Filmmaker Jonathan Culp. Photos courtesy Jonathan Culp

In the 1970s and early 80s, the Canadian film industry went through a boom of sorts. Between 60 and 70 films went into production per year, budgets were ballooning, and directors and producers were thick on the ground. Unfortunately, the bulk of these films were awful, inspired by neither artistic vision nor commercial ambition, but by the desire of groups of lawyers, doctors, and dentists to lessen their tax burden via a series of government programs meant to stimulate the country's film industry. The period has been referred to as "the tax shelter era," and its films have traditionally been discounted as garbage.

For Toronto-based collage filmmaker Jonathan Culp, though, these movies represent a wealth of raw material. In his new movie Taking Shelter, Culp has edited together clips from 434 Canadian films from the 70s and 80s and woven them into a (pretty difficult to follow) narrative about an alien invasion of Canada.

VICE: So, explain the tax shelter era to us?
Jonathan Culp: When people talk about the tax shelter, what they're talking about is a government policy, called the Capital Cost Allowance, or CCA, that was put in place to stimulate film production. It has been in place since the 50s, but the conditions weren't really optimal for investment. In the early 70s, there was a push from the filmmaking community to support feature filmmaking in Canada, so in 1975, the Trudeau government [increased] the Capital Cost Allowance to 100 percent. So you could write off 100 percent of your investment in a feature film. The young producer Robert Lantos, along with Steven Roth, were making a film called Agency—which was a Canadian production starring Robert Mitchum and Lee Majors—they discovered that they could exploit this policy through a limited public offering. Basically, by selling shares at affordable rates to doctors, lawyers, dentists, and stuff like this. And once this was vetted as a real thing, the portfolio managers and [people like that] started looking at Canadian films as a good place to for generic investors to park their money.

And they weren't making art films, right?
Literally, some of the portfolios were saying, "Don't invest in any movies with artistic inclinations." [Former Telefilm Canada executive director] Michael McCabe was very much an ideologue about making films that conformed to the American market, that could compete in the American market, and could stand up to the American product on its own terms. There was a lot of hostile rhetoric about how the Film Board and the CBC had stunted the growth of the Canadian film industry by standing in the way of the workings of the market. And really, what that translates to is genre. There were action films, there were high seas melodramas, there was a variety of horror movies.

So what made you want to make this movie?
This project has been in my head since I was nine years old. I read Jay Scott's takedown of tax shelter movies in the Globe and Mail, on my parents' subscription, and read about these funny tax shelter movies and was like, "Someday, I'm going to see these movies and make fun of them, and have a good time at their expense." So even before I knew that I was going to get involved in collage filmmaking, I was a little bit obsessed with these movies.

Can you summarize the plot of Taking Shelter for us?
Someone suggested I post a libretto, which I may get to yet, because the narrative gets very complicated. The simplest outline of it is: aliens invade Canada, mistaking it for America, and try to turn people's everyday lives into cinema in order to disorient them, so that they can colonize them. So there's a sense that the main narrative line is a description of what was attempted within the film industry itself at the time. And there's various character subplots, there's good guys and bad guys, there's through-characters and people who make cameos—Saul Rubinek only shows up for a quick scene before he gets drowned—but others hang in there. It's a thriller in a lot of ways, it's a fast-moving. My challenge was to make a collage film that worked as a narrative, but that achieved this without any intervention from me, in terms of voiceover or inter-titles or anything like that. Some people stick with the narrative, other people just choose to let it wash over them. It's like 4,000 image cuts and 8,000 audio cuts in 100 minutes, so there's a lot of sensory stimulation going on.

What did making this thing entail?
As I researched the subject, I found that the "tax shelter era" means different things to different people. I thought I was going to be able to just get a list of all the films that exploited the tax write-off, and found out that that tax information was not publicly accessible, so there's even a certain degree of speculation about what is or is not a "tax shelter movie." Which meant that I had to look up the whole era, and just taking in all of the titles that I could find from those two decades. And it amounted to 434 films in the end, which it was a haul that I was proud of, but it took a long time to accumulate those, it took a long time to transcribe them. My method required full transcripts, because most of my editing was done through text searches, which is how I let the material lead the narrative.

Why did you feel the need to transcribe everything?
OK I'll give you an example; you've got the super alien from outer space, Overdog, being played by Michael Ironside in Spacehunter. So this guy is like the montage monster, he speaks one word at a time. And so in order to construct his sentences, I had to actually be able to hunt through and find and isolate these single words to put these sentences together, and that was one of the technique things that I was able to do through transcribing. When it was working, you know when it wasn't like going to the dentist, it did provide a meditative space. Because it was a research project as well, and I needed to familiarize myself with these films as films. And get inside them, get to know the performers, because one of the style things that I settled on was the use of composite characters. Character actors like Henry Ramer, Kate Lynch, Gary Reineke, people that are not household names, but who might have appeared in small roles in eight or ten films. And by creating composite characters, I was able to sort of promote these Canadian actors into lead supporting roles.

How long did this all take?
Seven years. And that broke down to three years of sourcing, two years transcribing, and two years editing. Not necessarily 40 hours a week straight through there, but that was the arc of the work.

Did you ever want to quit?
I'm going to say no, because quitting renders the work already done meaningless in this context. I'm going to avoid projects of this nature for a couple of years, though. At some point you do miss contact with other human beings, and leaving the house and stuff. By the end of it, there was a certain amount of torment involved, but I'm glad I struggled through. It's like this is my homemade PhD, and now I get to talk about all the stuff that I learned, at length.

Does anyone who's featured in the film know about it?
I have met Lisa Langlois and Lesleh Donaldson, who are two of the three scream queens of '80s horror lore. The third, Lenore Zann, is presently running for the leadership of the Nova Scotia NDP, and she's dealt with some harassment online regarding her work in these films, so I doubt she looks back that fondly on these. I think those are the only performers, but I've noticed some directors that I'm friends with on Facebook—Larry Kent, who's one of the first independent filmmakers in Canada, from the early '60s—he liked my page. I've spoken to a few other filmmakers. I haven't mailed them copies, but I'd love to see what their reaction to the film is.

Anything else?
I think it's worthwhile giving these films another look. And I'm not a booster. A lot of the stuff that's been called bad filmmaking does fall into that category, but there's so much good stuff. I wouldn't have survived seven years in the VHS mines with this material if there wasn't a good percentage of movies that were good, or things that were good in the movies.

Taking Shelter plays at Cinecycle in Toronto on July 10 at 8 PM.

Follow Chris Dart on Twitter.

Image via Flickr user gaftels.

This post originally appeared on VICE Australia.

Between 2000 and 2014 there were 14 shark fatalities off the coast of Western Australia. And while that's not a super large number (64 people died from road accidents in the state in 2014 alone), death by shark looms large in Australia's national psyche.

Most of those WA deaths are believed to be caused by Great Whites, and as a result the State Government adopted a controversial policy to catch-and-kill sharks off Perth and the southwest beaches. Throughout the first four months of 2014, 172 sharks were caught and 68 shot; yet none were found to be man-eating Great Whites. The policy was quickly abolished following fierce opposition from the public and the world's top marine scientists arguing it didn't make beaches safer.

Around Australia, the most popular methods of dealing with sharks are still a combination of nets and drumlines. Queensland employs both, and as a result between August 2013 and August 2014 667 sharks were killed off the coast along with about 100 dolphins, turtles, and dugongs.

New South Wales sticks to nets during September and April each year to protect swimmers, but 63 percent of shark attacks in NSW have occurred at netted beaches.

So although we're in the middle of winter, it's not surprising that discussion has begun over how to make beaches safer this summer. Following last year's public backlash over culls, scientists around the state are researching and developing new methods to deter sharks without spilling blood.

At the University of Western Australia this discussion is being led by The Ocean's Institute's Professor Shaun Collin. Shaun's group has been exploring avenues of frightening, but not harming, sharks. "We are using our basic knowledge of the sensory abilities of sharks and their relatives to develop novel deterrence," he explains. They've experimented with strobe lights, sounds, and bubbles to deter attacks—but have received varying degrees of success.

Bright flashing lights were found to be effective as shark deterrents and did discourage sharks from biting. However they appeared to be only effective with nocturnal and bottom-dwelling shark species, not the more dangerous Great Whites.

Loud underwater sounds, including artificial and natural orca calls, were not effective at deterring small sharks in the laboratory and had only a slight preventive effect in the wild.

Short bubble bursts did deter sharks, especially Great White sharks, but again only for a short time. After which sharks became used to the bubbles and did not hesitate to cross the bubble barrier.

Something they've had more luck with is the Shark Shield. This is an electrical device that can be attached to an ankle, surfboard, or kayak, and has been found to have a substantial effect in deterring a range of shark species—including Tiger sharks and White sharks. According to Professor Collin, "It emits a strong electric field which interferes with their electroreceptive system and was shown to be successful in nine-out-of-ten cases, without harming the sharks."

Related: For more scary stuff in the ocean, watch our video about Garbage Island:

Another ambitious project has been the Shark Attack Mitigation Systems (SAMS). Working with the UWA's Ocean Institute, Optus, and Google, they have been developing a Clever Buoy that uses sonar technology to detect shark-sized objects in coastal areas. Once detected, a signal is transmitted to warn lifeguards on the beach.

Despite setbacks, the group's work has caught the attention of the State Government which has provided $646,000 AU [$480,000 US] over a two-year period, for research and development.

As Professor Collin re-iterated, "Once the results are published, the investigations will provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of existing shark deterrents and reveal a range of interesting findings about the sensory world of sharks."

Follow Ed on Twitter.

A 24-7 Ibiza volunteer (right) in San Antonio. All images courtesy of 24-7 Ibiza

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

If you've recently found yourself in Ibiza, stuffed to the gills with ecstasy—so much ecstasy your eyes flipped round and round in your head like wheels on a slot machine and your jaw turned into a slackline for your tongue to wobble on; so much ecstasy you lost your phone in the toilet, blacked out, and ended up face down in the street, occasionally being kicked by passersby—then you may have already met Charlie Clayton.

Charlie, along with his wife Abby and a team of volunteers, runs 24-7 Ibiza.

Around the West End of San Antonio, the 24-7 are a familiar sight—wholesome, corn-fed British Christians in black T-shirts: sober, smiley God-fearers in the eye of the pukestorm. They spend every night, between 11 PM and 7 AM, rescuing the most obvious casualties of the island's losing war on drugs. Somewhere in all of this, they try to nudge these souls toward The Lord.

24-7 Ibiza has been going since 2002, beginning life as a more insular entity that was all about praying. "But you can't go to a place and pray, and ignore the needs of others," is how Clayton frames the shift.

In 2015's Ibiza, the Christians work the strip as hard as any nightclub barker. But is it paying off? Can the same people who assuage their post-capitalist alienation by wolfing down $15 San Miguels in Pacha, before having aggressively pornographic sex in package hotels, actually find meaning and truth in a 2,000-year-old death cult? Is God going large in Ibiza this season? I called up Charlie Clayton to find out.

Charlie Clayton

VICE: Hello, Charlie. Were you out on the street last night? I believe you guys have your own vehicle—is it actually called the Vomit Van?
Charlie Clayton: "Nighttime assistance" is probably the best way to describe it. How it works is: half the team is in the prayer room praying. The other half is on the streets. Then, every hour, we swap. So if someone has drunk too much, or taken too many drugs, we will either walk them home—sometimes we'll take them in a wheelchair—or if their home isn't immediately accessible, we'd take them in our Vomit Van.

How many people do you encounter every night?
We helped over a thousand people last season.

Do you go straight in with the Jesus stuff?
If someone's drunk and not really with it, that's not the time to talk to them about their faith. But in the midst of that, when we're not helping people home, we'll ask people in the street: "Is there anything you'd like prayer for?" Which they do, surprisingly often.

READ ON THUMP: Carl Cox and Eats Everything's Guide to Getting Ibiza Right

Really? What sort of things do people ask to pray for?
Family, jobs, future—if people are ill, or things are a bit difficult. [We sometimes take] prayers that are a bit silly. But that's fine. We're not looking for structured, perfect prayers. I think, because we've been here so long, that prayer is not weird in the West End.

Do you get much abuse?
It's very rare. Even if people don't quite get why Christians are here, they still seem quite open to the idea—the culture here is very open, and people are on holiday anyway.

Do the people you're helping ever turn nasty on you?
Not in any intentional way. Sometimes people can just be a bit confused. But they're often with a friend, which helps.

Footage of the 24-Ibiza team in action

You must see a lot of pretty heavy things on the streets. Does it depress you, these drugged-up narcissists lost in their sex-binge culture?
No. What we would say is that we liken [it to] the fact that Jesus came into our personal mess and cleaned us up and helped us home.

But how do you feel about the club culture that surrounds you? Is it alienating to be surrounded by something you're avowedly not a part of?
We're not anti-the culture. Personally, I'm not a clubber. But our teams will go clubbing. They will drink alcohol—just not to excess. They won't do illegal drugs, but it's not like we're anti-the culture. We're a part of it, in our own way.

Do these teams have any favorite clubs?
Every two weeks we have a changeover of team, and we take all of the new teams to Ushuaïa, we take them to the Ibiza Rocks hotel. So we very much want people to come in and experience island life in all forms.

24-7 Ibiza volunteers on an "Orange Wednesday"

Would you say you've had many successes? Are there people who've come to Ibiza for a drug holiday and left with a Jesus habit?
There are definitely people who've come to Ibiza and become Christians. Most people we meet here, we will help and then never see them again. But that's not how we measure our worth.

Is there a recent-ish case study where that's happened very directly?
We do Orange Wednesday—every Wednesday, we go out and give out oranges on the beach, then ask people if there's anything they want prayer for. There was a guy, and I think he'd already been thinking about faith. So our team met him, and by the end of the conversation he personally wanted to become a Christian. I think we were probably the last piece of the puzzle for him.

Are you a fan of the music out there?
Clubbing's not my thing, but what I do find in the music—last year you had that [Swedish House Mafia] song "Don't You Worry Child" [the following lyrics are "See Heaven has a plan for you"]; there was that other song, "Hallelujah"; and even "God Is a DJ"—is that there is a lot of very spiritual imagery within the music. And Ibiza's a very spiritual place. Even if people aren't Christians, there's a real openness to faith here.

Watch our film 'Big Night Out: Ibiza'

Do you think taking five ecstasy tablets and then dancing to a song with "Hallelujah" in the chorus might be a legitimate way to manifest a religious epiphany similar to Christianity?
I'm not linking someone taking five pills and dancing in a club to any kind of faith.

But at the same time, many people find that taking lots of ecstasy tablets makes them more positive, more aware of their place in the order of things, and generally, I guess, just better people. Are you ever tempted toward that, for those very affirmative reasons?
That is a very difficult question. I don't think you can endorse any illegal drug, per se, just because it's illegal. Yes, of course, people on ecstasy seem happy. We meet a lot of them, and the atmosphere it can create is... interesting. But I'm not sure a drug can make you a better person. Often the people we take home have taken too much ecstasy. And often that isn't helping their bodies, even if their minds are having a wonderful time.

If ecstasy isn't the answer, could you perhaps describe the effect of Jesus on the human body?
Oh, let me think... the effect Jesus has on the heart is that my full belief is that humanity was made for a relationship with God. That satisfies the soul. There are a lot of people here searching, trying to fill that hole with alcohol or drugs. It doesn't matter what people are trying to fill the hole with, Jesus is the one that does it.

Is it good?
It's amazing.

Sounds a lot like double-dropping. Thanks, Charlie.

Follow Gavin on Twitter.

Photo via Flicker user Eirik Solheim

It's a normal day on the internet. Twitter is tweeting and faving, Facebook is liking and sharing, and Reddit is humming with all things good and bad online. It was a day like this in 2010 that cartoonist Ben Garrison had the gall to create something political about the Fed and post it online.

"The March of Tyranny" by Ben Garrison

The illustration, called "The March of Tyranny," was later uploaded to 4chan and edited so that the illuminati pyramid was replaced with the "Happy Merchant," an anti-Semitic meme featuring an unflattering depiction of a Jewish man.

From there things snowballed. Online users turned many of Garrison's other cartoons into offensive illustrations, and now he has been called the "most trolled cartoonist in the world." Because his name was left on all of the altered illustrations, when you google him the search results are a barrage of unsavory images and stories about him as a meme.

What's a guy supposed to do who, like Garrison, is being trolled to death and doesn't have any connections to larger organizations that can jump in and set the record straight? What if he doesn't have a way to get himself on TV to tell his side of the story—that he didn't make the offensive cartoons being circulated in his name? Where does one go from there?

The Online Hate Prevention Institute is one of the only institutes of its kind, working within Australia to stop and prevent forms of threatening hate speech online. To better understand the best course of action upon being trolled, I spoke over email with Dr. Andre Oboler, CEO of OHPI, as well as Ben Garrison. The two worked together in an effort to reduce the amount of trolling Garrison suffered.

STEP 1: Identify What Kind of Trolling Is Happening

Photo via Flicker user Cali4beach

Hate Speech: Hate speech targets people based on prejudice, including women, people of color, Jewish people, LGBTQI people—generally anyone who is not a white cis straight man.

Cyberbullying: "Cyberbullying can occur between people who know each other. It's often spoken of in relation to the schoolyard, but it is also an element of workplace bullying, domestic violence, and other forms of abuse," Dr. Oboler tells me. Like IRL bullying, cyberbullying is often instigated by someone who personally knows the victim. Tyler Clementi's death in 2010 is partially attributed to cyberbullying prompted after his roommate spied on him during an intimate act via webcam and tweeted about it.

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Trolling: "Trolling" is harassment marked by anonymity, so the victim has no way to strike back directly against her harassers. Trolling is not marked by number of harassers, like griefing (more on that below). OHPI sees a lot of " RIP trolling" instances, where users post hateful comments on social media accounts of deceased people. In a case of trolling the victim usually has no comeback against the troll as they don't know who they are. "The reason they had the nerve to [troll]," Garrison says, "was because they were anonymous."

Griefing: "Griefing is a distributed form of trolling, much like a distributed denial of service attack (DDOS). Some information about the victim is still needed, but it would usually be very basic," Dr. Oboler tells me. The term "griefing" comes from the world of online gaming, describing a group of players who would create a bunch of free accounts, and then gang up on a single player to ruin their experience. In the context of wider online harassment, griefing is when a lot of people put in a very minor effort, such as sending one hateful tweet, and the cumulative effect can be devastating.

Harassment categories are not mutually exclusive. In the case of Ben Garrison, trolls used griefing and anti-Semitic hate speech to tarnish Garrison's reputation. In a similar situation, trolls impersonated feminist writer Caitlin Roper and promoted transphobic hate speech under her name. Women online are disproportionately targeted for the grave sin of being women (see: Gamergate).

STEP 2: Report the Harassment to the Social Network on Which It Occurred

Photo via Flicker user Robin Hastings

Social media networks like Twitter and Facebook typically maintain "community standards" that disallow threatening or hateful content. Facebook's standards don't permit hate speech or bullying specifically, as well as a host of other distasteful things like attacking private figures or using the site to facilitate criminal activity.

Twitter in particular used to be notoriously bad for responding to hate speech. Former CEO Dick Costolo admitted this in a memo leaked to The Verge, saying, "We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we've sucked at it for years."

However, the site has recently adjusted their community standards. Whereas in the past a threat had to be "direct and specific," now any indirect threat is likely to break community standards under the wider umbrella of "promoting violence against others." Longtime troll Chuck Johnson solicited donations on Twitter to "take out" activist DeRay McKesson, and subsequently was permanently suspended. Before the removal of the "direct and specific" clause, Johnson's tweet may not have been considered a violation of community standards, and it's possible no action would've been taken. "There's also recently been a 400 percent increase in the number of staff at Twitter responding to users' reports," Dr. Oboler notes.

OHPI runs Fight Against Hate, which is not a reporting system, but an accountability system. After a user reports hateful content, they can log that report to Fight Against Hate, and the team at OHPI (including staff, law enforcement, NGOs, and researchers) can track how long it takes for the platform to respond. If they don't respond, the team at FAH is already clued in and can take action, lifting some of the emotional labor from the victims.

STEP 2.5: Watch for Phoenix Pages

Image via Deviant Art user Cristian Papi

"The problem of phoenix pages is a significant one on Facebook," Dr. Oboler admits. A "phoenix page" is when a hate speech fanpage or harassing user is removed from Facebook and then immediately creates a new page or account. "[A phoenix page] needs a swift response or we end up playing whack-a-mole as the time to create a page and have it gain a little traction is less than the time it usually takes to get a page removed."

In Garrison's case, it was exceedingly hard to get the various pages removed. "Facebook refused to take many of the pages down after repeated complaints. They would eventually take them down, but they made it very difficult to do it."

Keep an eye out for recreated pages/users after your harasser is removed and report it immediately so your initial efforts are not in vain. But know that it can be a serious time-suck. "I have spent countless hours filling out forms and sending email to image hosting services, Facebook and Twitter to get libel removed," Garrison tells me. "This is time I could have spent doing something productive."

STEP 3: Report the Harassment to the Police

"As a general rule, if people are feeling threatened or the online content is harassing them to the point that it negatively impacts on their ability to go about their daily life, that would be the time to contact police," Dr. Oboler notes.

But what if the police can't do anything? If the harasser is in one country and you're in another, too bad. Most likely, nothing can be done. When writer Amanda Hess reported her harassment to the police, the officer's response was "What is Twitter?" In order for police to do anything about online harassment, they must first understand it. Being forced to continually log and report instances of law-breaking harassment is one way to help them learn.

Twitter has made it simpler to report cases of harassment to law enforcement. On the federal level, Representative Katherine Clark and the House of Representatives have formally urged the Department of Justice to pursue online harassment cases seriously and more often. Local law enforcement may not have the technical knowledge or resources to meaningfully pursue online harassment, as detailed by Jezebel at the end of last year. Consider skipping your local police and reporting harassment through the FBI, via the Internet Crime Complaint Center. The IC3 purports to review each case and refer to local or federal law enforcement as necessary.

Skip the lawyer route. Garrison tried it, and while he had a case, his lawyer eventually refused to pursue it due to the expense, difficulty, and unlikely return of online libel cases. "[U]sually the perpetrators are broke and living in their parents' basements," he tells me. "Few lawyers will take on such cases and I suspect part of the reason is they want to avoid getting targeted by the Internet Hate Machine themselves."

STEP 4: Attempt to Salvage Your Ruined Reputation

Photo via Deviant Art user Rosa Quinn

The best way to do this is to openly connect yourself with the troll's impersonations, and say without shame, "This is what's happening to me." Caitlin Roper keeps impersonating tweets pinned to the top of her account. Ben Garrison continues to create art and denounces trollish impersonations whenever necessary. "I put a disclaimer on my site and I decided to ignore the trolls. This is what everyone says—just ignore them and they'll go away."

But when you're being griefed, that's often not enough. "In my case, after two years, they did not go away," Garrison says.

STEP 5: Discuss Your Experiences with Harassment and, If You Wish, Attempt to Understand the Mentality of People Who Hate You for No Reason

Photo via Flicker user aboveallprecious

In places like anonymous imageboard 4chan, there's a Wild West, anything-goes mentality. Some users see the internet as a magical space to say whatever they want for fun with no consequences, and trolling is how sadists indulge their Machiavellian desires. Garrison knows this firsthand. "To anonymous trolls," he tells me, "There is no such thing as libel, defamation, or harassment. It's all 'free speech' and they consider that to be 'absolute' free speech. Anyone who questions that is vilified and ridiculed."

Garrison held a Q&A session on 8chan, a 4chan clone, to see if he could reason with trolls on their turf. "What I found out was a great many of the young people using that chat board really did like me. Many were respectful to an old man." If you can reach a harasser in some small way, maybe that smidge of humanity will grant you some greater forgiveness toward the larger group. But results are not guaranteed. Garrison tells me he'd find it hard to forgive Christopher "m00t" Poole, former CEO of 4chan, for his refusal to grant Garrison's DCMA takedown requests, thus supporting the trolls' efforts. Trolls must be stopped from the top down, not the bottom up.

The best way to stop online harassment is to change the environment of the online communities themselves. Riot Games, creators of League of Legends, effectively curbed harassment in-game by holding tribunals where users were "tried" by the community and suffered consequences when they used hate speech in-game. Only when trolls felt real consequences on their own gameplay did their behavior change.

The tide is turning, but historically there's been an overall sentiment that what happens on the internet isn't "real." In today's interconnected world it's almost impossible to simply log off. Protect yourself first, but don't be unwilling to publish the worst of your harassment, and reach out to your online community for support. Slowly, corporations like Facebook and Twitter are taking notice and slowly, they're beginning to adjust the way they manage their communities.

Follow Kate on Twitter.

Thumbnail rainbow flag photo via Flickr user Ted Eytan

Watch: Young and Gay in Putin's Russia

Earlier this week, the United Russian Party—Putin's political party, which holds a little more than 50 percent of the seats in Russia's legislature—unveiled a "straight pride" flag in response to the LGBT rainbow flag. The group debuted the new flag at Moscow's Sokolniki Park on the Day of Family, Love, and Fidelity, which features the phrase "#настоящаясемья," meaning "real family" or "true family." Right above that is United Russia's definition of the true family—a man, a woman, two boys, and one girl.

"We are speaking of the traditional family," Andrey Lisovenko of the United Russia Party told the Guardian, just a week after the US Supreme Court ruled that US citizens can marry whomever they damn well please. "We mean the average, standard Russia family that is ours as you see illustrated in the logo—mother, father, and three children."

The Guardian's video goes on to report that Russian officials were trying to ban the rainbow flag, even on social media. Homosexuality is technically not illegal in Russia, but the new "straight flag" has been starting conversation about a 2013 Russia law book in which Vladimir Putin banned symbols promoting "non-traditional" values, the Independent points out.

Not all anti-gay supporters are pleased with the flag, though. The French anti-gay marriage group called La Manif Pour Tous are a bit miffed, claiming that the Russian propaganda flag is nearly identical to their own straight pride flag. The only difference is that the United Russian flag has three children instead of two.

Anti-gay and plagiarists? Bad look, United Russia Party.

Photo of LAPD officers and a man who would subsequently be shot on Skid Row, as anonymously uploaded to Facebook

Earlier this week, the Los Angeles Police Department gifted a mid-year snapshot of the local crime picture, and it wasn't a pretty one. The latest numbers show that crime in the city is up 12.7 percent through the first six months of 2015, with violent crime up just over 20 percent. The murder rate is actually down, which is nice, while property crime has seen a roughly 10 percent increase.

Since LA's crime rate had been in decline for more than a decade, everyone from the Mayor to LAPD Chief Charlie Beck to criminologists are trying to figure out what, exactly, is going on.

"You see police chiefs who immediately go to legislation and say that's the causation, that immediately go to the economy and say that's the causation," Beck said in a joint press conference with Mayor Eric Garcetti on Wednesday. "It's a number of things."

The chief and mayor cited an uptick in gang violence, a surge in homelessness, and a new state law on drug possession as potential factors. But according to Jorja Leap, an anthropologist who heads up the Health and Social Justice Partnership at the University of California-Los Angeles, the nationwide trend toward taking out our cell phones and documenting police conduct early and often might be at play here, too. The idea is that all the scrutiny in the wake of unarmed black men being killed by cops—like the man shot on LA's Skid Row in March—might be discouraging LAPD officers from being too aggressive.

Of course, that doesn't mean we shouldn't film police.

"I think it's a necessary thing. We need to have accountability. But the trouble is, we're going to have a period of adjustments here," Leap told VICE.

Beck didn't mention the cameraphone factor, instead suggesting that Proposition 47—the state law voters approved back in November de-felonizing drug possession—"cannot be taken out of the equation." Getting caught with most drugs doesn't result in jail time in California anymore, which theoretically means more criminals are on the street. But the chief stopped short of directly blaming the new law, and conceded that the uptick began late last year, LA Weeklyreported.

Gang crime is up 18 percent, according to the new data, with Beck predicting gang-related homicides will top out at around 130 this year. The chief also mentioned homelessness—which has gone up 12 percent in LA County over the past two years, according to a report by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority—as a culprit. Beck has said homelessness "drives almost all the crime" around LAPD headquarters.

But according to Dr. Leap, "The homeless will definitely contribute to property crime," such as petty theft, but "you cannot attribute the rise in violent crime to the homeless. Absolutely not. What I see the homeless arrested for in the greatest number is public urination, camping on beaches, camping in public parks. Homeless folks do not walk around with firearms or deadly weapons."

Leap does agree with the chief that gangs are at play, but thinks the videos are the thing.

"The minute someone knows they're being observed, they are going to act differently," she said. "There are police officers that understandably might weigh the impact of their actions, and they have to balance containing crime versus community response."

This is not an entirely new idea, according to Jeffery Fagan, a policing and criminal justice expert at Columbia Law School. "At this point, the whole idea of a 'chilling effect' from videos has been internalized in police culture, and spread like a cultural meme across the country," he told VICE in an email.

For instance, when Baltimore residents experienced their own recent surge in crime after 25-year-old Freddie Gray died from injuries sustained in police custody, Deputy State's Attorney Page Croyder went on Fox News to tell Sean Hannity, "If you were to lock [police] up and charge them criminally, they really couldn't do their jobs. They would be like, I'm not going to make an arrest, if I'm wrong I could go to jail. So that's a very chilling effect."

According to Fagan, after Croyder took to the talk show circuit to spread this idea, "several police union leaders picked up her theme and megaphoned it in their cities and regions thru the media." [sic]

As the Dallas Morning News reported, other major cities like Dallas are seeing their own violent crime surges, while fluctuations in New York City and Philadelphia have been less dramatic.

Another plausible factor in LA's case is that residents are simply being more diligent about reporting crimes. This came up in January, when officials noticed an alarming rise in reports of rape last year. At the time, Beck chalked it up to an increase in "acquaintance rapes" actually being reported to authorities, and vaguely implied that it was a good thing.

"We need to send a better message to our young people," he said. "The ways to keep yourself safe—the need to report, the need to work within your school, the need to contact the police—these are the things that will affect this crime category."

But now it seems like the uptick in rapes reported—this year rapes are up about 8 percent so far—is just part of a larger problem in LA. There have already been 739 documented rapes in Los Angeles in 2015, compared to 685 at this point in 2014 and 590 the year before that, according to LAPD stats. (As the LAPD report noted,
"Rape Stats from previous years were updated to include additional Crime Class Codes that have been added to the UCR [Uniform Crime Report] Guidelines for the crime of Rape.")

Check out the episode of our show California Soul about DIY Gun culture.

For her part, UCLA's Dr. Leap thinks police must do their jobs well and be subject to greater scrutiny. In essence, the public should have its cake and eat it, too.

"One thing we've got to remember: accountability doesn't happen overnight," Leap said. "This adjustment is going to take time, and it must be organic. There's going to be fallout. This may be part of a transition to greater accountability."

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

There are already five handguns on the table when 20-year-old Mukunda Angulo reaches into his duffel bag full of props and pulled out another.

"I never thought I'd say this," I tell him, "but nice guns."

Mukunda grins and continues to retrieve prop weaponry from the bag.

"Those are Berettas, actually," he says. "We used them in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. Tarantino likes to use silver Berettas from old 70s cop dramas."

A magazine slips from the bottom of the gun, and Mukunda, like a pro, slaps it back in. When he hands me the gun, I'm mildly surprised that instead of cool metal, my hand grips cardboard. He lays another weapon down, this time a sinewy-nozzled assault rifle, then a shotgun, and then—why not?—a chainsaw, complete with individual teeth. The conference table, which was inconspicuous and mundane only moments before, begins to shine with the lethality of a drug-bust haul.

Prop-building is but one of the many talents that the six brothers featured in the award-winning documentary, The Wolfpack, have acquired through reenacting films scene by scene, many of which were created while under domestic confinement by their intensely domineering father. Aside from heavily monitored trips, such as to the doctor, the brothers were never allowed to leave their house out of a fear of the outside world. "In the summer," says Mukunda in the film, to the documentarian Crystal Moselle, "there was more a chance of us getting out. Sometimes we'd go out nine times a year, sometimes once. And, in one particular year, we never got out at all."

In a more conventional home setting, the reenactments could have been mere child's play. But for the Angulos, they became a kind of salvation, glimpses into the world beyond their four-bedroom Lower East Side apartment. The boys' unique craft have caught some influential eyes, putting them on the path to promising film careers only five years since entering society. Since winning Sundance's best US Documentary award, Magnolia Films has acquired the film and teamed up with VICE to promote it.The Wolfpack is releasing digitally release the film on iTunes today.

Watch an exclusive clip of the Angulo brothers' reenactment of 'Pulp Fiction' from 'The Wolfpack':

"I actually haven't seen it ," admits 22-year-old Narayana, Mukunda's elder brother who has joined his brother in meeting me at Magnolia's offices.

"I can't help but connect that that was me," Mukunda says of watching the film. "But we've come such a long way in such a short period that we're all pretty optimistic about our futures.

I keep an eye out for familiar objects as Mukunda removes more costumes and props from the large bags by our table. I spot the Batman suit Mukunda shows off in the documentary, along with various other masks and bodywear—including Darth Vader and Iron Man.

Darth Vader mask. Photo by Evan Husney

"Everything here is made with cereal boxes, cardboard, paper, and tape," he explains, and then glances over at the Batman suit. "And the occasional yoga mat, for dexterity." I pick up the Vader helmet. It's painted black on the outside, but beneath the dark visor I spot the cheery eyes of a familiar leprechaun: Lucky from Lucky Charms.

"These might interest you," says Mukunda. He places a bundle of manila envelopes on the table. They're scripts for the many films reenacted, "around 25 to 30," adds Narayana, "though only half have scripts—we had a lot of films already memorized." I leaf through the dozen or so envelopes: Halloweens 1–5, The Unforgiven, No Country for Old Men, Reservoir Dogs, JFK. One particular envelope catches my eye. I open it to find a script with the orange-and-black title card faithfully reproduced by what appears to be marker: Pulp Fiction.

Script to 'Pulp Fiction' by the Angulo brothers

"We didn't use scripts when we first started out," says Narayana, "We'd just memorize lines, pause the film, and rehearse the scene."

"It was a very organic, in the moment kind of thing," says Mukunda. "We all had these films in our heads, and would just kind of act them out solo. We noticed we were all doing it, so we decided to collaborate on doing a film, the first being Lord of the Rings. I made swords and a Gandalf staff. We took it pretty seriously, acting out scenes over and over, getting better each time."

Many of the initial reenactments weren't filmed, and an early attempt to do so ended up poorly. "We tried to recreate and film The Dark Knight scene by scene," says Mukunda. "I spent a long time on costumes and scripts. But the camerawork was out of our league."

The brothers had better luck with Tarantino. The Wolfpack opens with a reenactment of Reservoir Dogs, where a brother playing Mr. Blonde sings "Stuck in the Middle With You" to another brother, who is bound and gagged. The film later shows footage from a reenacted Pulp Fiction scene where two of the brothers acting as Vincent Vega (John Travolta) and Julius (Samuel L. Jackson) are arguing as they clean brains from a car.

Watch our VICE Meets with Crystal Moselle, Director of 'The Wolfpack':

"I played Julius," says Narayana, shyly.

His brother turned to look at him. "We all knew you had to be Samuel L. Jackson!"

Narayana shakes his head. "I'm trying out for Mia Wallace next time."

Mukunda, who wrote the script, played Marsellis, the Kingpin-like mob boss memorably played Ving Rhames. When it came time to be bound, gagged, and ready for Zed, Mukunda simply wrote in "use a pillow." Whether the pillow was meant to gag or to be a stand-in for the gagging scene was left unclear. The role of Vincent was debated between two brothers, Mukunda and Govinda. Eventually Mukunda won the part.

"It was because I had the longest hair," says Mukunda.

His brother counters: "No, it's because you're the wolf." I wonder if this is a reference to Mukunda being the brother who first broke out of their house, or if I have accidentally glimpsed the brothers' hierarchy. Perhaps Mukunda, with his prop-making skills and directorial aspirations, had become a sort of de facto leader.

On Noisey: We Talked to the Wolfpack Brothers on Why 80s Music Rules

For their Tarantino attire, the brothers say they wore suits their father obtained from a Ludlow clothing shop that had placed them on a free rack. These same black jacket and trousers, coupled with black ties and shades, have given the boys a look of camaraderie that now graces the film posters for The Wolfpack.

"Pulp Fiction is about 50 pages," says Mukunda, pointing to the handwritten script in my hands. "It's all dialogue. If there are other moments, such as car crashes, we would write, 'Hit table.'"

Script to 'No Country for Old Men'

To get the sounds of gunshots, the brothers used a synthesizer. In another reenactment, this time for Oliver Stone's Platoon, to get the sound of rain, they used an applause function built into the keyboard. "We'd just weigh the key down, and have the rain going for as long as a scene needed."

Since the brothers would often reenact an entire movie in one go, a soundtrack was needed that coincided with transitions and accompaniment.

"We would grab a song, and edit it just as it is in the movie. So we would record all the songs onto one cassette tape, and you would edit it on another cassette by pausing where it would cut off in the movie."

The brothers credit Moselle with giving them the initial tools and training to improve their filmmaking skills. She lent them her cameras and gave them "little story assignments" to exercise their minds and help them learn the equipment.

Mukunda Angulo with Iron Man costume. Photo by Evan Husney

"One story needed a wide shot, another a dolly shot," says Mukunda. "One required a close-up, another a dissolve. We began putting these together to get our shoots to be how we wanted them."

Moselle and the brothers have now formed Wolfpack Pictures, an umbrella company for all of their various endeavors. VICE recently co-produced Mirror Heart, a short original film directed by Mukunda Angulo, that he describes as "different creatures coming to terms with their differences." It stars his five brothers as well as his sister, Vishnu. And later this year, the brothers will release another Mukunda-directed work, Window Feel, that will feature outside actors, including Chloe Pecorino who makes a brief appearance near the end of The Wolfpack. The Tribeca Film Institute has commissioned them to reenact a clutch of Robert DeNiro films, while the San Francisco Film Institute hired them to recreate scenes from three iconic films that take place in the City by the Bay: Mrs. Doubtfire, Dirty Harry, and Sister Act. And the Angulos have begun to explore individual interests—one brother is a dancer, another a cinematographer; two brothers have formed a band ("They scored Mirror Heart," says Mukunda, proudly), and Narayana has become engaged in activism. "Gasland got me into protesting fracking," he says. He now works for NYPIRG.

Watch 'The Mirror Heart,' produced by VICE in collaboration with Wolfpack Pictures:

These social engagements are a huge turnaround from the brothers' extremely sheltered upbringing, and both Mukunda and Narayana concede that the change has been easier than anticipated.

"We've become pretty adapted to society," says Mukunda. "For so long we were told how everyone was out to get you, and all the people we've met have been just the opposite, so nice and encouraging. Even our mother has emerged from this as a more empowered and independent person. She's making her own choices, and reaching out to friends and family she has not seen in a long time, and has a lot planned for the future."

I gently inquire about their father, last seen in the film lying shirtless across his bed, a tall hat on his head, watching television. "He has no say in anything," says Narayana. "Our mom's in charge of the house now."

The Wolfpack is out now on iTunes and in theaters nationwide.

Michael Barron is on Twitter.

Ah, summer. 'Tis the season when all the rich kids go to Europe or get to third base at camp and the rest of us work long, terrible hours for miserable pay and to "build character." While we can look back and laugh now, these were the worst days of our lives.

Like this, but with more shitty diaper water. Photo via Flickr user Bart Everson

Who knew garbage was so shitty?
My shittiest summer job was literally the shittiest. After working on a city crew maintaining forests and pathways across the east end of Ottawa, which also involved the threat of running over syringes with fuckin' weed whackers and lawn mowers, I had the unpleasant chance to work on the back of a garbage truck for two weeks.

Not just on any garbage truck, but one servicing parks. You know what's in park garbage cans? Yeah, neither did I until I did this job. Diapers and dog shit.

So there I was, cruising on the back of the shitmobile snatching pales of feces in all of its glorious forms, wind in my hair, shit in my nostrils.

On my first haul, which was jam packed with brown sludge, plastic bags, and smeared Huggies, I had to do the inaugural compact. As I hit the latch and the poop was being compressed, shit water popped directly onto my face. I yacked. That will always be the moment I consider when I think tapping on a keyboard and being a vampire is actually hard.

Respect to garbage men. - Ben Makuch, Associate News Editor

Teens? Terrible. Photo via Flickr user Peter & Joy Grace

Judging racist sketches in France
I used to be a corporate stiff, and as most corporate stiffs will admit, they get to that point where they want out and spend most mornings devising creative ways to call in sick, or falsely claim the death of distant relatives so they can sit at home and watch The Office instead. I did that, a lot. Until I decided to quit and move to France to teach the most annoying portion of the French population English. Typical.

The American-themed camp aimed to instil within these young, sexually driven teens pastimes, values, and hobbies of the USA—hobbies like baseball and singing folk songs by a campfire, and values such as the confidence to perform in front of your peers at talent shows (have you ever had to judge a string of French kids attempting their best Gangnam style?), and of course, hobbies like racist interpretations of the relationship between "cowboys" and "Indians" which were played out in highly offensive sketches. These week-long camp sessions closed with a dance party called "boom," much like the dances we had in high school (no MuchMusic sponsorships, unfortunately). I enjoyed these the most, as they were hotbeds for heartache, and dance floor corners were crammed with crying french boys post-slow dance rejection.

I should also mention that these kids did not understand English: maybe a word here or there, but not really. Counsellors were not allowed to speak French either, so I spent most of my day talking and aggressively miming at people that could not understand me. The most depressing part was that we got paid less than minimum wage to work over 10-11 hour days. When we sat down and did the math (which we tried not to do), we made about two euros an hour. We sat down and calculated how much children were charged to attend said camp, and the difference in figures triggered table-flip-type anger. - Navi Lamba, social media producer

Yeah, slaughterhouses are... yeah. Photo via Flickr user USDAgov

Stock car bouncing > chicken slaughterhouse "kill room"
When I was maybe 15, I started off the summer working the main gate at a stock car race track just outside of Peterborough, Ontario. I didn't have to deal with the cash at all, just ripped tickets and made sure that nobody was bringing in booze. Yup, a beanpole skinny 15-year-old long-haired kid essentially working as a bouncer, informing half-cut rednecks that they weren't allowed to bring in a cooler full of beers to help them enjoy the carnage while the races from atop uncomfortable wooden bleachers totally exposed to the elements. Surprisingly, I don't recall ever being physically threatened, but there were more than a few times when I sent ornery race fans back to the ticket booth to plead with the elderly woman who clearly ran shit. If she said "no," people tended to listen. (My understanding was that the no booze policy was a relatively new thing to be enforcing in a massive field close to the middle of nowhere.)

The worst part of the job was the sheer tedium of waiting for it to be late enough that they stopped charging admission, which involved just standing around in nearly complete darkness (the picnic table where I'd occasionally park my ass when the lineups petered out had one light bulb hanging directly over it—a beacon for the mortar-shelling assault of Junebugs). I lasted longer than my brother who, two years my junior, was tasked with selling shitty photocopied programs to the rowdy audience—as if anyone really needed to look up the stats on whatever jagoffs had entered the crash-'em-up derby that week. Occasionally the race got rained out, and I happily took the financial hit that came with losing an evening's work.

I ended up quitting the race track to work full time at a poultry processing plant (aka a chicken slaughterhouse). Having grown up on a farm, I was totally fine with raising chickens, and had no illusions about where they all went at the end of the summer. Plus, I'd already witnessed a few DIY executions—chickens literally running around with theirs heads cut off. But there's a big difference between axing a bird to death and working in a "kill room."

First, it's balls-hot mid-summer and you're in a metal shed surrounded by crates stacked six feet high crammed full of dusty meat birds shitting on each other and realizing in their tiny bird brains that something is most definitely up. Wearing gloves and a heavy rubber apron, I'd have to reach into a crate containing four to eight full-sized birds, grab the chickens by their feet and haul them out through a hole usually marginally larger than their bodies (a process that the chickens make difficult by spreading their wings or—naturally—struggling to not be next in line for death).

Next, I'd hang up the birds, chests down and asses facing the wall, by sticking their feet through metal racks. The idea is that any panic shit they'd fire off would fly towards the wall, while the neck and jugular would be easily accessible. Which is where John—a stocky 40-ish dude with a manicured beard and a wicked sense of humour—would step in a shock the birds with an electric knife while slicing their throats so all the blood would drain into a stainless steel trough below. Fill up the 10 or so racks each with about four or five blood-draining birds, and it was time to start tossing the corpses into a hot water bath that swished them around and removed most of the feathers. Sometimes one of the hanging birds would flop around and splash my face with horror-film blood spatter; other times, the soapy water would fly across the room and onto my face. It always took a second to figure out which it was.

Four to five hours of this was followed by an afternoon power-washing the shit and feathers out of all the crates, which would have been tolerable if the power washer wasn't so loud that you couldn't listen to music at the same time. (Agony for a young metalhead.) Despite all this, I still enjoy a good barbecued chicken. - Chris Bilton, VICE Canada deputy editor

Probably don't drive one of these bad boys over someone's foot! Photo via Flickr user Darren Moloney

I ruined a football career with a forklift
I spent three months working in a North Montreal shipping warehouse, hauling random boxes in and out of 40-foot containers. I'm not sure if you've ever spent any time in a giant corrugated steel box in 100-degree summer heat, but it really, really sucks. Just to be clear: these aren't the sort of shipping containers that rich, off-the-grid engineers in New Mexico fill with tempered glass and fancy geometric furniture so they can live "alternatively," but the ones where people desperate to escape third world countries are found dead or screaming in some dock.

Sometimes the work wasn't so bad, things would arrive all neatly plastic-wrapped and Jenga-ed up on pallets. You drove the forklift in, and pulled those fuckers out. If you were lucky, one box would "accidentally" fall and the shift boss would rip it open and distribute the spoils amongst the workers, and you'd get a shitty Peruvian backpack, or random off-brand granola bars for your girlfriend.

But most of the time boxes were just randomly tossed into the container by people who clearly didn't give a fuck that their cargo actually had to eventually be dealt with by other humans. At that point the work was gruelling, and we'd spend hours deadlifting unwieldy boxes in swamp-crotch Montreal humidity in a seven-foot wide cell where you would literally burn yourself if you touched the walls—it's the kind of sadistic scenario that might eventually become a popular Japanese TV show.

To be honest, it wasn't the worst job ever. But it was tough. Oh, also one time I recklessly ran over my friend's foot with a forklift and ruined his football career. - Raf Katigbak, VICE Canada senior editor

Bulk Barn! Photo via Facebook

Bulked up, like Drake
One year I got a job at a Bulk Barn. I should've known something was wrong when they hired me on the spot without looking at a resume, but the job was essentially split into two tasks: carrying awkward items, and cleaning up spills. You would think that the "bulk" of the work would come from refilling sour keys or whatever, but you know who uses Bulk Barn the most? Old people. And you know what old people love to buy? Same as not-old people, actually: flour, rice, chocolate chips. However, old people have shaky hands, and having to clean up any incidental spills around a bin only to find it tagged by whole wheat flour hours later is enough to drive anyone to the brink of insanity. Couple that with the fact that you end every shift smelling strongly of either coffee or curry, and you have all the making for a terrible summer commitment. - Slava Pastuk, Noisey Canada editor

This is not THE coffee shop, this is just A coffee shop. Photo via Flickr user Kathy Drasky

Chemical Valley coffee hous
One summer I worked at a coffee shop in Sarnia, Ontario, which holds the dubious honour of playing host to the pollution-belching cancer hole known as "Chemical Valley," and it was pretty fucked up. Let me begin by explaining that the shop was owned by wealthy family who was devoted to a variant of the Jewish faith that believes Jesus is actually the lord and saviour of the Jews, whether they like it or not.

In Sarnia, where a chain restaurant passes as an exciting new dining experience, this shop had shelves imported from Morocco—the kind with fancy sliding ladders—lined with books exposing the government conspiracy behind pasteurized milk, alongside $500 copies of the illustrated Torah. Even the pots came from France. Once, the owner wanted to print shirts emblazoned with a Bible verse about unifying the Jews and gentiles, and the one she had in mind actually contained the word "foreskins." As much as I wanted to own a shirt like that, I had to talk her out of it.

There were also essentially no customers, for whatever reason, which meant that I could read books, drink expensive tea, and stuff my face with rich, delicious pastries all day without anybody bothering me because my boss had no idea how to run a business. Actually, now that I think about it, maybe that was my best summer job. - Jordan Pearson, staff writer, Motherboard Canada

Freshly aerated lawn. Photo via Flickr user allispossible.org.uk

What the hell is lawn aeration?
For one summer, I decided it would be a great idea to do work for a lawn aeration company. Before you ask, lawn aeration is when you punch small holes into the grass with what looks like a lawn mower to allow air and other nutrients to reach the roots so they can grow and... well, that's all I remember from the sales pamphlet.

Anyway, the hours were from 9AM - 9PM, commission pay, and the head coordinator made a really passionate speech about how aerating would mold workers into real men or "Tammys" (code word for strong women because equality), so I signed up. On the first day, I was dropped in the middle of a random suburb with a bunch of flyers, a bottle of water and two houses I was scheduled to aerate. What the company failed to tell me is that May isn't a very busy month for lawn cleaning. So after my pre-booked services were complete, I spent the next ten hours dragging along this wheelbound buzzsaw of death in the dry heat. To make matters worse a storm warning was announced so when the company truck finally retrieved me at the end of my shift I was covered in dust, wet from the rain, and left with a torn shirt from a flying tree branch. Always one to turn a negative into a positive, I found joy in the fact that I was at least a cool hundred dollars richer. So with that in mind I walked to the service lady awaiting my payment for the day, only to be told that my count was off by $20 and be accused of stealing cash from my total. Always one to turn a negative into a positive, I politely disagreed with her sentiments and walked off. With cash in hand.

And never came back. - Jabbari Weekes, staff writer, Noisey Canada

Photo via Flickr user waferboard

I became the Man
At the time, I thought my worst summer job was the best job I had. After years of brain-numbing labour on the family farm, I somehow landed a job working at with the RCMP, basically as an intern. I got an unmarked car (which I got up to 170 km/h when I took it out at 3 AM one night, knowing there wouldn't be cops on the road in the area) and some cool black boots, and got to shoot at the gun range. I would aim at the target's dick and usually miss. But here's the thing—I totally bought in to the cop mentality. I thought protesters deserved the sweet taste of pepper because I was young, privileged, and didn't understand social justice. In short, I became The Man. And now, no one in the punk scene will respect me. And that's why it was the worst summer job I ever had. - Josh Visser, managing editor, VICE.com Canada

Construction, man. Photo via Flickr user William Franklin

Fuck you, pay me!
My worst summer job? Hmm, there were a few that were less than glamorous. But the one that probably takes the cake was a construction job I worked before my last year of university.

Long days with unfriendly people talking crap to me in languages I couldn't understand wasn't even the worst part—I had to essentially pull teeth in order to get paid. By the time I left to go back to school, I was still owed thousands of dollars and was starting to believe I wouldn't ever see that money. Going to school a couple hours away from where I worked didn't help me any, either, since attempts to track down my boss by phone were largely ignored.

He finally cut me a cheque after months of hounding him with repeated voicemails and threats of legal action. But the catch was that he never fully paid me out, shortchanging me a couple hundred bucks despite the fact he constantly had new cars and was making extensive renovations to his home. I still want that money! - Chris Toman, VICE Sports Canada editor

It was kind of like this, plus racism. Photo via Flickr user Notram242

Racism, in several languages
The year after spending a summer driving a lawn mower at my university, which was actually quite a nice job in retrospect, I decided I couldn't handle another four months of constant allergies and teetering on the brink of sleep while driving a (slow-)moving vehicle. Instead, I spent a month and a half miserably unemployed and mostly alone. When a friend told me about a job one of the regulars at her bar might be able to offer me, I was ecstatic. Following her instructions, I went to a motel on the seedier end of downtown Saskatoon and asked for Alan at the front desk. By the time I had been directed to his room, I was starting to get worried about the details of this job, none of which I knew. Luckily I was just walking to Alan's room to have him take me to the hotel's owner, manager, and resident scumbag.

My once and future boss sat me down and told me about the job, which was working the front desk, and sounded easy enough. He asked what I was studying in school, and when I said history he launched into an extended speech about how he loves history, and his favourite period of history is when "we expelled the Moors from Portugal." I was desperate enough for a job that I ignored his casual use of an anachronistic racial slur, as well as his command that I stand up and turn around for him, after which he claimed I "look just like Marlene Monroe!"

Over the course of my two months on the job I was instructed that in order to entice skeptical customers to stay at what was clearly a third-rate motel, I should offer them a lower room price. On the other hand, we were also expected to intuit when guests could be swindled, and raise prices for them. The owner was quick to offer freebies to get people to stay at the motel, unless those people weren't white. He was also quick to anger and once chased someone out of the lobby, screaming at him for some offence I never clued in to. I also picked up the Portuguese word for "Indian" by dint of how often the owner would switch to his first language to make offensive comments about his Indigenous customers.

When I finally found another job and broke the news to him, it was more like breaking up than quitting. Over the course of half an hour, the owner insisted I had done this to him, that I didn't care about him or his motel, and that he had treated me well and didn't understand why I was doing this. I didn't think he would be receptive to my explanation that constant sexual harassment is still that when disguised as compliments, or that I felt uncomfortable with my boss making cryptic but clearly subtextually racist remarks, so I waited until he tired himself out and then got the hell out of there. - Tannara Yelland, VICE.com Canada staff writer, content manager

December 30, 2014, protest calling for the release of Shaikh Ali Salman. Photo taken by Sayed Baqer, Bilad alQadeem.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

For as long as anyone in Bahrain can remember, there have been tensions between the country's Sunni monarchy and the Muslim Shia majority. But when the Sunni government called in the Saudi military to crack down on pro-democracy protests in early 2011, the battle became brutal. Thousands of protesters gathered in the center of Manama and four people were killed in clashes with security forces, with hundreds more injured.

In 2013, the government issued decrees restricting the rights of political groups to assemble and express themselves freely. Essentially, they took away their citizens' right to protest. Many neighborhoods face nightly raids and attacks by security forces armed with tear gas.

Despite this, the people of Bahrain remain in stubborn defiance. Graffiti calling for the king to be overthrown is visible like never before and road blocks are a normal part of everyday life. These road blocks are used by civilians in Bahrain to prevent police from entering their villages while they are protesting. They use whatever they can get hold of: wood, metal, furniture, milk cartons.

April 4, 2013. Photo taken by Ala'a Shehabi, Sanabis.

The Road Bloc Collective is a group of photographers, researchers, activists, and artists who have chosen to document the unrest in Bahrain. A new exhibition of their work, opening today in London, features photography, sound works, and installation. The photos give a small insight into the climate of civil resistance in the country.

Four of the photographs in the exhibition are by Hussain Hubail, an award-winning photographer who has been held in detention in Bahrain since Summer 2013. Hubail was given a five-year sentence for inciting civil disorder and hatred against the regime. He frequently covered protests and demonstrations against the authorities and published writing on the human rights issues unfolding before his eyes.

To learn more about Hubail's situation and the images in the show, I spoke to another photographer from the Road Bloc Collective who did not wish to be identified for safety reasons; he will be called "Abo Fadhel" for the purpose of this interview.

VICE: First off, how has the use of urban space in Bahrain changed in the last few years?
Abo Fadhel: Since 2011, roads have become places where people stand up for their rights: sometimes they turn out as a war zone, sometimes as theaters for different expressions, through graffiti, sculptures, and road blocks.

February 14, 2015. Taken by Mazen Mahdi, Miqsha.

There has been a visible increase of security by the government. Why?
Yes, since March 2011, the government militarized the country. They spread militants in the middle of the capital, Manama. There are police cars all over the highways and police APCs on the entrances of the villages that are blocking spaces like the former pearl roundabout. Why? Because they are scared of a new movement, scared of protests, scared of people going out, and asking for their rights peacefully.

Why is tear gas used in the villages?
To punish protesters along with the village people collectively, to prevent protesters from going out in the streets, to kill people in a slow way.

Photo taken by Mazen Mahdi,Sitra.

So how was everyone brought together into this Road Bloc Collective?
Well I took the pictures to cover what's going on in my country, to document the moments of people resisting for their freedom and democracy. I'm photographing all kinds of things happening around me—I love street photography—and these road blocks are just pieces of what I usually cover. I like the way that people are resisting.

I think my colleagues have the same passion; we want to be a part of a collective to show Londoners how we live every day.

Related: Interested in the situation in Bahrain? Watch our documentary 'Bahrain: An Inconvenient Uprising'

The Road Bloc Collective documents an ongoing battle for space, what do you think we learn about the relationship between space and power in Bahrain?
The government thinks it's more powerful when it occupies more space, by controlling entrances to villages—but that doesn't make it stronger than the people. It's just a matter of time till the Bahraini people go out again, take their places, and liberate themselves from the army vehicles and personnel.

Photo taken by Mazen Mahdi, Jidhafs.

What have you learned through photographing these situations?
I have seen these road blocks develop. The core aim is to prevent police vehicles from running over the protesters, but with time, the protesters start to use funny things sometimes and creative material other times. I'm witnessing the resistance.

Have you found yourself in any difficult situations? Have you ever been detained for taking photos?
Yes, I put myself in danger, and it was difficult to take good pictures a lot of the time. I was detained once but they had no details to secure me there.

April 1, 2012. Photo taken by Ahmed al-Fardan, Abu Saiba.

Do you know one of the other photographers, Hussain Hubail, well? He is detained at the moment—why?
Yes, I know him, Hussain was always present during the early years of the uprising, then he was arrested, accused of spreading fabricated news, and publishing news that incites hatred of the regime. All he did was take pictures; he captured the moment.

Photo taken by Mazen Mahdi, Jidhafs.

What do you hope the show will achieve here? Why have it in Europe? Could it show in Bahrain?
It is an art exhibition that aims to show the civil resistance of a tiny gulf country. We have lots of friends in London who helped us to put it together. We could not do such a thing in Bahrain; the government would destroy it like they have done with many other artistic projects that shed light on what's going on in the country.

What's next for you? Where do you see your photojournalism going?
I'm still working, and covering as much as I can. I don't see a bright future under the same regime, but I hope for the best.

Thank you, Abo.

Road Bloc Collective's show opens at Rich Mix in London today.

Follow Amber Roberts on Twitter.

All event photos by Jon Brady

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

It's a gray, muggy night in Scotland's capital, Edinburgh. And although it looks like the heavens are about to unleash a torrent of rain any minute, the spirits of gamers across the marvelous city are high. For this particular night marks the first leg of Capcom's Street Fighter V Tour, in which the UK's elite fighting game communities get their first cracks at the developer's latest. Excitement is through the roof among local fight enthusiasts—and rightly so.

You may not know it, but Scotland boasts a healthy, vibrant, and dedicated army of ridiculously good fighting game players. From coast to coast, there are regional communities that meet every week to play the likes of Mortal Kombat X, Super Smash Bros. on the Wii U, indie games like Lethal League and Nidhogg, and of course, the many iterations of Street Fighter.

Every week they meet to hone their skills, understand the minutiae of every wake-up, frame, and counter-pick, while enjoying the company of players who are just as fascinated with the genre as they are. Each year these communities do battle at the Scottish national fighting game tourney Hypespotting to wage war for some seriously impressive cash pots, and the glorious mantle of champion. You really have to be there to savior the raw passion in the air during this annual smackdown.

But on this night, it's all about one community. Rushdown Edinburgh, or RDE as it's shortened in member gamertags, is a group of like-minded people that rose from the ashes of a long-gone gaming cafe to become a vibrant name in the UK scene. I've been a member for about three years now, and I've seen it outgrow small venues, only to move and eventually pack larger bars and pubs to capacity before seeking a home elsewhere. Make no mistake, if Street Fighter V is being made for anyone, it's people like the RDE.

I enter the venue, a tucked-away nightclub called the Mash House that usually hosts diverse music nights, only to be met with that unmistakable sound of heavy attacks connecting with faces, Hadoukens billowing across stages, and the sustained chatter of gamers discussing Street Fighter V's new changes, reworked flow, and stunning PS4 visuals. Some of you may think from trailers that there hasn't been much of an evolution since the fourth game, released back in 2008, but you only have to play it to understand that's not the case.

Be fair, you would be all over this jacket, given the chance.

Rather than patronize series veterans in this piece by giving them a journalistic view on the game, I corner members of Rushdown after they come away from each fight to ask them, the seasoned players, their thoughts on Capcom's revamped offering.

Perhaps the greatest consensus of the night is that while the game looks slow in videos, there is a more aggressive flow to battles that rewards aggression, rather than methodical dancing back and forth while looking for an attack window. Secondly, one-time boss man M. Bison feels like a new character thanks to his reduced walking speed, diluted air moves, and new fireball attack. Change is good.

Related: Watch VICE's documentary on eSports

Also check out our film 'Bare Knuckle'

Ryu fan TheJW tells me: "The inputs feel much easier. Basic links seem simpler to pull off and there seems to be fewer single-frame links, meaning your window for combo-ing and firing off inputs is a lot more generous. In Street Fighter IV I felt your inputs had to be strictly-timed, but here it felt to me like there was more leniency when hitting inputs and links, which could make it easier for newcomers to learn the basics, while still feeling satisfying."

"The game also feels faster to get in on your opponent—more immediate—but more accessible, too," he continues. "Also, V-Skills and Triggers add a new layer of complexity that I can see being the new crux of the game. You also have more time to think about what you're doing, not how you're doing it."

This is definitely the case when playing as returning character Nash, who shares many traits with series mainstay Guile, although you need to rewire your knowledge if you're going to get the best out of this version of him.

"I played as Nash but found him hard, as I expected him to play like Guile," a player called James explains. "His flash kick definitely doesn't work the same, as it doesn't feel like an anti-air move, which I suspect is because the hit box is tiny, and he has a move that activates in the air and must be blocked high, which is interesting.

"When you get swept you can now stand back up instantly, so there's less time for you or the opponent to compose themselves or set up moves. It's going to take everyone time to figure out the V-Skills and V-Reversals, but yeah, Nash is exciting as he can teleport around his opponent, mix them up, and deal big damage in relatively unorthodox ways."

The V-Skills and Triggers—the former a newly introduced defense mechanic, the latter potentially tide-turning special moves activated after powering up a bar—have many players scratching their heads at the start of the evening, but as time goes on I was seeing some really impressive displays from RDE members. Player Dapper Penguin explained, "Ryu felt different. I mean, he still had his overhead attack, collarbone breaker, but his close heavy kick no longer hits twice.

"I felt he was faster and his new V-Trigger is cool. It gives him what I'm calling 'Thunder Fists,' which causes his punches to deal more damage and gives him a charged fireball that can't be blocked. He also has a parry again, mapped to medium punch and medium kick, but it's not as strong as in (1999's) 3rd Strike."

More jiggle physics, LULZ.

V-Triggers and associated additions aside, Street Fighter V characters still have super combos that are wonderfully animated, thanks to an abundance of physics-based elements on each character. Watching Birdie trundle across the stage as his mohawk flops around and his jeans start to sag is a real treat, and the animation looks eye-wateringly fluid in 1080p.

While someone is fighting the Janitor I notice another huge change—characters don't just take chip damage when blocking specials, but from regular attacks this time, which is the complete opposite of previous Street Fighter titles.

"You can still deal chip damage, but you can't KO off it," Penguin explains. "Chip damage from normal hits recovers over time, so if you're defensive you can increase your health again with time—it's a big change. The new Critical Arts are the only attack that can chip into a K.O."

There are other differences at play. Chun-Li's lightning kicks no longer come out by simply mashing kick buttons—you have to quarter-circle into them now. There are also changes to Ryu's crouching heavy sweep range, meaning the old "jumping heavy kick into low heavy kick" staple often fails, leaving you open to be punished. Some RDE members also feel that it's harder to score cross hits with Ryu's air Tatsumaki—another small, but fundamental difference.

Player SefSins says: "The fundamentals are a lot better than they were in Street Fighter IV, and it definitely feels more 'footsie' based. By that I mean, you have to find your grounding before attacking—being patient and waiting for your opponent to come into your attack range before committing to moves.

"I also like that Capcom have changed the jab-jab-jab combo style, which means you can't just do small punches then launch into special attacks. You have to actually use certain moves that link and commit more instead of mashing light kicks or punches in the hope they hit. I'd say medium attacks are best for footsie confirms. It really does look stunning, though."

It's evident that Street Fighter V is lowering the bar of entry for newcomers, while challenging seasoned players to up their game in order to remain in that upper tier of skill. There was no way Capcom could release a simple rehash—not that they would, of course—but it seems that years of feedback from communities like Rushdown and fans across the world have been listened to by producer Yoshinori Ono and his crew.

As the last sets are coming to a close and gamers wander off to enjoy a pint and discuss the technicalities of what they've just experienced, I corner RDE founder Craig Fairweather to ask him how it felt to be first on Capcom's list of tour stops, and what this meant in terms of the fighting scene's growth in Scotland.

Love real-life punch-ups? Check out FIGHTLAND.

RDE's Craig Fairweather goes up against Capcom's Matthew Edwards.

"I believe communities like Rushdown Edinburgh provide the most authentic experiences and environment for the players," he tells me. "I'm proud to host Capcom tonight, and I'm encouraged by the support—people traveled over the border to be here, and not just because Street Fighter V is here, but because they want to represent the community and show Capcom how involved they want to be in shaping a huge gaming landmark with Street Fighter V.

"Being the first stop on the UK tour justifies the hard work myself and the team put into supporting the fighting game community, reaching out to new players and hosting events on a weekly basis. Tonight is a huge pay off for those efforts and a real privilege for me, personally. It's also been a fantastic opportunity to prove how capable Scotland is when hosting events on this scale. We're just a few weeks away from our own major annual event, Armagedinburgh, and I couldn't be more excited for it. Again, I'd like to thank Capcom UK's Matthew Edwards and Neil Gorton for their work and this opportunity. And to all the community members—from the people that I've worked with for years, right up to the new faces that appeared tonight—thanks, you."

Make no mistake: Street Fighter V is for the hardcore players. But Capcom is also taking great steps to ensure that newcomers can, without intimidation, enter the fight this time around. It's already looking like a slick and balanced open invitational that everyone, regardless of skill, can enjoy. The real king of fighters is ready to begin its latest campaign against any and all challengers.

Street Fighter V is released for PlayStation 4 and PC in March 2016.

Follow Dave Cook and Jon Brady on Twitter.

Jane Fonda and Rachel Browne. Photo via Daily VICE

On Sunday, Jane Fonda came to Toronto to support the Jobs, Justice, and the Climate march—where around 10,000 people gathered to call on Canada to embrace a low-carbon economy.

I sat down with her on a bench in Queen's Park to talk about why she came and her long career as a—sometimes controversial—activist. She showed up, rocking a brown poncho and park ranger-esque hat about ten inches high.

Fonda, a staunch anti-war activist, got the nickname "Hanoi Jane" after posing for photos with Vietnamese soldiers in North Vietnam in 1972 during the war. She recently apologized for the blunder, which offended many American veterans, but that whole thing was off-limits during our conversation. "We're not going there," she said right before we got started.

And it's hard to fight back against Fonda, who's approaching 78. Taking off the hat for the cameras, she told us, was a deal-breaker. Then when some weirdo appeared from the woods halfway through the interview and started yelling at Fonda about G20 nonsense, she had none of it. "NO! I'm being interviewed!" she shouted back with a raised hand. He shut up and slumped away. After we wrapped up, he came crawling back to apologize—she accepted and indulged him with one question

VICE: Why are you here today?
Fonda: Something happened to me several months ago that was very important. I've been an activist for 50 years, I've been an environmental activist among other things. Of late, I've been focusing on gender issues and I thought, well, the big environmental groups are taking care of that issue. And then I read Naomi Klein's book, This Changes Everything, about the climate. It did change me. It changed everything about my life. Also, at the same time I got involved with this march, President Obama gave permission to Shell Oil to drill in the Arctic, and that was like the bottom of my heart dropped out. I like him and he's done good things for the environment, but how he could have done that, I just cannot fathom.

I'm going onto 78 years old and I thought, well, I guess the kind of fire in the belly, going to the barricades, being willing to get arrested, those days are over. I find myself reading articles about species going extinct and I'd say to my boyfriend, "We don't deserve to survive, what we're doing is so awful." I read Naomi's book and I thought that's a really bad attitude. I'm going to stop saying we don't deserve, and I'm going to get out there back to the barricades. I want my children to look back and say, "Grandma was on the right side, she did everything she could to make things better in the future."

Real action on climate change seems to rest in the hands of politicians—they are the ones who make the policies and have the power to make things change. What impact, then, can activists like yourself really have?
I love that question. It's the most fundamental question. We cannot rely on politicians. Ideally, what we try to do is get the best we can get elected to office. We have to look very carefully at which ones don't take money from the fossil fuel industry. The only thing that will make a difference is pressure from the ground. Slavery ended because of organization on the ground and the people who said: this is it, it's over, we can't do it, it's inhumane. Germany will soon have 50 percent renewable energy, and that's because of mass mobilization on the ground, and a powerful Green party. All the changes that matter happen because of people power on the ground.

There are many activists from abroad here. Some Canadians might be critical of others coming in and telling us what to do with our economy, our environment.
First of all, people are coming outside of Canada forthe Pan Am Climate Summitand the Pan Am Games. Secondly, it's the same reason why Canadians—some famous ones like David Suzuki—come to America for marches and rallies. The pipelines, tar sands, and fracking that happens in Canada affects us in the US. This is a global problem, so people have to come together.

You were just in Vancouver last month for the Toast the Coast protest against Arctic drilling and pipelines, working alongside First Nations leaders there. What are some of the ways they have influenced you and the work you do on this topic?
When I first became an activist, it was around the Vietnam war, but it was also around issues of what had been done by Europeans to indigenous people in the United States. I went onto many reservations and met with Native Americans and marched with them, and my feeling was that they didn't really want me here. That it was like, "Go away, celebrity." And it was hard to be an activist alongside First Nations people at that time. But over the time, European and Canadian environmentalists, in particular, have developed a working relationship with and respect for First Nations peoples that changed everything.

So in Vancouver, it was moving to me to be able to be there alongside—very comfortably, with no tension—leaders of the First Nations people. The courage that they have shown, standing, blocking with their bodies, the expansion of the Enbridge pipeline and other pipelines that want to bring the tar sands oil—the worst kind of oil—to the coast of BC and they have actually stopped some of these pipelines. And it's like, "I'm with you, man." The stories First Nations people have told me about what climate change and the oil industry has done to their families and homes: not being able to breathe, asthma, cancers. These are people who live off the grid in what was once pristine land and forests. And now, within a kilometre of their homes, there's fracking pits.

Looking back on your career as an activist, what were some of the biggest challenges you faced? And what advice do you give the young activists you work with?
It's OK to be not liked. You know, there's been a whole lot of hostility brought my way. And I understand that. If you're somebody who wants everybody to love you, it's really hard to be an activist. You're always going to be making someone mad. You just have to feel in your gut, I know who I am, I know this is the right thing to do. I want to also say to young people, don't think it's your responsibility to clean up the mess we've made. Older people have to be ready to fight and die ahead of young people because it's our fault. It's great there are young people here, my grandson is here with me today, I don't want them to feel it's all on their shoulders.

What's next for your in role as climate activist?
Well you'll just have to wait and see. I have a few surprises up my sleeve.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Follow Rachel Browne on Twitter.

A courtroom photo from the trial of Patrick "Hooty" Croy, a Native American man who killed a cop during a drunken standoff in 1978. Tony Serra kept him off death row by making a cultural defense, invoking centuries-old prejudices against Native Americans in the area. Images courtesy of Tony Serra

Attorney J. Tony Serra is perhaps the greatest hippie holdout in San Francisco. He took a (probably LSD-inspired) vow of poverty long ago, lives in a tiny rent controlled apartment, drives $500 cars, and wears used suits with splits in them to court. On principle, he refuses to pay taxes, which has landed him in prison twice.

He is also considered by some to be one of the greatest criminal defense attorneys in American history.

"I'm the best pro-bono, hippie lawyer still around," Serra says over the phone. "Still espousing peace and love, still doing psychedelics, still going to the Dead shows, still working for a more egalitarian society."

Serra (brother of Richard, the renowned sculptor) is a captivating and accomplished attorney, one who has stuck to a very particular set of principles for five decades. He's been a go-to lawyer for what he calls "anti-government entities," including the Black Panthers, the Hells Angels, and the Symbionese Liberation Army. He prefers any sort of unsavory client over traditional law enforcement, and resides outside what those of his generation might call "the establishment," preferring the company of his marginalized clients.

And at nearly 81, Serra shows no signs of slowing down.

"Litigation is what they call a young person's sport," he says. "But I'm still addicted, I'm still fervent, I'm still outspoken... Two years ago, during a murder case, I did have a heart attack, but it doesn't seem to have slowed me down much. [Laughs] Although you never know."

Serra is famous for his dramatic courtroom style, which a fellow lawyer once described as "exhausting...like having sex for hours." While he may prefer to look backwards, to the 60s, he has been consistently ahead of his time, especially on issues like police brutality and the War on Drugs (a 1980s news report in which he rambled at length about its future consequences was prescient to the point of being a bit eerie).

Serra's hooked on trying to win impossible cases. Some say that it's an act, or that he's overly theatrical—as one prosecutor put it to the LA Times in 1989, "Every trial is like a mini-movie for Tony." There was even a successful film, True Believer , made about Serra (which irked him with its negative portrayal of the protagonist's marijuana-smoking ways). He's like a hippie Atticus Finch, or a Clarence Darrow for Deadheads.

Born in 1934, Serra comes from humble beginnings. His father was an immigrant from Majorca, Spain, who worked in a jelly bean factory. Tony and his artist brother (who reportedly have barely spoken since their mother's suicide in the 1970s) were raised in San Francisco, next door to a family that would produce another world-famous sculptor, Mark di Suvero. He was educated at Stanford, where he started out as a jock, and transformed into an intellectual, majoring in epistemology. After graduation, Serra migrated to Tangiers in Morocco, looking to pull a Hemingway and join the writers and poets of its expatriate community. But at that point, he had never even smoked a cigarette, and was reportedly scared away by the copious amounts of heroin that permeated the scene.

Serra eventually applied to law school, and ended up at UC Berkeley during the height of the free speech movement. The rest is history—a bizarre history one can get a sense of simply by glancing at Serra's trademark hairstyle: a single, long braid. We spoke to the cult-favorite lawyer about San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, Huey P. Newton of the Black Panthers, and his own cynicism about the present state of the American legal system.

VICE: What inspired your vow of poverty in the 60s?
Tony Serra: There was a revolution, and the Haight-Ashbury was bursting at that point. In the Haight you had the music, the drugs, and the people coming from all over the world to dance in the street. All these communes were popping up, and you had preachers who were preaching, in a sense, Eastern theology. It was a very fecund period sociologically, epistemologically, spiritually. Those movements, those spiritual outcries, permeated my being. So I became a hippie on one side, dropping LSD, dancing till 2 in the morning, like a dance freak at all of the concerts. The Dead was starting, Jefferson Airplane was starting, Santana was starting. The major groups were here, in the vortex of the Haight-Ashbury, and there was all of the political maneuvering over at Berkeley and SF State. So out of all of that, probably during an acid trip, I decided to take an informal vow of poverty.

See, I'm not materialistic by birth, by propensity, by DNA, so it's not like I ever gave up anything. So it was easy. I owned nothing.

Why did you stop paying taxes?
I did not believe in taxation because it exploits the working class—it started when you were defeated by an army. When you were defeated by the Roman Army, they would impose a tax on you. It's always been economically or militarily oppressed people who pay taxes, so I refused to pay taxes. As you know, I've gone to prison. I've suffered three separate convictions. Every decade they bring me in, and twice I've gone to prison. But not for long though; it doesn't affect my practice of the law. The California Bar is very empathetic [Laughs].

"It's always been economically or militarily oppressed people who pay taxes, so I refuse to pay them."

Could you tell me about some of your famous cases? Maybe what it was like to work with Huey Newton and the Black Panthers?
Huey had been charged with the murder of a prostitute. It was an absurd proposition to begin with and, you know, someone had driven up in the car that he was chauffeured around with, not him. So there were a number of prostitutes on the street. One was called over, and shot, I think, by someone in the back seat of that car. And, as a number of prostitutes variously described, it was like a joke. "Oh, he had a hat on." "Oh, he didn't have a hat on." "His hair was ballooned out." "No, his head was shaven." There were so many different images. But the main [witness] identified him without hesitation. And so predicated on that real thin type of evidence, they went to trial. So it turned out the main witness against him, she had actually been in jail. At the time of the homicide she wasn't on the streets. So we triumphed.

And how I met Huey was sleeping in the Panther houses. They had been expecting a raid by the police. Back then you could still have rifles, only concealed weapons were prohibited. So the Panthers became armed, and there were sand bags. When I went, they would strip you naked, make sure you weren't an agent, or recording them. But I wasn't, of course, and they saw that I was idealistic. Huey himself was very charismatic, he's one of the most charismatic human beings that I've had the privilege of being close [to] at one point. This was before he became kind of an addict and was ultimately assassinated by some drug dealer—there's still controversy over really what happened. But I had him in the prime of his youth and his mind was good.

[During the trial] the courthouse was packed, the streets around the courthouse were packed. He was all buffed up, he'd take off his shirt, he'd go out there and looked like a Greek god. He was a great speaker. I learned an awful lot from him. His presence was extraordinary. I'm not, whatever you want to call it, an ESP freak. But when he would come in—let's just say you were on the fifth floor of the Hall of Justice, and he would come in downstairs—you could really feel him. You could feel his presence. Everything would stop, and people would look at the door, and about four minutes later he'd come through it. So he had a flow of energy, an energy field. He had an aura; he projected wide. He was very influential to me for the rest of my career. Remember what the Panthers used to say? Selfless service. They were supposed to be the people's servants. It was inspiring to me.

For more strange characters, watch our documentary on infomercial personality Matthew Lesko:

Could you talk about the gang-related case in California's Central Valley that you worked on, which resulted in a hung jury this January? It seemed to touch on a lot of key criminal justice issues.
I can't really get into specifics, but every time we have a case that involves a gang person, they'll add gang enhancements to dirty them up, because society rejects them. The dominant society that is symbolized in a jury rejects them. All you have to do is say "gang," and there's no credibility attached to the defense or the witnesses that come forward who are gang members. So you're not in court. If you've got a gang case, sometimes you think you're in trial and you're not in trial because of the societal rejection of the whole phenomenon. If police point a finger—as they say, you can convict a ham sandwich under those circumstances. As far as my trial, we did good. We hung it, solid hang. 6-6. I won't go into particulars, but in my opinion my client should have been acquitted, my client didn't do anything.

Could you elaborate on how you think trying cases has changed since what you would call the "Golden Age of Law"? Why do you think jurors are more inclined to side with the prosecution these days?
Ever since 9/11, jurors are prosecution/law enforcement-aligned. Fear dominates their lives. They are afraid of domestic terrorists, gangs, serial killers, psychopaths, and felons. They believe that law enforcement protects them from the chaos and the dissidents. They are willing to give up all constitutional rights so as to be safe from perceived harm. A lawyer in a trial cannot attack police officers and their credibility as we did previously; we cannot derogate the snitch; we cannot claim police entrapment or police brutality. The jurors are not listening to us in those areas. As a consequence, we lose cases that we would have won before 9/11.

What do you make of the recent high-profile instances of police brutality across the country?
Obviously, it's in all of our consciousness: What's been happening for generations, for decades, is that police are violent to people. They even sometimes plant a throwaway gun. For the most part, over the years, they got away with it, because we couldn't catch them, so to speak, en flagrante delicto. But now because everyone has these phones, these cameras in their phones, we're catching them. We're catching them, you know, even on a gun case with a body that's been shot from the back. And the brutality of four or five or six standing around and kicking someone, or beating them to death, or throwing them in paddy wagons driving them over whatever bumps and turns so that they get banged around in the back. Law enforcement, not at all levels and not all people, attracts sadists. Because as a law enforcement officer, you can inflict pain, especially as a jailer, and it's considered OK.

Our office created a book that outlined—before the epiphany through the cameras occurred—that outlined all of the cases in the country that focused on police brutality and police murders. It was just a self-published account, but it was quite thick. Of course, I'm hip to police injustice, and there are more dimensions to it than just brutality and murder, like the use of informants. It's false and precarious, and giving them great benefits and sending them back into society is another huge reform that's required. The use of the grand jury system—we shouldn't use grand juries at all. So there's so many areas to reform, and I'm kind of activistic in all of them.

Law enforcement often attracts sadists. Because as a law enforcement officer, you can inflict pain, especially as a jailer, and it's considered OK.

What is your thought process like in court?
Delineated and focused. I must throw my "semantic spears" fast and accurately. I'm like an eagle concentrating only on the kill. One cannot really be good as a trial attorney unless he or she has somewhat of a photographic memory: no notes, no reading, always standing, passionate and assertive. I'm one of the last of a dying breed. Most defense lawyers are negotiators nowadays. They are ultimately compromisers. I'm not!

What do you make of the recent surge in large protests against the police?
It's so important. I applaud it, I rejoice it. Demonstrations are something that we still have. We still have the free speech and the constitutional principle that allows people to protest. So peaceful protests, demonstrations, it has always been the American way to reform injustice. It's the people, it's democracy, it is the people surging up and demanding a change, and exposing, ultimately, the hypocrisy of government, and the lack of integrity on many occasions with regard to government and law enforcement.

We're drifting, do you understand, we're drifting toward totalitarianism. Through our law, through law enforcement and through all of the money, through lobbyists that are behind some of the laws that law enforcement utilizes against us. So if there is no protest, there is no real avenue to the heartbeat of a democracy. So I encourage protest. I encourage people getting together and exposing the—whatever you want to call it—the conduct of law enforcement, the conduct of politicians, the conduct of military, the conduct of [the] CIA. It is a welcome thing in democracy, and I hope that it increases.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Follow Jocelyn Silver on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Andrij Bulba

Starting this month, Tennessee residents are allowed to break into parked cars with no legal repercussions, so long as they believe an animal locked inside faces imminent danger. The law is targeted at dogs confined in sweltering cars on sunny days that might be on the brink of suffering heatstroke and dying. But could it be abused by jerks who just like breaking shit and poking around other peoples' property?

Sixteen states have laws on the books against leaving pets unattended in confined vehicles. Yet Tennessee's is a national first insomuch as it extends the right of intervention not just to law enforcement or animal control, but to random civilians, granting them wide protection from civil liability for damage to the vehicle.

The new law expands on one enacted in the state last year permitting civilians to break into locked cars to save minors in danger. That law was also nationally innovative, as 19 states have banned leaving kids unattended in cars, according to the advocacy group KidsandCars.org, but there was no explicit precedent for the right of intervention by passersby. Both measures were proposed by a Republican representative from Greeneville named David Hawk, and apparently motivated by stories of heat stroke deaths where police arrived too late after a concerned citizen had sounded the alarm. (At least 44 children died of heatstroke in locked cars in 2013, the last date for which full data is available, according to KidsandCars. Pet statistics are a bit harder to come by.)

The Volunteer State's break-in provisions lay out a broad procedure one must follow to legally break into a locked car. First you have to determine that the car is locked and that there is no other viable means of entry besides breaking in. Then you must make a "good faith" determination that the creature—whether pet or child—is definitely in imminent danger that requires removing them.

Finally, before breaking in—using no more force than is necessary—you must call law enforcement officials to inform them of the act and seek their counsel. After freeing the animal (or child), you then have to leave a note on the car's windshield explaining the forced entry, providing contact information, and detailing where you'll be awaiting the arrival of law enforcement. This meet-up spot has to be safe from the elements but reasonably close to the parked car.

The hope is that these regulations will ensure the law is only used when absolutely necessary by rational passers-by. And so far, at least, it seems to be receiving a good deal of positive press.

"Animal welfarists are predictably happy with the new law," Joan Heminway, a professor at the University of Tennessee who specializes in animal law, told VICE. "And, I suspect, there are many in the middle who just think this new rule makes sense because it saves the lives of living things, and that just seems right."

Yet some internet denizens have expressed doubts—concerns that are especially visible on forums like Reddit. The question has been posed: How can you accurately judge when an animal is in imminent danger? After all, rights groups have been stressing that pets can, under the worst conditions, die within ten minutes in a hot car, and even on a relatively mild, 78-degree day, a parked car can overheat to 160 degrees quite rapidly, as NBC News reported.

It's easy to envision how overzealous citizens might get a bit trigger-happy when it comes to "saving" animals. After all, the law avoids placing explicit limits on the level of force you can use when breaking in.

"I've... had idiots who don't have any common sense leave me notes when my dogs are in the car ... with the vehicle running [i.e. the air conditioning on]," opioned one Redditor. "Don't give idiots a crowbar."

Representative Hawk hopes that media coverage of the law will help people develop some basic, commonsense metrics for diagnosing risk. In an e-mail exchange with VICE, he cited what he believes are the two big indicators of distress in dogs as determined by doctors: "exceptionally dry, heavy panting, followed by the dog's tongue turning a bluish color."

No guidelines have been provided for diagnosing imminent danger in other animals, at least so far, and their safety is also covered under the law. Hawk suggested he and his colleagues expect there would be very few other types of animals in cars, rendering that moot. But we may well soon hear about a Tennessee resident arguing they had the right to break into a car based on the Talmudic distress signals of a gecko, apparent to them as a gecko-owner but invisible to the rest of us.

Hawk recognizes the law's subjectivity, but believes that it was right not to limit its scope at the outset. Apparently his colleagues agreed, as the animal break-in measure—technically an addition to the child break-in law— passed the Tennessee House with a resounding 90-2 vote, and cleared the Senate unanimously.

"We certainly considered the potential for differing opinions from a caller or callers, law enforcement, emergency responders, animal control, and the animal's owner, just to name a few of the interested parties," Hawk said via email. "Recognizing that crafting legislation is an imperfect process, we did not feel that a specific course of action could be described in law for the many potentially different situations that could occur."

Representative Hawk and Heminway, the animal law expert, both believe that more specific guidelines and limitations will emerge with time, as officials and courts run up against complications and work out the real-world kinks. (To wit, if people do stupid things under the law, they tend to serve as precedent against repetition.)

"We are always open to any suggestions and will be working with the administrative and judicial branches of government to see if some standard operating procedure is needed as we move forward, or if each situation will receive advice on a case by case basis," Hawk added.

According to Heminway, "Interpretations of the law will be undertaken by courts and the legislature only with experience under the new law, which will take a number of years to accumulate, as with interpretations of any new legal rule." She added that Good Samaritan laws like this one are written to be pretty resistant to abuse by bad actors.

Of course, even the best of Good Samaritans can make awful calls. So even if the law can't technically be used for ill, there's a chance that we'll see some strange headlines as Tennessee residents adapt to the new reality. More immediately, the law will probably save a few dogs' lives, which seems well worth the potential for some wrongly shattered windows.