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Last week Australia's SBS premiered its brand new series What Is a Hipster? In 2005 this might have been an interesting exploration of the commodification of alternative culture. In 2015 it was a late addition to an extremely tired conversation. Watching a preview centered young bearded guys talk and their obsession with typewriters, I kept wondering, Who is this for? Who is left that wouldn't know what a "hipster" is that actually cares about this stuff? Then I remembered my parents.

My folks are in their mid 60s, educated, intelligent, and largely removed from the contemporary world. Their life together is a blur of low-level suburban adventures and the occasional feud with another eccentric with a low center of gravity. I had to invite them over to watch this show to see what they might learn from it.

Before we pressed play I quizzed them on their idea of "cool." My dad's definition was "cleanliness"—which was surprising for how much food he had on his face at the time. My mum didn't hesitate: "People who don't do drugs" was her reply. I should mention that I'm 27 and have lived away from home for almost a decade. She was happy to have the opportunity to get a clean living message out.

I urged them to think of someone they knew from their youth who stood out as being cool. After a pause my dad recalled a mutual friend who was totally his own person, who lived, dressed, and acted entirely as he pleased with little interest in what people thought. My mum nodded thoughtfully before interjecting, "He always used to walk around with that donkey on a lead."

At this point I was already so exhausted and confused I put on the TV.

My mum seemed eternally confused about what was happening on the screen. We were several minutes in before she understood that I didn't make this show myself and stopped asking if I "took the pictures" and whether or not it was present day. Dad seemed more relaxed, although when I listened back to my recording, it was punctuated with his withering groans.

After a few minutes of watching annoying people buying coffees, my dad cocked his head and said "awakened goth" for no apparent reason. My mum told me everyone on screen looked like me.

Honestly, they weren't immediately engaged. Maybe it wasn't for them after all. As I bristled at typewriter jokes dad looked bored and mum used every scene change as an excuse to complain about her acquaintances' partners.

After a while they began to engage with the show. "Are hipsters greenies?" my mum asked. "Do they put that much effort into what they wear, or are they just wearing what they feel like wearing?" My dad offered that he thought that might have been the point. Don't let the sauce stains fool you, he's a quick study.

By the time the host made it to the Melbourne vintage store Shag they seemed to enjoy trying to unknot this social bow tie. My mum started saying things like "flower power" and I began to suspect she was confusing hippies with hipsters.

As the host was strapped into a pair of suspenders I asked them what they thought of hipster style so far. Very eager to please, my mum looked panicked and said, "Laid back, comfortable?" Dad, sat quietly before offering, "They look like the guys who did ballet."

Near the program's halfway mark I asked again what they were picking up about the hipster social mindset. Mum suggested, "I find your generation very non-critical and nonjudgmental." I asked her if she understood this wasn't a hippie thing. She promised she got that, but insisted, "It's about unconditional love. That's your style." (Full disclosure: I suspected she was stoked I invited her for dinner and didn't want to mess up her chance of another invite.) Dad just said everyone looked like they were "saying 'fuck you' to the whole world." He remained my star pupil.

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Answering questions about beards

Things continued quietly though the bit on beards, save for my mum mentioning how nice someone's British accent was. But when we got to tattoos the general vibe of enthusiasm (her) and apathy (him) fell away long enough for them to express actual disdain. Dad warned, "over my lifetime I've seen a lot of attractive girls and then I've seen the tattoo." What about boys, I asked "They're their own idiots." To change the subject I asked where they thought the most hipsters in the world were. Mum said Holland and we all sat in silence for a while.

As the show came to a close we somehow began talking about drugs—it could have been the Holland comment—and I asked if they thought alternative culture went hand-in-hand with drug use.

My mum said she was sure that everyone spoken to in the show smoked weed. (Except she said "dagga" because she's an old South African lady and that's what they call it there.) Then, in what I'd consider the upset of the night, Dad corrected her: "Oh no, all those people are into ice [a.k.a. meth]." Turns out at some point my dad quietly accepted that everyone in Australia smokes ice and considers it a more sophisticated option. When I asked if he was sure he didn't mean coke, he assured me coke was only for yuppies. Then he casually added, "We only took amphetamines to stay awake."

By now it was getting late and I wanted to reclaim the TV to watch Better Call Saul so I asked them for final impressions. Mum said, "To me they're young, happy, I love you, you love me, no judgement." That's when I realized she had largely zoned out for most of the 30-minute show. Dad admitted he found the odd hipster annoying because the "us versus you" attitude was narrow-minded and painted his generation as an enemy.

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Hipster family bonding

Never one to end on a negative note, mum countered with, "It's a very special time of your life, to be a hipster, it's when you're carefree, young, experimenting, loving, and open to life." By the time the credits rolled my mum was basically conflating being a hipster to spending a year abroad to learn Italian.

Before they left Dad asked if we could end with a Churchill quote. To tell a white 66-year-old man to not quote Churchill is like telling a bird not to fly, so I said sure. "If a man is not a socialist by the time he is 20, he has no heart. If he is not a conservative by the time he is 40, he has no brain." When I smiled encouragingly, he added, "I pity those who weren't communists in their youths."

I asked them if they would watch episode two and Dad said probably not. Mum assured me she would, but I think she was being polite. Ultimately I doubt they left with an understanding of what a hipster is, but who cares? No one else knows either.

Follow Wendy on Twitter.

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Southwark lollipop man Brian Granger

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

London's crossing guards, lovingly referred to as "lollipop" men and women, are a dying breed. Government cuts have gradually squeezed their luminous signs and hi-vis jackets off the streets and into strip-lit council building storage rooms, with dozens of school crossing patrols axed in boroughs including Brent, Wandsworth, and Lambeth.

The communities London's lollipop people serve consider them vital to child safety, which makes a lot of sense given the fact the "accident incident rate for children peaks between 8 AM and 9 AM, when they travel to school, and again at 3 PM when they leave," according to road safety charity Brake. This probably explains why pupils have protested against the cuts in a number of boroughs.

While budget cuts are to blame for the decrease in jobs, the potential of having to deal with violent drivers is deterring people from applying for the available roles. A number of people working school crossing patrols in England have even been taught self-defense in case of road-rage flare-ups.

I was interested in what the city's lollipops thought about the current situation, so I took a walk around and asked a few of them.

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SHEILA RICHARDS – LEWISHAM

"Get out the road darlin', you're holding up the traffic," shouted a builder in rigger boots and a buzz cut.

It was obvious from the smile on Sheila Richards' face that she saw the funny side. She's been holding up the traffic on St Asaph Road in Lewisham for 38 years and has no intention of quitting any time soon.

"You meet all kinds of people. All the years I've been here I've never had one row—I get on with everybody," she said. "My least favorite part of the job is when drivers are rude—when they 'F'—but I love what I do. You need to be patient, reliable, and have awareness. It's not a hard job, but sometimes you have to risk your life. One driver once asked me if he was supposed to stop, and I said, 'No, I'm just standing here to be killed.'"

I asked Sheila what she thinks about council cuts forcing lollipop men and women out of work. "I think it's disgusting when the council want to cut lollipop jobs," she said. "You're one to be needed, aren't ya?"

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CHRISTINE JOSEPH – CAMDEN

Christine Joseph has been helping children cross Torriano Avenue in Camden for four years, working as a domestic assistant when she's not holding her sign up to motorists.

"I work ten hours a week as a lollipop lady and I'm planning on working a long while longer—I love it," she told me, before a rambling man interrupted our conversation.

"I love lollipop parties... lollipops... I mean lollipop women," he slurred. His speech was foggy but the message was clear: he's a big fan of school crossing patrols, just like the children local to the area.

"The kids compare me to a superhero," said Christine.

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JANET WOODEN – ISLINGTON

"I keep my stop sign in the downstairs bathroom," Janet Wooden told me.

Following a friend into the job, she became a lollipop lady in 2006 and has been patrolling Islington's Blackstock Road ever since.

"My favorite part of the job is talking to the kids and knowing they have all got to school or home safely, and being trusted by the parents to know their names and to watch over them on their journeys. I also like the questions I'm asked by the public," she said.

Janet was animated when explaining the role lollipop men and women play: "We are an important part of the community. It is very wrong to cut the funding," she stressed. "We are the eyes and ears for the community; we keep an eye on the kids and return lost property when given to us. Any lost or scared kids know they can come to us for help."

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BRIAN GRANGER – SOUTHWARK

Bermondsey resident Brian Granger has only been in the lollipop game for three years, but hasn't looked back since signing up. His patch is Rodney Road in Southwark.

Abraham, his supervisor, was there when we met to make sure my questions weren't too prying, but there wasn't all that much I wanted to press him on.

What's his favorite part of the job? "I love crossing children and meeting new people," he told me.

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FRANK SMITH – TOWER HAMLETS

Frank Smith lives on the Isle of Dogs, only a few steps from the crossing he patrols on Manchester Road. He became a lollipop man when he retired.

"I'll be 55 on May 8," he joked (I think). "I've been doing it for just over 12 years and I do three shifts a day because the children here are very young—they come and go so often."

Frank has been on the end of some abuse during his time on the crossing, but talking to people remains his favorite part of the job.

"I don't like it when cyclists don't stop—they just whizz past ya," he said. "People are rude quite often, but you get used to it. You need a sense of humor and dedication. I don't think the councils should cut any jobs because a lot of small children don't recognize the dangers of crossing the road."

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VICTORIA ADAM – WESTMINSTER

Victoria Adam halts traffic on Westminster's Lisson Grove. Her three children went to the school next to where she work, and apparently it's the parents here who cause her the most grief.

"Some parents are very rude. The drivers are OK with me, but the parents are rushing all the time. They have to wait for the green man; they don't understand. When you tell them to stop they're not happy," she told me.

"I've been a lollipop lady for about 15 years. My favorite part of the job is helping people cross the road, especially the young and old people. People talk to you and it makes you happy, smiling to drivers. It's a lovely job. I love it."

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JACKIE CLARKE – TOWER HAMLETS

Jackie Clarke spends her weekdays making sure Garnet Street—close to Wapping station—is safe for local children. She's been working with kids for 17 years and had some big shoes to fill when she picked up her stop sign for the first time, replacing a lady who'd been the longest-serving school crossing patrol officer in London.

"Getting up early in the rain and snow is the hardest part of the job," Jackie told me. "I applied for the position on a whim, but I have always worked with children. I think it's terrible that some councils are cutting the service because, in some places, you really do need them. Traffic does go mad sometimes."

On March 30, 2005, Mitch Hedberg, the funniest person in the world, died at 37. Heroin and cocaine were reportedly involved. It was a sudden, shocking tragedy that left the comedy world shaken and bereft of one of its brightest stars. As fellow comedian Doug Stanhope put it in a blog post the next day:

I don't know how Mitch died. I know how Mitch lived and he lived brilliantly and by his own rules. The number of years next to his name is trivia. The contents of those years is inspiration.

Hedberg was an old-fashioned one-liner spitter like Henny Youngman, and an observer of the foibles of everyday life, like Jerry Seinfeld. But the simplicity of his format obscured the qualities of his work that make him a legend. "I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to, too," is one good example of a classic Hedberg joke. "I order the club sandwich all the time. And I'm not even a member, man. I don't know how I get away with it," is another favorite.

Ten years later, comedy nerds and comedians alike talk about him in breathless tones, overcome with sentimental feelings at the mere mention of his name. Those who worked with him offer him up as a role model. Patton Oswalt's brand new book quotes an otherwise lost-to-history Mitch Hedberg line to illustrate professionalism:

Beware of any comedian who writes for half an hour and then tells you they have 30 minutes of new material.

We asked a few members of the comedy community to mark ten years AM (After Mitch) by reflecting on his life and legacy. The result is less an intimate oral history than a few snapshots of the effect Mitch had on the comedy world. It's also a fond remembrance from a whole bunch of funny people: Marc Maron, Chris Cubas, Eliza Skinner, Hannibal Buress, and Emily Heller.

Marc Maron: Generations of young people, I think see a sort of punk rock, or rock 'n' roll element to him. I feel like the people that locked into Mitch early on were kind of like cool, maybe slightly druggy young people that discovered him. He's a discoverable thing. I think that's what happened with that special, like, "Did you see this guy? Who is this guy?"

We shot Comedy Central Presents the same week and they were horrible audiences. His audience wasn't very good either. I had a horrible night, and I remember seeing him, and his wasn't great either. I remember him eventually just sitting down on the stage, almost like giving up in a way. Not really giving up, but just like, "I'm gonna do what I'm doing."

Chris Cubas: When you start, there are a lot of people telling you rules. Like, "Don't wear this," and, "Make sure you look better than the audience." Seeing him go up with sunglasses on, not give a shit about any of that, just be super weird, and not listen to any of that bullshit, was a very important thing that he passed on. He wasn't trying to speak about issues. He was telling jokes about ducks. And coming from Austin, where so many people want to be Bill Hicks, and they're like, "Here comes my abortion riff!" Mitch is the polar opposite of that.

Eliza Skinner: I worked for my dad for a summer. He was a filmmaker and I was his assistant, and we had an hourlong drive every day to the set. And my dad's not a chatty guy. I was like, "Ugh, what am I gonna talk to my dad about?" So I downloaded every Mitch Hedberg bit I could find from Limewire and burned them onto CDs, and we just listened to Mitch Hedberg. My dad's a funny guy, but a really staunch British man who doesn't like silly things. He fucking loved it, and we just giggled the whole way. He's really silly, but in a new, delightful way. Like if you'd seen oranges all the time, and then someone turned an orange inside-out and said, "It's also this." And you'd be like, "What? I never saw that!"

Hannibal Buress: I was doing some stuff that was similar to him but the funny part is—I've told this before—I had this VHS tape from a gig that I did at the Jukebox Comedy Club in Peoria, Illinois... In my first six months of doing standup. I showed my buddy Mike the tape and he was like, "Yo, you sound just like this dude. You gotta listen to it." And I hadn't heard of Mitch before.

Hannibal Buress, at perhaps his most Hedbergian

I didn't even watch him that much because of that... I didn't overly listen to him because I didn't want to absorb him and channel him. Even while I admired Mitch a lot, you don't want to be described as the black version of somebody. I think there's more to me than that, you know? So yeah that would be weird. But I always felt like he was amazing but we were just doing something in different ways.

Marc Maron: Before he was a star, if [the audience] didn't get on board, he could bomb, but if they did sort of lock in, he could kill. It was sort of fascinating, because he had a sort of taste. That was the way he was going to do it. He wasn't going to go any other way. If the audience didn't get on board, it's gonna be a long half-hour to an hour for them. But if they did, if they got him, he would destroy. It was kind of fascinating.

"He's one of those guys that you'll hear in other comics. Just a hint of Mitch." –Marc Maron

There's a lot of comics that have passed through their Mitch phase into their own voice. But he's one of those guys that you'll hear in other comics, just a hint of Mitch. He's not hinged to a time and he's not hinged to a topic. He was a real, kind of a poetic mind. So it's a rare thing that you can sort of revisit a comedian any time and it still has a vitality to it and I think that's why Mitch is so kind of ever-present.

Emily Heller: He was definitely the first comedian I was obsessed with. I used to watch him on Comedy Central. And in the dumb kids math class at my high school, the teacher would start every class with ten minutes of "TV Talk," and I would tell Mitch Hedberg jokes—crediting him, of course. Then when I was 17, I saw that he was playing at the San Jose Improv. So me and my friend wrote an email to the club, and asking if we could go to the show even though we were 17, and promising that we would buy a bunch of food, and that we were gonna turn 18 really soon, and they said "Sure. Just make sure you print out the email and bring it when you come."

So we drove down after school one day to see the show, I don't remember ever feeling my face hurt from laughing before. He told that joke: "If you are flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit," and he prefaced it by saying, "This next joke was on the special, but there's a new part." So he told the joke, and then at the end, he said, "...unless you are a table." That was the first show I ever saw.

Hannibal Buress: I started working in the club initially because I did a guest spot in front of his sold-out crowd... I went up to his green room, which was obnoxious, because I wasn't even working at the club yet, I was just up there hanging, which I imagine was pretty awkward for him. I hate that shit when random people are in my green room.

Sometimes when you're new in comedy you have this hunger and drive that you know erodes your social skills and basic decency. That was where I was at that time and he was just chill. I know somebody would be like, "Who the fuck is this? Are you on the show? Do you work here? Who are you? You gotta get the fuck out of here cause you're making me feel weird." But he didn't do any of that at all! Even if he was feeling weird, I guess he wasn't the type of guy to kick somebody out and make them feel bad.

So I'm hanging out up there with him and I just ask if I can get on the show. And then one of his shows, he put me on for five minutes, let me go on in the guest spot, and then like three other Chicago comics that he had never seen before.

Marc Maron: The last time I remember seeing him was before he almost lost his leg. I think I saw him briefly here in LA, at a comedy club, and I knew that he didn't look good. He just didn't look right. I had no idea to what degree he had gotten strung out. I didn't know that the three days I spent with him in Seattle, that was about it for me—I think I went through one other sort of run and then I got sober. I remember seeing him long after that. Years of drug use, especially the type of drugs he was using, and you start to look a little haunted, you know?

Eliza Skinner: I was going to a comedian's birthday party the day he died. There weren't even strong connections to him, but as soon as I walked in the bar, Jake Fogelnest went, "Mitch Hedberg died." Just a wet blanket all over the whole bar. Then everyone was trading jokes all night. It's very jarring any time it happens. The Harris Wittels stuff felt very similar. I thought, "People still die from heroin ODs? We're still doing that? Fuck."

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Skate culture and street art are often seamlessly bound, especially for graffiti legend Persue. Watch as the west coast nomad tells us about his greatest influences and sources of inspiration at Canada's newest skate park, the Dew Underground.

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Image by Ben Thomson

New Zealand is suffering its worst weed drought in recent history, and so far pot-starved kiwis have no one to point the finger at. The current shortage began at the start of the year, with parts of the South Island and upper North Island seemingly affected the worst. One grower from South Island's east coast Waimate district told media earlier this month it's the most severe shortage they had seen in 15 years, and that it was a "nightmare for consumers," who were struggling to buy weed at any price.

Though no one seems to understand why there's no weed in these parts of New Zealand, but many suspect that police seizures are behind the shortage. However, there have been no publicly reported busts in the last few months, with the exception of a haul worth an estimated NZ $300,000 [US $225,000] that came about just last week and resulted in 15 arrests and over 2,000 plants being uprooted. News of more marijuana being seized can only have local smokers shaking their heads.

One Auckland supplier told VICE it's logical to assume more raids took place earlier in the year. "I didn't hear of any busts but I can't really understand why there's a drought considering I'm one of the few people I know that sells weed that isn't grown under lights," he said. "So for me to have a drought, that can be expected, but I don't see why hydroponic weed would have a drought."

The supplier said the shortage has pulled irregular customers out of the woodwork. But while they're desperate to buy, there is nothing to sell. "This is the first time I've run out of weed since I was a teenager," he says. "I had to buy weed for myself for the first time in 20 years."

As harvest time nears, small amounts of cannabis are starting to dribble back onto the market. Growers whose plants are almost full-size are taking advantage of the drought to make some quick cash. Cannabis plants are usually harvested around April or May, before the regular rainy season starts, to avoid the buds composting on the plants. It is predicted this year's crops should yield a healthy amount of bud, thanks to a strong growing season powered by a hot, dry summer.

However, the risk is any upcoming harvest may get scooped up by more raids. Police are pushing the public to turn in growers, and earlier this year issued a "guide to identify cannabis operations." Citizens were warned to be on the lookout for people "carrying shovels, spades, and similar equipment into the bush" and "unusual sightings of lights, head torches, and headlights in rural areas at night." Other potentially nefarious activities include constantly closed curtains or having black-out windows. And, of course, people are to be on alert for a "distinctive smell" wafting over from the neighbor's house.

There's a lot of distinctive smells in New Zealand— a 2008 survey found that 14.6 percent of kiwis between the ages of 16 and 64 smoked weed in the past year, making the country one of the top ten most toking-est countries in the world. But decriminalization still seems a way off, even though, as Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party leader Julian Crawford points out, legalization would stop regular citizens from interacting with the criminal element and risking unnecessary convictions.

"I think there is a lot of stigma around cannabis and a lot of people choose to keep their cannabis use secret," Crawford said. "But for me I've been quite open about it and I think it has limited my career prospects and my travel prospects, because I have cannabis convictions from previous arrests."

Crawford would like to see New Zealand implement a model of regulation and taxation similar to Colorado. Crawford also posits such regulation would also help supplies stay consistent.

"People don't like how cannabis is being supplied by gangs and black market forces," he says. "Sometimes there is a large amount of cannabis available and sometimes there's none available. It'd be easier if there were retail outlets that guaranteed the supply and took profits away from the gangs and brought the tax revenue into the public purse."

Of course, such a model would likely push marijuana prices up for the first time in recent memory. Weed in New Zealand has sat at an average of about NZ $350 (about $260) per ounce for at least 20 years, if not longer. As one seller points out, the industry's immunity to inflation could be a contributing factor to it's shortage: "With P labs you can generate more money, so maybe it's just a financial thing. You've got to sell a lot of weed to make $350, and $350 doesn't go far these days. It was a lot of money in 1995, but not anymore."

Follow Danielle on Twitter.

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All photos by the author.

It was telling that rapper Kool Keith asked me to meet him at Tick Tock Diner near Penn Station in New York City to talk about his recent projects. The restaurant is idiosyncratic. It isn't decorated enough to be a Jack Rabbit Slims, but it's over-lit with neon lights, contains a handful of art deco kitsch, and is filled with tourists who just got off the train. The scaffolding obscuring the outer façade has probably caused many of the New Yorkers who walk by to forget that the decades-old grub hub is still there. Tick Tock can be busy, but it's seen busier days. It was also opened back in 1997, the year Kool Keith dropped his second studio album, Sex Style, the first solo record he put out under his own name.

"I'm not stuck in no time," Keith eventually told me while pouring me a glass of Cupcake wine under the table. "I'm future. I'm future-past. I'm future-future. Beyond future. Past the future."

This sentiment feels on point. The musician, born Keith Thorton, has been obsessed with space, time, and all things sci-fi since putting out Dr. Octagonecologyst—the bona fide cult classic where Keith assumed the guise of nymphomaniac, serial killer space surgeon Dr. Octagon. The rapper and his many alter egos have always been described as eccentric and even legendary, though anachronistic or timeless may be be a better fit. His music sounds like the creative output of a singular brain—one that probably doesn't absorb any recent cultural input that was made outside its own skull.

But outside the occasional hip-hop listicle, Kool Keith doesn't get much press these days, even though he hasn't stopped making music or hustling on other entrepreneurial endeavors. He's put out an album or mixtape annually for the past seven years, and has recently been touring, directing porn, designing clothing for strippers, and even creating an unscripted web series for Funny or Die that features bad sex jokes and cameos from George Clinton. Although the rapper hasn't made anything as unforgettable as his imagined identities like Dr. Octagon, Dr. Doom, and Black Elvis, he insists his "dreams are fulfilled."

I met up with Kool Keith at the tail end of his recent East Coast tour, which finished with a sold-out set at Public Theater near Astor Place in Manhattan. At Tick Tock, we chatted about his favorite sci-fi shows, modern hip-hop bugging him out, and how he's been taking "mind steroids" to keep his lyrics up to par. He also proposed that we start a new musical group called the Ketchup Boys and write songs about said condiment.

The man may be out of place and time, but there are few artists as spectacularly weird as Keith.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/q4y9IZqJEhw' width='640' height='360']

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VICE: What have you been listening to these days?
Kool Keith: Elements of new people or stuff that sounds brand new, you know what I'm saying? Satellite radio has a lot of new stuff, I think.

Are there any rappers you like?
I'm not impressed with what the rappers are saying these days. I'm hearing a lot of the same stuff. I'm excited about new sounds. I'm excited about new sounds. I'm a fan of new, new sounds. Basically, new sounds. New, new sounds. I'm a fan of new sounds.

You're 51, now right?
Me? No, I'm about 21. In the music, at least.

What makes you rejuvenated and youthful? What's different about the Kool Keith today from the Kool Keith when you were first making music?
I'm doing new music, doing some listening, keeping my flow up to point. You notice I don't sound old. I write a lot, and practice a lot. All these rappers are reading from their phones... It bugs me out that they're reading from the phones. I like writing on paper. I feel it naturally on paper. The paper can tell me how long the verse is. It tells me how long to rap for.

What are you writing about these days? Tell me about a recent song you made.

When I worked on Octagon, I sometimes felt trapped within a concept. I don't want to be stuck in the concept. I just made those various characters to separate the albums so I could make more records and feel free. I write so many songs, man... I write so many songs. The goal is to feel free to write about whatever I want.

You've got this new web series show where you're playing a million different characters. What's inspiring them?
I was in LA, filming stuff. I always film in LA—just making movies and mini movies, like random street comedies without written scripts. I like those. I never took it totally serious, I just did it randomly to have fun. I want to get it on TV probably.

It's good to have a non-scripted show. Like, everyone's seen scripted. Mine's not scripted. I like to just have fun and make people bug out in the street. Remember how Benny Hill used to be? It's like Benny Hill.

How do you keep it all focused? Your rap stuff , TV projects, lingerie line—even those Dr. Octagon action figures you're making.
I'm real patient. I just get to it when I get to it.

You've been making porn too, right?
Yeah, I directed some masturbation tapes, but I'm not in them. I'll give you one, they're called Masturbation Sessions. They're pretty cool and are shot in HD. They're really about my clothes, a way to show off my clothing line. I'm not impressed by strippers' clothing, so I've been trying to introduce a new clothing style. I design, sketch it out, everything. It's a way to keep my mind sharp and ideas flowing. I use lycra.

Can you tell me about your ever-present love of space?
I grew up with space. I was always rushing home to watch Star Trek, Speed Racer, Gigantor, Lost in Space , which was one of my favorites. Mr. Spock passed away and that was really serious for me. Leonard Nimoy was a big part of my life. I always used to watch Leonard Nimoy from back in the past. He was a real inspiration to me while making records.

Are there any modern pop culture figures who are inspiring to you?
No. Only Star Trek was big to me. Buck Rogers , maybe. And Dr. Who!

What about today though? Is there any new shit that's influencing you?
I'm my own information-inspiration. I don't got nothing new really good to watch, to feed off. There are really no good sci-fi shows on. I mean I see a lot of these sci-fi shows on now that are more like mystery and vampire stuff. They don't relate to space, man.

But you don't write about that stuff right now. Can you elaborate on what inspires your ideas for rhymes today?
I'm writing in a style that's steroided up. I write about fantasy. Fantasies are what I feel in my life. Just fantasies. I don't care if it's about celebration or space shit, writing about a limousine, or elegance. I've been writing about elegant stuff lately a lot, though.

Like what—living large?
Yeah, living large in my way. I can rap about anything 'cause I traveled around the world, so I feel like I can write about anything. I feel steroided up. I'm taking steroids. I'm taking mind steroids and then creating these lyrics.

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I feel like in the past, you were focused on being the most unique or eccentric. Why steroid-up your music now?
Everybody wants to hear wild stuff now. I don't think nobody wants to hear about bad things—poverty, the struggle. People want to hear something and say, "This is wild." I like to write about this life, like, a limousine with ten wheels on it and reclining seats, as opposed to me talking about a go-cart that's made of wood. I get off on steroiding everything up. I steroid up all the stories.

I've already advanced my music and production so far ahead of my lyrics that everything sounds so future. The lyrics automatically sound future, as a result, even if I'm talking about something that's more basic. I could have a song that's like, "Ketchup is red," and the song is all about ketchup. I'm making it easy for you, I'm giving you futuristic music and the truth at the same time, but I'm making it more fun to listen to. I'm an artist who can do anything.

When young people hear your new work today, and maybe aren't familiar with your past stuff, how do you want them to feel?
I want them to feel that this guy's timeless. A timeless person, like you can't put him in a bracket of a genre. They don't have a box for me yet. It's just I'm a in a unlimited box, but that's what I want them to see. I'm not stuck in no time. I'm future. I'm future past. I'm future future. Beyond future. Past the future.

Do you ever wish you were a more mainstream or famous rapper?
I traveled around the world, I feel like I can go anywhere I want. I learned that sometimes fame can be dangerous. You can't travel, you gotta go around with a lot of people, you gotta go around with 20, 30 people everywhere. It's not safe, you have an unsafe crowd, you know your life is in danger all the time. You can't sit in the diner and have a cup of tea. I think that that bothers me a lot. That bothers me a lot. I think I feel good because I always wanted to do normal things.

Are you happy now?
Yeah, I'm happy. My dreams have been fulfilled. My dream was to see LA as a kid. And I lived in LA for 10 years. I felt I lived out my dream. I didn't have a desperate goal to reach, whereas a lot of rappers today do.

Which of your creative endeavors makes you happiest these days?
I can go in the studio right now and make a song tonight, just on a whim. We could write about ketchup, we could make a band called the Ketchup Boys, or just something we wrote freely. Freedom. Writing freedom. Writing freedom has been my greatest happiness. It's not like a record company is breathing on my back, it's not like a big executive is sitting in the room watching me.

Two hundred years from now, 3,000 years from now, how do you want people to remember you?
I want them to remember me as a person that wasn't scared to be daring, a person that wasn't scared to be original, a person that took chances, a person that didn't care about the laws of music, a person that could take anything and turn it into something good.

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Follow Kool Keith and Zach on Twitter. And check out Kool Keith's Instagram.

In the run up to the 2015 general election, a war is going on for the right to live in London. Rapid gentrification—praised as "regeneration" by local councils and property developers, derided as "social cleansing" by critics—is breaking up established communities. In some cases, families who've lived in London for generations are left homeless; in others, they are forced to move across the city or out of it completely. Meanwhile, the real estate opportunities are making lots of people—many of whom do not actually live in London—very rich.

In part one of Regeneration Game, host Daisy-May Hudson visits the Carpenters Estate in Newham, the borough with the biggest homelessness crisis in London. With Westfield shopping center, the Olympic site, and excellent transport links surrounding the area, the land on which people's homes stand has rocketed in value. The council has said the Carpenters Estate is no longer "viable" and has been slowly trying to relocate residents over the last eight years—but a group of local moms are leading the fight back.

Follow Daisy on Twitter.

More from VICE on the Election 2015:

Watch 'Regeneration Game' Part Two here

Watch 'Regeneration Game' Part Three here

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Anti-PEGIDA protesters showed up in large number on Saturday. All photos by the author

With Quebec's protest movement back in high gear, maybe now isn't the right time to hold a racist demo in Montreal.

But then again, maybe the folks over at PEGIDA Quebec—whose German acronym translates to English as Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West—think a provocative march through a neighbourhood with a significant Muslim population is just the thing to announce their arrival. What's better than a tension-filled atmosphere and lots of media attention to give it some visibility?

The people behind this obnoxious idea are inspired by the relatively new German-based PEGIDA movement, which started in Dresden late last year and now has offshoots in several other countries. The group denies it's racist, although its founder, a one-time petty criminal called Lutz Bachmann, left the movement after a picture of him dressed up as Adolf Hitler made the rounds in January.

"PEGIDA Québec isn't racist," organizers wrote on the event's Facebook page. "That's why we have to join forces with all defense leagues in order to unite against Islamisation."

Saturday afternoon was supposed to mark the group's first public event and those "defense leagues" failed to show up.

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Protesters gathered to oppose PEGIDA's anti-Islam message.

Instead, hundreds of people gathered in the parking lot of a mall near a part of town called Little Maghreb, after its significant North African population, in Montreal's Villeray district. A mixture of leftists, students, Palestinians and Arabs, some anti-racist skins, and plenty others were basically telling PEGIDA Québec to go fuck itself, and that it sure as hell wasn't welcome in Quebec.

According to PEGIDA Quebec's Facebook page, the rally was supposed to start at 4 PM. By a quarter past, with virtually no one from the group to be found, it had been declared cancelled. Of the 183 people who had indicated they'd be attending PEGIDA's gathering, fewer than a dozen came out (or dared to identify themselves as pro-PEGIDA). While some were yelled at and chased off the protest site, many were also given pamphlets on Islam and told to educate themselves. "We invite you to talk to Muslims instead of hating us," one anti-PEGIDA protester yelled into a loud speaker.

The anti-PEGIDA crowd erupted in feel-good cheers after the cancellation, and went off to join one of the city's near-daily anti-austerity marches.

PEGIDA blamed the fiasco of a demonstration on, of all people, Quebec Solidaire, a left-wing party with three members sitting in the National Assembly, claiming that QS put together the "well-financed" counter-demo.

Standing quietly on the outskirts of the now-festive anti-racism rally, the group (who didn't seem to have consensus on how to pronounce PEGIDA) told VICE they were disappointed with the turnout. "It's possible that people were scared off because this is the first time our movement gathers in North America," said a younger PEGIDA member who refused to give his name.

Among those who took Saturday afternoon off to attend the counter-demo was Sabine Friesinger, whose dad is German and mom is Jewish. She said, "In my family, the situation of racism, anti-Semitism, and fear of the other is something that we've been very aware of and is totally unacceptable. And the danger starts on the discourse level. Because, what will people do after? Where will this racism take them?"

Standing next to her was Chadi Marouf, an ethnic Palestinian born in Jordan. Both were heartened that the counter-demo dwarfed the PEGIDA one, but said he wasn't surprised it's happening in Quebec.

"Whenever you have national identity fights, you end up with some sort of discrimination against minorities," he said. "That's only normal."

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Pauline Beaud with her sign

A little further along, Pauline Beaud was holding up a sign that read, in French, "I am the woman with the headscarf who gets insulted on the metro." She said she turned out to show that Quebecers aren't racists or Islamophobes.

"The PEGIDA movement makes me very worried," she said. "I have family in Germany and I've known about it for a while, and was really disappointed to hear that it was getting support here in Quebec. So I just wanted to show very clearly to everyone who comes to Quebec that they're just a bunch of losers who don't represent all Quebecers."

Disappointed, OK. But was she surprised?

"Unfortunately, no, not completely."

Things got a little weird just a few minutes after the main body of counter-demonstrators left. I didn't see what started it, but a crowd of young-ish people—and then TV cameras and reporters—had formed a semicircle then a full circle around one guy in his late 30s or early 40s who'd started a shouting match with some of the anti-PEGIDA demonstrators.

The exchange was mostly idiotic, with the one guy yelling basically that we're in Quebec so people should act like Quebecers, that Montreal is an Anglo-Saxon city not a French one, they should fuck off—and then he started making monkey sounds at them. The demonstrators then told the guy that he was a disgrace, to shut up, get lost, fuck off, he's an asshole, etc. The cops eventually escorted the guy away, to jeers from the crowd.

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Anti-PEGIDA protesters and passersby had a few confrontations.

The same thing happened with a middle-aged woman a few minutes later, when she and a young Muslim guy started screaming at each other. Again, the cops broke it up after a few minutes.

But this being Quebec, and with anti-government, anti-cop sentiment running near the fever pitch it did during the student protests of 2012, the crowd—several dozen strong—then started taunting the cops. As I was looking on, one of the protestors, kind of nattily dressed with neatly combed hair and maybe out of his teens, turned and yelled at me with a sneer if I was a PEGIDA member.

For a few seconds I didn't answer. I didn't even know he was talking to me, but he kept staring. I was taken aback—I'm not often mistaken for a racist—but assured him that no, in fact, I was not. A national TV reporter I sort of know was standing next to me and laughed out loud.

The kid turned around and melted into the crowd. I was half-tempted to ask him what the hell he meant but I didn't really care enough to be bothered. The cops eventually left and the crowd of mostly young and excitable student types dispersed.

And that was it. That was PEGIDA Quebec's big debut. Their obnoxious plan to march through a largely Muslim neighbourhood and blare out anti-Muslim vitriol outside local mosques fell flat, kiboshed by Quebec's endemic protest culture.

But, racists, fear not: PEGIDA Quebec is promising another demo next weekend, same time, same place.

With files from VICE Quebec Correspondent Brigitte Noël

Follow Patrick Lejtenyi on Twitter.

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Last week the cream of the UK's gay porn industry descended on Soho, London. Producers, directors, and some of the heaviest hung actors in the country were decanted out of limos at the Shadow Lounge for the 2015 Prowler Porn Awards, there to receive such accolades as Best British Twink, Best Daddy, Best Bottom, and Hottest British Porn Star.

Welcomed by Sister Jacqui of the Sister of Perpetual Indulgence, and a seven-foot-tall trans woman named Heather Fetish, industry icons spilling out onto the pavement in a haze of tuxedos, tans, and incredibly pungent cologne included gay porn veteran Ashley Ryder, Mr. Leather UK 2015 (a.k.a. Greg Robinson), and newbies like Alex Silver, who later walked off with the trophy for Best British Twink.

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Mr. Leather UK 2015

Watching everyone arrive, it felt a bit like I'd been transported into a Brett Easton Ellis novel, the diamond-sharp cheekbones and coke-fueled fabulousness brightening up the gloomy Thursday evening.

Along with all the male fans crowding around outside, there were a fair number of straight girls in the queue who were just as excited to see Sam Barclay and JP Dubois walk off with the Best On Screen Couple award as the guys.

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SmackyGirl

One of these was SmackyGirl, a Norwegian gay porn obsessive and blogger, who was covering the event for her site. Another was Sarah and her group of mates up from Hastings for the night.

I asked if they were all massive gay porn fans.

"No, we're mates with Mickey North. And we love the Cocky Boys," they said. "Oh my God! Excuse me—Paddy O'Brian's here!"

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Sarah and her mates

At the bar inside I got chatting to Mouse, a performance artist who's currently got a residency at the Box. A veteran of the trade, she has played Torture Garden, the Sex Maniacs Ball, and The Erotic Awards. One of her recent shows climaxed with her pulling a 22-foot flag emblazoned with the words "I Love Drum and Bass, Give It To Me" out of her vagina.

What will her act at the Box tonight consist of?

"I'm on for three minutes. I drink soup with my vagina."

Cool. How did she first discover she had a talent for this stuff?

"I have a really strong vagina."

After the show had wrapped up I bumped into Alex Silver and asked him how it feels to have bagged the Best British Twink award.

"It's good. And bad. I'm getting too old to be a twink now," he sighed.

How old are you?

"Nearly 20."

Ancient. And what are your plans for the future?

"I want to go more international. And I want to get into directing. I've set up a studio in my apartment. Fans get to come and do scenes with me there."

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Darius Ferdynand arriving at the event

With Best International Porn Star going to Lucas Ridgestone, Darius Ferdynand picking up Best British Bottom, and Best Fetish Film going to Young Bastards Used and Abused, it was a night of worthy winners.

By midnight the show was over and many people were leaving, with Mouse and Ashley Ryder heading to the Box and several limos full of gay porn stars heading back to party at their hotel.

"There's loads of us staying there," said Alex. "We're gonna party hard."

Follow John and Jake on Twitter.

See more photos from the night below:

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Jordanian social entrepreneur and comic book artist Suleiman Bakhit. All images courtesy of Suleiman Bakhit.

Suleiman Bakhit knows more about the violence born of religious insecurity than most. The right side of the Jordanian comic book artist's face is marked from temple to cheek with an impressive scar, from where he was slashed with a razor in an extremist attack in 2008. "It's improved my dating life exponentially," he quips.

Suleiman was attacked for producing comics. But these weren't the willfully blasphemous provocations of Charlie Hebdo or Lars Vilks; the social entrepreneur's ongoing mission is to counter the attraction of Jihadi groups by presenting Arab and Muslim kids with alternative, positive models of heroism: superheroes instead of jihadis.

I caught up with Suleiman over Skype from Washington, DC, where he was speaking at the White House Summit to Counter Violent Extremism. "I feel I challenge some existing assumptions around extremism. A lot of people have done work on issues like poverty and unemployment, but in fact much of the most recent data indicates that sympathy for extremist groups actually goes up with the level of education and the level of employment, not the other way around," he told me. "Groups like al Qaeda, al Nusra, and ISIS may target young, naive boys from poor villages to become suicide bombers, but the leadership is always middle class and above."

For Suleiman, the urge to join groups like the Islamic State seems to spring from issues of psychology rather than economy, or even of theology.

"Many people joining these groups aren't even very religious," he said. "MI5 released a report that some British men on their way to Syria or Iraq bought the book Islam for Dummies—that's a real case. This is much more about a sense of belonging, a sense of identity, and a call to adventure... It's about narratives."

This analysis seems to chime with the attraction of other extremist gangs, both religious and secular, throughout history. The jihadi groups flatten and weave all the complexities of Islamic and Arab history into an elaborate, seductive, and high-octane mythology of self-definition. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is essentially the Rocky IV of Islamic extremism.

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Suleiman's own story begins when he was studying at the University of Minnesota. Shortly after 9/11 he was attacked and beaten by four guys for no other reason than his being an Arab. "I did briefly think about hating all white people forever, but that wasn't really me," he said, smiling.

"I realized the problem was that the only story these guys knew about me, or about any Arab, was 'terrorism.' So I started doing talks and workshops in schools around the area, just thinking that if I could give these kids a positive experience and insight into where I come from we could all begin to change things."

In the talks he's done for TED and the Oslo Freedom Forum, Suleiman describes his "lightbulb moment" as when a six-year-old girl put up her hand and asked if there was an Arab Barbie. Suddenly the room was buzzing. Was there an Arab Batman? An Arab Superman?

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Photo by Jon Gosier via.

The thoughts inspired in that classroom eventually led Suleiman to quit school and move back to Amman, pursuing the seeds of an idea. His initial research was immensely dispiriting.

"Going into schools in Jordan, I would ask kids who their heroes were, and they'd just give me blank looks," he told me. "Then, if I pushed, they'd say they had heard that Bin Laden and [militant Jordanian Islamist] Zarqawi were protecting the Arabs against the West, who were invading our lands. So these were the only heroes they really had. I realized that groups like ISIS and al Qaeda not only operate in a political vacuum, but also a narrative vacuum. One of the most serious problems in the Middle East today is that terrorism is packaged as heroism. That's what young boys grow up thinking it means to be a man."

Suleiman set about countering this toxic dynamic by developing a series of comic books, founding his own company—the Aranim Media Factory—with an initial grant from the King Abdullah II Fund for Development. The idea was to "inoculate" young Jordanians from extremist ideologies by giving them an entirely new and different set of heroes.

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A panel from 'Element Zero'

Some of Aranim's biggest hits were Element Zero, a kind of Arab Jack Bauer or James Bond character; Princess Heart, a modern retelling of the 1,001 Nights; and Mansaf and Uzi, a comedy riff on Popeye based on Jordan's national dish.

Two stories that Aranim had in advanced development, but were never published due to funding issues and what Suleiman describes as "cultural blocks," were Saladin 2100, a post-apocalyptic eco-warrior drama, and another based on the exploits of a real-life, all-female elite counterterrorism unit in the Jordanian military.

All in all, the Aranim comics sold over 1.2 million copies. This is impressive in a country of 6.5 million people, but becomes even more striking when—as Suleiman noted—you realize "studies show that any pamphlet or paper you release in Jordan gets passed around and read by at least three people. Aranim's work really showed what an absolute hunger there is among young people in the Arab world for another set of narratives. We saw huge changes in attitudes in just a couple of years."

Eventually Aranim shut down due to lack of funding, but Suleiman is currently setting up his new project, Hero Factor, which—if anything—is even more ambitious in scope.

Hero Factor will partly aim at creating cross-platform content, including comics but also films, TV, and apps, becoming, in Suleiman's words, "an Arab Disney, offering new narratives to Muslim kids: narratives of resilience, heroism, and service to others." But there is also a deeper, research-driven aim behind the new venture. "We are trying to learn about what people think and feel, to model what it means to be a hero, how the classic hero story fits into the modern Middle East," said Suleiman.

The importance of storytelling—and the idea of "the hero"—is profoundly important to Suleiman. His conversation was shot through with references to the myth-analysis and archetypes of Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, and Otto Rank.

"The most important story humans have is the classic hero's journey. Right now, all governments are saying to kids is, 'Don't be a terrorist.' The extremists are saying, 'Be a hero.' It's obvious which narrative is stronger. But all the extremists offer is what I call 'shadow heroism,' in the Jungian sense. We need to claim that narrative space back. Even people like Abu Qatada have said publicly that they will probably lose the war on the ground. Osama Bin Laden often referred to a 100-year war. This is a war of narratives, and to win we must present another mythology to displace that of the extremists. Because, right now, that toxic story is the only one Arab and Muslim kids are hearing."

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Another panel from 'Element Zero'

Despite the hurdles, Suleiman is optimistic. "Approximately 50 percent of the Middle East is under 15; 62 percent of Muslims are under 30. With such a young population we can actually effect serious change within three to five years," he told me. "It just won't be governments that do it; governments aren't good at communicating. But they can enable us—civil society and social entrepreneurs who can really make a difference. And we're ready. I can make a long-lasting positive impact for less than the cost of a single drone."

"Yeah," I laughed, "what you need is a comic-industrial complex." Without missing a beat, Suleiman immediately fired back: "Well, what we really need is a hero-industrial complex."

And that makes me stop and think. In a world where politicians seem to range from the terminally bland to the terminally awful, the thought of a hero-industrial complex based on Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung is probably the most exciting political idea I've heard in years. Imagine it: teams of CIA goons in dark suits and sunglasses recruiting geeky artist fan-boys at Comic Cons across the world. It's almost like the setup for a classic screwball adventure-story comic book.

There's a reason why the run-up to this election has yet to "ignite"—no one knows what is going to happen, and it's only going to get more chaotic once the result is announced. What that result will say more loudly than anything else is that Britain is confused, complicated, and changing at a quicker pace than its political system can keep up with.

As such, we will be focusing our efforts out in the field, seeing how government policies play out at street level, away from the Westminster echo chamber.

Instead of slavishly following bickering parties and pilloried politicians, we've been looking at the issues people definitely are invested in. We've got feature-length docs sifting through the rubble of the Coalition's austerity measures: the fall-out Britain of food banks, housing crises, and council towers turned into vertical shopping precincts for drugs, sex, guns, slave labor, and stolen gasoline.

All the while, our political correspondent Gavin Haynes will be carving his own kind of campaign trail through Britain in the run-up to the election—hitching a cab with jihadists so they can outline their vision for a future London, crashing student house parties, and hanging out with the Al-Zebabist Nation of OOOG, a separatist group running against Nigel Farage in South Thanet.

It's going to be the most anarchic election in living memory. It would be a shame to cover it in the same gray, old boring way.

Dive into our Election '15 coverage:

WATCH – Regeneration Game: The Battle to Live in London

WATCH – We Filmed at UKIP's Insane Party Conference

A shooting broke out in front of the National Security Agency headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, Monday morning. Around 9:30 AM, two men dressed as women rammed the gate of the Maryland facility, with some reports suggesting the vehicle was a stolen Ford Escape.The FBI had arrived by 10 AM, but there are still few details about what happened—apart from the fact that two people were shot and one was killed by NSA cops.

Curiously, one federal official told CBS News that cocaine was found on the scene.

Fort Meade is a US Army installation that, in addition to housing everybody's favorite spy agency, serves as host to the Defense Information School, the United States Cyber Command, and the military band. It's Maryland's largest single employer, according to its website—about 56,000 people work there. It refers to itself as "the nation's preeminent center for information, intelligence and cyber."

Despite the large number of military and security experts who work at the facility, this is actually the second shooting there this month. On March 3, police arrested a 35-year-old former prison guard named Hong Young for a series of shootings in the Washington, DC, area, including one near the NSA HQ at Fort Meade. His motives are still unclear. "This guy apparently has some . . .issue going on that our detectives continue to follow up on to see exactly what's going on with him," T.J. Smith, Anne Arundel County Police spokesman, told the Washington Post of Young. The attacks, it seems, were at random.

Likewise, the FBI doesn't seem to think today's incident was a terrorist attack. "The shooting scene is contained, and we do not believe it is related to terrorism," the agency said in a statement. "We are working with the US Attorney's Office in Maryland to determine if federal charges are warranted."

A spokesperson from the Anne Arundel County Fire Department told the Washington Post that they couldn't release any information beyond the fact that they sent units to the location (because the shooting happened on the NSA property). Local police could not immediately be reached for comment.

Although the names of the two men haven't been released, the fact that they were apparently cross-dressing dudes holding cocaine hints at a fascinating backstory. The FBI is currently conducting interviews with witnesses, which means more details should emerge shortly. We'll update this post as the story develops.

UPDATE:

From Jonathan Freed, NSA Director for Strategic Communications:

Shortly before 9:00 AM today, a vehicle containing two individuals attempted an unauthorized entry at a National Security Agency gate. The driver failed to obey an NSA Police officer's routine instructions for safely exiting the secure campus. The vehicle failed to stop and barriers were deployed.

If you were hungry, unfussy, and in Melbourne at some point the late 90s, you might remember Smorgy's. This was a chain of restaurants that looked like Polynesian barns, serving all-you-can-eat nursing-home food, located in suburbs that your dad visited to buy mulch. But despite these handicaps, Smorgy's was awesome.

Smorgy's was like your worst favorite TV show, or your first pop-music crush–it was crap, but you were too young to know. Yet unlike those things, it's now gone. The chain went bust in the early 2000s, and its locations all burned down or got bulldozed. So to keep the tiki flame lit I compiled some thoughts, photos, and interviews from Smorgy's: Australia's best worst restaurant ever.

The photo above is of the entrance to Smorgy's in Burwood. Instead of regular doors, the Bundoora, Ringwood, and Burwood venues all had weird volcanoes you walked through to get inside. (The Geelong Smorgy's didn't, but I never went there, so whatever.) These fake concrete volcanoes used to blow up as well. Every half-hour or so there'd be a blast of burning gas from the top, just like at the Crown Casino but for kids. It was fucking nice.

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Gorgeous. Image via

Inside there was always one of these things. What you're looking at above is a type of feature wall decked out in plastic plants, a few monkeys, and a waterfall that smelled like an indoor pool. Each restaurant had a variation of this, including one place that had a full-on talking tree.

You might disagree here, but I think there are few things in life more scary than animatronics from the early 90s. It's just how they move—it's terrifying. Also, the Smorgy's animals talked and moved their little faces in the worst way imaginable. They were clearly built by the same psychopaths who made Falkor for the Never Ending Story, or Aslan for the BBC's version of Narnia. At the age of maybe nine I remember looking at the talking tree and feeling my flesh shrink-wrap around my spine. Years later I ate too many magic mushrooms at a party and got exactly the same feeling. Restaurant decor shouldn't feel like a bad trip.

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A big night out. Image via Flickr user Aaron Monson

These aren't my friends. They're total strangers in a photo from Flickr, but they sum up the Smorgy's clientele pretty well: There were always a few early-20s dudes getting drunk or sobering up and eating way too much. Sometimes there was vomit in the toilets. Sometimes the vomit wasn't in the toilets. When I was 19 or so I recall coming to Smorgy's after a big day on the sauce. I think that must have been just before they closed up because we threw food at each other and no one stopped us. The employees just sort of looked resigned and gave us dark looks when we left. Staff morale was generally quite low.

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A boatload of food. Image via

In keeping with the spirit of the fake waterfall, the food was served from an unnecessary feature thing. In the case of the Burwood venue the salad bars were built into these boats. The food wasn't great, as I mentioned, but there was a lot of it. There was a whole carvery section with roast beef, vegetables, and gravy. Then there was an Asian section next to an inevitable Italian quadrant, with lots of bain-marie linguini and corn flour–flavored carbonara.

The desserts included a donut machine and a Mr Whippy dispenser, as well as vats of cubed jelly and egg custard. There was everything you could ever want; it's just that its flavor existed in only two dimensions. It was like they had a control knob for sweet and salty, but the other knobs had fallen off and gotten lost. And they didn't even care.

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The Bundoora Smorgy's. Photo by Simon Reeves, Built Heritage

To find out what the Smorgy's experience was like for the poor, poor staffers who had to serve the food and clean puke, I tracked down Johnathan and Andrew, two brothers who collected plates at the Burwood store in the late 90s.

Jonathan: It was my first job. My brother worked there so I had an in with him. And I remember the interview process was really intense. I had to go to their central office and meet this sour middle-aged woman who sat me down and drilled me for an hour. Why did I want to work there? How would I respond in a conflict situation? What was an example of a personal flaw? I was 14 years old, and the job was to collect dirty plates.

Andrew: You think that's bad? I was there for three years. Jonathan and me had the same job, walking around in Hawaiian shirts, putting stuff in a bucket and taking it to the dishwasher. The main thing I remember was that shirt. Mum washed and washed it but it always smelt like a deep fryer and something else. We threw out so much food. The bins were always full of sugary food and it had this smell that my Hawaiian shirt adopted. You could never get rid of it.

Jonathan: I hated the management. It was just this guy named Dennis who was always telling me off. The restaurant looked over a big oval, and Andrew talked about flying a giant kite from the oval that read, "Go fuck yourself Dennis." Did you ever do that?

Andrew: No, that was my quitting plan, but I never did it. I remember all the kitchen staff were like, lonely. There was one chef who always talked about his ex-wife. He was there, making this food every day, all week. I don't think he had anything else going on.

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The Ringwood Smorgy's on the way out. Photo by Simon Reeves, Built Heritage

Jonathan: I left after just two months. One time I saw a huge sign on the front that said "Under New Management." That lasted a few weeks, then it closed down. It was actually derelict for a while but I didn't feel sad about it. I think the building is gone. Now it's an apartment block.

Andrew: I might have felt a bit sad when it closed. The place was shit, but it was also part of growing up.

It was for me too, Andrew. It was for me too.

Follow Julian on Twitter

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In a 2011 interview, the writer Jeanette Winterson said, "Time is never linear. You always feel that everything happened just yesterday but also 100 years ago. I don't want to experience time in a line."

On its surface, the episodic game Life is Strange, which just saw the release of its second part, is about literally not experiencing time in a line. Your character, the introverted photography student Max Caulfield, discovers that she has the ability to rewind time, a gift she uses to both impress her friend Chloe and to save Chloe's life more than once. This mechanic is Life is Strange's gameplay hook, its gimmick, but what makes the game so fascinating to me is the way that its concerns with time go so much deeper than Max's nifty superpower. This is a game that understands that we live our lives in interconnected moments, not in straight lines.

When Max and Chloe are thrown together by circumstance in the five-part series' first episode, the weight of time is present in their interactions. Five years ago, the two were best friends. Then Max and her family left the town of Arcadia Bay, and she and Chloe have had no contact since, until they find themselves barreling down the road in Chloe's truck. Can the two of them pick up where they left off, and return to being the best of friends?

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Max and Chloe in the latter's truck

There are hard conversations that need to happen first, feelings of neglect and betrayal to be aired. The past—not the immediate, linear past but the past of their friendship, the past of five years ago—must be confronted and reconciled with the present the two characters find themselves in. Max's life seems to be going pretty well. She's pursuing her dream of becoming a photographer at an elite private school. Meanwhile, Chloe's life is going to shit. Her new stepfather is an authoritarian asshole, her family is struggling to pay the bills, and her new best friend Rachel, who filled the void left by Max's departure, has vanished.

The contrast between what Chloe and Max once were to each other—which the game lets us see in photographs of their shared past, and lets us hear in Max's memories—and what they are now, is present between the two of them in even the happiest moments they share. Things change, even when they don't.

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And while Max's ability to rewind time is Life is Strange's most obvious way of letting you engage with the passage of time as a player, it is not, to me, the most interesting. I love that, here and there in the game, there are opportunities for you to just inhabit a quiet moment for a while. On her school's campus, there are spots where Max can just chill and enjoy the afternoon. In her dorm room, she can strum the guitar to her heart's content. My favorite opportunities to linger in a moment come in the second episode, "Out of Time," at a junkyard Chloe takes Max to, a place laden in so many ways with the weight of the past. Max is mindful of how every discarded object in that junkyard—every refrigerator, every junked car, every scrap of an old punk T-shirt—has a history, and was once a part of someone's life. More than this, she's mindful that this is a place where Chloe and Rachel spent time together.

In one spot, Max finds graffiti on a wall asserting that "Chloe was here" and that "Rachel was here." The game gives you the option to leave your mark, too, asserting that you were there, but to me, doing so would have felt profoundly disrespectful of the time that Chloe and Rachel shared that I, as Max, wasn't a part of, staking a claim to moments that weren't mine. There's a real beauty to the junkyard, this physical manifestation of the passage of time, and because the game gives you a few spots where you can just sit, relax, and wistfully take in all the detritus of people's lives for a while, you get the sense that even Max, who can rewind time to an extent, is keenly aware that the moment is always slipping away, and that in the end, there's nothing she can do about it.

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Chloe dances to Sparklehorse's 'Piano Fire', giving this scene a melancholic undercurrent

These are moments that you can linger in for as long as you want, but there are also moments you can't. My favorite moment in episode one, an exuberant scene when Chloe starts dancing on her bed and the friendship between Chloe and Max is at its least troubled and most joyous, is cut short when her stepfather barges in. This, the moment I most wanted to linger in, is over almost before it starts. But at least you get to take a snapshot of Chloe dancing before it's gone. I kept thinking of the Japanese term mono no aware, a kind of wistful awareness of how everything is fleeting. What better way for the game to make you aware of how each moment is slipping away than by casting you as a photographer, and letting you take what you can from a moment before it's over?

Life is Strange is set in the present day, or near enough—it plays out in the autumn of 2013 in the Pacific Northwest—but the way its characters drop more references to songs and movies of the 80s than they do to contemporary hits makes the game feel to me like it takes place somewhere outside of time, both now and then, today and yesterday. Amplifying this feeling is the fact that so much of it is bathed in a beautiful golden sunlight, the kind that makes you nostalgic for a moment even as it's happening. It makes you aware that it's slipping away. It makes you feel like you're already looking back on it from a great distance, like it's a faded photograph, soft and somehow perfect.

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As the first episode of Life is Strange, "Chrysalis," comes to a close, a montage plays in which we see many of the game's characters taking notice of the strange snow falling on Arcadia Bay. All of them are bathed in that golden sunlight. Accompanying these images, we hear the Syd Matters song "Obstacles." "We played hide and seek in waterfalls," Jonathan Morali sings. "We were younger, we were younger."

Life happens in a straight line, but because some things stay with us while others fall away, that's not always how it feels to us. Moments in the future can bring the past flooding back. We were younger, and we are, and we will be again.

Follow Carolyn on Twitter.

It's hard to pin a genre on the Danger Boys. Their debut album jumps from R&B to punk to psychedelia to electronic jams without warning. Somehow it doesn't come off as abrupt or forced, which is why it makes sense that the album was mastered by Ween's Andrew Weiss—like Ween, the Danger Boys are masters of pastiche. The record is stuffed with twisted reimaginings of the Modern Lovers, Mac Demarco, Of Montreal, and probably peaks with a really terrifying song called "Nature Boy" that sounds like Tool trying to write a reggae track.

The Danger Boys' lead single, "Argentina," is a strange and catchy slacker R&B tune. It doesn't sound like anything else on the album, but none of the songs do. In the video, one of the D-Boys pines for a fair maiden on a beach while staggering down the boardwalk in his tighty-whiteys. He's also carrying a chair. It's bizarre and captivating, just like the song.

Watch it and then listen to their full album below, via Bandcamp. It just dropped today.