If your N64 collection ever featured a game with this box art, we're so, so sorry (and doesn't Nintendo's "seal of quality" just add further insult to the injury?)

This article is part of VICE Gaming's Comic Connections week— find more here.

The world is superhero crazy right now. Marvel recently gave its comics the mass reboot treatment in Secret Wars, while its runaway cinematic universe is so successful that everyone's trying to copy it. If the Transformers and Ghostbusters movies are getting shared worlds, can a Pitch Perfect or Adam Sandler cinematic universe be far behind? It's enough to keep you awake at night.

One of the greatest shared universes of all time is the realm of video games. Puzzled? Then consider the core fundamentals found in the majority of games out there today: progression systems, a degree of narrative, gameplay mechanics, world boundaries, and musical scores are just a few tropes expected by default in this industry. The commonality of expectations is both a blessing and a curse.

Developers can often become entrapped by the laws of game design, but there are times when sticking too rigidly to those universal values can cheapen a game so badly that even Poundland couldn't sell the results. And one of the best examples of common design harming what should be a simple concept is the superhero game.

These shared design constraints and rules shift depending on which generation you look at, but they include health bars, the possibility of death, invisible walls to restrict play-space, and more. The first example to spring to mind is Superman and the scores of sub-par games that have held back his awesome power. When, in a game about Kal-El—with all of his god-like powers—would a health bar be an appropriate design restriction? Certainly not in a game like Sunsoft's 1994 SNES effort, The Death and Return of Superman.

It's a side-scrolling brawler like Streets of Rage and Final Fight, where Superman can be defeated by demonic enemies—simply by punching our hero in the face enough times that his health bar depletes. I'm aware this is commonly how health bars work, but if you follow Batman comics, you'll know that in Frank Miller's legendary The Dark Knight Returns, Superman diverts a Russian nuclear bomb, is engulfed in the blast and survives.

Superman prepares to punch, um, whatever this other thing is, in Sunsoft's 'The Death and Return of Superman.'

He's practically reduced to a skeleton, but just brushes it off (at the expense of some local flora) and gets back to work, like he's just stubbed his toe or something. Why, then, does he keel over so easily from a few melee hits in The Death and Return of Superman? Depending on the mechanics at play, the rules that so stringently dictate a superhero's powers, weaknesses, and methodology become warped and in many cases, causing the overall package to suffer.

You can see how, by embracing the shared values and mechanics of "the game," Superman isn't accurately represented in Sunsoft's brawler. It's still a really fun game that's well worth seeking out—unlike Titus Software's infamous Superman for the N64 (regularly cited as one of the worst video games ever)—but does it make you feel like the indestructible man we know from the comics? Not even close, and that's because it was designed with firm gaming rules in mind.

A promotional screen shot for the awful 'Iron Man' game of 2008.

Sunsoft made a few great superhero games back in the day, including Batman Returns on NES, which sees Bats laying waste to Gotham's criminal dreck with a gun and a boatload of firepower. Again, if you know the lore, you already know what's wrong with this picture. Bruce Wayne has a strict no killing or guns policy, so when you see him whittling down scum with enough ordnance to rival Contra, you know someone's missed the point.

But as the years went on, we saw this trend of ill-informed and mechanically jarring superhero games continue, but in baffling new ways. Chances are you didn't play 2008's woeful Iron Man movie tie-in from Secret Level and publisher Sega, but in it, Tony Stark can earn money by completing missions to upgrade his suit before trudging on to the next moribund stage. Tony Stark? As in, Tony Stark, the billionaire inventor whose greatest power is perhaps his infinite money and resources?

Experience and currency are two forms of progression etched into the fabric of game development, and by shoehorning it so lazily into this beer coaster of a disc, the developers have overlooked a vital element of what makes Tony Stark the hero he is. He's not got super-human powers, but money to burn on fancy new toys. Earning cash by slaying scores of poorly designed enemies with less AI than a pocket calculator makes zero sense here. Be thankful if you never played this one.

Related: Sitting down with George Miller, the director of 'Mad Max: Fury Road'

You may also like: The Mystical Universe of 'Magic: The Gathering'

Latter-day Batman games have risen up out of the mire. Thanks to Rocksteady Studios, we've seen some of the finest superhero games ever to grace code. The Arkham series hits the tone of DC's brooding, damaged hero wonderfully, and presents gameplay mechanics that actually fit the character. These titles also include fluid combat that wouldn't look out of place in any of the good Batman movies, and the detective sections that are so often overlooked in his games.

Even the criminally under-appreciated Captain America: Super Soldier manages to hit several strong notes. The critics blasted this one at launch, but at a second glance it's not bad as a bargain-bin purchase because of all the high-flying stunts and bone-crunching combat at work. It was never going to win awards, but you do feel like the first Avenger as you flip and bound through HYDRA-occupied Europe while turning the faces of goons into paste with your fists and Vibranium shield.

The launch trailer for Rocksteady's third Arkham series game, 'Batman: Arkham Knight,' released this week.

Perhaps these rare victories in superhero gaming are a case of recent technology advancements? Today, developers seem more equipped to make solid mechanics befitting of their superhero of choice, and it's possible games like Batman: Arkham Asylum have inspired other studios to do better. Whatever the case, I'd argue some of the best superhero games out there today haven't got anything to do with Marvel, DC, or any comic publisher for that matter.

I always felt like Platinum Games' Bayonetta and its sequel could represent a superhero IP. The games' titular protagonist has a health bar and is bound by many of the traditional universal gameplay tropes, but you don't see her dying from something stupid like not being able to swim—like Peter Parker in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 game (idiot)—or falling over from a few feeble punches to the face.

On Motherboard: Superman is 75, But We Can't Let Him Retire Yet

The stuff Bayonetta pulls off should be standard in superhero video games. The explosive tutorial for Platinum's Wii U sequel has her fighting angelic monstrosities on the back of a fighter jet as it corkscrews and destroys big portions of a city, only to then battle a huge boss from the roof of a runaway train, before she takes to the air to combat a colossal demon on the side of a ruined skyscraper. It's like playing the Chitauri invasion of New York in The Avengers, but in turbo mode.

The Bayonetta games star a near-indestructible hero who pulls off the kind of feats the likes of Thor, Iron Man, and Superman should be able to do in their games, but because they're often bound on a leash made of traditional gameplay mechanics, they're not allowed to be the heroes we've come to know and love over the decades. It's a disservice to their characters and the creative people who have worked tirelessly on their stories.

Bayonetta shows off some superhero-worthy moves on the back of a jet.

There is hope, of course, because the triple-A space has become quite adept at dispensing instant gratification in games. Infamous: Second Son enables player to raise utter hell in Seattle from an early point in the story, and before long you're zipping across the city while taking out D.U.P. troops in huge numbers without little issue. Similarly, the mad feats possible in Injustice: Gods Among Us with just a few button taps really nail the over-the-top action from DC's stock with sheer style.

Spectacle like this should come naturally in superhero games, by having the game designed around empowerment, while simple cash cow tie-ins that miss the point just shouldn't be allowed. By being too tied down by the expectations of what games should be, developers of comic games can become blinded to what they could be. With Marvel and DC films lined up from now until at least 2020, there's plenty of time for the gaming industry to push the bar higher, and get it right.

Follow Dave Cook on Twitter.

It is a sad but historical fact that neither race-motivated terrorism nor mass shootings are new to the United States. Thankfully, both are rare in a country with hundreds of millions of guns and hundreds of millions of people. At the same time, they are not unusual. And in Charleston, South Carolina, last week, they converged in one awful act of terror and racism.

The desire to do "something" after a tragedy is normal. Indeed, politicians often count on public outcry to enact new legislation. In his statement responding to the attack on Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church last Thursday, President Barack Obama made the familiar allusion to gun control. "We don't have all the facts, but we do know that, once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun," he said.

Trending Now: White Supremacist Cited in Charleston Killer's Alleged Manifesto Donated to Major Republican Campaigns

But as politicians call for new gun laws in the wake of this racist attack, lawmakers ought to take a look at the origins and effectiveness of similar gun control measures that have passed, and their consequences—especially for black people. And in an era where blacks and other minorities continue to suffer from over-policing and disproportionately suffer the abuses of law enforcement, any new criminal laws should be carefully considered.

Like many criminal laws, gun control legislation has disproportionately affected black people and contributed to sky-high rates of incarceration for minorities in the US. As Radley Balko wrote in the Washington Post last year:

Although white people occasionally do become the victims of overly broad gun laws...the typical person arrested for gun crimes is more likely to have [black] complexion.... Last year, 47.3 percent of those convicted for federal gun crimes were black — a racial disparity larger than any other class of federal crimes, including drug crimes. In a 2011 report on mandatory minimum sentencing for gun crimes, the U.S. Sentencing Commission found that blacks were far more likely to be charged and convicted of federal gun crimes that carry mandatory minimum sentences. They were also more likely to be hit with "enhancement" penalties that added to their sentences. In fact, the racial discrepancy for mandatory minimums was even higher than the aforementioned disparity for federal gun crimes in general.

Balko's piece goes on to detail the case of Shaneen Allen, a black woman and single mother who legally owned a firearm in Pennsylvania. She was arrested in New Jersey for having that weapon during a routine traffic stop in October 2013. She faced a three-year mandatory minimum sentence despite a clean record and having committed no other crime. Allen fortunately received a pardon from Governor Chris Christie as her case gained national attention.

Another story that made headlines was that of Marissa Alexander, a black woman who was convicted and sentenced to a mandatory minimum 20 years in prison in Florida after firing what she claims was a warning shot in self-defense against her estranged husband. After public agitation and much legal wrangling, Alexander was offered a plea bargain and was released from prison in January after serving three years.

This evidence is anecdotal, to be sure, but strict gun laws with harsh penalties aimed at punishing violent criminals can also ensnare law-abiding people who make mistakes. That these laws often affect people of color is not at all new.

The history of gun control in this country is long and has usually been directly or indirectly tied to race. After the Civil War, disarming freed slaves became a priority of white Southern state governments and roving bands of terrorists, like the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist organizations. In this environment, gun rights were viewed as an essential tool for freed slaves and other black Americans to take care of themselves and their families.

In part to circumvent resistance from black Americans, Southern states created convict lease systems, not unlike old slave leasing systems, aimed at profiting off of captured black labor. As Nicholas Johnson describes in his book Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms, blacks who carried firearms to protect themselves were often pulled into this leasing system for violating concealed carry laws. As Johnson and other authors have noted, those laws, as well as vagrancy and other minor offenses, were almost exclusively enforced against blacks.

In the years following Reconstruction, conflagrations like the coup d'état of Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, the Tulsa race riots in 1921, and the Rosewood Massacre in 1923 peppered the South as outgunned blacks fell victim to white mob violence. As Johnson explains in his book, some blacks were able to fend off small attacks on themselves or their homes, but white mob violence—and Jim Crow—ultimately prevailed as the dominant and unchallenged power structure.

Fast-forward to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. committed himself to peaceful civil disobedience and political non-violence. He also applied for a gun permit for personal protection given continuous threats to his safety. It was denied because the local police were not required to issue him one. Such discretion comes from "may issue" gun permit laws, still in effect in states like New York and New Jersey, which allow states or localities to determine whether or not an individual may carry a gun, even if that person meets all the legal requirements.

As UCLA law professor Adam Winkler wrote in the Atlantic and his book Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms, the "true pioneers of the modern gun-rights movement" were the infamous Black Panthers. Fed up with local authorities' abuse of blacks, the Panthers openly, audaciously, and legally carried guns in public, taking advantage of California's open-carry law.

The state reacted to black militancy by passing a bill known as the Mulford Act in 1967, repealing open carry, signed by then-governor Ronald Reagan. Other states followed suit. In 1968, the federal Gun Control Act and Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Acts were passed—the first federal gun regulation in decades—in no small part as a reaction to the race riots of the era, according to Winkler. The passage of these bills opened the floodgate to further federalization of criminal laws and the "tough on crime" mindset that dominated late 20 ^th century American politics. In tandem with the War on Drugs, the full force of government became focused on urban and inner city crime.

Of course, while "urban" and "inner city" are geographic descriptors, in America, they also mean "black and Hispanic." Thus continued our long history of racially influenced criminal lawmaking. It is little wonder that law professor and author Michelle Alexander dubbed the resulting criminal justice and mass incarceration apparatus the New Jim Crow.

Watch: President Barack Obama Speaks with VICE News

In recent years, some of these policies have been deemed unconstitutional. In the landmark 2008 Supreme Court case that ended the de facto gun ban for home possession in Washington, DC, personal safety was the motivation for one of the original lead plaintiffs, ShellyParker—but instead of white mobs, Parker was afraid of the neighborhood drug dealers and hoodlums that thrived on the drug trade. It was also the driving factor for the late Otis McDonald, whose Supreme Court case against the city of Chicago in 2010 effectively ended indiscriminate gun-in-the-home bans across the country.

Looking ahead, we should not continue the old thinking of the past two centuries. Mass shootings and other gun crimes elicit strong emotions, but they should be tempered when trying to craft sound policy. Every gun death is a tragedy. Any loss of life wreaks havoc on families, friends, and communities. In hindsight, it is abundantly clear that Dylann Storm Roof should not have had a firearm. It is much less clear any law could have prevented him from using it to murder nine people in cold blood. Far too often, our gun laws and criminal laws—even when well intentioned—have disproportionately burdened the black community. As calls grow for more gun laws, let's not compound a tragedy by continuing the same mistakes of the past.

Photo via Flickr user Steven Depolo

Before Makayla Sault and J.J., Billy Best was the poster child for quitting chemotherapy.

However, it wasn't until I started following the stories of those two First Nations girls from Ontario who quit chemotherapy for alternative and Aboriginal medicine that I heard about him.

Torn between fully supporting Aboriginal rights and being unable to bear watching the slow, avoidable death of a child unfold in the news, I felt compelled to read the comments on news articles and Facebook posts about them, losing myself down a rabbit hole of links while trying to make sense of the world.

There, Billy Best kept popping up as the example: an Aboriginal kid with leukemia who'd run away from chemo and traded that poison for a vegan diet and injections of a made-in-Canada cure-all elixir called 714-X. He lived. If he survived, so can they, the internet said. You can do it, Makayla.

Clearly, Best is living proof of something.

Newspaper clipping

For the past 21 years, he's told his story over and over again. According to his book, he got an all-expenses paid trip to New York to tell his story on Good Morning America. He found someone to co-write his biography and he self-published it. He's told his story to the desperate in cancer support groups around North America and used it to sell natural health products.

These days, his story has found new life on websites devoted to "natural" remedies and conspiracy theories about the medical-pharmaceutical complex. The anti-vaxxers love it.

He told his story to me in an interview recently, and called me back hours later, agitated, to clarify something: he wants no one to take any lessons from his story. There is no moral. Billy Best is simply a man engaged in the act of telling the world about himself, again and again, because he is blessed with being asked.

According to Best, if someone is inspired by him to quit chemotherapy to take 714-X or another natural remedy instead, and they die, it is simply not his fault.

"I'm just sharing my story," he said. "The blessing I have is to be able to share. I never really think past that."

In 1994, when Best was 16, he ran away from his adoptive parents' home in Massachusetts and his chemotherapy treatments for Hodgkin's Lymphoma at Harvard's Dana Farber Cancer Institute. After five rounds of chemotherapy, he fled on a Greyhound bus to Houston, planning just to skateboard until he died.

"I decided to run away and die. I wanted to die on my own terms," he said.

His aunt had cancer and had been getting chemo treatments. But she died on the same day he was diagnosed, and the synchronicity of that scared him. The chemo made him feel sick and he doubted the doctors who told him he had a high chance of survival if he stuck with it.

"I'd seen what it had done to [my aunt] and believed that after you got a cancer diagnosis, the doctors gave you poison and the poison kills you," he said.

His flight from modern medicine caused a classic American media circus. He parents made pleas on TV for his return and America was told to be on the lookout for a bald teen on a skateboard. Sure enough, he was recognized among the skaters he'd met in Texas.

He agreed to return to his parents, as long as he didn't have to go back to chemotherapy.

A charity bought him a flight home.

He was swept into a tide of television appearances. Talk show producers jumped at the chance to show a boy who was choosing to die rather than face another round of chemo, so they gave his family the five-star talk-show treatment in New York, with limo rides and free swag. Best details in his book, and in his interview with VICE, that even Oprah wanted him on, but he could only tell his story so many times back then, and he turned her down.

With his newfound celebrity, Best attracted the attention of strangers who called his family and wrote him letters about 714-X, this amazing new alternative treatment from Canada that would build up his immune system to fight and kill his cancer. The way he describes those messages, full of hope and promise of a natural, alternative cure, sound like the posts on blogs and message boards about his 714-X story today, the "Unique Cancer Treatment Successfully Used by a Famous Run-Away."

His parents agreed to drive him across the border to Rock Forest, Quebec to meet Gaston Naessens, the creator of 714-X.

"It was very exciting," he said. "I was fleeing from the department of social services here—the doctors had just reported my parents when we told them that we were going to seek alternative therapy."

Gaston Naessens named 714-X after himself. G is the seventh letter of the alphabet and N is the 14th. X is the 24th, for his birth year, 1924.

Gaston Naessens. Screengrab via YouTube

It is mostly water, with nitrogen, camphor, mineral salts, and trace elements. He developed it in Canada, after he moved to a cottage in Rock Forest, Quebec from France in the 1960s.

It is to be injected directly into the lymph node in the groin, or, in some cases, inhaled, according to the product's website.

"It was purposely designed to restore the Somatidian cycle, which is the discovery that my husband made in the 1950s," Gaston Naessens' wife, Jacinte, explained to me in a phone interview recently, while Gaston Naessens, who speaks only French, was at her side.

He did not consent to an interview in French, but she spoke with VICE and sent us a letter and some written answers to our questions on his behalf.

The Somatidian cycle is the life cycle of Somatids, according to Naessens, who claimed to discover these creatures in the blood that can only be seen with the special microscope he invented, the Somatoscope.

"It was based on a lot of work, necroscopy work, and his understanding of the blood at the time," she said.

Gaston Naessens believes small, indestructible Somatids are the building blocks of life itself and signify the health of the immune system, so when 714-X restores the Somatidian cycle, it strengthens the immune system, which enables the body to cure itself of what ails it.

If this sounds like something out of science fiction, you're not alone: the theory was completely rejected by the medical establishment.

Billy Best met Gaston Naessens at his home in Quebec in January, 1995. Naessens took a pin prick of Best's blood and put it under his Somatoscope.

"It was very impressive seeing the laboratory and the technology and the equipment, how he was able to see blood and it was magnified much greater than anything I'd ever seen the hospitals do down here," said Best.

Gaston Naessens introduced him to others who were taking 714-X for cancer, AIDS and other ailments—and it was "powerful" to hear their stories, Best said.

"To be able to see a person who has been through what you are considering going through—it was very helpful in helping me have faith in what I was doing was going to help. I had a belief the decision was the right one, and it was going to get me better."

This was at the height of 714-X's popularity in Canada. A jury had acquitted Gaston Naessens of contributing to the death of a patient a few years earlier. He had been charged in the death of a woman who'd chosen to get injections of 714-X from Naessens instead of chemotherapy.

"It was not the patient that complained," explained Jacinte. "She had refused all other treatments; it was her choice."

Canadian evangelists of 714-X had rallied around Naessens in court, telling their stories of how it cured them, and they protested on the streets of Montreal, telling the court and the world that they believed in 714-X.

After the trial, Health Canada began authorizing the drug's use by the public through the Special Access Programme, which is meant for the release of non-approved medicine in serious or life-threatening cases before it has cleared clinical trials. Within a few years, Naessens was selling it to about 125 new people a week, the majority of them suffering from AIDS, but since then it has become used more for cancer, said Jacinte.

Dr. Gerald Batist, the director of the department of Oncology at McGill University and the director of the Centre for Translational Research in Cancer is, by definition, a member of the medical establishment that had always rejected Gaston Naessens. After the homicide trial, Naessens welcomed him to his basement lab to look over his research.

"I asked him to show me his best files, his best examples of cures and they were all bunk," recalled Batist.

One of Naessen's examples was a patient who had had a tumour removed from his colon, by an actual doctor, Batist said. Afterwards, Naessens had injected the patient with 714-X. The fact that the he remained alive and well—which was the likely outcome for any patient in this circumstance, Batist said—made Naessens see him as cured by 714-X.

Another patient had an HIV-related lesion on the roof of his mouth and as he received 714-X injections it got smaller.

"Of course we know that these things have waxing and waning periods, they get larger and smaller, so it was absolute rubbish. Everything. He proudly gave me these cases and he didn't understand what he was treating. He didn't understand the nature of cancer."

In every case, according to Batist, the patients' improvement was easily attributed to the conventional medical treatment they'd received before trying 714-X.

The famous Somatoscope wasn't working, the parts not even attached to each other, Batist said. The Somatid creatures it is supposed to have found were "bunk" in the words of Batist, with no basis in actual biology.

Batist looked into Naessens background.

The story, documented in news stories and journal articles, was that Naessens had developed a "cure" for cancer called GN-24, which supposedly attacked cancer through an anti-fermentation process, and another, called Anablast, which he created by allegedly successfully immunizing a horse against cancer and turning that horse's blood into serum to inject into people.

Newspaper clipping

While the French government cracked down on Naessens in the early '60s, desperate parents from across Europe sought him out in Corsica to treat their children with leukemia, leading to the same kind of popular support and protests that would occur in Canada 20 years later over 714-X.

"He had to leave France because a couple of children that he was treating for Leukemia died," Batist said.

When Naessen arrived in Canada in 1964 he told the Canadian Press he was "convinced" his Anablast serum could cure a three-and-a-half-year-old Montreal boy of Leukemia. The boy's father said he believed Naessens had cured 500 people in France. Naessens gave the boy his injections, but it didn't save him.

According to Batist, Naessens assured him he has never told anyone to give up their conventional medical treatment to rely only on 714-X to cure them, but Batist came to believe that wasn't true. "I found a number of patients who, in fact, he had told to stop their treatment, and died when they had effective treatment available to them," he said.

It's not uncommon for people to want to stop chemotherapy and all doctors have patients who want to give up any treatment they don't feel working, said Batist. But, if they think they are stopping for an alternative that will help them, and it is a fraud, it's a problem.

"People are desperate, afraid and they grasp at things that seem promising. But all the promise in this is false," he said.

Batist said it was a "horrible mistake" for the government to ever grant people access to 714-X through the Special Access Programme and it remains a "scandal for Health Canada" because it allows the Naessens to use that to give 714-X the impression of legitimacy.

"714-X is nothing," he said. "It is not anything that has any benefit to anyone—except, maybe, for the people who sell it."

In 2004, after 15 years of officially granting sick Canadians access to 714-X, Health Canada tried to stop granting it—because in all that time, no clinical study had proven it was effective at doing anything.

Newspaper clipping

But the people using 714-X fought back again, launching a class-action lawsuit against the government and giving more earnest testimony about the power of 714-X to make them healthy and the misunderstood genius of Gaston Naessens.

The court ruled against Health Canada, so the government still grants access to people who have terminal cancer, and whose doctors petition the government for access to it, today.

There are far fewer Canadian customers—like this woman from BC who is crowdfunding to afford it—today than there were in the '90s.

That's because of the bureaucracy, said Jacinte. 714-X is selling much more abroad where it's sold through doctors and direct online, especially in Japan where the Naessens were recently awarded a patent, she said.

The Naessens are trying to convince the Canadian government to consider 714-X a natural health product, which would allow them to sell it more broadly, and with fewer rules. In Canada, natural health products must be safe to use, but they do not need a prescription to be sold, do not need to be proven to work.

After years of attempting to get a legitimate partner to prove it works in a clinical trial, Jacinte Naessens, said they are no longer trying. She said that is because 714-X isn't a typical "drug."

I asked her if she thought government's resistance toward that is because of the risk that people will give up on conventional cancer treatments like chemotherapy, and trust 714-X to cure them. She said they never try to convince anyone not to take conventional medicine alongside 714-X.

Newspaper clipping

"If they go with chemotherapy, it's not my decision it's their own decision," said Jacinite. "I go with their own freedom of choice."

According to Jacinte, Naessens never says 714-X itself will kill cancer. Instead, it helps strengthen the body's immune system, so the body can heal itself.

Asked whether he believes it can cure cancer, she wrote, "According to Naessens, when the immune system picks up, all is possible."

As for Dr. Batist, she wrote at length about how he has his own agenda in curing cancer by orthodox chemical means and she believes he "was and is still assigned by 'someone' to discredit Naessens in all possible ways."

She concluded with this message: "Two camps, two visions, stuck between ego battles. A sad story for cancer patients dying every minute."

After his trip to Quebec, Billy Best started taking 714-X, following a vegan diet and drinking a version of an old Ojibway medicine inspired therapy called Essiac Tea. When it became clear that he had survived cancer, he embarked on another media circuit telling the world his cancer was cured by healthy living and 714-X.

His family went into the business of selling natural health products for a while. They continue to promote 714-X, Essiac Tea and natural cleaning products on his website. He isn't directly involved in the selling part, he said, he just continued to tell his story and working normal jobs. When we talked, he was preparing to go to Germany because his book has been picked up by a publisher and translated into German and he was preparing to speak at a conference there on natural health.

Sometimes, people tell Best his story has inspired them to give up conventional medicine and chemotherapy for 714-X, he said.

I asked him if he worries that, unlike him, they won't survive.

"I never said what happened to me would happen to everyone. I have never said what happened to me would happen to anybody. I have only shared something that was helpful to me," he said.

I guess, that way, he bears no responsibility for what people decide to do when they hear it.

When we last talked, Makayla Sault had died, and J.J was still alive and, as far as the public knew then, not on chemo.

Best said believes everyone who's capable should make their own medical decisions, if they're old enough.

There have been many children of different backgrounds who've refused chemo over the years—Daniel Hauser, Cassandra C., Sarah Hershberger—and though Best didn't know the two Ontario girls, he was adamant that, when it comes to First Nations children in particular, the government should not control their medical choices. His birth father is a Canadian residential school survivor.

There are parallels in the stories: all kids who'd abandoned chemotherapy for different kinds of alternative medicine, against the wishes of the medical establishment, in the middle of a media circus.

Weeks after I spoke with Best, the news broke that J.J.'s leukemia has returned and she has turned back to chemotherapy, alongside traditional aboriginal medicine. But he didn't know that when he said he had a message for her: stay strong.

"You've got people who have been through it before and made it," he said. "Just keep that in mind."

So, I don't know what—a sense of guilt, responsibility, fear or just a whim—made him decide to call me back a few hours later to insist that his story means nothing. All he said was that, in all these years of telling his story, no one had asked him what he wants people to take away from it.

After thinking about it, he said the answer is nothing.

Follow Jessica Smith Cross on Twitter.

Today, news has emerged of a one-man anti-immigrant army called Chris Gadsden, who patrols his ten-acre farm in Toddington, Bedfordshire, and rounds up any illegal immigrants he finds, sometimes taking them to the police. He claims to have collared 50 migrants in the past month alone in this way, and the Mail is calling him the "migrant catcher", which is a bit creepy. How different things are in rural Bedfordshire compared to Walworth, South London. There on Sunday, activists got in a fight with the police, knocking one officer out, all in an attempt to block a UK Border Agency (UKBA) van and save an immigrant from detention.

A few dozen people turned up on East Street market in Walworth at about 5PM, responding to a call out on Twitter from the Anti Raids Network. UKBA had by this time already snatched their target – a man from one of the shops – and taken him into detention, holding him in their van. People blockaded the van, which was parked on a small side street, climbing onto it, putting wheelie bins and their bikes in front of it and letting the air in the tires down and pelting it with fruit and eggs from the market up the road.

Police reinforcements including a dog unit and three vans full of Territorial Support Group (TSG) – riot cops – in full body armour were called in. They stomped down the road like Stormtroopers and the dogs were brought out almost immediately.

The cops and dogs were pretty intimidating, but people weren't afraid to shout at them and do a bit of jostling. Still, the cops managed to push people away from in front of the UKBA bus, clearing a path.

Once the UKBA van had got away, the anger of the crowd was palpable and it turned on the police – traffic cones, glass bottles and even bricks were hurled at them and their dogs.

Like learning about people fighting? Check out The Mexican Town That fights To Summon the Rain:

Sensing the mood – which I guess is fairly hard to miss when people are throwing bricks at your head – the cops tried to make a quick exit, but people blocked their vans. They moved on foot for about 500 metres, getting more traffic cones and bottles hurled at them and wheelie bins pushed at them. I guess that's another reason for middle England to hate wheelie bins.I saw one TSG officer being hit full on in the back of the neck by a traffic cone and had to be helped into a police van by his colleagues. Police later confirmed that he was KO'd but didn't need hospital treatment. "A police dog was also hurt and was treated at the scene," said a police spokesperson. Eventually the police got into a wide enough street and could drive off.

As they slowly retreated down the street, chants of "fascist pigs", "scum" and "who killed Mark Duggan?" followed the TSG, whilst a homemade sound system blasted out dance music.

The police arrested a guy who got in their way, "on suspicion of violent disorder, assault on police, criminal damage and animal cruelty". There was a protest outside Walworth police station through the night calling for his release. Activists believe he's facing trial today.

The crowd grew throughout the protest as people came from surrounding streets to see what was going on. By the end there were probably to at least a hundred taking the opportunity to join in with abusing the police.I spoke to an activist who said they'd witnessed another UKBA raid in Walworth on Friday. "They're targeting Walworth. But seeing this reaction today, they're not going to try it again. The police and UKBA had a really tough time", the activist – who didn't want to be named – said. "The aim is to make these immigration removals as difficult for them as possible, discouraging further raids. This was a major public order situation and it's really difficult for the police."

Once the police had left, everyone went round tidying up the road – moving wheelie bins back, moving traffic cones and plastic barriers. Then everyone had a bit of a dance.

As one-man army Chris Gadsden marches around his farm, hunting for more failed asylum seekers to turn over to the authorites, I guess it's only fair that immigrants have an army of concerned citizens on their side too.

@owebb

Update: There's a noise demo taking place outside Walworth police station at 8PM today to support the arrested activist. Details here.

More from VICE:

Why Saturday's Anti-Austerity Demo Probably Won't Affect Austerity

London: It's Time for a Rent Strike

I Sell Legal Highs in the UK and Now I'm Fucked

Follow Leslie on Twitter, Tumblr, and buy her books from Fantagraphics.

I'd arrived a bit early at the subway station down the street and figured I might as well take my time getting there. After all, government-sponsored events tend to move slowly at first and pick up later on. But even a half-hour before the scheduled start time of 9 AM, a line curled down the block of brownstones, leading up to the side door of the Emmanuel Baptist Church in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn.

The people waiting in the hot Friday sun were for the most part black men, many of them in their teens or 20s. They had another thing in common: All of them were here because they wanted to avoid ending up in handcuffs.

In anticipation of Father's Day, the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office hosted a two-day initiative called " Operation Begin Again," in partnership with the NYPD and the city courts. The idea was pretty simple: If you had committed a "quality of life" crime in the past—like having a bike on the sidewalk, carrying around an open container of booze, or spitting—and hadn't paid the fine or appeared in court for a summons, you could plead guilty and have your resulting warrant for arrest cleared. You'd still have to pay the fine, but you wouldn't be immediately detained should you have another run-in with the cops for, say, walking a dog without a leash. All New Yorkers were welcome.

Operation Begin Again is the latest attempt by Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson to clear the overflowing rosters of the New York City courthouses, some of which remain open until 1 AM just to stay on top of the constant stream of arrests. It dovetails with recent reform measures, proposed by New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, that would decriminalize some of the offenses at the center of broken windows policing, which emphasizes cracking down on minor offenses in order to prevent major crimes like murder. Early in his tenure, Thompson also softened his borough's policy on marijuana arrests—an idea that has since been formally adopted citywide by the mayor and the police commissioner.

As of last month, there are about 1.2 million open arrest warrants in New York City, and what I saw on this block in Brooklyn—where nearly 260,000 warrants are outstanding, according to Thompson—was a very small slice of that. The sheer volume of offenders is arguably a direct result of broken windows policing, and now city officials are apparently ready to vent some steam from an overloaded criminal justice system.

The line stayed long throughout the morning as more people joined it; volunteers went up and down fielding questions. The church was effectively turned into a court (reporters weren't allowed inside) with a vestibule upstairs set aside for legal aid. The entire street was barricaded off for the event, almost like a block party, and a hodgepodge of organizations like the NYPD, the US Army, the Fortune Society, and the Vera Institute for Justice had set up stands.

I spoke with people who had come from as far as Harlem to get their warrants cleared. To them, this was easier and cheaper than going to court, since a court date generally means getting a day off from work. Most were in and out of the church in about 20 minutes, and the process was made simpler by the fact that people could simply hand over their IDs and ask lawyers to search their records for them.

Harrison Williams, 62, said he seemed to get booked for a ticket on a superfluous crime every year or so, despite having worked for the city's Parks Department for 37 years. "It's like they gave my picture to the rookie cops or something," Williams, an African American and Brooklyn native, said. "You'd have a beer closed in a bag, and the cop will give you a summons for an open container. It's like, 'But you opened it! Come on, man!'

"We're a target," he continued. "You can't win."

Others were even more vocal, lambasting the law enforcement officials who had set up a stand for community relations just within earshot. "We don't have money to pay for this," a man named John, who refused to give his last name, angrily told me. "They target our type of low-income neighborhoods to balance their books"—a reference to the alleged quota system used by the NYPD—"because we're not a liability. We don't have any credit."

Another man, Eddy M., 52, asked me: "Who wants to always walk the streets with the fear of being arrested and tossed in jail? This is to get the police off of our backs."

A spokesperson for the Brooklyn DA's Office, Charisma Troiano, told me over the phone later that afternoon that nearly 270 individuals were cleared of warrants on Friday. To get a sense of proportion, that's about .02 percent of the citywide total. On Monday, Troiano said that over the entire weekend, some 1,000 people showed up, and nearly 670 warrants were vacated.

This was just the first of several sessions for Operation Begin Again; the next one will come in East New York, a Brooklyn neighborhood that has one of the highest crime rates in all of New York. They're considering setting up shop at synagogues and mosques as well.

Most of those trying to get outstanding arrest warrants cleared were black men. Photos by Jason Bergman

The initiative, Troiano said, is a win-win for all parties involved. "It helps keep Brooklynites safe," she told me. "Some of them are unable to trek down to court to take care of it. And when you have these minor offenses, you put law enforcement in situations that could escalate. Instead, it lets the police concentrate on bigger offenses."

This logic has recently been used by Police Commissioner William Bratton, who, in an interview with the Associated Press last month, said the sheer number of New Yorkers with warrants doesn't help anyone. "It would be great to get rid of a lot of that backlog," he said. "It's not to our benefit from a policing standpoint to have all those warrants floating around out there."

In terms of solutions, Bratton has teased easing up his signature broken windows policy by either offering amnesty to some people with outstanding warrants or having officers give citizens a warning first, rather than a ticket. Elizabeth Glazer, the director of Mayor Bill de Blasio's Office of Criminal Justice, has said in the past that the administration is looking into "how to safely reduce the number of already outstanding warrants in this city." (In related news, a spokesperson from the Mayor's office told me that 25 percent of the backlog for notoriously delayed Rikers Island cases have been cleared in two months, thanks to a new fast-track program called Justice Reboot.)

"It's just another unnecessary case the judge has to see," Troiano, the Brooklyn DA's spokeswoman, added. She brought up another issue: Outstanding warrants are a major obstacle for those seeking student loans, citizenship, and, maybe most importantly, employment. If you were given a ticket ten years ago for something as minor as a noise complaint and never paid it, your outstanding warrant comes up "as a violation on background checks," she said.

This initiative could start to change that, which most of the people I spoke to said was one of the primary reasons the line was so long: They had a tough time getting jobs because of their pasts. Basically, there are 1.2 million New Yorkers walking around with a ticking job-application time bomb.

"It's a stain on your past," Brian, a 30-something African American man who declined to give his last name, told me after his warrant was cleared. "Inside, the people are going through different processes, depending on their tickets, but most of the guys I saw in there were looking for jobs. They needed jobs."

In 2001, Brian said he was given a ticket for having a bike on the train—a punishment for a "crime" that, in today's Brooklyn, seems absolutely asinine. For years, he would receive a letter in the mail every few months, telling him that he had to pay up or face an outstanding warrant. After a while, he threw out the receipt from the ticket and forgot about the letters, simply because he couldn't believe he had to pay for something so trivial.

Troy Cuallo got a ticket for being in a park after dark with his bike.

Others had similar stories and expressed frustration at having to deal with such petty BS.

"This is stuff you can't really avoid," Troy Cuallo, an 18-year-old who was there to clear a year-old ticket for walking through a park past dark with his bike, told me after leaving the church. "If you wanted to close the park, why didn't you? Instead of just standing there and waiting for me to come along. It makes no sense.

"I just refused to pay that," he continued. "How are you protecting and serving me?"

Follow John Surico on Twitter.

All photos courtesy of the author.

A few years ago I found the journal I meticulously updated during my 13-day stay at an adolescent psych ward. I was 13 at the time, on a combination of medications (an SSRI and multiple mood stabilizers) and was having an adverse reaction to one or more of them. After meeting with my mom, my psychiatrist told me the decision was made to hospitalize me so my medication cocktail could be adjusted quickly and safely in a controlled environment. I obviously wasn't thrilled at the prospect of being hospitalized but I wasn't surprised by their decision. It was something we all had talked about previously and part of me felt like I was just biding time until we were out of options.

The hospital was about half an hour north of where I grew up in Westchester, New York. I remember the intake process taking an extremely long time so I was actually relieved when it was time to go into the ward itself.

I don't remember much of the experience and I put off reading the journal for a while. I was scared that it would unearth emotions I didn't feel like dealing with, or make me remember something I've been repressing for the past ten years.

I recently reread it for the first time and luckily, my fears were unfounded. Parts of it feel completely unemotional, like an outsider wrote it, reporting on day-to-day experiences at the psych ward and how weird everyone else is. There are of course other moments where my emotional instability was glaringly obvious (see above, where I go off on some guy named Kyle and then talk about tongue twisters). The tone suddenly shifts from that of a mundane, judgmental teenager to an angry, unpredictable mess of a human over the span of one sentence.

I wrote constantly, thinking it would help pass the time or aid in my healing in some way. Journalling four times a day in a place where very little happened made for a redundant and sort of uninteresting read. The word "bored" appears on every page at least once, and most pages feel like an exact replica of the last.

The inside cover of my journal has a diagram of my childhood bedroom, which I decided to have painted a color called "Nacho Cheese Orange" while hospitalized. I wish the doctors had shifted their focus from my medication to interior design decisions for just a moment to tell me me that painting my room bright orange was likely an uninformed decision.

The following page has a note from my brother.

"Don't show this to Any1,.. I hate your Dr...Get Better soon, I love you so much, & get the hell out of here so I don't have to come back. Love you so much. Your Dr = Nurse Ratchet"

It would be another three years before I read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest so his literary reference was lost on me, but based on what I knew of my doctor, I figured Nurse Ratchet was a healthcare professional whom I would not like and at some point condemn to hell.

Days 1 - 3

There was no honeymoon period. The first entry was written on the afternoon of my first day there and within hours, I immediately hated everything: my surroundings, the other patients, my psychiatrist. To make matters worse, they were serving fish for dinner, which I described as my "worst enemy." I always hated fish and I took it personally that they would disrespect me by serving it for dinner my first day there. It seems I was having trouble making friends, but I had no problems complaining about and insulting my fellow psych ward cohabitants. "Ralph looks like a gopher. This place sucks. I might as well be burned on a pitchfork." I never lost sight of what truly mattered, how much I hated the hospital. I mainly disliked that they burped a lot and flirted with each other. I was jealous of the relationships they had with each other and how comfortable they were with their surroundings.

I knew I had at least eight more days ahead of me and was completely convinced each day would tirelessly drag on like the last. I was right, but the first few days were by far the hardest. Nearly everything I wrote was about leaving, visiting home, or missing my mom.

Days 4 - 5

"She likes Good Charlotte. Gross! I'm definitely gaining weight from the Risperdal."

I finally started adjusting to my new environment and communicating with the other people there. I started writing less about how much I missed my mom and more about the people there and what activities we were doing.

I was moved into a room with two girls who were also there for medication changes. I liked one of them named Rachel, whom I described as "on suicide watch but Jewish." We quickly became close, partially due to our shared hatred of our third roommate. The only reason I gave for disliking her is that she liked Good Charlotte and only ate seaweed. In all fairness, the seaweed thing was pretty bad and I still don't eat sushi because of her, but that doesn't quite warrant calling her a "piece of shit."

Days 6-7

I never laid out a concrete reason for why I hated my psychiatrist so much other than "there's just something about her that pisses me off." This quote does provide some insight though. "I told her I was getting better at controlling the man in my head." (The "man in my head" was the way I described the behavior I felt I couldn't control.) "She said 'if a two-year-old told me that, OK, but you're 13 and should know better.' She is just mean to me." All of my negative feelings were justified when she decided to extend my stay by ten days to further adjust my medication. This was during a now-infamous family meeting when I told her she should "go to hell." I stand by what I said, though I probably shouldn't have screamed it at her and it definitely didn't help my case that I was ready to be discharged.

Following the meeting, the entries are extremely angry and filled with borderline death threats to my psychiatrist. Rachel was also discharged, which was deeply upsetting to me. I wrote about when other patients left and not really caring because I hated them anyway but I was notably sad about Rachel. I was clearly moody and upset but wrote about making an effort not to seem that way and lie about feeling better. "There's no reason I can't be depressed and bipolar at home. If I could get better, great. If I get out of here sooner, even better."

Related: The War on Kids

Days 9-10

"I'm not in the mood for bitches right now."

I went back to trash-talking the other patients in my journal and after a few days of good behavior, I was finally granted a "pass," which meant I could participate in gym and eat in the hospital cafeteria with patients from all the other wards. "Gym" wasn't exactly the reward I was hoping for but I concluded it was still nice to get outside even if it meant exercising.

The hospital was directly across from the shopping mall I went to growing up and I could see it on the walk to the gym. Most of the mall was obstructed by trees but the glowing facade of the Cheesecake Factory was in plain view. "I've never been to the Cheesecake Factory but Rachel said their salads are good. She's never had their cheesecake." I would've done just about anything for a Santa Fe Salad in that moment but instead I had to go play dodgeball with my fellow patients. In my journal I refer to seeing the Cheesecake Factory multiple times, as though it were some kind of beacon representing freedom and the outside world.

Days 10-12

On the morning of Day Ten we had a meeting about relationships that I decided didn't "correspond with me at all" and I shouldn't have to be subjected to an hour of fixing other people's problems. The light at the end of the tunnel was my seventh viewing of Zoolander, which I watched with my new roommate after Seaweed was discharged.

By Day 11, I was only journaling once or twice a day. I had a home visit and saw my "Nacho Cheese Orange" bedroom for the first time, which seems to have been an exhilarating experience. I felt my room makeover represented a new beginning; I definitely didn't want to go back to a little girl's room after this experience. Now, I'd probably pick a more stabilizing and less food-inspired color to represent my future.

That afternoon when I met with Nurse Ratchet, I learned I'd be going home in a few days. After that meeting I concluded that my psychiatrist was "much better than I thought. But still a bitch."

Day 13—Last Day

I was definitely relieved to be out of the "crack den" but it was difficult, nearly impossible, for me to return to my life as a normal 7th grader after the two weeks I just had. I felt bombarded and overwhelmed by the questions the students and teachers asked me when I returned to school. Despite my efforts to normalize my situation, the experience left me feeling alienated and unsure of myself. I finished that year but to my disappointment, my emotional state didn't magically fix itself. It would be another year or two of therapy programs before I felt somewhat stable and about another four years before I could watch Zoolander again.

Zoë Klar is on Twitter.

Thumbnail image of International Yoga Day observance in Maharashtra, India, via Wikicommons

Sunday, June 21, marked the arrival of the UN-declared "International Yoga Day" in India. With more than 35,000 participants, the world's largest congregation of schoolchildren, yogis, and uncomfortable-looking officeholders took place in New Delhi along the Rajpath. The gathering not only broke the record for the most people doing yoga at one venue, but also for the largest number of foreign nationals in a single yoga lesson, with 84 countries participating.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi took his place at the front of the crowd, much to the surprise of the public. Quite the yogi himself, the downward dogging 64-year-old has taken many measures to promote the practice of Yoga and reclaim its prominence from the West.

Popularizing the ancient Indian practice has been a prominent element of Modi's political agenda—the country even has a Minister of Yoga, Shripad Yesso Naik. The notorious spiritual leader Baba Ramdev, close supporter of the PM, has also been a big name in the popularization of Yoga. Though Yoga has many known health benefits, Ramdev goes to the point of endorsing the replacement of sex-education with Yoga education, claiming Yoga can cure AIDS, cancer, and even "cure" homosexuality.

The recent steps to expand the practice of Yoga have also caused some controversy within several groups representing India's Muslim population, who say that this movement is a threat to secularism. The groups say that they should not be pressured to chant "Om," which is a sacred word rooted in Hinduism, nor to practice the sun-salutation Yoga position, which would entail the demonstration of worship to something other than Allah—the sun.

In response, the pose was removed from the Yoga day's agenda, and, despite the controversy, many Muslims participated in yesterday's event, even though the month of Ramadan had begun and many were fasting. International Yoga Day was a success in India and around the world, with 192 countries participating and even a massive yoga demonstration in Times Square.

Want Some In-Depth Stories About Yoga?

1. I Went to a Yoga Class for Stoners
2. Yoga's Culture of Sexual Abuse Can't Be Ignored
3. Photos of India's Quiet Places
4. Watch Our Documentary About Cat Yoga

When Nantucket resident Nancy Holmes's mother died in September 2014, she called the nearest funeral home to make arrangements. But if she wanted an embalming, the funeral home told her, it would require shipping her mother's remains via ferry to their facility on the mainland. After that, the body would have to be ferried back to the island for the service and subsequent burial in the local Catholic cemetery. "Your choices are dictated by the distance of the boat ride and the cost of the boat ride," she told me. Ultimately, Holmes decided against it and asked that the funeral home send a hearse with a coffin to the island instead. "Other people don't mind. We just didn't want to send her. It wasn't what we wanted... It just seemed kind of ridiculous to me."

Transporting a body from the place of death to a funeral home is usually an inexpensive and straightforward process in the United States. Until January 2014, it wasn't a problem in Nantucket either. That's when the island's only funeral home closed its doors, after the home's owner Richard Lewis retired at the age of 79. Ever since then, the 30 miles of bay that separate the island from the mainland provide for delays and additional costs that often lead to residents altering their funeral arrangements.

"There are storms in the winter time. Ferries get cancelled a lot between September and April. There were times when the boat didn't go [for several days], and somebody died and funeral arrangements were delayed," said Catherine Stover, the Nantucket town clerk who has been leading efforts to open a funeral home on the island. She added that "this is no reflection on the service that people have gotten, which has been wonderful." Stover also happens to be a licensed funeral director who worked in the industry until 1998 on the mainland. She said that the Lewis family, who formerly handled all of the island's funerals, "were splendid caretakers of the dead. We owe them a lot."

The challenge in opening a new funeral home is making such an operation financially sustainable. Nantucket's permanent population is about 10,000; in the summer, it surges to about 50,000. There simply wouldn't be enough business to sustain a for-profit funeral home. "If people could afford to build a funeral home and run it in Nantucket, they would've done it," Stover reiterates.

Stover's solution is to form a non-profit corporation which will be on public land, rather than having to purchase expensive real estate on the open market. She has also convinced a local contractor to build the facility at cost. So far, the residents have been supportive. A recent town meeting approved the location, and through a crowdfunding campaign she raised the funds needed to file paperwork for the 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation.

Of the almost 20,000 funeral homes in the United States, only a handful are not-for-profit. Often, it is to serve members of a specific religion. But there are secular outfits as well. In the case of Nantucket, geography necessitates it—but geography isn't the only reason to eschew profits.

"People couldn't afford the cost of a funeral. So they just all came together and organized this thing to have a funeral home and it's been that way ever since." –Malcolm Magar

The People's Memorial Association of Washington (PMA) is a non-profit organization that was formed in 1939. For 65 years, PMA worked with Bleitz Funeral Home in Seattle to provide its tens of thousands of members a low fixed rate on cremation and burial services. In 2006, Bleitz was purchased by funeral and cemetery conglomerate Service Corporation International (SCI). SCI did not renew the contract. Instead, PMA proceeded to make contracts with Alderwoods Group, a provider of funeral services with five locations in King County. The following year, SCI bought Alderwoods—effectively spelling the end of the PMA contract.

While PMA had statewide reach and worked with funeral homes all over Washington, the Alderwoods acquisition meant that it had no funeral homes in Seattle with which to enter into agreements. PMA's board of directors decided that the only way to guarantee affordable services for their Seattle members would be to start their own funeral home. As a result, the Co-op Funeral Home opened its doors to the public in June 2007.

Co-op's managing funeral director Nora Menkin told me, "It's still a business. We deal with the same profit/loss statements and balance sheets as any other business. But we also have the good fortune that [if] we end the year in the black, it doesn't matter how far in the black. I think last year we had maybe $200 profit, and that's a good year. We paid our staff, we have good benefits for everybody, we treated our clients well."

When Menkin began at her current role with Co-op, her predecessor provided her a list of five other funeral homes that were already operating with a similar operating structure. According to its website, the nation's first to operate in this way is People's Cooperative Funeral Home in Lone Wolf, Oklahoma, which is still in operation today. According to managing funeral director Malcolm Magar, People's Cooperative was started in 1936 when the owner of the existing funeral home couldn't afford to keep it.

"It was the Depression. People couldn't afford the cost of a funeral. So they just all came together and organized this thing to have a funeral home and it's been that way ever since."

Magar has worked there for 53 years. It's not incorporated as a non-profit, but he told me that they "operate as close to it as we can."

Watch: VICE Japan's "A Good Day to Die: Fake Funerals in South Korea"

While an operator that isn't driven by profit might be seen as the place to go for cheap funerals, the desire to offer the lowest price is not necessarily what drives a non-profit funeral home. Stover told me that in her community, "people have an emotional need to have a local place." Holmes added that there's a very practical consideration of having a space to hold a viewing: "We could have done it at our church. But people that don't belong to a church don't have a place to do it any more. I suppose it's not against the law to do it in your home, but most people aren't comfortable with that."

Photo by Flickr user Peter

According to Menkin, Co-op does operate with the goal of maintaining the $755 member price for direct cremations (non-member price $895), but there are now places in Seattle that are cheaper. Menkin told me that the main difference between Co-op and other funeral homes is that traditional homes want clients to come in so they can sell pre-need arrangements after someone has just completed the paperwork for the person that just died. This happens because staff often works on commission. At Co-op, staff members do not receive commission, "so there's no incentive to sell a family anything that they don't need."

People's Cooperative was not the only organization of its type to form and operate during the Great Depression—though, from my research, it appears to be the only one that still survives today. A big reason for that is because in the years after World War II, co-ops in general were seen by many with suspicion as vehicles for communism. Funeral co-ops and memorial societies like PMA, which operated all over the country, were seen by anti-communists as part of the same conspiracy.

Josh Slocum is executive director of the Funeral Consumers Association (FCA)—a funeral industry watchdog group (PMA is an FCA affiliate). Slocum provided me a 1966 pamphlet entitled "Co-ops and the Funeral Industry: A case study of Socialist war on a segment of private industry," which is riddled with conspiratorial scaremongering about the evils of cooperative funeral homes and memorial societies like PMA. The cover has a backdrop of hammers and sickles to drive home the point. PMA says that it took until 1957 before they had a written contract with Bleitz due to concerns about being publicly associated with an alleged communist group.

Fast forward to today, and both McCarthyism and funeral cooperatives are all but gone. The other great communist menace—memorial societies—are still very much around, as local affiliates of the Funeral Consumers Alliance.

Related: The Cops Who Turned Their Backs at the NYPD Officer's Funeral Are the Most Threatening Protestors of All

The for-profit funeral industry also hasn't been supportive of these endeavors. In Massachusetts, state law stipulates that funeral directors own at least 10 percent of the business. This means that effectively a non-profit (which has no shareholders) could not operate a funeral home. Stover was able to lobby local legislators to amend the legislation for an exemption which she said passed "at the 11th hour." Stover tells me that she encountered "a ton of pushback" from the funeral industry through an "organized statewide [lobbying] effort." Washington had no similar ownership laws impeding the creation of Co-op and in Menkin's experience, the member of the state Funeral and Cemetery Board see themselves as "regulating the industry against the bad eggs and making sure consumers are being taken care of."

When asked if Stover sees mainland for-profit operators in an adversarial way, she responded that she doesn't. "We have a lot of options available to use that are not available to the general industry." One of those options under consideration is to run the funeral home as a co-op. As of right now, she estimates that $2 million would need to be raised in order for the funeral home to become operational. She's optimistic that this is an achievable goal and hopes to be operational in 2016. One thing that is for sure is that she's not looking to get back into the business herself: "I've got a nice job that I love, I've got grandchildren, and I've got stuff I wanna do."

If Co-op is any indication, a non-profit operator can be quite successful even after just a few years in business. Co-op is now the fourth highest volume funeral home in Washington State. Menkin says the growing staff is "bursting at the seams" at their current location and they are looking for a new location.

Follow Simon Davis on Twitter.

All photos by Monika Mogi

I met Monika Mogi a few years ago in LA while we were both nervously standing around at the Ardorous/Rookie group show in which we both had work. Her boyfriend had a car and some weed so we escaped the crowd and drove up to Griffith Park to relax. Since then, I've been watching Monika produce more work than any of my peers. She's only 22 years old and has shot look books for a handful of huge brands, somehow never sacrificing her creative vision in the process. Street casting her subjects herself, Monika has built a library of go-to amateur Japanese models. She's also the Tokyo correspondent for my magazine, the Editorial, and is continuously sending interesting photo stories my way—whether it be a backstage look at Jenny Fax or a photo essay on her Grandpa who can bend spoons with his mind. We've become very close over the past few years so I decided to pick her brain about her success and her Japanese experience.

Claire Milbrath: When I first met you it was at the Ardorous/Rookie exhibition in LA. How did you first make the connection to Petra Collins and the Ardorous?
Monika Mogi: When I was 16, I spent a lot of my time online after school and had a blog where I posted my zines and photos. I met Petra randomly through that, and then she started the Ardorous and asked if I would join. Since then we have done exhibitions and the book, Babe, will be released this summer.

Can you tell me about Babe? What kind of work do you have in it?
I am so excited to see Babe! It makes me so happy to be apart of something. Being involved with artists who understand each other feels great. The work I have in it is a mixture of old and new work.

You've done a lot of commercial work for such a young artist—X-Girl, AA, and UNIF, to name a few of your clients. How did that happen?
I think living in Tokyo has helped. I haven't done that many jobs overseas. I suppose hustling is part of working, but I hope that people just enjoy my work, or connect to it.

I'm interested in your background. I know your mother is Japanese and your father an American sailor, so you are literally a product of history. Does that come out in your work? What's your views on Japan/America?
It's hard to answer questions about family because it takes so long to explain. My mom grew up near an American military base in an industrial town in Kanagawa and she ended up marrying a sailor. My family lived in California when I was young, but my mom and I moved back to Japan when I was 12, and I've basically been here since. Growing up with a single mom who was always working gave me the freedom to be on my own in Tokyo... I think that comes out in my work.

Do you feel you make work that is about "being Japanese"?
I don't completely know the full Japanese experience. I have no nationalistic feelings about anywhere. I think it's a good thing. I have strong feelings for some places where I've lived, and I do love my experience of Japan. But I don't really feel anything when it comes to being Japanese or American in terms of my own identity. I will never be accepted as a full Japanese person in Japan because I am hafu and I talk with an accent.

You are on American Apparel's payroll as a photographer. Can you talk about your work for them and how it's changed with the recent company changes?
I started working for AA at the store when I was 17. The creative director hired me to be a photographer after I showed her my work. Working with AA has been really natural for me since they give me the freedom to shoot however and whomever I want. During shoots, it is just me and the model, and I usually shoot my friends. I was recently surprised with the media attention to the ad I shot, "Hello Ladies," which is on the back of the current issue of VICE. It's funny how some sources thought it was all planned out after company changes, but really it was just another day walking around the factory while I was visiting LA at the beginning of the year. It also isn't the first time an ad has been made that's dedicated to employees. I actually became fascinated by AA ads when I was 14 or so because I thought "Wow, that could be me. She is not afraid to show her tummy rolls! It's OK to not wear a bra?" Looking at women that I could relate to rather than a Victoria's Secret Angel made me feel accepted and understood. Although the company is currently changing and the image may change as well, I will always try to take photos young women can relate to.

What's your take on the trending use of feminism in photography? Do you feel pressure to make work about being a female?
I've never felt any pressure to make work about being a female. I take photos because it is fun for me. I don't overthink it. The general awareness of feminism is important, and to define myself as a feminist is important.

We once talked about the anxiety that comes from living in Tokyo. Can you talk a bit about that?
After the big earthquake, I couldn't sleep at night because I would always imagine another one happening. I'm over that anxiety now, but living in a big city in general is exhausting. I like to take a train to the beach and countryside.

It seems like you are always shooting fashion, is there a different direction you'd like to take with your work?
Yes! I am planning on shooting more documentary. I plan to temporarily work as an Ama san ( 海女 ), a free-diving fisherwoman, which has been in Japanese history for over 2,000 years. It is interesting to me because they have a real perspective of how the ocean is changing and a profound respect for nature.

Look at that quiet smile. What does he know about our future? Will he tell us? Photo via Flickr user United Steelworkers

"OH, BURN!"

So hollered a Conservative MP when Prime Minister Stephen Harper suggested the Leader of the Official Opposition should take a seat during question period on June 17: "At least the leader of the Liberal Party knows when to stop getting up," Harper droned.

NDP leader Thomas Mulcair retorted to the jab with a smirk: "That's the kind of arrogance that could mean that this is the Prime Minister's last question period." That smug comment triggered infantile laughter amongst his caucus.

The heated exchange wasn't only fascinating in its resemblance to a locker room face-off between pubescent teens, but because Mulcair's assessment—that this might be Harper's last round in the ring—could prove to be true. The three major parties are within points of each other for first place heading into the federal election (expected to be held in late October): At last count, the NDP led by 0.8 percent over the Conservatives and 5.2 percent over the Liberals. But the approval ratings of leaders are a far more distinct story: Mulcair stands out with a 67 percent approval rating. Liberal leader Justin Trudeau trailed with 51 percent. Then there was Harper in a beyond-distant 34 percent. Ouch.

"Single issues never matter a ton during an election," explained Peter Loewen, assistant professor of political science at the University of Toronto. "What matters is people's impressions of the leaders and where they stand. There are a bunch of these issues where Thomas Mulcair really does have a lot of daylight between himself and the other two candidates. That's really to his advantage."

Back in February, the NDP were polling in a distant third. Bill C-51—the highly controversial "antiterrorism" legislation that became law on June 18—changed everything: Frank Graves, president and founder of the polling firm EKOS Research Associates, says there's a significant contingent of "promiscuous progressive voters" who will oscillate between the Liberal or NDP depending on the perceived chances of party success, some of whom jumped ship due to Trudeau's support of Bill C-51. The NDP vehemently opposed the bill, pledging to repeal it if elected; as a result, Loewen suggests that gives Mulcair "a lot of room to run."

"Bill C-51 provided an opportunity for the NDP to take a position which became where the public were," Graves says. "It wasn't obvious at the time, but it's become particularly true among progressives who just find it an appalling act of stupidity and overkill and a violation of core progressive values."

The position the federal NDP have found themselves in—separated from direct competition due to a few select pieces of legislation—was one that recently proved very successful in the leftie takeover of Alberta in May. The provincial NDP, led by Rachel Notley, is by no means a "socialist party;" many policy planks were notably similar to those of the Liberals and Alberta Party. Yet small offerings such as raising the minimum wage for the 2.2 percent of Albertans who currently earn that, and conducting a review of the province's resource royalty framework managed to differentiate them from other "progressive" parties: the orange clan appeared kinder and more concerned with the average voter.

"Already, the Alberta election has changed Canadian politics," says Dennis Pilon, associate professor of political science at York University and co-author of the 2012 Rosa Luxembourg Foundation report Left Turn in Canada: The NDP Breakthrough and the Future of Canadian Politics. "When the pundits and the 'I know better than you types' get up and talk about 'let's talk about realism,' everyone can now just say 'Alberta.' If the NDP can win in Alberta, they really can win anywhere."

Trudeau's recent announcement of 32 Theses regarding electoral reform threw some fuel on the fire for the Liberal cause. In addition to many other ideas, Trudeau pledged to introduce a new voting system by 2019, prohibit omnibus bills, and augment the contentious process by which senators are chosen (Pilon notes the Liberals have pledged to introduce an alternate voting system since 1921 and never have). Meanwhile, the political resurrection of Gilles Duceppe, long-time leader of the Bloc Québécois, may partially cannibalize the NDP vote in Quebec.

The electoral success of the federal NDP may in fact depend on the decisions made by the Nötley Crüe in the coming months. The Alberta government's already under fire for inconsistencies over finances and the province could feasibly dip into a recession (defined by two consecutive quarters of negative growth). If that situation—something the respected Conference Board of Canada predicted back in January—occurs, it could gift easy ammunition to the Conservatives and Liberals.

Regardless, the NDP win has allowed Canadians to imagine something different. "Alberta's permitted people to think that it's possible," Graves says. "If the most conservative province in Canada can elect an NDP majority then why can't we?"

Follow James Wilt on Twitter.

Image via Wikimedia Commons and Flickr user Joel Mandelkorn

President Obama recently sat for an interview with Marc Maron for the comedian's WTF podcast, which he hosts out of his garage. Observing that WTF stands for "What the Fuck," people who would like Obama taken down a peg no doubt listened hungrily for the president to say something at least borderline offensive.

There weren't any such gaffes. Obama will likely not even have to comment on Fox News's pearl-clutching segment about the part of the interview where he used the n-word.

But it was a big moment for the medium of podcasting, signaling the further ascendancy of podcasters as important contributors to the discourse. That'll be interesting to watch, because podcasters, Maron included, tend to conduct weird, rudderless interviews. And even without a major gaffe, this one was weird and rudderless.

For instance, when President Obama got going about his early college days in LA, Maron risked sounding a little overeager when it came to bringing up a black comedian...

Obama: I am an African American, but not grounded in a place with a lot of African American culture, so I'm trying to figure out—all right I'm seen and viewed, and understood as a black man in America. What does that mean? I'm absorbing all kinds of stereotypes and ideas from society...
Maron: Like Richard Pryor! Got a boxed set right there!
Obama: Like Richard Pryor, or Shaft.

In his memoir, Dreams from My Father, Obama wrote "I sure could curse like Richard Pryor." That little nugget of information is pretty important to understanding why Maron chose to compare Obama to Pryor.

Immediately afterward, Obama bantered like a champ as Maron jumped in with his thoughts on reinventing yourself as a young rebel.

Obama: So I'm trying on a whole bunch of outfits—
Maron: Hats!
Obama: Here's how I should act. Here's what it means to be cool...
Maron: Yeah.
Obama: Here's what it means to be manly...
Maron: Is that when you started smoking?
Obama: Yeah. Exactly.
Maron: Me too! Yeah...
Maron: You know...
Obama: That looks good, sure!
Maron: You start smoking. You start drinking coffee. You got a leather jacket.
Obama: And then you fight that for the rest of your life. The worst.

Sure, Obama's brief brush with leather jackets and coffee doesn't quite measure up to Maron's serious battle with addiction. But they both struggle with nicotine to this day. They're practically cousins!

Here, Obama seemingly turned the tables, trying to relate with Maron on how this moment fits in with how he expected his life to turn out:

Obama: I'm a big fan, and I love conversations like this because if I thought to myself when I was in college that I'd be in a garage a couple miles away from where I was living, doing an interview with—
Maron: As president!
Obama: As president—with a comedian? I think that's a pretty hard scenario to—
Maron: You couldn't imagine it!
Obama: It's not possible to imagine. Nobody could imagine it.

Nobody could imagine it? Granted, the part about being president is hard to imagine when you're in college, but talking to a comedian in a nearby garage? That seems pretty easy for any college student to imagine.

We interviewed President Obama too. Watch that now:

The substance of the interview consisted of Maron trying to give listeners a rare glimpse of a seated president's humanity, while Obama—fully knowing this was meant to be fun—struggled to dial his stump-speech module from 100 percent down to 95.

For instance, Maron ventured out on a limb with a provocative premise, and Obama couldn't completely go along with it, so he just said "right" five times while Maron spoke:

Maron: There's an element—And I don't know if this will be insulting to you, but there is an element to the presidency that is sorta middle management.
Obama: Yeah.
Maron: And, and that—it seems to me that you knew going in what you were up against.
Obama: Right.
Maron: 'Cause I read your early work, and you knew how it laid out.
Obama: Right.
Maron: You knew how capitalism worked.
Obama: Right.
Maron: You knew how—you knew that there was no—you can't go in going, like, y'know, We can't live in a white man's world! Those color lines had to be, y'know, scrapped.
Obama: Right.
Maron: But also, you knew the realities of business.
Obama: Right.
Maron: So it seems to me that in thinking about that middle management frame, that your... that you knew the game you had to play, but you knew that you had to... I think left to its own devices, sadly, the government is only going to cede so much to poor people.

After watching Maron drift a little, maybe the candor-inducing magic of his garage kicked in, because Obama drifted from that question about race and poor people, to the touchy topic of drones, before bringing things back around to the "middle management premise":

Obama: We've gotta be mindful that whatever abstract views you have about drones, or that you have about intelligence gathering, that if you were sitting there in the information room, that you've got some responsibilities and some choices to make, and that it's not all...
Maron: Clear cut...
Obama: Clear cut the way oftentimes it gets presented, so I guess, to go to the point you were making earlier that's where, yeah, it's like middle management.

Toward the end, Maron very tentatively asked the president about fun:

Maron: What do you do to...to...to... to have fun? I mean like, I, I'm... I can't imagine what it's like to raise a family in the situation that you're in, as president, it must feel sort of insulated.
Obama: You know, the biggest fun that I've had is watching my girls grow up, and...
Maron: Yeah?

Maron's "yeah?" sounded a bit dejected, as if he were saying, "Oh, you don't do anything fun, not that you'll mention anyway." If the president raced slot cars or something, we probably would have heard that by now.

Obama kept talking about his kids. Maron didn't sound thrilled.

Obama: When Michelle and I came into office, the biggest worry we had was, is this gonna be some weird thing for them, and are they gonna grow up with an attitude, or are they gonna think that everybody eats off of China?
Maron: Right, right. Are they?

After "Are they?" Maron laughed, and muttered something like "All right, come on," like Obama might say "OK, yes. They're awful." It's a comedy podcast, and this question had the greatest potential for levity. Maron sounded disappointed.

But interviewing a president isn't a recipe for laughs. Still, Obama admitted that he does more in his free time than just watch his kids grow up:

I've been trying to work out pretty hard just to stay in shape. That's useful. But it's not—you know, I used to play basketball more but these days I'm—I've gotten to the point where it's not as much fun because I'm not as good as I used to be, and I get frustrated.

There wasn't much more time after this bit to dig into Obama's frustration about aging. They had to close off the interview by talking about which comedians Obama likes. Answer: Louis CK, which he pronounced "Louis," not "Louie." What a gaffe!

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

David Byrne with the Ventures Guard. Photo via Twitter user Ventures Guard

I'm sitting in a music studio on the top floor of an unmarked warehouse in Hell's Kitchen. The space is packed with monitors, a massive soundboard, instruments, and about 25 people. David Byrne stands behind me. Merrill Garbus of tUnE-yArDs perches next to me on a folding chair. In front of us is an expansive band playing a swirling, hypnotic score by composer Nico Muhly. Despite all that's going on around me, I'm transfixed by a YouTube video. On the computer screen, the renowned color guard team Alter Ego performs their program "Let It Begin with Me." Voices run atop Muhly's music, which is perfectly in sync to Alter Ego's routine.

NPR's Ira Glass occasionally asks a question in his familiar reedy tone and halting cadence—"what the hardest part?" Mostly, though, the young performers provide a running commentary of their set as it happens, announcing the moves, discussing the amount of commitment and sacrifice it takes to master this "sport of the arts," sharing what it means to be a junior member on the team with performers you've admired for so long—"the person you look up to is spinning right next to you!"

At the end of the song, the young men and women, a variety of colors and body shapes, stand facing the audience each with one arm outstretched while a young woman arches her back to the sky in a gesture both supplicatory and demonstrative. The notes of the score fade, and for a beat, the room falls silent.

I lock eyes with Garbus. Her hand is on her heart, and she's clearly moved. "Fuck, man," she says to me.

There's not much more to say than that.

St. Vincent (Annie Clark) at Friday's rehearsal in Manhattan. Photo by LeeAnn Rossi. Courtesy of Todo Mundo Ltd

In 2008, a color guard team asked David Byrne's permission to use a song from his stunning orchestral piece The Forest, a 1988 collaboration with theater visionary Robert Wilson inspired by both The Epic of Gilgamesh and the Industrial Revolution. Intrigued, he requested a video of their performance. The team sent him a DVD of the world championship, and he was blown away by the skill and expressiveness of this vernacular form that he had never heard anyone talk about in either the refined or hipster art worlds of New York City.

Byrne went to Dayton, Ohio, to attend a championship himself, and came up with an idea—what would happen if composers created original work for the routines, which are usually set to montages of soundtrack music or song snippets mixed with spoken-word elements, such as excerpts from recorded speeches. Byrne thought this collision might yield something unique, an event that, in this age of downloadable, easily disseminated, pocket-sized commodities would be a unique theatrical experience, a blend of amazing physicality accompanied by a full band and human voice.

If you're at all familiar with Byrne's career, this impulse should come as no surprise. Theatricality lies at the heart of his performances. As Byrne writes in his book How Music Works, even Talking Heads' earliest gigs as a stripped-down trio in 1976 were driven by an awareness that the context in which the performance occurs shapes the performance itself. The band's spartan, groove-forward sound fit CBGB's intimate environs, while their preppy young-Republican look helped them stand out from the punks. Later, the Kabuki-influenced big suit of the Stop Making Sense tour, a show in which the stage was assembled before the audience's eyes, was an oversized spectacle suitable for stadium crowds.

Check out VICE Meets Nick Cave:

After years of planning, the result of Byrne's brainstorm—Contemporary Color, featuring ten color guard routines set to original music composed and performed by How to Dress Well, Devonté Hynes, Lucius, Money Mark and Ad-Rock, St. Vincent, Zola Jesus, and others—is about to be unveiled tonight at Toronto's Air Canada Centre as part of the Luminato Festival, and this weekend at Brooklyn's Barclay's Center, in association with the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Contrary to those mega venues, the rehearsal room is unadorned, covered in maroon and yellow soundproofing pads, stuffed end to end by the band on one side and technicians on the other. Strings and horns occupy a corner, guitars and synthesizers another. The drummers, including Byrne's longtime percussionist Mauro Refosco, stand in the center. Byrne assigned every composer a color guard team to work with, but each piece of the puzzle didn't quite know what the other pieces were up to, which is why the area around the computer table is crowded. Everyone wants to get a sense of what the show will look like assembled, and this is one of the last full run-throughs before it goes live.

Devonté Hynes.Photo by LeeAnn Rossi. Courtesy of Todo Mundo Ltd

Byrne is a silent and polite master of ceremonies. He makes sure I have a prime seat and finds me a headset so I can tap into the house mix, then resumes his position in the center rear of the room, where he taps his feet to the music. After Merrill Garbus gets up, Nelly Furtado, sipping a coffee, takes her place. Soon, Zola Jesus joins us. Furtado asks why I'm taking notes. When I tell her I'm press, she nods politely but angles herself away from me. Jesus disappears into her phone. I get it, and don't intrude. They're at work. By and large the composers are, like me, quiet observers, though Garbus sometimes hums and skats a bit, extending the previous song into the pause in perfect tonal mimicry, as though she were a mockingbird unable to stop herself from singing. In general, the rehearsal atmosphere is pleasant and collegial, but there's no time for fooling around—things move at a good clip.

The collaborations between color guard teams and composers have happened at a distance. The composers tried to create work that as much as possible matched the routines, so the teams wouldn't have to come up with new sets. Some routines did end up changing a bit based on the music—and Furtado's team developed an entirely original routine for her song—but for the most part, this is a game of timing. The musicians and teams won't have much opportunity to practice together in person, so the band has been aiming to sync their music to the videos of the teams' performances while the teams have been working for months to coordinate their movements to the tracks. In theory, it should come together with minimal bumps. During this run-through, the band only pauses briefly between songs, as they will at the show. In these rests, Jumbotrons will show short documentary pieces about color guard, the teams, and the composers.

Read about color guard and you're going to get a mistaken impression. The teams effortlessly spin and toss chunky wooden rifles and metal sabers. At the most climatic parts, they twirl flags in the air. It sounds patriotic and militaristic—about as elegant as the football games during which these spectacles take place. But Contemporary Color is composed of winter-guard routines. Winter guard is color guard's funky cousin. These sets are performed in auditoriums on the off-season, to a discerning, eagle-eyed crowd watching from above. Imagine Busby Berkeley meets Balanchine meets Beyoncé, equal parts contemporary dance and sis-boom-bah spectacle.

David Byrne with the Ventures Guard. Photo via Twitter user The Knot Group

The flags are not blunt tools. Just as in a Chinese ribbon dance, their fabric unfurls and waves. The material moves in slow-motion, rippling and undulating in rhythm to the music, water that's been given shape in the air. During Black Watch's oceanic piece set to sumptuous music by Devonté Hynes, the teams raise their flags in quiet, maritime swells, defying not just our expectations, but the conventions of the form itself, where the flags are usually trotted out for bigger effect.

The rifle tosses and spins don't just happen vertically—they go laterally, and diagonally, passing between team members, while the performers flip and somersault as their implements fly, catching them after executing perfect landings. Amidst it all, the team moves in balletic harmony, or, as in the final program of the night, Emanon's "Beautiful Mechanical"—an I, Robot routine about machinery—they pop and lock like it's showtime on the Q train. That mesmerizing program is set to a dense, sci-fi inflected tUnE-yArDs composition, which begins with vocal sampling layered so thick the percussion transforms into an almost choral melody.

With 11 recording artists, ten teams with a total of 300 performers, and one Ira Glass, it's taken a significant administrative effort putting Contemporary Color together. "What do you think?" one of the organizers asks me at one point between songs. He's a burly guy, and he stands close, as does Byrne, who, though looking away, has his head cocked and gives every impression of listening. That's how Byrne's been the whole rehearsal. Quiet, but always on the move, aware, and good humored as well, rolling his eyes when he's unable to remember the words to his own song, donning reading glasses to search through print-outs of music to find them. Their curiosity seems legit—I am, at this point, one of the first people outside the project to see it.

"I love it," I say.

"Would you have the balls to tell me if you didn't?" he retorts.

David Byrne.Photo by LeeAnn Rossi. Courtesy of Todo Mundo Ltd

But I'm not lying. I do love this stuff. I'm primed to love it, perhaps from having had a life-long relationship to Byrne's genre-bending work itself. Under his microscope, art forms as disparate as Latin music, opera, Afrobeat, and disco get examined playfully but formally, dissected and re-stitched into something unique and wonderfully unusual. Not unlike winter guard itself.

Byrne's blending color guard with live music elevates both. The songs, even when they hew toward film-score tracks, are given life by the dancers. And the music creates narratives out of the routines, so that characters emerge and the emotions on display deepen and take on new resonance. Mechanicsburg High School in Pennsylvania's "Every 40 Seconds," about abducted and lost kids, is downright creepy set to an arrangement by How to Dress Well that features the mournful tones of a children's choir. In other collaborations, the score and routine create a fascinating texture. Shenendehowa High School in Clifton Park, New York's Hitchcock-inspired routine recreates iconic scenes from Psycho (complete with portable showers) and The Birds (with a jungle gym and flags bearing raven-head insignias). It veers wonderfully toward camp, but Lucius's eerie melody pulls it back, highlighting the conceit's cleverness and darkness. Byrne's contribution is a hymn-like pop song that sounds as if it draws inspiration from his years-long interest in color guard. "How could I know I could be lifted this high?" he sings.

On Thump: Listen to a Very Rare David Byrne Remix of Skylab's "Mother's Milk"

Well, the color guard teams make such lifts and tricks look easy, but toward the end of rehearsal, while the band bangs out the rousing finale, Money Mark runs into the room with a flag propped on his shoulder. It's about five-feet long, large and unwieldy. He nearly takes out a hanging light while prancing back and forth with it. The show's producer, LeeAnn Rossi, and associate producer Chris Giarmo, who have been immersed in the world of color guard for three years now, get cheers by demonstrating the most basic of flag moves.

Byrne, who had been dancing in place behind me, laughs. For a moment, the pace slacks, everyone releases a breath. Then someone says, "We going to run through this thing again?" and it's back to work.

David Byrne's Contemporary Color will be at the Air Canada Centre in Toronto on Monday and Tuesday, June 22 and 23, and at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn on Friday and Saturday, June 26 and 27.

Brian Gresko's work has appeared on Salon, the Atlantic, the Daily Beast, and Guernica. He is the editor of When I First Held You: 22 Critically Acclaimed Writers Talk About the Triumphs, Challenges, and Transformative Experience of Fatherhood (Penguin Books, 2014). Follow Brian on Twitter.

David Sweat and Richard Matt are still nowhere to be found. Photo via New York State Police

On Saturday evening, New York law enforcement seemed to be closing in on Richard Matt and David Sweat, the convicted murderers who busted out of the state's scariest prison two weeks ago. But just hours after they were supposedly spotted in Friendship, New York, new evidence in the form of old underwear shifted the focus more than 300 miles northeast to a place called Mountain View.

Officials' inability to lock shit down has been one of the subplots of a story that's captivated the nation by being alternately terrifying and salacious. But the discovery of a cabin in Mountain View with clothes and DNA evidence that reportedly match the escapees has at least helped bring the duo's initial flight into focus.

"The dogs have got a good track, and we are tightening the perimeter," one official told the upstate newspaper Plattsburgh Press-Republican Monday, "so within the next 24 to 48 hours, we're confident they will be caught."

A press conference in Cadyville, New York, Monday afternoon revealed very few details about what police found in Mountain View, but a law enforcement source told the New York Times they found a pair of underwear and DNA that matched the escapees. The Press Republican added that officials found a jar of peanut butter at the site, along with boots and bloody socks, and that the camp itself is owned by a group of corrections officers.

On Monday, June 6, Matt and Sweat used power tools to escape Clinton Correctional Facility near the Canadian border, and soon afterward, Major Charles Guess of the NYPD told CNN that the two murderers could "literally be anywhere." The following weekend, the duo was supposedly spotted almost 400 miles away from the prison in a town near the Pennsylvania border called Erwin, and a day later, someone else claimed to see them inching toward Pennsylvania.

Despite all the evidence indicating the convicts were in southwest New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo last week said that, for all he knew, Matt and Sweat were in Mexico.

This affair has been mortifying, to say the least. Although a New York Times article likened the initial escape plot to that of The Shawshank Redemption, and Cuomo seemed to buy the idea that they might be chilling like Ellis Boyd "Red" Redding and Andy Dufresne on a beach in Zihuatanejo, there's very little that movie, a life-affirming tear-jerker, has to do with this escape.

To begin with, David Sweat is a cop killer and Richard Matt is someone who dismembered his ex-boss. Prior to committing the grisly murder that landed him in "Little Siberia," as Clinton Correctional Facility is known, Matt reportedly raped a woman, stabbed a nurse, and killed an engineer outside of a bar in Mexico. Neither of them are good dudes, but a retired police captain went so far as to call the latter "vicious" and "evil."

Soon after Matt's rap sheet started making the media rounds, it was reported variously that he has a huge dick, that he was willing to seduce a 51-year-old prison worker to get power tools, and that he just so happens to be a decent celebrity portraitist.

On June 18, Sweat and Matt earned spots on the US Marshals' most-wanted list. If the goal there was to ramp up public awareness, it seems to have worked: On Saturday, in Friendship, a woman working in her garage spotted two men fitting the fugitives's descriptions emerging from the woods. One pulled a sweatshirt over his face to conceal his identity, according to the Wall Street Journal. A command center was set up in a local bingo hall, and hundreds of officers converged on the town of about 2,000 people, as well as the surrounding area.

But sightings are often bogus in cases like this and can throw police completely off track. After all, as the Timesreported, officials have also sifted through tips that suggested Matt and Sweat were going in the complete opposite direction—to Prince Edward Island, off the eastern coast of Canada.

On Sunday night, police called off the search around Friendship after deciding that it was probably a false alarm. The law enforcement official who talked to the Times suggested they were at the Mountain View cabin within the past 48 hours, and Friendship is 104 hours away from Mountain View on foot.

When the two convicted murderers first broke out, all they left behind were two dummy dolls and a possibly racist note that read, "Have a nice day!"

That message was obviously meant to taunt police. But perhaps the killers weren't giving themselves enough credit. As it stands, they've been giving the cops hell for half a month— even if it's hard to imagine they'll last a whole lot longer.

Jim Hall, a certified guide who lives near the cabin, suggested Sweat and Matt are currently contending with black bears and some seriously unforgiving terrain.

They "have got to be hungry, dirty, wet, and cold," he told the Times. "If you're not a woodsman, you could die out there real easy."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Thumbnail via Flickr and Wikicommons

In 2016, Patsy Cline will become the first woman and country singer to be reanimated as a hologram, Billboard reports. Cline, who died in a 1963 plane crash, was the first woman inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame after cry-yourself-to-sleep songs like "I Fall to Pieces" and "Walkin' After Midnight" made her a mainstream success.

Excited and/or horrified fans can thank Hologram USA, who partnered up with the singer's estate to create a full concert experience featuring a performance of her greatest hits, commentary, and audience interaction. Hologram USA, a company probably best known for making that insane Tupac hologram at Coachella, is also planning a Liberace tour and working on a mass-resurrection of famous comedians.

Will this new-fangled technology change the future of live performance? Are Kurt and Dave destined to play together again? Or are all dead celebrities from here on out doomed to an eternity of digital resurrections as bad as Livia Soprano's CGI scene from beyond the grave? Only time will tell.

Want Some In-Depth Stories About Music?

1. From Rave to Revolution: How Pop Music Has Changed the World
2. Pirate Radio Turf War, Raids, and Raves: Looking Back at the Early Days of KISS FM
3. This Is Who Shamir Is and Why You Should Care
4. A Love Letter to the Replacements