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Adolescent boy from the Baritribe, South Sudan, apparently imitating the tribal tradition of warriors putting ashes on their body. This is the ash produced from burning trash. All stills from 'We Come as Friends.' Courtesy of Hubert Sauper

Austrian-born, Paris-based filmmaker Hubert Sauper understands that technocratic data is mere noise compared to the stirring power of the moving image. In his deeply unsettling, Oscar-nominated 2004 documentary Darwin's Nightmare, he masterfully illustrated the devastating effects of a non-native, predatory species of fish (the Nile perch) that devoured everything in a Tanzanian freshwater lake, including the locals' quality of life. Through an artful blend of cinema vérité, an intimate proximity to his subjects, and a lucid sense of wicked ironies, the film showcased the various socio-ecological threads of global capitalism at its most grotesque.

Neocolonialism itself is the theme of We Come as Friends, the second standalone part in Sauper's proposed trilogy of real-life African horrors. Alternately stunning, sobering, and utterly surreal, the documentary, which was shot over the course of six years, witnesses the before-and-aftermath of South Sudan's recent independence. Sauper meets with the exploited (a tribal leader who shamefully signed away hundreds of thousands of acres for peanuts) and the exploiters (a Chinese oil worker admits he doesn't give a damn about polluting the region before heading home richer) while flying around the country in a tiny, ramshackle airplane he built and piloted himself.

Watch an exclusive clip of 'We Come as Friends':

As Sauper says, "I'm basically just another white man with this crazy flying machine, which is in itself the representation of the white man in an ironic, strange, and sometimes dark meaning, because planes are dropping bombs or bringing the white doves of peace."

A smart, charming man who laughs easy even while discussing grave topics, Sauper spoke to VICE about his provocative new film from the BBC Worldwide North America offices in Manhattan.

VICE: Wearing the hats of both filmmaker and journalist, you were in the middle of South Sudan at precisely the right moment to capture a tumultuous series of events in real time. How did your research and gut tell you where to be?
Hubert Sauper: How did I time it? I knew that the premise of this film was the psychology of colonialism. It was going to be somewhere in the center of Africa, but I didn't know from the beginning where. I was thinking of East Congo, because it has this amazing colonial legacy with King Leopold of Belgium, and I had made my first African film in Kisangani. But then I saw the division of this country coming up, and I saw the narrative around it. The Berlin Conference in 1885 was basically designed to split Africa into protectorates and colonies, which then became nation-states.

South Sudan had never really been colonized because of physical hardship. The Boers were trying to go into the center of Africa, but they got sick from malaria. It's very different from other places on the planet, where the colonizers brought the diseases, like the Spaniards brought the smallpox to the Incas and Mayas. In the center of Africa, it was actually the other way around. Colonizers who wanted to get in there got sick; their cows got sick. And now it has been "colonized," I mean quote-unquote, because I don't want to say it's the same. "History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes," says Mark Twain.

We landed and people would laugh at us, and I knew that when somebody laughs at you, you're already a friend. –Hubert Sauper

Americans like myself are aiding and abetting in a small way every day, whether it be interactions with people in service industries or the products we buy. What do you hope audiences will do or think after taking in the film?
You and I are from one culture and one side of the industrial world, right? We're drowning in unbelievable amounts of information, and because [of this], we're lacking intelligent information. Movies are the quintessence of life experience. It's a form of communication that is so much more effective than statistics. What I'm hoping for is to shake up and fuck with the mainstream thinking. That's the enigma of life, and we have to be reminded that appearance is not what is behind the veil, and behind the curtain there's another curtain. It's a fantastic process. You never come to the ground of the real truth. You try to work yourself a bit deeper into this complexity of things.

It comes to that point that you and I are suddenly talking about something, which we wouldn't do if it weren't for, in this case, that film. So this is carrying a lot of hope and confidence, to me, even though people are saying, "In your movies, you're showing us problems without showing us a way out." But I'm a filmmaker, not a policymaker. And I'm not a prophet. I don't want to put myself into the position of showing you all these problems, and toward the end of the film providing all the possible solutions for it. That's the step forward that audiences should make because they're inspired by this chaos.

On Motherboard: The Promise of Drones in South Africa's Poaching Crisis

Schoolchildren in Toposaland sing in honor of the US delegation, to thank them for the new electric power plant. "Our dear friends, brothers from the USA, we are yours, you are ours, thank you for the electricity..."

At least you remember that a documentary is still cinema. Too many docs, especially the social-activist variety, simply convey information that washes over us like a Wikipedia page with moving images. Do you have any sort of philosophical approach to finding the balance between chronicling a subject and creating a vivid, artistic work?
Well, I'm not trying to make art. I do what I can, and it happens to be seen as art. But it sounds a bit pretentious in this part of the world.

Then let's not say art. Let's just say expression.
Yeah. But the truth is that I went to art school, and I have a university degree in art, and that's the way it is. It's not more, not less. Art is a complicated thing to explain, but when I switch on a camera and engage with someone, I don't do an interview. I try to base into this group's energy and frequency, and I get so much more than I could ever wish for. An example is this woman who talks about her past of being a refugee running away from Sudan, and she says, "We have this song we sang," and I said, "What is the song about?" She starts to sing, and there are shivers down my spine. It's jaw-dropping. As I see her, and as I hear the beauty of her voice and I'm recording, it's such an intense moment. It is almost automatically an intense moment for the audience.

It took years of detours, days on end, to find this woman. It's a process, right? You have to be ready, too. The man at the side of the road who's kind of this genius-idiot, he's this Dostoevsky figure. I wasn't looking for him, but he triggered my attention as I was ready to meet him, one day. I walk up to him, we engage in this talk, and there's so much truth in it. He goes after me and is like, "You're European, you don't even know. You're the guys bringing the guns," and I'm like, yeah, just give it to me. [ Laughs] I take the blame, you know? I base into his highly intelligent naiveté, and I am, in a way, this idiot myself.

I knew I had to expose myself to the eye of the cyclone of bullshit, basically. –Hubert Sauper

If not an idiot, people at least think you're crazy for flying around Africa in this rinky-dink airplane. Do you think that helped you approach people, because you either seemed less threatening or gently eccentric?
I knew it in advance. The whole concept of the airplane was to build something ridiculous and practical that would bring us to places we couldn't come unless we would drop from the sky. It bears this whole chain of metaphors that I wanted to use, but also break. The airplane itself is the symbol of superiority and industrial arrogance. But this little plane called "Sputnik" is also the opposite. We landed and people would laugh at us, and I knew that when somebody laughs at you, you're already a friend. You immediately have this link, then you can go, "Should we have dinner together?" and they feed you, help you repair a tire, and things happen. It was the concept of the film. The irony is that because we were so vulnerable, we were exposed to this military world in a sometimes hostile way, in Libya and Egypt.

Yes, how did you get out alive? What were some of the physical challenges and dangers that we didn't see on film?
Ninety-nine-point-nine percent you don't see, of six years of life. I was taken as a spy, and they were sure I was Mossad or CIA or something, sneaking around with this little airplane. I kept insisting that I come as a friend and have permissions, and they're like, "Yeah yeah, just sit here and wait for another week and we're going to sort this out." They call the Ministry of Defense and the guy who gave me the permissions is on leave, and he doesn't write back a telefax. So I was in a very bad state sometimes, but still even that was a part of the concept. I knew I had to expose myself to the eye of the cyclone of bullshit, basically.

The European colonial heritage of bullshit is like this nonfunctioning bureaucracy and militarism marching in step. The uniforms, the jet fighters—it's too much nonsense. I had to dive into it in order to talk about it. It came to a point that I just couldn't make it any more, and I was really, really stuck. Then the idea imposed itself that you can only live there if you mutate into a uniformed idiot yourself. So I bought pilot shirts and gave myself four stars, because I'm the captain. It's like the crown or something, but in a completely idiotic way. We were laughing our heads off, it was so ridiculous.

Related: Watch our documentary 'Saving South Sudan':

While watching, I was reminded of films like The Act of Killing and General Idi Amin Dada, in that you turn the camera on all the players and give them enough rope to hang themselves. It's so direct, your findings, that it becomes alien and surreal. Did you have specific techniques to disarm people?
Barbet Schroeder, who made General Idi Amin Dada, is a close friend and one of my heroes. He also was witness in the lawsuits that were filed against me after Darwin's Nightmare. I had some dubious import/export-lobby hitmen who were trying to bring me down, so it's interesting you bring him up because he's a start for me.

It is, in part, a technique of infiltration. It's fooling with authorities, which is a kind of adolescent drive that I love, like to kick the idiot teacher's ass when you're ten and you're the class hero. But also, toward the people in the villages, I try to be as honest as I can. The more you open up, the more you are not that arrogant Westerner who knows everything. With this link that you create, there's a lot of truthfulness that suddenly emerges in what people say.

Lastly, you're quite modest about this airplane you've built. I can't imagine there are how-to YouTube videos out there. Do you have any advice for anybody who wants to build an aircraft?
It's not rocket science. I get a lot of credit for this, but I can tell you it's a hundred times more difficult making a film than making a flying tin can. It's like building a tree house. There are hundreds of thousands of tree houses, and we can build them one way or the other. It's a primitive structure; it has a little Rotax airplane engine, basically the technical features of a plane from the 1920s. So it's a low-performing airplane, and extremely slow, which is the opposite of what an airplane should be because an airplane is something that beats time and space, right? The Sputnik doesn't. But the advantage was that we could land on a little strip, piece of road, or on a riverbank, and we could have people take the piss out of us and laugh.

The only advice I have is, do what you need to do. People say, "You take so many risks to make your films." But the ultimate risk is to work for a bank and find out at 65 that you should've done something else with your life. So the only advice is, live your life. [ Laughs]

We Come as Friends is now playing at IFC Center in New York and in select theaters nationwide starting August 21.

Follow Aaron Hillis on Twitter.

Two-year-old Justin Darrow plays in front of Kanesatake barricades in a 1990 edition of crime journal Allô Police!

The newspaper clipping has been on the living room wall for decades: a photo of a doe-eyed toddler framed and displayed by proud parents. But Justin Darrow's childhood memento is not a snapshot of a day at the park or of a children's birthday party—it's a souvenir of wartime.

"I'm playing in front of a barricade, a couple cars flipped on top of one another," Darrow explains. "Growing up, it never seemed really that strange: I was a kid, into army stuff and trucks. I had no knowledge of why they were there, and it didn't scare me." It probably should have: built out of police cars, the barricade's purpose was to keep the army off the reserve and protect residents against erstwhile gunfire.

These are not ancient memories of a foreign conflict: Darrow is now 27 years old, and grew up on a Mohawk reserve one hour north of Montreal.

*

When the administration of Oka, QC tried to build luxury condos and a golf course on ancestral land long claimed by the residents of Kanesatake, they encountered unyielding opposition from the Mohawk Nation. The ensuing standoff during the summer of 1990 lasted nearly three months and resulted in the death of one police officer and one Mohawk elder.

During the conflict's 78 days, Mohawk Warriors squared off against the Canadian army, both sides wielding assault rifles, neither relenting. Roads were blocked, families were separated, and multiple arrests were made. The tensions also spurred egregious displays of racism in neighbouring communities, and at one point residents of Châteauguay burned hanging effigies of Mohawk Warriors.

The standoff ended on September 26, 1990, and has since been considered a victory for Aboriginal people, a watershed moment that inspired First Nations across the country—and the world—to fight for their rights. The groundswell of empowerment has led to an increase in resistance movements, the most recent of which consist of efforts to block pipeline projects (a country-wide battle that has also evoked the possibility of another Oka Crisis).

Yet for those who took part in the standoff, the "triumph" came at a heavy cost. Many Kanesatake residents subsequently struggled with depression, substance abuse, and suicide. In the years following the events, stories of organized crime, drug trafficking and police raids kept Kanesatake in the news, a downward spiral difficult to dissociate from that summer's events.

A 2005 research paper on the aftermath of the conflict found that the crisis has had "immeasurable psychological, behavioural, physical and emotional effects on all community members, including children."

In their findings, Gloria Nelson and Joyce Bonspiel-Nelson said that while causation is difficult to establish, healthcare professionals in Kanesatake witnessed an uptick in "children expressing their feelings in negative ways, such as acting out of violence, abusing alcohol and drugs, contemplating and attempting suicide, self-mutilation, racism, bullying, dropping out of school, post-traumatic stress disorder and teenage pregnancy."

Darrow, who was two at the time, has few memories of the events and says his family tried to keep its distance from the conflict. Still, he says he's witnessed the community's ongoing struggle with a past many would rather forget. "It's a tough subject, especially for the ones who are older, hard for them to go back and recollect," Darrow says. "It was traumatizing."

Justin Darrow doing a fakie heelflip at Valleyfield Skatepark. Photo courtesy Damien and Olivier Sellier

Darrow found salvation in skateboarding. The young athlete, who recently competed in the Skateboarding World Cup, is now the ambassador of an organisation that uses the sport to help underprivileged children. But without the sport, he says, he'd be "out doing gang-related stuff, or dead in a ditch."

*

While the conflict resonated in First Nations communities across the country, perhaps the most closely involved was the Kahnawake Mohawk reserve, located on Montreal's south shore. The community sent its men to Kanesatake as reinforcement, and hosted the warriors who came in from other regions to take part in the resistance movement. In solidarity, Kahnawake residents also blocked access to the Honoré-Mercier Bridge, one of the main arteries connecting Montreal Island to the mainland.

Kahnawake resident Roxann Whitebean was six and a half years old when the tanks started rolling into her community. Now 31, she still has vivid memories of the events, and describes how impressed she had been with the presence of both military and media. "I thought it was awesome," she says. "Then I realized, after a period of time, that we weren't allowed to leave and that people were screaming at us."

Watching the news, she realized the armoured vehicles weren't there to protect her and her family. "They were there because we did something wrong. And that was very confusing to me, because usually when I saw the army on TV, they were the good guys, they were the ones saving everyone."

"It was a very confusing time for so many young people."

With food running short, Whitebean and her sister were eventually smuggled out of the community on a boat, leaving behind their grandmother who refused to abandon her home.

Whitebean says that for her and for many of the people she grew up with, the conflict's social impact would reverberate for years. "After 1990, a lot of young people were angry about what happened," she says. "They didn't really understand, and [they] acted out."

"They were uncontrollable and fearless because when you're that young and you're surrounded by the army, you know, it changes your mentality."

In her adult years, Whitebean began working at an elementary school, where she realized how little the younger generation knew about what had happened. "They were so curious, I found out they were discussing it in the schoolyard," she says. "But they thought it was something that took place 200 years ago."

Feeling a need to tell her story, Whitebean catalogued and fictionalized her recollections in a short film, her first, which recently premiered at the Montreal First Peoples Festival. Legend of the Storm tells the story of the Oka crisis as seen through the eyes of a child; a perspective Whitebean felt had been neglected. "I made it for our people as a whole so that we can share our stories and show what goes on in the minds of children when they're faced with extreme circumstances," Whitebean explains.

Both Darrow and Whitebean say that, despite the adversity they faced, the generation who grew up during and after the standoff inherited a unique perspective on what it means to be Mohawk, and how important it is to preserve the cultural heritage and the land.

"Our people are very strong, we have healed from many things," says Whitebean, echoing one of her film's most poignant lines. "I think we're moving along quite nicely, considering that the last [residential school] closed in 1996."

In their findings, Nelson and Bonspiel-Nelson say the historical context is important to keep in mind in treating those affected by Oka. "The challenge is to address not only the crisis in front of us but the ones behind us, too, because our children and our young people ahead of us are depending on us to hand down our strength, love and wisdom, not our grief and trauma," they wrote.

For Whitebean, this is a matter of communication. "As Onkwehonwe people, we're able to share our stories more, there's an open communication now whereas before no one came to the reserve, we didn't really like to leave the reserve," she says. "I think that we're opening up and that we're healing."

Preserving the fighting spirit is also part of the healing process, and Kanesatake's leadership has vowed to block TransCanada's pipeline, which would cross the northern part of its territory. "We stood up for something, we're still standing up for something," Darrow says. "There's so much history here, we don't need catastrophes that would escalate tensions between First Nations and Canada."

"If we were peaceful before, we have to be even more peaceful now."

Follow Brigitte on Twitter.

An inmate looks out at the Hudson Valley at the Fishkill Correctional Facility in 2007. Photo via AP Photo/Mike Groll

JRock died in a Fishkill Correctional Facility staircase.

Fishkill, in Beacon, New York, sits next to the crumbling gothic ruins left behind by the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, and in my time there inmates believed that the wrecked asylum held ghosts, remnants of the twisted people who had dwelt within it since it opened in 1892. Maybe JRock—who was 30 when he died, and had the "government name" of Samuel Harrell—has joined them. In any case, his story isn't over—on Tuesday, the New York Times published a long investigation into Harrell's death that suggests he died after being brutally beaten by correctional officers in April, and that guards have retaliated against prisoners who've dared to discuss what happened since. The whole affair is a testament to a culture of hands-on discipline in the state prison system, one I experienced firsthand.

If JRock's spirit remains on earth until the wrong that led to his demise is righted, it will probably linger in the staircase for some time.

Related: The Pains I've Endured in Prison Buses and Police Vans

Staircases are ominous at Fishkill; a month before my release from the place in February of last year, an old-timer named Kirsch, who was the first person to speak to me when I entered the state prison system in June 2004, died of a heart attack in a staircase. He used to dye his hair with typewriter ribbon, preventing him from showering if he wished to remain a brunette—or rather blue-nette. His body was not claimed by anyone and was interred in Fishkill's graveyard.

The narrow flights are dangerous places where you can slip and fall, but JRock's death, I suspect, was not caused by a loose step but by a lack of cameras. Electronic eyes watch the yards and the walkways, but not the stairwell. Indeed, the only truly thing haunting about Fishkill is the Beat Up Squad—what we prisoners called the group of guards who took it upon themselves to inflict informal corporal punishment upon us in the staircases.

I knew JRock from the medication line. Like many inmates with bipolar disorder, he had another world within his reach, one he could visit by simply not taking his pills. Many prisoners did this; the walkway was covered in spat-up tablets. The bipolar world was one of manic highs and depressive lows. The Times reports that JRock's mother died in November, and as far as I knew, she was his sole source of support—pretty much the only person who picked up the phone when he called (collect, of course).

Fishkill is a very easy place to get on "chemical handcuffs"; the compound was full of "droolers," men visibly incapacitated by haldol or lithium. There is an utterly inaccurate rumor identifying Fishkill as the shooting location of One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest; JRock hadn't seen it, in any case. He was difficult, and had trouble most of his life thanks to his condition. We weren't friends—with five months left to go home, I steered clear of a guy like that.

Watch our interview with New York Senator Chuck Schumer:

The enormous line for meds I stood in every evening in Fishkill was a testament to it being one of the state's facilities that specializes in troubled prisoners. There is a huge wing devoted to mental health, with rubber rooms and pill-pushers, and two floors of the clinic serve as a hospice unit. That's where prisoners die of old age and the diseases that come with it. Many of the old-timers I met ten years back who guided me as a "newjack" wound up there. They rarely recognized me and took a couple months to die. The hospice cost a lot, and even held quadriplegics; there is a compassionate release procedure for releasing sick men to die at home, but I never witnessed it actually help someone get out. The hospice did not play much of a role in the compound's life beyond the steady stream of porters fired for bringing tobacco to the dying men pleading for it. But the "bug unit," as the mental health facility was called, cast a long shadow.

The Beat Up Squad, specializing in violence enhanced by delusions and paranoia, doesn't exactly discriminate.

Since almost all of the mentally-ill inmates lived among the general population—prisoners were often specifically transferred to Fishkill for treatment—the cops didn't know who was who and were wary of all of us. They had reason to be; I once witnessed an ill man catch a delusion and turn around to punch the man on line behind him in the face. He did it with all his strength and for no reason whatsoever. I was next on line, but the cops jumped on him and brutally restrained him. They had seen this before.

I spent two birthdays in Fishkill, the tenth and eleventh times I popped a can of ginger ale to celebrate in prison; five months after I turned 36 I bought a cup of coffee at a gas station to mark my release after 123 months incarcerated. The last five months of my time, spent at a medium-security facility as close to the city as you can get, should have been a cakewalk after the four maximum-security joints I did seven years inside and the three special housing units (SHUs) in which I served a combined year of solitary—a.k.a. box time. But I walked on eggshells. This was Fishkill, and Fishkill is haunted. The Beat Up Squad, specializing in violence enhanced by delusions and paranoia, doesn't exactly discriminate.

Every prison has its own culture, which disseminates from the top down. One prison I spent a relatively happy two years in had a superintendent who wore pinstripe gangster suits and loved to chat with the mobsters. The joint was old enough to have ovens that were meant to bake bread for the prisoners. These days a simulated Wonder Bread comes from a central depot, but when I was in that prison, the grand old ovens were used to make pizza. Each month, whichever wing of the prison was cleanest had a pizza party. When I turned 30, a combination of bending the rules and kind officers looking the other way let me have my own pizza party in the yard. I gave away 20 pies and ate a whole one myself. That was a prison that wasn't haunted. No one ever got beat up, and those deemed to be mentally ill went across the river to Fishkill.

Fishkill had no pizza parties, and it was easy to earn a beating. If the Squad was called in, you were looking at a trip to the hospital. The big men who function as a platoon are not just accustomed to taking down psychotics and schizophrenics, but also prisoners freaking out because of K2 overdoses, which prison officials have suggested is what possessed JRock that day. Upstate, synthetic cannabinoids are called "spike," after the New York City street name, spice. (Bloods hate Crips so much they refuse to use the letter c—they smoke bigarretes, shop at bomissary, and love themselves some spike.)

My sentence, served between 2004 and 2014, overlapped with the rise of K2. But Fishkill probably had the biggest plague of it, being the closest prison to the city and easiest to access by public transit. It might be the K2 capital of the Department of Corrections.

The drug's effects are not nearly as pleasant as those of marijuana, and it is very easy to have too much, at which point delusions can set in. In one week of 2014, when quite a bit of the stuff was smuggled in, I witnessed one man fight a wall with all his might and another demolish a whole weightlifting setup. The cops bring guys like this in, at their own risk, but then there is no way to give them box time. Urinalysis, the DOC's way of drug testing, can pick up THC, cocaine, opiates, and Buprenorphine. The latest addition is for catching suboxone users, but there is no test for K2—or at least there wasn't in my day. Even when someone is caught with it, they used to get around the trouble by claiming it's herbal tea. My friend's daughter just told me she visited her old man but was unable to bring him tea—which she said has been banned.

The officers named in the New York Times investigation are familiar to anyone who has resided in Fishkill for more than a day or so. If ever it was haunted, it was by the reputation of Thomas Dickenson, whom ten individual prisoners separately suggested was behind JRock's death. When I was first warned about him, I already had a decade in and asked how bad he could be. The answer: pretty bad. He stared at every passing set of eyes, looking for a challenge. I avoided him as best I could and did not say a word when he took away my headphones, right when the Tanglewood concerts began.

JRock wasn't as disciplined, or not as committed to being on his best behavior. His mama died and he just wanted to go home, so he packed his bags and announced he was leaving—apparently a major sin in the eyes of the Squad. He was ready for the train, but instead he took the stairs. Whoever was haunting them at the time took JRock to the hospital instead.

We all know where he went from there.

Follow Daniel Genis on Twitter.

This article appears in the August Issue of VICE Magazine

I grew up in Catskill, New York, and have spent the majority of my life in this small town. Despite living here for some 20-odd years, I feel a disconnect that doesn't quite allow me to call this place "home." Catskill means so much to me and yet there is nothing keeping me here—friends have moved on, family is here but the kinship isn't. Passing through the same places every day, I feel like an observer, constantly in search for connection that manages to elude me. The repetition can become smothering, a constant reminder of stagnation—small changes become beautiful, and yet things never really change. You learn to love and hate it all at once—always wanting to leave, always coming back, longing for the day you drop everything and go for good.

See more of Juan Madrid's work here.

Image via Flickr user Mike Babcock

I moved to New York in the summer of 2013 to be a writer. I had no plan and no money, so while trying to jumpstart my career, I worked as a page for the talk show of Bethenny Frankel, she of Real Housewives and Skinnygirl cocktail fame. The series shot in a building owned by CBS, and I was a per diem employee for the network. When I told strangers about my job, I usually had to clarify that it wasn't anything like the position held by 30 Rock's Kenneth Parcell, the overeager and apparently ageless NBC page whose only love was "everybody and television." I wore a pink polo, and I was primarily tasked with pointing audience members to different rooms and telling them that they wouldn't have to wait much longer. Most of those attending Bethenny were middle-aged mothers, Real Housewives fans, or people who enjoy low-calorie alcoholic beverages.

In the beginning, Bethenny was popular enough. However, as the ratings started to drop in the winter, there were occasions when not enough guests showed up for the live production. In these cases, the audience coordinators tried to recruit unsuspecting tourists on the street, and if their attempts didn't succeed, they had to land on their last resort: paid audience members.

Related: These Guys Made Up a Fake Case to Get on 'Judge Judy'

Most of the men and women hired to watch Bethenny were aspiring actors and actresses, and they shuffled inside only minutes before shooting began, carefully whisked down the hallway as if they were illicit items that had to be rushed through customs. A majority of them were between 18 and 30 years old, and as they were still young in their careers, they treated the gig as another clip to put on their growing reels: I recall a morning when a young lady asked me if I'd kindly point her in the direction of the green room, as if she needed to change into her costume from "human" to "audience member." These viewers filled each of the empty chairs as seriously as they could, and depending how they looked (if they had a beautiful face, if they were noticeably energetic, or if they fit into an underrepresented demographic), they could be given priority seating, right in the center. Of course, nobody who actually stood outside for hours to see Bethenny was ever explicitly debriefed on the situation, though I can't say no one ever discovered what was happening.

Professional audience members are not given meticulous instructions, and they're not discouraged from participating. Essentially, they're a secret team of human morale-boosters, and they're just another way for the producers to alter both the dynamics and the televisual experience. Of course, they're easier to control, and they're more likely to continue on the circuit if they stand out for supplying a positive influence: energizing the host, appearing great on camera, maintaining an endless optimism.

There's no questioning the fact that "non-fiction" television, from CNN talking heads to the haggling on Pawn Stars, offers a staged reality. The idea that producers goaded Jersey Shorestars into arguing with one another isn't all that surprising, and the fantastical coverage of 9/11, as David Foster Wallace noted for Rolling Stone in 2001, registered as notably calculated (the anchors in short sleeves, the reporters with "mussed" hair, the "relentless rerunning of spectacular footage"). However, something strikes me as particularly manipulative about compensating people to cheer and clap during some cooking show. People being paid to act fake to support people who are being paid to act fake. The deceptive feeling is due in part, I think, to the attitude that surrounds the practice. Paid audience members exist on the peripheral of the industry, as a sort of unspoken truth that shapes talk shows. While Bethenny, as far as I could tell, used extras solely when it was in a bind, there are several shows throughout Manhattan and Connecticut that do so for every episode, regardless of the circumstances. Many paid audience members whom I approached for interviews declined—not because they feared losing their job, but because they feared identifying their job at all.

Though most paid audience members have hopes of breaking into acting, there's a small group I found who have no dreams of the big lights and the future stars on Hollywood Boulevard: bored grandmothers, unemployed job-seekers, artists desperate for a quick buck. One man, in his 30s, turned to audience work after he abandoned a profession in the medical field: He wished to have more time to focus on his creative writing.

Joining the noble ranks of professional audience members is simple. Just take a quick browse through the TV/Film/Video/Radio section of Craigslist. The ads are written as if the authors are trying to avoid detection, like they're weed dealers at a party trying to subtly indicate they have pot ("Did you want to meet my friend, Mary Jane?"). The show isn't identified by name; the location isn't given; the company doing the casting isn't stated. Audience work might be the lowest paid job in the business, and it might promote poor labor conditions—there are horror stories of pay creeping below minimum wage, overheated studios, and of unscrupulous producers taking advantage of undocumented immigrants. But in New York, once you're on the inside, it's really just one thing: It's a fucking hustle.

Related: Meet the Two Kids Who Remade Indiana Jones

A friend of mine, a Brooklyn-based comedian who sits in audiences for extra cash, has his shifts confirmed only a day—sometimes just hours—before they're supposed to start. Recently, on an evening beach trip to Far Rockaway, I witnessed as he struggled to receive all the details in full by the end of the night. Though once everything is secure, he said, there's no better satisfaction. It reminded me of those scenes from Intervention, when the addict finally scores his or her drug of choice.

"All I need to know is where I'm going tomorrow," he said, as we rode the A train back to our neighborhood. "Then I'll be good."

The head of the casting agency that employs him, he explained, is notoriously difficult to pin down. In the beginning of August, when I started writing this piece, I made numerous efforts to contact the man for a comment, and he never responded. Later that same month, while I was speaking to a former accountant turned audience worker, Steve Rivera, he paused the conversation twice to text his boss about his availability for the next afternoon.

Like my buddy, Rivera thrives in this kind of environment: he gets a thrill each time he firms up a taping.

On Motherboard: Amazon's 24/7 Hell Is the Future of Work

"I've always been a hustler," the pleasant and funny 48-year-old tells me at a café near Union Square. "I've never had a choice."

Rivera grew up in Spanish Harlem. After his mother died when he was 11, he helped raise his younger sister, supporting her financially with many different occupations: stocking food in the grocery store, hanging up fliers for a pest control company, checking IDs at the door of a now defunct downtown club. In his 20s, he attempted to launch an acting career—he abandoned it, he claims, after a casting agent insisted his crow's feet would never allow him to go far. He lived in the same apartment for 37 years, until he sold his place following a dispute with the landlord. Rivera talks like a New Yorker, in the curt tone that almost convinces you he has it all figured out. After he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis a few years ago, he retired and relocated to Florida, hoping to spend his days in leisure. However, he became restless. He moved back to New York from Orlando earlier this year, and since then, he has attempted to launch the acting career he feels eluded him during his youth.

"It's a second life," he says. "I'm going to try to do it over again."

Rivera serves, he claims, as a professional "cheerleader," and he has sat in the audience for AOL Builds, televangelist T.D. Jakes's show, and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. But he longs for larger success, and in only ten weeks, he might be well on his way. He was approached, he claims, to be a soldier for Independence Day: Resurgence. He served as an extra on the upcoming Jennifer Lopez NBC series, Shades of Blue. He has even gotten his longtime girlfriend, who had to leave her job after a work-related injury, to join him as a paid participant in the audience. Rivera's age might help him—there are few people, he says, who do audience work over 35.

"Find your niche," he repeated to me, almost as if was his motto. "That's what I did. That's all you've got to do."

"How?" I asked.

"Go after it," he said. "That's New York, man: hustle, hustle, hustle."

Follow Alex Norcia on Twitter.

Llanwenarth House in Abergavenny, where Davies was making illegal renovations. Photo via the BBC

Read: Murdered Canadian Millionaire Might Be a Dad, and a Paternity Test Could Mean Millions for the Baby

A millionaire property developer in South Wales was fined £300,000 [$470,000] by a Newport Crown Court on Tuesday for illegally altering a famous mansion and using the headstones of three dead children to, among other things, build himself a patio.

The developer, Kim Davies, snagged the 150-year-old gravestones from a deteriorating chapel in Llechryd, South Wales, and recycled portions of the gravemarkers to make wall plaques and patio stones. According to the BBC, the headstones marked the graves of three young children—four-year-old David, three-year-old Rosie, and 11-month-old Thomas.

Davies bought the 16th-century Llanwenarth House mansion back in 2007 and spent over £1 million [$1.6 million] illegally remodeling it with the intent to flip it for a profit.

As a Grade-II listed building—it's the spot where poet Cecil Frances Alexander supposedly drew inspiration for the famous hymn "All Things Bright and Beautiful" in 1848—renovations are only allowed if they keep its original, gravestone-free look. Davies advertised the renovated mansion, hoping to sell it to some wealthy potential homeowners, but wound up accidentally alerting the police to his illegal modifications. Officers got a warrant and gained access to the historic building, revealing Davies's massive illegal changes, including the "patio paved with the gravestones of dead kids" feature.

The Daily Mail reports that so far, Davies has sold his Aston Martin and a Lamborghini Spider to help cover his court costs, but that's nothing compared to the terrible, Poltergeist-style haunting he has coming.

The approximate spot along Highway 95 where milepost 420 should be, via Google Maps

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420 is a number associated with weed, and weed is a drug that makes you think shit is funny when you smoke it. So if you're stoned, the Niagara Veterans Memorial Highway in Niagara Falls, Canada, also known as Highway 420 is comedy gold. Do you know what the country code for calling the Czech Republic is? It's 420, dudes! Do your sides hurt yet?

Also, the mile marker along US highway 95 in Idaho after number 419? That's 420 too! Except it's not anymore, because stoners kept stealing it so they could take it home and hang it in their bedrooms. Today, the Idaho Transportation Department acknowledged that it had to get rid of mile marker 420 altogether, and replace it with mile marker 419.9, because that's not funny at all.

The marker, which was just outside of Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, was one of very few mile 420 markers, Transportation Department official Adam Rush told The Associated Press. Rush claimed—weirdly—that highways don't usually cover more than 400 miles.

In other 420 news, over this past weekend, stoners who also like to jog decked themselves out with the number 420 and ran a race in San Francisco. According to Time, this was so they could "change the perception of weed." One of the participants was quoted by the San Francisco Chronicle as saying, "People who use marijuana have been classified as dumb, lazy, stupid people, and with this race we're showing them we're not what they say we are."

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Photo via US Government / Wikimedia Commons

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Flibanserin, the so-called "female viagra," was finally approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration Tuesday, ending a years-long struggle to get the controversial drug on the market. Marketed under the pronunciation-resistant name "Addyi," it's the first medication ever approved for the treatment of generalized hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD). In other words, it's the first drug ever approved that specifically helps women have more sex.

How it does that is still unclear. Much like Prozac, Addyi futzes with the patient's brain chemistry. Unlike Viagra, which works by giving already-horny men boners when they previously couldn't get boners, Addyi was shown to be effective in a more obscure way: in trials, women taking the drug had sex just slightly more often than women who were taking a placebo, for whatever reason. Whether the drug accomplished this by making sexual partners look hotter, or by making sex sound more fun, or by just generally improving female sex drive, hasn't yet been determined.

And unlike Viagra, Addyi has to be taken every day, as opposed to just on date nights when the kids aren't home. It also has to be taken for weeks before a patient will feel any effect. The drug was rejected twice by the FDA in 2010 and 2103, because the effect was too slight, and because it had shown too many side effects in trials, including dizziness and nausea, along with drowsiness and fainting—potentially interrupting the user's more frequent bouts of hot sex.

While the drug can now go to market, the FDA will employ its gravest packaging alert, the notorious "Black Box Warning," used only when the FDA really wants you to reconsider taking a drug. Essentially, the warning tells women that if they drink alcohol while they're on Addyi, they might faint and hit their heads.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

"Having breasts was shameful. My grandmother noticed mine when I was 10. One night, she made me lie down on a bamboo bed by the fire. She pressed on me with a hot wooden spatula and tried to flatten them. Even now, I don't want people to touch my chest." – Jeannette, 28 years old.

This article was originally published on VICE France

"Breast ironing" is the Cameroonian custom of massaging young girls chests with hot tools – spatulas and pestles being the most common – in an attempt to flatten their developing breasts. This is done with the intention of postponing their first sexual relationships by making their bodies less attractive to men. Parents often fear that the girls won't finish their studies if they meet a man and become pregnant.

For the most part, the flattening is carried out by female family members, either at home or with the assistance of a healer. The process begins as soon as the girls hit puberty – for some, that means as early as eight years old. The consequences of this can be disastrous for the victim's health – cysts, breast cancer and breastfeeding issues are all common, not to mention the abundance of psychological consequences linked to the practice. According to a 2011 GIZ report, one out of every 10 Cameroonian girls has been subjected to breast ironing.

French photographer Gildas Paré recently travelled to Cameroon to photograph some of those victims and take note of their stories. We sat him down for a chat about his work and this traditional act of mutilation.

VICE: You were originally a food photographer. What made you want to shoot these portraits?
Gildas Paré: I wanted to work on something more personal and I was interested in issues surrounding femininity. I was surprised to find that the custom of breast ironing was so poorly documented. After some research, I found out that a journalist, Kirk Bayama, was filming a documentary on the matter. I contacted him and a few months later we travelled to Cameroon together.

Can you explain this practice?
The idea is that if your breasts don't grow, men won't be attracted to you. Mothers do it in the hope that their daughters won't get pregnant and instead be able to continue their education. If no one's attracted to them, they won't end up getting married early.

A wooden spatula that has been used for breast ironing.

How does it work?
It often starts when the girl is about eight or nine years old. Their family will wrap tight elastic bandages around their chest. They tighten them at night, sometimes during the day, too. Another technique is massaging the breasts with hot instruments. The assumption is that heating these tools and pressing them on the girls will melt the fat, which is completely insane. They use a wide variety of things in this process: pestles, wooden sticks, spatulas, spoons and rocks. Most of the objects tend to belong to either their mothers or grandmothers.

All of the women pose bare-chested. Was it easy to convince them to do so?
Not at all, it was actually really difficult. During our first meeting with RENATA – the women's rights NGO that helped us – one of the victims immediately told us that it would be impossible. "You can either photograph their face or their breasts, but not both. They will never agree to that," she said. I told them that if I didn't do it that way, it wouldn't be of any use. A clothed woman wouldn't have the same impact. We had lengthy discussions about it and they finally agreed with me. They understood what I was doing – that my point of view wasn't sexual but an insight.

You wanted them to be topless from the beginning, is that right?
Yes, definitely. Otherwise, there wouldn't have been such a direct confrontation with the audience. Breasts have a strong impact on people.

What sort of relationship do these women have with their bodies?
They suffer on a daily basis. They can't stand wearing a swimsuit, so they don't go to the beach. It's hard for them to undress in front of their boyfriends – if they even have one, that is. The physical pain might fade but the psychological trauma doesn't. Most don't want their chests to be touched ever again.

"They tell you: 'Don't scream, it's for your own good.' I haven't had the courage to talk about it to my children yet. Three days ago, my son asked me 'Mommy, why do you have small breasts?' I told him that I didn't know. I also have a six-year-old daughter. But I'm not ready to talk about it. I would have loved to breastfeed a future president." – Carole N., 28 years old.

The title of your project is Plastic Dream. Why is that?
These women are desperate for plastic surgery. They want to earn enough money to be able to afford breast operations. They'd like to be able to wear nice dresses, to go out and show themselves. But for now, they'd prefer to hide. That's what's really terrible.

When I went there, I had so many preconceived notions: I thought I'd find all these women with huge scars on their bodies. But in the end, it was the psychological wounds that we talked the most about. I was a bit overwhelmed.

Was there one story in particular that moved you?
Every single story was powerful. Even if their wounds weren't visual, they were broken inside. One of the women suffered a lot: She was ironed with a spatula, then a rock, then raped and married off to a man without her consent. She had a kid when she was just 14.

In Cameroon, if you can't breastfeed your child, things can get difficult. Feeding bottles or milk for the baby are not readily available on the market. Since that girl wasn't able to breastfeed, they used driver ants to sting her with venom in an attempt to kickstart milk production. It's a horrible story.

What's next for this project?
Right now, I'm looking for places to exhibit these portraits. I'm currently negotiating with a gallery. I also really want to go back to Cameroon to shoot some more.

You can find Gildas' work on his website and Matthieu on Twitter. More photos and stories below.

"When my breasts started to grow, people in my house began to talk about it. Neighbours, my mum's friends, our elders. So much talking! Even I started to feel ashamed because people were talking about it. Eventually, my mum decided to iron my breasts. 'If we don't iron them, it will attract men. And we know that men mean pregnancy,' she said. We needed to kill those breasts, she claimed. She used hot rock on my right boob, then the left, then the right. This went on for weeks. I suppose she meant well. Breasts are what makes a woman beautiful, though. Today, mine are flabby. They can't even stand." - Carole B., 28 years old.

Berry pits are also used to flatten the breast. Women heat them and then rub it against the chest.

"I was eight when my mother told me: 'Take your top off. Do you have breasts already? When a girl your age has breasts, men look at her.' I didn't understand what she was doing. Every day, sometimes three times a day, she would flatten my chest with a hot spatula. She would just say: 'It's for your own good.' It was a nightmare. I noticed that the more she massaged me, the more my breasts grew. When she realised it wasn't working, she used a rock. That was hell. It felt like my body was on fire. A guidance counsellor, who I told everything, tried to talk to my mum and get her to stop. I was happy because I thought it was over. But she did it again — with heated fruit pits this time. She massaged and massaged. I packed my stuff and moved to my aunt's immediately. Sometimes, I try to understand my mother's actions. It hurts so much when I look at myself in the mirror." – Doriane, 19 years old.

"My breasts finally began to grow when I was 18 years old. Before that, boys weren't attracted to my body. I felt really bad about it. My grandmother began destroying my breast when I was 12 years old. I would try to run away from her every morning but she'd catch me. Other kids were going to school and I was being massaged with a hot rock. She did it twice a day for a year. Having breasts is natural, it's human. When I didn't have them, I felt like a boy." - Agnès, 32 years old.

"Pestles remind me of my childhood pains. That same piece of rock people use to crush spices has been used to crush women's beauty and wilt teenagers' skin. My breasts began to grow when I was 10 and my family thought that massaging was the solution. When I was 16 and got pregnant, they also darkened. A black fluid would come out every time I tried to breastfeed. I have a hard time remembering it all. I decided to forget it and to fight violence against women." – Cathy, 27 years old.

"Every morning, before going to school, my mum makes me lift up my top so she can make sure I haven't taken my bandage off. It's been two years now and she still checks it on a daily basis. It's humiliating. I'd like her to stop. When I grow up, I want to be a lawyer or play piano. I hope that wearing this bandage will help me to continue my education." – Cindy, 14 years old.

Elastic bandage used to curb breast growth.

Driver ants used to stimulate breast milk production.

"She was my mum, so I had to obey when she called for me. Even if I ran, she'd catch me; when I went to bed, she'd grab me; when I was washing myself, she'd get me and start massaging. She'd find a way, no matter what. I could cry all I want, but she would still do it. It felt like she was stabbing something into my chest. She's dead now. I never really understood what she was thinking – if she thought she was helping me or punishing me. My cousin raped me when I was 13 and I ended up giving birth to his child. I needed to produce milk but I no longer had breasts. We tried to use driver ants. When they sting you, your breasts inflate and it's supposed to encourage milk production. I've had three children and, despite the ants, I haven't been able to breastfeed any of them." – Emmanuelle, 23 years old.

"At night, my mother would make me wear a really tight elastic band around my chest. During the day, she'd massage me with a spatula, a pestle, a stick or a rock. It really hurt. I asked her to stop and eventually she did. But after the ironing, my breasts grew really fast. Like really, really fast. I was so ashamed. I wanted to hide them. People on the street would scream at me about my boobs. By my twenties, my breasts started to sag like those of a 50-year-old woman. I'm reluctant to undress in front of people. Sometimes, I keep my top on when I have sex with my boyfriend. I really resent my mother" – Gaëlle, 26 years old.

Homemade elastic band.

"Sometimes, I can't breathe because the bandage is so tight. It scares me. I've had it on for a year. It's really hot, so I get spots everywhere underneath it. I don't understand why my mum does this." – Manuella, nine years old.

Pestle.

"My mother told me that my breasts were going to attract men. So she brought me to a traditional healer. He grabbed a knife, cut my breasts, one after the other and sucked the insides out with a tube. He told me: 'If you don't do it, people will think you're a prostitute.' I fainted from the pain. It took days to heal. Breasts are a gift from God." – Lisette, 34 years old.

Crushing rock.

A healer.

Screenshot via Tumblr

Over the years, Stephen Harper's done everything imaginable to present himself as warm-blooded human, employing stylists and make-up artists, limiting photography by the media, and releasing an unstoppable flurry of propaganda-like photos. As it turns out, most of these efforts are effectively pointless once a dildo is gently inserted into the frame, which is exactly what an artist from Montreal has been doing for the past year, posting the phenomenal results on his Tumblr "Stephen Harper's Dildos."

We spoke with Maxime, a Montreal artist who doesn't want his full name associated with Harper and dildos, about his creative process.

VICE: What first inspired Harper's Dildos?
Maxime: I was trying to find some new humour and concepts to ridicule Harper; I saw a few Photoshop montages but they was badly done. I have some skills at Photoshop so I decided to browse the web. The artistic motive behind it is because Harper is so awkward about emotions: he shakes hands with his daughter. It's like he can't have physical contact with anyone. It was a way to make it even more obvious and awkward by bringing it to another level.

Is there a special something you're looking for in Harper when you pick a photo?
Harper talks with his hands, so I try to find some picture that I can put a dildo in. The content too is important. There are two kinds: very absurd and unrealistic, like the guitar. The other kind of image is the kind where it seems like the dildo belongs there, like it was part of the image.

How long does it take to make each picture?
It depends on each one. The photo with the army took much longer than others. I've made a lot of photos. I have a nice collection of dildos already cut and ready.

Is there anything you do to prepare for the editing?
I don't smoke weed, but when I make those images generally I have one or two drinks. It's always on my mind. As soon as I see an image of Harper that may work I save the image and put it aside for later.

This current federal election is the longest in modern history. Do you think you'll be able to keep up with new dildo material?
I try. I have some montages that are already made but haven't posted yet. Along the election campaign, I'll be putting some updates regularly. Understand that this is a serious artistic protest. The goal is to make those images viral. If I can convince at least one person not to vote for Harper because they've seen an image of Harper with a dildo in his hand, my work is done.

Finally, do you think Harper has ever actually touched a dildo?
Probably not.

Image via the Slants

Simon Tam grew up spending most of his time bussing tables and doing kitchen prep work in his parents' San Diego restaurant. The son of two Chinese immigrants who had survived communism—his father perfected the art of making wontons while homeless in Hong Kong—the future musician also grew up understanding the value of perseverance.

From the first day of kindergarten, Tam told me, he experienced racism. Teachers told him not to speak his native tongue at home, and he still has a scar on the top of his head from getting hit by rocks while being called "Jap" or "gook." It wasn't until much later, when he was an adult living in Portland, that he came around to embracing his roots, after watching Oren Ishii and her Crazy 88s being portrayed as cool and confident in Kill Bill.

"I started thinking about my own art—music -- and how many Asian musicians I could think of," he says. "There was that one random dude in Smashing Pumpkins and that was it. If there really are 17 million of us, how come we're not in the charts or in Billboard magazine?"

That's how, in 2006, he came to form the Slants, which he describes as "Chinatown dance rock." But when he applied to trademark his group's name in 2010, he ran into some problems. Even though all of the members of his band are Asian-American, Tam was told he was being racist and violating the part of the Lanham Act that prevents people from trademarking "immoral, deceptive, or scandalous matter; or matter which may disparage or falsely suggest a connection with persons, living or dead, institutions, beliefs, or national symbols, or bring them into contempt, or disrepute."

That rule is open to interpretation, and some trademarks includes words and phrases many would consider offensive—for instance the name of the NFL team the Washington Redskins, a trademark that is currently being fought over in the courts.

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Tam's battle to get the Slants' name legal recognition has consumed five years of his life and cost him thousands of dollars. There will be an oral hearing at the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on October 2 in Washington, DC. I recently called him to see how hopeful he was that he'd finally win.

VICE: When you first turned in an application to trademark the Slants, did you ever dream you might be rejected?
Simon Tam: I did not think it was possible at all. it completely took me by surprise. I did not know the law existed. The Washington Redskins had their trademark, and [so did] all kinds of things that weren't the most politically correct. At the time we applied, I had just done a North American tour playing for more than 100 Asian-American events. And we had just done an album where we had donated 100 percent of the profits to Asian-American women with cancer. The press was giving us love, saying we were kicking down stereotypes. So when the Trademark Office made their decision it was like: What? The only thing they showed was an Urban Dictionary.com definition and a photo of Miley Cyrus and Toby Keith pulling their eyes back in a gesture, so I thought, "Let's fight this thing."

Did they ever come up with more legitimate evidence that the term Slants was offensive than Urban Dictionary?
They did a couple of years down the line—after we responded and had internment camp survivors write in. That's when they came back with two things: They had an internet article that falsely stated that our band's performance was canceled due to controversy at this Asian-American leadership conference. And they found some White Supremacist message boards and said they used the term in a disparaging manner. So my attorney actually called the Trademark Office attorney and asked, "What is going on here? What do you guys need to prove these guys aren't offensive?"

Watch our documentary on racism on America's fraternities and sororities:

What did they ask you to do?
The Trademark Office came back with a demand list they thought was impossible because it would be so expensive. They said we needed a big, national, independently conducted survey that showed that the majority of Asian-Americans support what [we're] doing. They said we probably needed more experts who could talk about the history of the word, and that we needed to deal with the news article about our show being cancelled. So we went back on the hunt. We worked with all that stuff.

We got two surveys—the big one said 92 percent they surveyed supported our use of the name and only 8 percent found it disparaging, which was far less than any survey ever conducted on this type of case in the history of the country. We got an editor at the new American Oxford Dictionary who wrote a 70-page report saying [slants] was obscure when it was used and that these days it's more commonly used in activism and empowerment. And we got a member of the steering committee for the conference to say our show was never canceled due to our name, it was canceled because they didn't have a concert that year. And then we supplied them with another 2,000 pages of evidence. They said they couldn't trust the study and pulled a bunch of dictionaries from the 30s and 40s to say [slants] was offensive.

"It would be a bunch of white people debating what's offensive to Asians. That's our legal system."

Who is making the decisions about the name? Is it a group of people or what?
It's been the same examining attorney every time. His name is Michael Shriner—a random white attorney. So for the first five years they did not speak to a single Asian about the issue. In fact, we had a governor-appointed board of Asian-American leaders here in Oregon say, "How come you're not talking to representatives from our community?" They wrote back and said they were committed to diversity and had Asian-Americans who worked at the Trademark Office. That was their response—that they had Asians in the building, not that any of them worked on the case. And the big irony of it can be really prominent when you think about the actual court system itself. When we had the oral hearing first time around in the federal circuit, the courtroom consisted of the attorneys, who are all white, and if I were to go there I wouldn't be allowed to talk. It would be a bunch of white people debating what's offensive to Asians. That's our legal system.

Why should people care about this when other evidence of systemic racism like police brutality and poverty is rampant? Shouldn't your resources be going to something more important?
Well there's a couple of things. After we unleashed a barrage of evidence, wedecided to reframe the conversation and submitted the second application that our attorney called "race-neutral." In other words, it didn't say anything about us being Asian. The only thing Asian about it was my name. They gave us the same examining attorney, and he just copied and pasted his response. You're not supposed to do that. We wrote back and said, "You've approved 'slant' many times before, why not this time?'" They said basically we were too Asian—that we used an Asian woman on the cover of an album, that we used dragons.

"I think racism as a structure is extremely complex, and we have to use small victories to build momentum."

In other words, if I were white and fired my band members and replaced them, we wouldn't hit that Asian threshold. And I think it's wrong to deny people their rights based on their race. And it's a literal definition of systematic racism, right? The system is denying rights. I'm very much of the mindset that Martin Luther King, Jr. had: An injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. If you look at the law the Trademark Office is using against me, it's been disproportionately used against minorities, artists, people of color, the queer community. It is, to me, unacceptable that a law written in the 40s—before the Civil Rights Act—is still being used to suppress minority voices. I think racism as a structure is extremely complex, and we have to use small victories to build momentum.

How much of your personal money have you spent fighting this case?
A pretty good amount. I would say between $10,000 and $15,000, but it would be substantially more if I had not been blessed with having such generous attorneys who were willing to work pro bono. The survey alone would have cost $80,000.

Do you worry that this case will completely overshadow your legacy as a band?
People ask me that all the time, and I think it's already happened. We used to be known as the band that was fighting stereotypes and playing at anime conventions. Now we're known as the band that's stuck in this legal battle. While it definitely is frustrating and takes a little bit of attention away from my art and my music, I don't mind that much. Since this thing started we've done anti-racism work on behalf of city governments, federal prisons—which is really funny because other branches of government have no problem tapping us when they need anti-racism work.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

The author as a young boy. Photo courtesy Shaun Michaud

He looks like the saddest man alive. His wrinkly face is a dam ready to crack tears at any moment. I squirm at the thought of a flood.

I peer around his dark cube of an office. It makes me wonder how Concordia University spends my tuition fees.

I can't admit to the school psychologist that I'm only here to glean information about child abuse for a feature story for a journalism class. Yet, I feel the sudden urge to confide in him.

"Do you sometimes feel a strong desire to hurt others who might have hurt you in some way," he asks.

No shit, Sherlock.

In the questionnaire I was required to fill out beforehand, I remember it stipulating that the psychologist has to report any manifestation of a "desire to hurt others." I detect the trick question and go for an honest answer.

"I'm glad you've decided to be honest with me, Shaun," he says, seemingly relieved. "Do you, at times, feel an urge to hurt yourself?"

I sense the need for a swift and bold-faced lie. He listens without blinking.

Outside the barred windows, the place looks like a lost arctic outpost buried under white windswept dunes.

I feel trapped. Repressed emotions are bubbling to the surface. I flex my upper body, trying to ram back down the incoming flood of words and tears. To this day, it is difficult for me to talk about my past trauma.

I convince him that I'm overstressed. I mean, how do I bring myself to say, "Hey, my first-grade teacher beat me with a ruler every day for six months?"

Especially to this dude, who looks like he's already holding the weight of the world on his shoulders. In any case, he sets me up with two more appointments. I might get another chance to tell my story after all.

For a long time, I led myself to believe that my first year of elementary school had been epic. That I had wrestled a dragon and won.

The fact is I cried that morning of September 1985.

"I thought you were eager to begin school," my mother said fixing my denim jacket on my six-year-old shoulders.

My father drove me to my Montreal elementary school. My heartbeat quickened as we inched closer. He told me to remember the way we came. It was the last time he would ever take me to school.

"You're a very smart boy. You'll find your way back. Just don't speak to strangers."

I hesitated getting out of the car. The school was quaint. Tall trees beckoned me forth with long green arms. This might not be so bad after all, I thought. Besides, this is what I had always wanted.

I had witnessed my older siblings leave me behind every day for years. I was eager to show them how smart I was.

I remember my brother laughing in the kitchen, begrudgingly shoving books in his knapsack.

"School sucks. You'll see."

We formed lines like little soldiers in the schoolyard. The bumbling first-graders were separated from the disciplined older students. While they marched up to the building, we were led to the side, where long cabin-like barracks would be our home away from home for the next year. And the site of painful memories for years to come.

An old crone led the way to exile. Her tail end swayed as if a goat danced under her long, bland skirt. Her curly bob made her look like a gray microphone. Geeky glasses with oversized lenses sheltered a mean streak.

She ordered us to stand next to our desks before she sat down. Only then were we allowed to do the same. She presented herself. Her name was Marion.

I can't remember feeling rage before 1985. One thing I know for certain, though: my observational skills aren't a by-product of her punishments. I knew the moment she laid eyes on me that I would bear the brunt of her sadism.

Marion took attendance.

A young boy with tanned skin and a dark mane picked his nose then stuck his index in his mouth. Like worms struck with rigor mortis, her hair stood on end when she shrieked. Her rage was spectacular.

"Maudit sauvage."

The boy looked down as if used to the insult.

I had never met an Aboriginal person before. She discharged a vocal vomit of abuse at him. Little blonde girls giggled. I stared at his buff sullen cheeks and noticed that they were a shade or two lighter than mine. I made a sudden attempt to hide behind a student sitting in front of me. I felt bad. Still, better him than me, I thought.

Marion turned her attention to the list, reading names aloud, tearing down unfortunate souls with a mere flick of the tongue.

I froze like a statue. The gorgon had noticed me. I tried in vain to force down tears. She yelled at me to shut up, a sardonic grin etched on her face.

She trotted toward my chair, ordered me to splay my tiny right hand over the desk, and whipped the ruler like a smith trying to bend steel.

I yelled out and ran in frenzy. I ran as fast as I could. Tears streamed toward my ears. I was known as one of the fastest runners in my neighbourhood. Except, I ran toward the back of the classroom.

Marion caught up to me like Freddie Kruger. My dream had turned into a nightmare. I screamed every time the wood connected with the back of my hand. Little blue-eyed girls laughed in unison. The cheers seemed to egg her on; her eyes twinkled with strange glee.

I promised her swift retribution.

"I'll tell my mother."

She smirked in defiance.

I wouldn't tell my mother this story until I turned 21, gasping for breath between weepy fits. So I kept my mouth shut. I broke my father's rule after that first day of school. I asked a strange man for directions to the 15-minute trek back home. When I walked in, a ray of sunlight radiated through the patio door where my mother was watering her plants. I ran and hugged her; motherly love wiping away my memory.

"I'm not surprised," said Dr. Victoria Talwar, an associate professor of psychology at McGill University. "Children won't necessarily report abuse. Negating the event is a way for kids to protect themselves. It takes big steps for a child to talk about abuse."

Having failed in my initial approach with the sad school psychologist, I emailed all the experts at McGill University. Talwar leads a research team in understanding children's behaviour.

"The teacher is in a position of trust," she told me over the phone. "Children don't think an authority figure can be bad. They think they've been bad and are being punished for it."

Marion smacked me around every morning at school like clockwork. She liked to hear me squeal and hit harder if I resisted. One morning, my scream was so horrendous it made the little blonde girls cry.

To placate her, I soon learned to pretend. The rest of a typical day with Marion was sprinkled with a litany of insults and other cruel gems—like forbidding bathroom breaks.

I often went home with a trail of wet hot urine staining my pants. It made walking uncomfortable so I pretended to limp. A man I often bumped into thought my little subterfuge was hilarious until he met the same wet stain over and over again.

Constant humiliation at a young age will fortify your ego against any indignity you may encounter later in life. There is nothing like smelling like a bathroom stall to help you care less about what people think of you.

Under Marion's watchful eye, the smart boy became a dunce. The school officials required that I and three other students have a tutor. Unsurprisingly, we were all on Marion's black list.

We met the tutor every week. She was my first crush, my dream come to life. Her red hair was like fire. She said it was all natural, no dye—with a wink and a smile. When she walked in, Marion seemed to shrink in her chair like a withered old fruit.

Under the woman with red hair's guidance, my grades shot up. She said she would speak to school officials about me. She said something I had stopped believing—the way kids forget Santa Claus—she said I was smart.

One afternoon, though, everything fell apart.

When the tutor came to take us away to safety, Marion said I was too good to be in remedial class. She said she was jealous that I was putting so much effort with the tutor. She said it made her look bad. How come I couldn't learn with her? My tutor pleaded in vain.

"Are you doing it on purpose?" the crone asked me.

I cried my heart out begging for the woman with red hair to take me with her. I cried all afternoon.

When I asked to go to the bathroom, Marion declined and said I better not wet my chair.

A few days later, she made me run around the desks again. Six-year-olds were gripped to their seats like frightened gargoyles.

"I want to hear you scream," she yelled sneering, gripping the ruler.

By then, I had dulled the pain. But I knew how to make her feel good—give it a good cry and run like the wind. And never forget to add a howl that would reach the next class. But remember that no one will come to your rescue, black boy.

The door slammed open. Marion's grin melted away; I thought her whole face would melt like the Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark. The principal and a girl on Marion's black list barged in; her outraged parents followed in tow.

The girl's mother stared at me with shock and awe. I wiped the tears out of my eyes to reveal cold indifference. Part of me couldn't help but feel sad that the fight was over.

Marion never raised the ruler again. She was allowed to teach till the end of the year. The principal, a mild-mannered man, would often visit the barracks. The last few months were uneventful.

I saw her again a year or so later. I was eight years old by then and the neighbourhood bully. My class was walking in file to the Montreal-North Library. In the fog, I glimpsed her hunched back from afar. I rounded my fists like my new karate sensei had shown me and readied my gaze. She was with a friend who looked just as expired.

Marion didn't teach anymore.

We came within an arm's length of each other. Shame betrayed the lines on her mug.

I stared her down in victory. The buzzard faded into the mist.

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