Finally, you sigh—there's a key in one that lets you through the door. You switch the power on, and the elevator is now working.

A child’s drawing is found in the bedroom, of a family in which everyone is happy but for the enraged, terrifying father figure. Here the the lamps shake, the lights go off and back on, and “GET OUT” is written in blood red on the wall.

It is at this point that I want to leave the hotel. 

A walkthrough of the Ocean House Hotel mission

The little girl ghost cries and you follow her sobs through all the traumatic epistolary accounts: The diary tells you the mother was suspected of cheating and the father was an ax murderer who killed her over a stray necklace, that he was an alcoholic and set the hotel alight. You get stuck in a kitchen where the pots and pans violently attack you. The closer you get to the pendant, the more things get unstable. The bedrooms shake with flames, and you run your puny character through the upstairs rooms desperately trying to find the one thing that will let you get out of this hell.

All of the sudden a hallucination begins. It is sunny, the room bathed in golden light. All the furnishings are new. Soothing music plays. This is what the hotel once was.

The pendant you are seeking is on a table. You take it. Then it is dark again. The haunting is over.

That is all of the sunshine you will see for the rest of the game. Terrifying and brilliant. Awful and exhilarating. I never want to play through that mission again for as long as I live.

- - -

I love survival horror, but I’ve become such a scaredy cat because, frankly, the experiences I’ve just described have served to make survival horror games something more than their parts. My memory of those experiences has amplified their power to be more terrifying than the designers ever actually made them. The fear lives in the mind, you know? The idea that I might one day be as scared as I remember being at these moments is preventing me, a fully grown adult, from trying to play through more games without the company of other grown-ups.

I’m enjoying the suspense and dedication to the genre in Alien: Isolation, but you can rest assured that I’m playing it with someone else in the room—just in case that witch from Granny’s Garden comes creeping up behind me.

Follow Cara Ellison on Twitter.

Is This the Year People Finally Give a Shit About Third-Party Candidates?

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Florida gubernatorial candidate Adrian Wyllie and his supporters wage their lonely assault against the two-party system. Photo via Facebook

Danielle Alexandre manages the campaign of Libertarian Party candidate Adrian Wyllie, a gubernatorial candidate in Florida who's currently polling at around 7 percent, and she talks so fast, and with such furious momentum, that I only manage to transcribe about 10 percent of what she says.

“I think the people themselves were disillusioned into thinking that either one of the [two major] parties would be different from the other,” Danielle tells me. “Both parties continue to damage our country, and I think people are looking for another option. I don’t think the Libertarian Party has changed at all over the last 15 years in what we believe, but I think people are just done with the two-party system.”

This is the narrative that Alexandre and Wyllie, and the rest of the country’s third-party and independent campaigns, have been killing themselves to sell in the lead-up to the 2014 midterms. Every election involves some spin on the narrative that the two-party system is clinging to the edge of oblivion. But now that a Congressional approval rating in the low teens is so commonplace it’s no longer newsworthy, these political interlopers smell blood.

Although Wyllie doesn’t have a chance in Florida, other independent candidates this election cycle have gone from being vote-stealing scapegoats for the major parties to serious contenders. Independent Greg Orman has eked out a slight lead on incumbent Republican Pat Roberts for Kansas’s Senate seat, spurring the GOP to send every famous politician it can find to go shake Roberts’s hand. In South Dakota, cowboy poet Larry Pressler is catching up to major-party Senate candidates Democrat Rick Weiland and Republican Mike Rounds in the polls. And Alaska Independent Bill Walker gained major momentum in the gubernatorial race against incumbent Republican Governor Sean Parnell when Democrat Byron Mallott abandoned his own campaign and came on as Walker’s running mate. Now, Walker has the lead, and FiveThirtyEight thinks he has the best chance of all the independent candidates to actually pull off the victory.

Beyond the favorites, there are independents all over the country making enough noise to disrupt their races. Ray “Skip” Sandman, running for a House seat in Minnesota as an anti-mining Green Party candidate, is fulfilling the traditional role of the third-party challenger: Democrats are accusing him of selfishly ruining liberals’ chances in the race. And the Connecticut Post reports that Democrats have been buoying up independent conservative Joe Visconti’s campaign for governor because it undermines Republican challenger Tom Foley's chances of beating incumbant Dan Malloy. 

Ray "Skip" Sandman is causing trouble in Minnesota.Photo via Facebook

But supporters of the candidates resent being treated as though their votes and efforts are pointless—or worse, some form of sabotage.

“There’s no question that it’s a more difficult campaign than having a party apparatus behind you,” says Crystal Canney, who is directing communications for Maine gubernatorial hopeful Eliot Cutler, an independent, and served the same role for Maine independent Angus King’s successful Senate bid in 2012. “But what you’re going to see over the next decade, or even more quickly than that, is that people are so fed up with business and politics as usual that they’re going to start coalescing around the candidates who can actually put the needs of the many above the needs of the few. There’s a sea change going on. You can feel it.”

Canney’s view matches the macro-narrative of independent candidates through the years:Tthey’re on the right side of history, leading a charge that’s progressive, not necessarily in its politics, but in its vision of what politics can be. In the idealist philosophy of independents, anyone can run for office, and win, merely by representing the people, and the Charge of the Light Brigade is always just over the horizon.

In reality, the candidates who have made a major impact in their races, like Orman and Walker, have counted on traditional weapons of politicking, like millions of dollars in advertising or the support of a conventional party structure. Pressler’s campaign might be the truest evidence of the halcyon future of third-party dreams.

Meanwhile, others are fighting on for single-digit shares of the vote: Steve Shogan, a neurosurgeon now aiming for Colorado’s Senate seat, has framed himself as that tried-and-true underdog character, the only guy who’s concerned with the issues; Sean Haugh, a former pizza deliveryman, and Amanda Swofford, a paralegal, are bringing the national Libertarian crusade to the North Carolina and Georgia Senate races, respectively; and Libertarian Robert Sarvis, who managed to irk Rand and Ron Paul in 2013’s Virginia gubernatorial race, is now running again, this time for the state’s Senate spot.

Sean Hough, a marijuana-loving libertarian and former pizza delivery man running for Senate in North Carolina. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

People like George Smart make many of these campaigns possible. Smart saw Haugh during a televised debate and thought that his ideas were worth hearing. Now he’s helping to host a fundraiser for Haugh, even though he still isn’t sure how he’ll vote.

“The political system has broken down because of this enormous amount of outside money, where it’s like trying to have a meal during a huge food fight,” Smart tells me. “There’s not a chance that he’s going to be elected, but what it boils down to is, do you want to vote for the best person or not?”

This is the conflict for most voters who are sympathetic toward independents. Do you want to vote for the best candidates? Is that what politics is really about? Or is voting just a compromise? Or maybe you should just run yourself? But it would be a mistake to think that all members of the third-party ecosystem are working to create an egalitarian electoral environment. Some are just as partisan as the Republicans and Democrats. And for them, it’s only a matter of time before the rest of the country starts to see things their way.

“I think everybody inherently wants to live free, and I think everybody inherently understands that they don’t have control over anyone else’s life and don’t want anyone to have control over their lives,” Alexandre says. “I believe nearly everybody is libertarian at heart, or at least a good portion of them. We yearn to live free. That’s the beauty of our country.”

Follow Kevin Lincoln on Twitter.

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California Hells Angels Are Suing the Government for Blowing Up Their Clubhouse

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Cops have made a show of going after the motorcycle gang. Photo via Flickr user Thomas Hawk

On August 2, 2011, Special Agent Patrick Ryan of the DEA obtained a search warrant for the Hells Angels clubhouse in San Diego county, California. As night fell on the city of El Cajon, a voice sounded over the police scanner.

“If you are inside... get away from any doors or windows in the building," it blared. Moments later, what sounded like a gunshot sent a bright yellow blast through the clubhouse's front door, setting off a cacophony of car alarms. Explosive breaching charges and flashbangs had been set off.

The Hells Angels are an outlaw motorcycle club that the US Department of Justice estimates has between 2,000 and 2,500 members in more than 230 chapters around the world. They pose “a criminal threat on six continents,” according to the DOJ website. They also tend to have a relationship with law enforcement that's cartoonish and characterized by excessive force and camera-friendly moments of chaos.

The raid in El Cajon was the result of a two-year investigation, and agents were looking for specific Hells Angels members, but the explosion revealed a building empty except for a terrified dog. A month later, authorities arrested three dozen club members for conspiracy to traffic meth. The chapter's leader, Stephen Sanders, was sentenced to 25 years for the 2007 kidnapping, torture, and robbery of a gang member who wanted out.

Hells Angel Maurice Eunice did not get pinched, but in a lawsuit filed in 2012, he doesn't contest the warrant's validity—after all, the California Hells Angels have a long criminal history. Instead, Eunice claims that the United States, the agent who ordered the raid, and the city of El Cajon blew up his buddies' hangout to put on a show for the press, rather than just calling him up for a key to get inside. As the Angel who owned the clubhouse, Eunice says the government conducted an unreasonable seizure and, once inside, intentionally caused him emotional distress by stomping on pictures of his dead friends.

“We found the pictures inside with footprints on the glass,” says Julia Yoo, the civil rights attorney who wrote the complaint. “And there's a video of the incident that was filmed before any of the other [members of the media] showed up. There was an agent standing outside giving interviews. Somebody tipped them off.”

In the past, these kind of heavy-handed raids have caused unnecessary violence. In 2003, cops in Phoenix conducted an early-morning raid on a Hells Angels clubhouse by knocking, waiting six seconds, and deploying a flashbang. According to a study by the libertarian Cato Institute, a sleeping member thought he was being robbed and picked up a gun, at which point an officer shot him. (Police didn't find any drugs.) 

That same year, police officers in San Jose shot some of the Hells Angels' dogs during a raid and caused structural damage by using drills to remove the club's insignia from a driveway. In that case, the Angels sued, eventually getting a $990,000 settlement.

As one commenter wondered on the legal blog Overlawyered, “The real question here is just how necessary the raids—with their attendant purile Boys-Own-Adventure “Dynamic Entry” SWAT procedures—really were. Might not been better to show up in less dramatic fashion, warrant in hand, and simply knock politely at the front door?"

In recent years, the Angels have taken to suing the feds, who they believe unfairly peg them as criminals. In 2012, they sued the US government for denying visas to the group's foreign members. That case, which listed Hillary Clinton and then Homeland Security boss Janet Napolitano as defendants, was ultimately dismissed. Likewise, in the San Diego case, the Angels had no luck: Earlier this month, a district judge granted a summary motion on the exploding clubhouse that ruled in the government's favor.

But the notoriously antiestablishment club—which has a penchant for using lawsuits to get its way—is determined to get revenge on the DEA for turning a routine raid into a Michael Bay movie. Yoo plans to appeal, and her partner, Eugene Iredale, says the officer's actions caused about $130,000 in damage to the clubhouse.

Amy Roderick, a DEA spokeswoman in San Diego, said she couldn't comment on the decision to use flashbangs at the clubhouse, as the raid was carried out by the El Cajon Police Department's SWAT team. Lieutenant Mike Molton of the El Cajon PD said that he wasn't able to comment on the specific case but told me the devices are typically used to distract suspects or when the cops suspect a place might be booby trapped. 

But Eunice, the Hells Angel who filed the lawsuit, insists this was a case of unnecessary force, and that suggesting his clubhouse might be booby-trapped is insane. Although the Angel doesn't much like to discuss things over the phone, he did tell me that it's not so strange for an outlaw motorcyclist to use the court system to his benefit.

“I've never had too much experience in the courthouse," he said, "but I'm just trying to express my right as an American citizen.”

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

The Plane of the Future Has No Windows

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The Plane of the Future Has No Windows

Video Shows Crowd Take Down Man After Homophobic Attack at Texas Airport

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Video Shows Crowd Take Down Man After Homophobic Attack at Texas Airport

I Learned the Art of the Chokehold from a Retired NYPD Officer

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Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu has gained currency in military and law enforcement circles. Photo via Flickr user JBLM PAO

I’m fighting a cop.

Looming over his prone body, I reach out for his wrists and pin them to the ground. His arms are now useless but—like some kind of massive, irradiated, post-apocalyptic beetle—he clings onto me with his legs.

I stand up and he remains attached. Suddenly, he reaches down and pulls my legs out from under me. In the millisecond it takes for my body to come crashing down, I realize how exposed I was (and how smart he was to take advantage). He smothers me immediately, and I am no longer a threat.

“You OK?” Mike Codella asks in a thick Brooklyn accent.

I’m fine.

Codella is an expert at Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, a contemporary martial art that he used during a 20-year career with the New York Police Department. Graying but still broad-shouldered and fit, he now runs Codella Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Academy on Staten Island.

“Like most people who got involved in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, I saw the early UFC fights,” Codella told me. In those fights, which infamously took place in a cage, he watched a slight young Brazilian named Royce Gracie contort himself in all sorts of weird positions to win an essentially no-holds-barred competition. Amazingly, the men he beat dwarfed him in size and strength. Codella, himself only 5'7", figured he could incorporate the same holds that this Brazilian used in a cage to subdue much larger men on the street.

Codella recounted a situation that took place during his time on the city’s Special Frauds Squad. “There was some kind of Nigerian bank fraud and the guy actually became confrontational,” he said. “He was tall, lanky, probably like 6’3’’, and he took a fighting stance. Basically, I just took him down with a common Jiu-Jitsu takedown and mounted him, and he was kicking and trying to buck up. Obviously, he could not. Then, eventually, I just put him in an arm lock where he kind of gave up. And then we just cuffed him… The idea was to just take this big guy down without even having to strike him.”

Using his techniques in the field is safer for the officer as well as the suspect, Codella argued, but it also is better from a PR standpoint. “Especially in today’s climate, it doesn’t look good, hitting a guy,” Codella explained.

Over the last 20 years, Jiu-Jitsu has become popular with law enforcement officers of all stripes. Relatives of the legendary Royce Gracie now run Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Academy, in California, which has developed a curriculum specifically for military and law enforcement personnel. A dizzying array of organizations have been certified by the Gracie Academy by having a member either take a five-day instructor course, which allows that person to train his or her colleagues, or, at minimum, an online class. The list includes the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the DEA, the FBI, the Coast Guard, the Air Marshals, the Border Patrol, the Secret Service, and sheriff’s departments and corrections officers from Texas to New Jersey. Police departments of major cities that are certified include Chicago, Dallas, St. Louis, Atlanta, and Los Angeles.

“Generally, the agencies pay their way just like an agency pays for an officer to go to a firearms instructor course or any other defense tactics course,” said Charlie Fernandez, who directs the program for the Gracie Academy. The academy conducts about ten of the five-day seminars per year, Fernandez says, with an average of 40 officers at each.

The NYPD has its own team of Jiu-Jitsu enthusiasts, the Finest Grapplers, who compete in events like the North American Grappling Championship. Members of the team provide training to other officers at the Police Academy’s main gymnasium twice a week, according to the group’s website. At the new UFC gym in Staten Island, members of the NYPD’s Lieutenant’s Benevolent Association, a union representing high-ranking officers, receive a special discount if they join. Maxum Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, a gym on Long Island owned by an NYPD homicide detective and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt, also offers a special discount to members of the association. At LaSalle Mixed Martial Arts, another Staten Island spot, the head Jiu-Jitsu instructor, a native of Brazil, trained his home country’s national police before moving to the states.

“I get a lot of cops,” Codella said of his own gym.

One of the reasons Royce Gracie was able to subdue much larger men was that he used chokeholds, an essential part of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. “We do teach a vascular neck restraint,” Fernandez told me. That sort of hold, he explained, “applies bilateral pressure to the sides of the neck, which slows the blood flow down to the frontal cortex, and that’s the part of the brain that controls consciousness. Most of the time the subject complies when they feel that. If the subject does not comply, then the subject goes unconscious at that point, which enables the officer to safely handcuff ‘em and then the officer can do whatever resuscitation or follow-up care that their agency mandates.”

Codella demonstrates such a restraint by taking a seat behind me. He wraps his legs around my torso and secures one arm under my armpit and the other behind my neck.

“Try to get out,” he says.

I thrust my hips off the mat and roll away, but Codella maneuvers an arm underneath my neck and starts to squeeze. Using his legs, he positions me for maximum torque.

The harder I fight it, the worse it will be. He squeezes harder, but I try to relax. A second passes and Codella cinches down more.

Pain begins. I manage to resist for only a split-second longer before I tap out.

As far back as 1985, Benjamin Ward, the New York Police Commissioner at the time, issued an order limiting the use of chokeholds unless a person’s life was in danger and a chokehold was “the least dangerous alternative method of restraint available.”

In 1993, chokeholds were banned regardless of circumstance. “Members of the New York City Police Department will NOT use chokeholds. A chokehold shall include, but is not limited to, any pressure to the throat or windpipe, which may prevent or hinder breathing or reduce intake of air,” reads the patrol guide.

However, complaints about chokeholds have increased dramatically since 2001, according to a report by the New York City Civilian Complaint Review Board. That year, there were 82 complaints. In 2009, complaints peaked at 240. Last year, there were 179.

During this same period, the UFC transformed itself from spectacle with a cult following to the leading organization for a sport that almost everyone has had heard of, if not watched. The UFC’s last pay-per-view card in 2001 generated a mere 65,000 buys. A year later, a card broke 100,000. In 2005, things really took off when a reality series, The Ultimate Fighter, appeared on cable television.

Codella thinks police should be taught the correct way to apply a chokehold, and that if they were, maybe we wouldn’t have so many cases like that of Eric Garner, the Staten Island man who died after being wrangled to the ground in a videotaped incident this summer.

“If these guys did this in the academy, for the six months they’re in the academy, if they trained some Jiu-Jitsu and some chokes, they’re never gonna kill a guy with a choke. I’ve been training for almost 20 years and I’ve never seen anybody die with a choke,” he said. The officer who leapt on Garner simply didn’t know the correct form for a chokehold, according to Codella. “What he put on was not a chokehold. You can’t talk when I’m choking you. If I put a choke on you, you’re not gonna say, ‘I can’t breathe,’ because you’re not gonna be able to.”

In Jiu-Jitsu, fighters are taught to release a choke when someone taps out or, if a person doesn’t tap, when his or her body goes limp.

Codella says that if the officer in the Garner incident had received proper training, “The minute he feels that guy is about to go to sleep, he woulda released it. I’ll never, ever kill a guy with a choke. I’ll never kill a guy unless I want to.”

Eben Pindyck, a student at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, has written for the New York Times Magazine, the Oregonian, and other outlets.

John Tory Is the Boring, Rob Ford-Antidote Toronto Asked For

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John Tory took the election with 40.3 percent of the vote. Photo via Twitter.
Last night, in what was no surprise to anyone who had been following the Toronto election even peripherally, John Tory defeated Doug Ford and Olivia Chow to win the privilege of becoming Toronto’s mayor in 2015.

It’s an odd moment for many journalists, myself included, as we are finally facing the reality of a 416/647 no longer run by the crack-smoking, high school football-coaching, wildly inappropriate force of nature that is Rob Ford.

During his four years as mayor, he managed to get fired, get his job back, face drug and sexual harassment scandals, make numerous racist remarks, hang out with alleged criminals, get sued for allegedly orchestrating a jailhouse beating of his former brother-in-law, go on Jimmy Kimmel dressed as a cheap magician, receive an invite to the White House Correspondents’ dinner, get made fun of at said dinner, and gain the endorsement of Mike Tyson.

This smattering of insane crap represents only a fraction of the twisted, noteworthy things Ford accomplished as mayor.

There is almost zero chance that Toronto will ever witness a mayoralty as unpredictable, embarrassing, and darkly entertaining as the one Rob Ford forced the city to endure between 2010 and 2014. Even before the crack, Ford was a total shitshow. He compared “orientals” to dogs and asked a woman if she wanted to get raped in Iran, after getting into an altercation with her that he initially pretended did not happen, at a Leafs game. He charged at Toronto Star reporter Daniel Dale with a cocked fist (and later called him a pedophile), and fell off a scale during his failed weight loss program which resulted in a twisted ankle.

Most importantly, Rob Ford was the subject of a major police surveillance operation (which may still be ongoing) that included a Cesna plane to tail the mayor. The Toronto police’s endeavour came up with all sorts of information about how Rob Ford likes to drink, pee in public, and hang out with an alleged extortionist named Sandro Lisi. Around that time, he was even caught on camera in an inebriated state, threatening to commit “first degree murder.” And while it’s clear the Toronto police were chasing a very big fish, no charges were ever laid.

With all of that negativity floating around, Rob Ford was still able to capture the admiration of people around the world. On a recent trip to Denmark, I was told by a friend that he loved Rob Ford. Last night, a colleague from New York expressed his disappointment that Ford would no longer be the mayor of Toronto. And I can understand, from their outsider perspective, why they feel that way. If you only heard bits and pieces of Ford’s absolutely insane mayoralty (presuming you are not one of the Kool Aid drinkers in Ford Nation) you would think Toronto had the most entertaining political scene on the planet. And maybe to some extent that’s kind of true.

But the day-to-day reality of having that man as mayor created a bleak mess that had long overstayed its welcome.

We are now about to open a new chapter of municipal politics in Toronto, where the city is not overseen by an addict with criminal affiliations who cannot even go for takeout at Steak Queen without causing a media storm.

Our new mayor’s platform hinges primarily on the controversial SmartTrack transit plan, which represents 53km of a new rail system—though the majority is repurposed GO rail—in Toronto set to start moving passengers (according to Mr. Tory) by 2021. Tory claims he can get this done without raising taxes, a dubious claim that has been punctured by some experts, but it is certainly a more nuanced and sophisticated transit plan than Ford’s subways subways subways.

Tory has also claimed he wants to revitalize the city’s parks, increase funding to Toronto’s social housing and also to arts and culture in the city. While he certainly doesn’t fall as far left as Olivia Chow, he has always taken a more measured and practical approach to actually enacting said changes; whereas Chow’s failed campaign often saw her faltering in debates by standing on the shaky ground of waxing poetic with pie-in-the-sky nonsense.

Our new mayor will need to embrace a council that (for the incumbents, anyhow) have spent four years being bullied and condescended to by Rob Ford; while observing his gradual and spectacular implosion. He will also hopefully learn to embrace the diversity of the city, especially since Toronto’s “fresh” council has less than 30 percent women and only 13 percent people of colour. These are sad statistics in a city where 49 percent of its citizens are of a visible minority. And Tory, of course, is one of the whitest people alive.

Given John Tory’s history as a Conservative party campaign director who approved the infamous Jean Chretien “face ad” that attacked our former PM’s palsy, and as a man who has both denied the existence of white privilege and has insisted women should learn to play golf to help close the wage gap; it’s hard to see Tory as the man to unite our diverse metropolis. Plus, during his time working at Rogers, he instituted sketchy billing policies that snuck hidden fees onto customer bills, which makes him very, very hard to like.

But after four years of the fucked up carnival that was Mayor Rob Ford, John Tory was able to successfully position himself as the non-Ford option for a city that was fed up with being embarrassed all of the time. With Olivia Chow floundering, and Doug Ford running around telling the father of an autistic child to go to hell or calling Jennifer Pagliaro at the Star a “little bitch,” it wasn’t hard for Tory to quietly smile during the debates and let things play out as they have.

Toronto has the antidote for Rob Ford that it asked for, and it’s almost a given (despite the fact that Rob did win a City Council seat for Ward 2) that Toronto politics will be immensely less exciting going forward. With a city as diverse and vibrant as Toronto, this new regime is looking to be as interesting as soda crackers. But if Tory can make good on some of his more ambitious promises, unite city council, and embrace a left-leaning side that is painfully hard to believe in, given his many gestures of entitled male whiteness—we just may have a very positive change on our hands.


@patrickmcguire

Mapping the European Union's Massive Crackdown on Immigrants

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A banner at a protest against immigation raids in Berlin. Photo via Flickr user Markus Winkler

This month saw the largest single-operation crackdown on undocumented immigrants in European Union history. Dubbed “Mos Maiorum” (a Latin phrase referring to the “ancestral custom” of the Roman Empire) the initiative, which ran from October 13 to October 26, saw EU member states join forces to clamp down on illegal immigration and the organized criminal syndicates that facilitate it.

Operations of this kind happen twice a year and are growing in size as the number of migrants in Europe increases. But this was the first time people knew it was going to happen in advance, thanks to some documents from the European Council published by the Statewatch website in July. The documents stated that border guards were to reprimand immigrants and record information relating to ethnicity in a bid to better understand the flow of immigrants into and across Europe—and in order to eventually plug up that flow.

The publication of the documents gave migrant solidarity activists time to develop a tool that enabled people to track the goings-on of law enforcement as they happened. Called Map Mos Maiorum!, the live map, which was created by a group associated with the Berlin-based anti-racism collective Nadir, let people to see pictures, read testimonies, and receive updates when Mos Maiorum activity was reported. If the reports are anything to go by, this activity mostly involved cops hassling people getting on public transport to produce their IDs and arresting them if they failed to come up with the goods. As you can imagine, in many cases the police were accused of using racial profiling in the process.

“We wanted to make this visible to people,” explained Alex, a representative from Nadir. “It would be great if we could reach the immigrants themselves with this information, as a kind of warning, but for many reasons this is not possible at the moment. Instead, we wanted those people whose countries were investing in this initiative to know what was going on.”

The operation was started by the Italian Presidency of the EU Council and the Italian Ministry of Interior, in association with Frontex, the EU agency for border security. Frontex has stressed that it merely served an advisory role in the operation. Nevertheless, its involvement has raised eyebrows; the agency has faced criticism because there’s a perception that it cares more about border enforcement than tackling human trafficking and upholding human rights. Its rescue work is often regarded as being incidental to giving vulnerable migrants a hard time.

Take Frontex’s Operation Archimedes, for example. Carried out in September by Europol with the cooperation of 34 EU member states, its aim as outlined by the authorities was to infiltrate and eradicate organized crime. Yet of the 1,150 arrests made, only 90 were carried out for human trafficking, with the vast majority being dealt to those guilty of and facilitating illegal immigration. This has given rise to the belief that the initiative was in fact an excuse to increase border security, and gather information relating to immigration routes, under the guise of a pan-European anti-trafficking and crime initiative. It is predicted that the number of migrants affected by Mos Maiorum will be at least double that of Archimedes, which only lasted one week.

Alex admitted that the Mos Maiorum map wasn’t complete. “What is shown on the map is still only a small part of the whole picture, because we do not receive reports of all of the controls,” he said. “We don’t have good connections in Eastern Europe, for instance. Language barriers are a problem, and we do not have connections to activist movements in every country.”

Nevertheless, there has been quite a lot of international cooperation, leading to the operation being healthily documented. “People and organizations from all over Europe are helping us,” he said. “There is a very active group in Sweden and many in Italy and also France. These groups documented these controls and regularly contributed to the map. But by far the most common report has been from anonymous individuals. It’s a crowdfunded project and we receive donations from all over Europe.” In addition, protests against Mos Maiorum were coordinated in Germany, Sweden, and Brussels.

VICE News: Capsized in Lampedusa

Italy, which kicked off the initiative, bears the brunt of immigration from Tunisia and Libya, with migrants crossing the Mediterranean, where they are commonly held on the island of Lampedusa, whose coasts have witnessed a series of tragedies, most infamously the drowning of 300 Eritrean immigrants in October last year. Frontex has largely failed to curtail this. Fortress Europe is reinforcing its balustrades to an ever-growing number of displaced people in a seemingly unwinnable struggle.

As the number of migrants grows, it seems that the EU is toughening its stance on immigration. The European Commission is already developing an electronic entry/exit system to prevent immigrants from overstaying their visas. Several member states are pushing for this to include the gathering of fingerprints and medical details from non-European passport holders. These details could then be shared with law enforcement agencies. The mass retention of personal data has been criticized by the European Court of Justice, but the Italian government thinks it has already found a way around their legal objections. Mos Maiorum might be the biggest initiative in the EU’s ongoing pushback against undocumented immigrants, but it seems that it could be only a taste of what’s to come.

Follow Nathalie Olah on Twitter@NROLAH

Sothern Exposure: My Summer at Fantastic Caverns, Missouri's Drive-Through Cave

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The caves are still a big draw. Photos by the author

It's 1966, and I have a summer job as a photographer at Fantastic Caverns, a local tourist attraction. The tour guide, a kid my age who is going to die next year in Vietnam, drives a jeep pulling a long wagon where the stub-holders sit. He explains how stalactites hold tight from above and stalagmites grow upward with all their might. A hundred yards into the cave, the guide stops and says, "We’re stopping here for a photograph so when we come back out we can check it for missing people."

Everyone laughs, yuk yuk.

I’ve got a 4x5 Speed Graphic camera and two Graflex flash guns on stands. I have a nice spot up above and tell everyone to look at me and say moonshine. I take the shot and run up to my little cellar darkroom where I’ve got tanks and trays of developer, a little enlarger, and an old print dryer. I dip and dunk the sheet of film, then give it a quick wash under the faucet. I slap it wet in the enlarger and make 5x7 prints, which I quickly develop, wash, and squeegee onto the dryer. I stuff the prints into cardboard folders and meet the folks as they come out of the cave. I sell the pictures for a buck each and hope they don’t fade before the people drive away.

Everything in the darkroom is wet and everything electric is frayed. I’ve been jolted on my ass three times. One afternoon, the tour guide knocks and comes in to hang out. He’s kind of a bully and I don’t really like him, so I ask him to flip a switch on the print dryer for me and then I crack up laughing when he gets zapped with 120 volts. I think about it the following year when he dies at war and it still kind of cracks me up.

On Saturday nights, Fantastic Caverns has a country music show in the big room where, not all that many years ago, the Ku Klux Klan supposedly held meetings and socialized. People come from far and wide, ordinary folks and hillbillies, cowboys in Cadillacs and country gals who smoke and drink and don’t stand for no nonsense. The owner pays me 25 bucks to take pictures of the show and the stars.

Bobby Bare is the headliner. His hit songs are "Detroit City" and "500 Miles Away from Home." I sit with him for a while in the back of a jeep, waiting to be taken backstage. He smokes a Lucky Strike and I smoke a Kool. We don’t talk, and when we get backstage, I take his picture.

The show starts and I’m standing offstage next to a fat guy in overalls. A cross-eyed comic in baggy pants takes the stage and says, "Howdy folks!" The fat guy next to me roars with laughter even though we haven't heard a joke yet. He slaps his leg and jabs me in the ribs with his elbow, pointing at the comic. Fifty years later, I’ll wish I’d taken more pictures and saved the negatives.

In August, the owner hires a crew of men with dynamite to blast a new opening in the cave so jeeps can drive in one side and out the other. I bring my little brother with me and we lay behind a couple of logs. When they blast, three times, the ground reverberates and rocks and mud rain down and it’s very fucking cool, like being in a cowboy movie.

Soon the summer's over and I’m a high school senior. On Friday night, there's a dance for teens at Fantastic Caverns. Rock and roll. I bring my girlfriend, Suzy, and I’m driving the family car, a 1965 Oldsmobile 88 convertible. The road is curvy and hilly and I’m sucking on a bottle of Old Crow whiskey. I tell Suzy how I drove this road every day for three months and can drive it with my eyes closed. I’m going about 70 when we come to a hairpin curve and I keep going straight over a barbed wire fence, landing in a field about five feet lower than the road. Unscathed, Suzy and I catch a ride to the dance with friends and somebody calls a tow truck to come and get the car.

The next day, we find out the car's body has been knocked loose of the frame. I tell my pop I wasn’t drinking and somebody going the other way ran me off the road. He gets the car fixed, but it’s like an old person with a broken hip—never the same as before. 

Many years later, I’m visiting my pop and he’s 90 years old and I’m 60. “You lied to me about not being drunk when you wrecked the Olds,” he says, “didn’t you?

I tell him yeah, I did, and I’m sorry and I won’t do it again.

Now it's 2014 and I'm back in the Ozarks, visiting family. I've got an afternoon to myself, so I drive north on Highway 13, take the turnoff to Fantastic Caverns, and take pictures through the windshield.

Inside the shop, everyone is hospitable. I tell the guy behind the ticket counter that I’m the one who first set up a photo concession here in 1966. He introduces me to the woman who serves as the photographer now. We talk about what it was like back then and what it’s like now and they let me ride through for free and give me a picture. I have a really nice time and say thank you.

Scot's first book, Lowlife, was released in 2011, and his memoir, Curb Service, is out now. You can find more information on his website.

VICE Premiere: Joseph Keckler's Teen Goth Relapse

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This video is an account of an afternoon in which New York performance artist Joseph Keckler left the office to go downtown and channel the romantic figure of the wanderer. It was made with with his longtime collaborator, filmmaker Laura Terruso, and comes out of Keckler's much lauded performance piece, I Am an Opera, which the Village Voice called a "tantalizing song cycle–cum–multimedia one-man show" before naming Keckler Best Downtown Performance Artist of 2013.

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (Spanish: El sueño de la razón produce monstruos) c. 1799 by Francisco Goya

Keckler will be releasing two more versions of this song, in two different genres, by the end of the year. One will be a chamber pop ballad—same chords, different lyrics—and the other will be a German goth remix made by a real-life German goth.

Goth Lied features Lisa Kaplan as the boss and includes cameos by Gerry Visco, Gabe Fuller, Jess Ferguson, and Shepherd Laughlin.

Read more about Joseph Keckler and find dates for upcoming performances here.

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