Photo via Flickr user ItzaFineDay

By now, it's nearly indisputable that former prime minister Stephen Harper possesses a bizarre and deep-seated dislike for science. During his reign, scientists were banned from talking to journalists about their findings, the mandatory long-form census was eliminated, inexpensive but vital facilities were shuttered, entire departments were either defunded or experienced major staffing cuts. (For a full and very depressing catalog, check out Evidence for Democracy's True North Smart and Free project.)

But there's a new boss in town. Justin Trudeau, prime minister-delegate of Canada, has repeatedly pledged to depoliticize science, vowing to create an independent chief science officer (an idea the Conservatives inexplicably shot down in May), unmuzzle scientists, and restore the long-form census. Re-establishing the country's reputation as a research leader won't be easy. VICE chatted with four scientists to find out what they think about the Liberal victory and how the new government can go about improving science in Canada.

David Schindler, world-renowned limnologist, Killam Memorial Professor of Ecology at Edmonton's University of Alberta, founder and long-time director of the Experimental Lakes Area

VICE: Any general thoughts about the Liberal victory?
David Schindler: Well, I think I and every scientist I know is relieved to see Harper out of there. My personal preference would've been for Mulcair, but oh well.

Are you optimistic this next government will take a more nuanced stance on science?
I think they will, but there's enough concern that a group of us are actually drafting a letter to urge the Liberals to get on with setting back the clock on things like environmental legislation that has been damaged. The muzzling of scientists could be banished overnight. So we'll see if there's any response to that. Again, I'd feel more confident if it was the NDP, where things like that were openly discussed during the campaign. I think one of my disappointments is that during the campaign there wasn't more discussion of things like that in the debates.

Why do you think that was? It seems like the muzzling of scientists, for instance, is something that's angered a lot of people in Canada.
I think it was probably more that they always second-guess the public. The big concern is always this nebulous thing called "economy," which to me seems right down there with discussing astrology. But if that's what people want to do. Some people think baseball scores are wildly important. I guess if you really think about global things you realize very quickly that most people worry more about what's going to happen tomorrow is right on. Our whole civil service needs an overhaul. One of the reasons that I'm not optimistic that we'll see a lot of change is over the years I've seen very little change in how these government departments operate, from Liberals to Conservatives and back. The reason is the ministers are all out there fighting political battles and they leave the day-to-day running to senior civil servants. And almost none of them are scientists. They're operating in the dark. Their only criteria are what will keep the minister or party looking good. There's no science there at all. That has to change. Page is right on: we need a total revisitation of the mandates of those departments.

The Telus World of Science in Vancouver. Photo via Flickr user Kenny Louie

Wendy Palen, assistant professor and former Canada Research Chair of aquatic conservation at Vancouver's Simon Fraser University, board member at Evidence for Democracy

Any general thoughts on the recent Liberal victory?
Palen: I have to say I'm still a little bit in shock. It's great. To be honest, I'm still sort of processing what it all means. I find it an incredibly optimistic time in Canada right now. I recognize the election represents an incredible opportunity for Canada, especially with regards to science.

There have been plenty of issues documented by organizations like Evidence for Democracy over the years, whether it be the muzzling of scientists or funding cuts or facilities getting shut down. Have these sort of actions impacted your work or the work of people you know?
My work hasn't been directly impacted by things like the closures of the Experimental Lakes Area, but I've certainly been very aware of many of those stories. And I know some of those scientists, and have interacted with them. But of course, we're all affected in different ways. The biggest thing I feel is when I go to scientific conferences: my colleagues from other countries comes up to me in bewilderment and just want to know what's going on in Canada. I also work on a lot of energy development and climate-related issues. For me, that's very hard to take. I think of Canada as being this progressive and thoughtful and evidence-based sort of a place in terms of basic values. My hope with the election is those values will come back to the forefront. It's a really positive step in the right direction, for me.

What do you think the past nine years of Conservative reign has done to science in Canada as a whole?
It's been well documented. We have eroded our public science capacity in Canada. The capacity to both monitor the consequences of our decisions in terms of government action and then also to understand what's happening in both our environment and in public health. In my mind, rebuilding our public science capacity has to be a priority for the future by hiring back thousands of scientists that were fired during the last 10 years, which an essential first step to restoring the capacity to make evidence-based decisions about the health and prosperity of Canadians now and in future generations. I see that as a huge piece of our challenge in the coming years. I have every reason to hope because they've made strong commitments for science and evidence-based decision-making during the campaign. Things like reinstating the long-form census and unmuzzling government scientists are obviously a really big part of that. Things like creating an independent chief science officer are things that Liberals are on record as having promised, and Evidence for Democracy and me as an individual scientist are really excited to see them follow through on those things.

You mentioned that a lot of your work is around energy and climate, which seem to be two of the issues the previous government was most averse to discussing in real terms. Do you think it's fair to say the reason a lot of this happened was so they can maintain their ideological stance on the issues?
I can't even say the answer to that would be "yes," even if I were to be on the inside circle that knows those sorts of things. I feel like what we have evidence on is that Canada's not doing its part internationally to address climate change with meaningful legislation. Canada is seen as a climate laggard right now rather than a climate leader. We have the lowest, least ambitious targets of any developed nation. That's not even subscribing to anything ideologically: we're not doing our part in any sort of proportional way. Justin Trudeau has not come out with a lot of specifics about what his government will hope to achieve in terms of climate. There are some things there. But Paris is really soon. It's hard to know what's going to be possible between now and then. But again, I'm still very hopeful the fundamental change in perspective in terms of where these governments seem to be coming from give me a lot of hope on the climate file: there's a lot of opportunity there with the new Liberal government.

Photo via Flickr user Laurel L. Russwurm

Michael Rennie, assistant professor in biology at Thunder Bay's Lakehead University, Canada Research Chair in Freshwater Ecology and Fisheries, former research scientist with Fisheries and Oceans Canada, founder of blog unmuzzledscience

Any initial thoughts on the Liberal victory?
Rennie: I'm optimistic in the sense it's going to be a different gang holding the strings. The main issue I see, and this would be an issue for anyone coming in right now, is there are certain things you can fix right away—let's open communication channels a bit. As a government scientist, I received media training. In that process, you get the impression your communications department is going to help your promote your research rather than keep you from talking about it. That would be relatively easy to change in a short amount of time.

What's going to be the difficult part?
Dealing with the systematic dismantling that's occurred over the past six-or-so years. Steve Campana has said, and I would tend to agree, that it's probably going to take about a decade of concerted effort to undo the damage that was done under the previous government. We're talking about systemic change. They changed acts of government in order to better facilitate development. In doing so, they absolutely gutted entire sections of the science departments of, say, Fisheries and Oceans Canada.

What did the dismantling of Fisheries and Oceans Canada, for instance, look like?
They don't have a contaminants program anymore. It doesn't exist. We're talking about hundreds of staff and some of the top scientists in the world doing this sort of research who have now moved on into private sector or doing other things. How do you rebuild that capacity? I don't know. Maybe you don't. Maybe you say "we're not going to down that contaminants angle anymore."

Fisheries and Oceans Canada is so understaffed: they have capacity for just about nothing. That dovetailed with all the top-down thing where it takes you six forms to hire a summer student and you've got to work on it six months before you want him. Everything right now is setup to make nothing happen. So it's that stuff that needs to change. A serious reinvestment that demonstrates they're committed to making government science happen, but also a commitment on the bureaucratic end that they're going to make changes to the processes in place so that we can actually hire the people we need and it's not going to take three years to hire a new scientist or biologist. That's all going to take time. It's really going to be hard for that to happen overnight.

Are you optimistic that change will come?
There is some hope here. Justin Trudeau's already said he plans to have a cabinet of decision makers. It already sounds like he's committed to letting people run their own departments, which never happened under the previous government. If that same philosophy is carried on down the line, we might actually see something happen because everything stalls out largely because everyone is so risk-averse. Every manager is going to pass it up the line, which is entirely the wrong way to go. If people at the managerial level can start making their own decisions without having to get approval from six levels up then we might actually be able to see some things happen. But in large part that's going to require that systemic change so that it doesn't take five forms of ministerial approval to hire a summer student.

You were recently quoted in Science saying that a majority government can lead to issues around science funding and communication. Expand on that a bit.
There's not as much accountability. You can do what you want and no-one can really do anything about it. I'm hopeful in terms of the way things were set up in terms of commitments that were made by the Liberal Party moving into this to say "we recognize a reinvestment in science as a major priority, we're going to bring back the long-form census," all of the campaign promises that were made. Fingers crossed that they're going to follow through on that stuff. If they don't, there's not a whole lot we can do other than continue to stamp our feet and shout. We'll have to see where things go. My hope is this next government will want to be held accountable for the things they promised and provide a means of following through on those things.

Tony Turner, former Environment Canada habitat planning scientist focused on mapping solutions for songbirds in boreal forest, suspended for writing the protest song "Harperman"

Any general thoughts on the recent Liberal victory?
Turner: I think it's a positive thing. Any of the viable opposition parties that could've won would've been fine. It's such a contrast between any alternatives from the Harper regime.

There's been a lot of talk over the last few years about issues like the muzzling of scientists and funding cuts. The response to your song "Harperman" seemed pretty emblematic of the crushing of dissent. Was that whole experience unexpected for you?
No, it was totally unexpected. I wasn't walking with my eyes open into a situation where I thought I was provoking the government. I had these two separate lives as a singer-songwriter and as a government employee. I thought I was acting within the values and ethics of the department and have freedom of speech, as all public servants do. But they don't always exercise it. I think that's one of the key things. That's why the government was clamping down on freedom of expression for public servants. I had lunch with some of my work colleagues a few days ago and they still feel like they can't say anything. There was a column on CBC that I contributed to a few days ago and they couldn't get anyone from within the government to speak during this transition period. You can really feel people still feel quite muzzled.

Tell me more about muzzling.
There's two aspects to muzzling: there's getting your results out there, and that's how I think muzzling should be actually interpreted. Getting the results of your research out to the public, or being published, or whatever. My case was different because my results were never muzzled, per se. I wasn't doing pure research. Mine was more the freedom of expression to express myself in a song during a political campaign while being employed in the public service. They're related because they both have to do with freedom of expression.

Would you say the issue of muzzling grew under the Conservative government?
Certainly, we'd never heard the term before the Conservative government was in power. All of a sudden there came examples of people whose results were not being allowed to be published or made public. We would get information about some issue like sea ice in the North, but we'd hear in from the United States before we could hear it from our own scientists who actually generated the research. It's stuff like that: really, really over-the-top control of objective information. I think the Conservatives just did not know how to handle real information to support their decision-making because their agenda was so ideologically based.

What are a few things the next government can do to show to Canadians and scientists they do care about issues like this?
I think Mr. Trudeau said it publicly, and so have the local members who have been elected in the Ottawa area: they want the public service to know that they care about what they're doing and they're going to change the way things operate, and they're going to make evidence-based decision-making. I want to believe that he will be true to that statement, that he will use evidence-based decision-making and will unmuzzle the scientists. In their platform, they've designated a chief science officer, who will help make science available to the public through a single portal or mechanism. They're going to unmuzzle scientists so they can speak about their research. And they're going to develop processes where scientific results are considered when they make decisions. It's not always going to be the key factor that informs decision making but it has to be there as part of a whole mixture of other political considerations when they do make decisions. We've seen that kind of balance in previous governments: even if they haven't always used science, it's at least there in the decision-making processing. But under Stephen Harper it never seemed a consideration in decision-making at all. That's just wrong in an educated, modern society.

Follow James Wilt on Twitter.

Photos by Guy Thacker

Tar sands mining companies have continued to withdraw water from the Athabasca River in northeastern Alberta despite low flows that have made navigation difficult for river users downstream and left Fort Chipewyan's harbour dry.

Boats docked on Lake Athabasca in Fort Chipewyan have been sitting on sand for the last month as water levels have dropped lower than many residents can remember, thanks to a series of droughts felt over the last few years.

According to the Keepers of the Athabasca, an alliance of Indigenous and non-Indigenous residents working to protect the watershed, low water has meant the fall moose hunt for First Nations has taken a blow this year.

"You can't get a canoe out there because it's so dangerous. There's so much mud you can't walk out," Jesse Cardinal, Keepers coordinator, told VICE. "Navigation is at a standstill, and this is prime time for fall harvest. People are out harvesting fish, moose, wild game. Everybody is wanting to go out hunting to try to fill their freezers, so it's really important for their treaty rights, for the ability to hunt and fish and trap and access their cabins."

Alberta Environment and Parks spokesperson Lisa Glover confirmed that levels near Fort Chipewyan were below average and that Lake Athabasca was lower than in previous years.

But while First Nations harvesters have had their navigation throughout the delta impeded by low water levels, oil companies have seen no restrictions to the amount of water they are allowed to withdraw from the river.

River users were already complaining of extremely low levels by the end of May. Barging operator Guy Thacker, who ships goods between Fort Chipewyan and Fort McMurray via the Athabasca, reported on June 1 that the river was "30 percent islands, 60 percent sandbars and 10 percent water," making navigation a challenge.

Responding to a low flow advisory for the Upper Athabasca on July 24, the government suspended Temporary Diversion Licences (TDLs) and notified water users that no new applications would be accepted.

But according to the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER), the body responsible for implementing the province's Surface Water Quantity Framework, limits were only placed on industry upstream of the town of Athabasca and not in the Lower Athabasca area that supplies the tar sands.

"Alberta Environment and Parks did not place restrictions on the Lower Athabasca Basin, downstream of the Town of Athabasca," AER spokesperson Jordan Fitzgerald noted.

Five TDLs were suspended on Aug. 6, but lifted again on Aug. 25. Since then, 14 TDLs have been issued to divert water from the Athabasca.

Oil companies are the largest water user on the Athabasca River. A 2007 report by the University of Alberta said the tar sands industry requires the same volume of water as a city of two million each year to produce one million barrels of oil per day. Total production (mined and in situ) reached about 2.3 million barrels per day in 2014, according to Alberta Energy.

While the Alberta government maintains oil companies are using just one percent of water from the Athabasca annually, Cardinal said that's not true in the case of the extreme drought experienced this year in Alberta—the same conditions that resulted in record wildfires across the province.

"Giving companies first rights to water, over long-standing Indigenous treaties or any other recognized water licences holders is clearly a human rights issue," Cardinal said. "There are still reports coming into the Keepers of the Athabasca that the Athabasca River is still extremely low. Why has the water restriction been lifted? At a time when communities downstream depend on healthy water levels for fall harvesting, and daily use, such as drinking water?"

Existing regulations set limits on water withdrawals by oil companies from the Lower Athabasca each week of the year based on average flow conditions, which determine if management actions are required.

Those limits are considered outdated by the province and are in the process of being updated, with a new management framework for water quantity promised to come into effect by Oct. 29.

The new framework will include new limits, requiring the majority of existing companies to stop water withdrawals during low-flow periods, and establish weekly triggers based on predicted future flow conditions that take into consideration a range of climate change scenarios, to ensure there is adequate water quantity for Aboriginal land users.

But Cardinal has doubts about the new framework, which she said was developed with minimal input from First Nations. The framework is part of the province's Lower Athabasca Regional Plan (LARP), a land use plan hotly contested by First Nations. Five have pulled out of the process based on complaints around a lack of consultation and accommodation.

Furthermore, the new limits are inconsistent among oil companies. While most oil companies could be prohibited from withdrawing water during times of low flow (87 m3/second), Shell's Muskeg River and Canadian Natural Resource Ltd.'s Horizon project will be able to continue drawing a limited amount (0.2 m3/second), while Syncrude and Suncor will be able to withdraw even more (2 m3/second).

Alberta Environment blames the variance on "infrastructure challenges" that necessitate a bare minimum withdrawal during low flow periods to prevent freezing at some tar sands facilities.

Cardinal said the Alberta government needs to enter into a co-management regime with First Nations on the Athabasca River that would incorporate community-based monitoring into the management framework and fully consider the concerns of indigenous peoples in setting these kinds of limits.

Alberta Environment said working more closely with First Nations partners is the eventual plan.

"Alberta Environment and Parks did commit to community based monitoring, particularly in the context of navigation," Environment and Parks spokesperson Glover said. "This is still in development."

Follow Meagan Wohlberg on Twitter.

Photo by Bruno Bayley

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

It's no secret that London is a divided city right now. An ever-extending megalopolis torn apart at its buffed steel joints by issues of class, culture, race, gender, lifestyle, income, and occupation. I mean, in how many other European cities would a hooded-up mob organize an attack on a tourist trap café? Where else but London would a high street estate agent have to hire private security? It's basically Les Miserables with considered thinkpieces replacing public executions.

Numerous distinct cultures and social groupings exist within this framework, but I'm not sure any of these divides crystallize what's going on quite as well as the one between two men at the heart of two very different Londons: J Hus and Jay Rayner. The canyon between the pair reminds me of the theory that 1970s America was divided by the mythical "Manson/Nixon" line, with Charlie cutting the wild, bohemian new America away from Richard's conservative middle.

J Hus is the current superstar of underground British music, his distinctive afro-grime cuts "Dem Boi Paigon" and "Lean & Bop" becoming anthems for the roads. Ignoring the traditional routes to success (he's only just signed a record deal), he's instead built his fame on an organic local fan base that came to wider attention when "dem boi paigon, you can't bring them man around me" became the battle-cry of a near-riot after a house party-gone wrong in Hackney. He is, in my opinion, the most genuine—and the most exciting—British artist in years.

Jay Rayner, screen shot via Youtube

Food critic Jay Rayner also has a fan base, but they're more likely to be interested in the new Hackney's pisco sour cocktails than the old Hackney's Snapchat block parties. With his Van Dyke beard, town crier physique, and Argentinian center-back hair, he cuts a fairly bizarre figure, but make no mistake, Rayner is London's epicurean-in-chief. An engaging writer, he's won legions of acolytes through his Guardian column, and many a restaurant can thank him for that last table booking on a Saturday night. A cult figure among affluent Londoners, he's something of a street food Michael Winner.

Despite having 20 years and a whole lot of social clout (Rayner's mother is the late TV agony aunt Claire Rayner) between them, these men have become emblematic of London's opposing groups, as well as the city's increasingly terminal separation from itself. Also, both their names start with J.

But just how different are they, and what do the various facets of their work represent in a society increasingly influenced by its cultural forbearers?

LIFESTYLE

Nineteen-year-old J Hus is a man who lives life on the edge. Just a few months back he was hospitalized with a stab wound to the leg, only to post a picture of himself being treated in hospital, not only smiling, but throwing up a gang sign linked to his Canning Town/Stratford affiliations. Quizzed about it by Complex, he unrepentantly suggested that his detractors simply "don't understand the culture." As many of his contemporaries move towards the world of big-money tours, high fashion collaborations, and establishment respect, you get the overwhelming feeling that J Hus might be a man who just wants to watch the world burn—so much so that he even boasts about how little he showers.

Rayner, on the other hand, is a man of quiet comforts. He knows where to get the best crème brûlée in London; he is a member of a jazz quartet; he once said that he enjoys the National Portrait Gallery because "had a privileged upbringing which means that quite a few of the new faces in there were familiar to me from real life." He eats custard tarts in bed. The lifestyle he leads is one many people in this city are trying to emulate, which puts him in a not too dissimilar position to Hus.

J Hus. Screen shot via Youtube

CULTURE

J Hus is representative of a new young London, one that is wildly aspirational, hedonistic, and uncompromising when it comes to getting to the top. He's a fervent capitalist, bemoaning the days when he "used to eat sardines for dinner," whereas Jay Rayner likes to eat them at Jojo's restaurant in Whitstable, "introduced only to salt, lemon juice, and the heat of the grill."

Rayner is on the Masterchef judging panel and J Hus is nominated for MOBOs. Hus is from "shitty old Newham, where I boy my old friends like I never even knew 'em," while Rayner claims to have first eaten alone in a restaurant at age 11, during a Swiss skiing trip. The difference is simple: J Hus was born wanting and Rayner was born having, their respective work perfectly illustrating the lottery of birth in London.

LANGUAGE

"A lobster bisque makes its point through udder-squirts of cream. Pâté en croûte is a dense cramming-together of blitzed animal between two slivers of pressed pastry, all served far too cold. Main courses are prime ingredients at excruciating prices. A beef fillet for £46 comes with a Yorkshire pudding which isn't as good as those I make, alongside a dry bit of sawn-through marrowbone topped with breadcrumbs. Most odd is two slices of pork belly, cooked for seven hours before being grilled, in a sticky glaze that smells lightly of Marmite."

"Dem boy paigon / I can't stand them / I don't trust you if you ain't mandem / They wanna do me / imma do you before you do me / Imma do you before you do me"

I'm pretty sure you can guess which is which there.

STYLE

While J Hus's look is pure road-luxury: Moncler, North Face, Stoney, hats, and hoodies from his own brand "The Ugliest," Jay Rayner's look is simple flamboyancy. He's a big man who's a little soft in the middle, and his wardrobe of pinstripe blazers with big sleeves and flouncy, paisley cuffs is his chosen swag. He looks like somebody who'd drive a hard bargain on an episode of Flog It!, or perhaps the guy you first suspect in an episode of Midsomer Murders, or maybe it's a once-lauded painter forced into teaching watercolor classes at an adult education center in Putney.

SELF-IMAGE

In the end, these two men, so polarized by this invisible line in London's sand, eventually find a kind of commonality in their own opinions of themselves. In particular, their physicality.

See, while most MCs will boast about how pretty they are, J Hus does the exact opposite. He is loud and proud about how ugly he is, calling himself "The Ugliest" at every opportunity. Even though, despite a bit older than his 19 years, his face has a kind of editorial charm to it.

For his part, Rayner has been frank about his battles with his weight, writing in The Guardian that "the problem was I had become used to my size. I have never been thin. There is a picture of me taken shortly before my sixth or seventh birthday party, all toothy grin and flowing cravat, and looking at it I can see my weight was probably about normal. But I don't recall feeling normal, even then. I did not come from a family of normal people. Normal people were thin and we were certainly not that."

I suppose, for all their socio-cultural differences, J Hus and Jay Rayner are united in their loathing for themselves, and what could be more indicative of living in London than that? No matter where you're from, what you do or who your friends are, you're always going to be made to feel bad about yourself. I see a Fire in the Booth freestyle collab coming on.

Follow Clive Martin on Twitter.

Australia's Indigenous population is consistently overrepresented in the country's prisons, but it's even more apparent in the juvenile justice system. In 2014, a report on New South Wales stated that young people of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander background made up 48 percent of all young people in state custody—the national average in the adult system is 28 percent.

To get an idea of what life is like for an Indigenous offender in juvie, we followed rapper and proud Yorta-Yorta man Briggs into Reiby—a Juvenile Justice Center on the outskirts of Sydney.

Larry Fessenden as Sam in Habit Stills courtesy Glass Eye Pix

There's a great moment in Larry Fessenden's Wendigo (2001) where a small boy spooked by a nightmare stands at the top of the stairs outside his parents' room; it's a snapshot of childhood terror that prompts shivers of recognition. It's tender and terrifying at the same time. Wendigo is a weird movie—cheaply produced, with wild shifts in tone from everyday drama to hallucinatory mania, and topped off with some ropey special effects—and yet for all its originality and lo-fi integrity, it never quite found the audience that it deserved.

The same thing can be said for Fessenden's other films. Despite owning perhaps the most coherent body of work in modern American horror cinema, the New York based writer-director-producer-actor-raconteur is not a household name—even in households of hardcore horror fans. A new Blu-Ray collecting Fessenden's first four feature films might serve to make him less obscure. Or else, it'll just remind diehards of what they already know: that this guy is one hell of a filmmaker.

Leaving aside his earnest but cheesy neo-Frankenstein riff No Telling (1988), Fessenden has contributed a trio of small classics to the monster-movie genre he loves so much: Habit (1995), which cleverly melded the iconography of vampire films to a tale of addiction; Wendigo (2001), a plangent end-of-childhood elegy invaded by a ravenous Native American spirit; and The Last Winter (2006), still the only American horror movie to directly address the nightmare of climate change.

That Fessenden has also spent the last 30 years advancing the cause of handmade personal cinema through his production company Glass Eye Pix—whose imprimatur can be found on the early work of his good friend Kelly Reichardt—only cinches the case on his behalf. VICE caught up with Fessenden via telephone from Los Angeles, where he was presenting a screening of Wendigo, to discuss the arc of a career in need of some champions.

VICE: You've only made five feature films since 1985 but you've directed episodes of television shows, developed video games, hosted online radio plays.... Do you see yourself as somebody who has done as much work as they can possibly do? Do you have any regrets that you haven't made more movies along with everything else?
Larry Fessenden: I call myself a journeyman. I have a perspective that I think can be expressed in different mediums. I like to draw, I like to paint, I like music. I love exercising the power of sound by doing radio plays. I'm a performer, whatever that results in...I like exploring other peoples' relationships to their art forms, too. I find that many of my comrades have even more powerful ideas about what they're doing and I just watch. It'd be hard for me to only focus on my own work. I like peering around the corner at another person's process. As far as regrets go, I'd like to be remembered for a body of films and I'm not working fast enough to have a sort of Hitchcockian canon of movies to my name. The pleasure of digging into his canon is something I won't be able to offer—not that anybody wants it from me, anyway. It's no big loss.

I'd say that what your movies represent is something pretty rare—a small body of genuinely personal horror films, or maybe genre films that express some kind of consistent philosophical worldview.
I particularly appreciate that iteration, an individual's worldview. I think of myself as philosophical more than personal. Habit does appear to be a very personal film. It's about demons and alcoholism and losing control and feeling the spectre of madness in your life... that's a personal observation. But there are philosophical underpinnings there too, and those things also come out in the other films as well. Wendigo is about the usurping of land, the Native Americans overtaken by settlers, and then the settlers overtaken by yuppies. I'm always intrigued by how society functions and then how its dysfunctions are a reflection of our personal shortcomings. How does that manifest? How does it turn violent and ugly? That's my thesis about collapse, and that's in The Last Winter. One could make a comedy in response to these things, I suppose, because it's possible to see them all as absurd.

Jake Weber as George in Wendigo

It's funny how the tropes of so many horror films seem to shield the people watching them—and making them—from larger and much more frightening realities.
Horror movies deal with reality even when the people making them aren't aware of it. And they're often quite reactionary. "If you have sex, you will be stabbed to death." That's a reinforcement of puritanical values, and those values seem to drive a lot of people anyway. So I say: let's peel those clichés away, and let's look at some real horror—some real things that we're afraid of. And maybe we can be enlightened and go forth and make a better world. I always think that my films are hopeful, and that when people wake up in life they can try to make a change. That might not be true. That might be a presumption.

Sometimes it seems like the very worst horror movies—and I mean the ones that are bad in every way, from form to content to ideology—are the ones that succeed.
I have had no financial success. It's essential to acknowledge that. But you can have a loyal fan base. There's a history of worthwhile artists who didn't find enormous remuneration but have a pocket of fans. This is a fate that I can only hope for.

So you can live with being a cult figure?
I think so. That's one thing about getting older. I realize, for example, that when I was younger, Jaws was my favourite movie. I felt a kinship with Spielberg. I don't think that I deserved to be him. I feel a kinship with Hitchcock, Polanski, and Scorsese, too. When I see their films, I know what they're doing. I just didn't have the mechanism to be as powerful as they were. Everyone has their weaknesses. I think that it's a profound thing. You think about somebody like Ed Wood, who had so much passion—you can have all that passion and not be as good at something as you want to be. It's not about self-pity. I think a lot of my faults stem from my having a marginalized perspective. The things that I like aren't very mainstream. I like monsters. And monsters aren't as popular as slasher movies, right now, or ghosts. You always have to account for your own taste.

With that in mind, what's the mindset of a man who has earned himself a shiny new Blu-Ray box set?
I've worked pretty hard to get all these movies back under one roof—I had to sort of rescue Wendigo from total obscurity. So that was a challenge. I'm a collector-minded person, and none of my movies were on Blu-Ray, and none of them had been well transferred onto DVD since their VHS days, either. So I did it as an act of self-preservation. But I've also been mentoring a lot of guys, like Ti West and Jim Mickle and all the younger and less successful but still vital members of the Glass Eye Pix team, and I felt like it was good to establish what I'd contributed as a director to the horror genre, which has gone through many changes since I got started in the early 90s. I think I've tried to bring a personal authenticity to horror tales, and that wasn't on the agenda. I wanted to make a little nod to my contributions, and also to 30 years of Glass Eye Pix, which is about celebrating everyone who's worked with our little company. And I think we need little companies that are combating the genericization of cinema. So it's not about personal glory, it's about the glory of an idea—of auteur-driven cinema.

Zach Gilford as Maxwell McKinder in The Last Winter

Talking about the passage of time: it's funny to think that a technologically progressive medium like Blu-Ray is increasingly going out of date.
It's a real heartbreaker. Even in New York City, you can no longer go to a video store and browse, and look, and discover some kind of unexpected gem. You can't go to the Renoir section and realize you haven't seen all those movies. You can't go and sample the Cassavetes box set. You can't just waste your money on new releases because you want to see the making-of featurette on Jurassic Park or Godzilla. You can't put it on the shelf. It's very sad. Books have disappeared as well. I can glance at the book shelf or the video shelf and absorb the ideas in there. It's all vanishing now into the ether, and into the fucking streaming. Now, that's reality. On the other hand, my son can now choose to watch almost anything on any night . I can say, "Let's watch Basquiat, that's a cool movie," or All The President's Men. That's wonderful. I miss the tactility, though, and the special nature of graphics. The poster and the box art for a movie is really important, and that's very much what I grew up with. When I wanted to get out of the house, or when I had writer's block, I used to go to Kim's Video and just wander amongst the shelves. It's not the same to scroll through movies alphabetically on Netflix.

You've made movies on almost every format imaginable, from super-8 to 35 mm to digital video. Do you think that formats impose their will on artists, or are they defined by how artists use them?
I think part of it is always economic, and it's always about what the trends are in theatres and what they want stuff delivered on. You can still capture on film but you're going to end up delivering on DCP. I think the medium completely affects the work, by the way. If you see a movie called Wendigo, it's going to use old-school techniques; its DNA is in the celluloid. That's what that movie is all about—the grain and the texture.

That can turn into a fetishistic point of view—the idea of the superiority of celluloid over anything else.
I agree. I'm not a fetishist. I like doing different mediums—shorts, podcasts, video games, or audio dramas. I don't feel so rigid about all that. I'm happy to make a movie in any way.

Follow Adam Nayman on Twitter.

"After I won the Nobel Prize, my life didn't get easier," Orhan Pamuk recently told me while looking out the window of his Manhattan apartment. Less than a year before winning the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Turkish novelist faced criminal charges for mentioning the Armenian genocide and the killing of 30,000 Kurds to a Swiss newspaper. Winning the Nobel Prize made him an accidental spokesman for the cause and a lightning rod for the government's crackdown on free speech. Hate campaigns became so threatening, Pamuk felt he needed to flee the country. He couldn't celebrate being Turkey's first (and until this year, only) Nobel Laureate because his books were being burned at Turkish nationalist rallies.

For years after his prize, he avoided talking about politics, and few could blame him. The Committee to Protect Journalists states that 20 journalists have been killed in Turkey, while at least seven—including VICE News's Mohammed Ismael Rasool—sit in jail today. Like Pamuk, many writers, musicians, and artists have been prosecuted for breaking Turkey's Article 301 that makes it illegal to insult the republic, while numerous NGOs continue to fight for Turkey's freedom of expression.

Turkey has seen a positive change this year, with both social media and the art world whittling away at President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's ability to censor self-expression. When I first sat down with Pamuk, it was just a few days after I saw his artwork on display at this year's Istanbul Biennial, of which he was honorary chairman. Artists covered the city with over 1,500 pieces of artwork, many of which not only make explicit comments on the Armenian genocide, but explore Turkey's ongoing war against the Kurds. "If an artist said today what I said in 2005, they wouldn't have the problems I had," Orhan told me. Still, while I sat in a bar in Kadiköy, just a few nights after the Biennial premiered, Turkish nationalists stormed the headquarters of the pro-Kurdish party HDP just a few blocks away. The far right had attacked HDP locations across different cities in Turkey, and had attacked newspaper Hürriyet for its left-sympathizing news coverage.

For years, Pamuk resisted conversations that were solely about politics. Not only for his own safety, but the pressure to represent all progressive political causes in Turkey was limiting. "Not only do I have to maneuver myself to fight with the government, but I also have to hear people's demands," he once said in an interview with Agence France-Presse. Not every author has been so blunt in challenging Turkish censorship, and many expected him to speak to their individual cause. "I'd spend six years working on a book," he said, pointing to one of the piles of books that coat his desk, "but the only topic the journalists would ask about is political Islam."

His latest book, A Strangeness in My Mind, is a candid exploration of all the political taboos in today's Istanbul. As his 12th novel, and second since winning the Nobel Prize, the narrative is anchored to the historical events that continue to haunt the country today. Centering on the life of Mevlut, a poor migrant from Anatolia who comes to Istanbul to sell boza, a traditional Turkish fermented drink. His business affords him a floorless home that his family built on the outskirts of the city, and after a few futile attempts to graduate high school, his future seems at the mercy of boza, a drink quickly fading to obscurity. Pamuk examines 40 years of Turkish policies through the eyes of someone reluctant to get involved. Unlike the central characters in Pamuk's bestsellers, which include sultans, the bourgeoisie, and others with a measure of affluence, Pamuk has refocused his lens on the poorest and most underrepresented communities in Turkey. His characters, who range from Marxists to Islamists, witness civil war and fall into the cracks made by urbanization, which remains a major problem facing modern Istanbul.

Pamuk's passion for Istanbul is often compared to Joyce's Dublin or Dickens's London, but that comparison ignores the depth with which Pamuk represents each faction of the city, wandering into relationships, political parties, and lifestyles that are otherwise ignored. "This was originally supposed to be a short novella about a boza seller who loses his fortune when bottled boza becomes a product," Pamuk told me. "But after interviewing so many 80–90 year-old former boza sellers, and hearing about what they saw, I realized there is so much more to tell." Six hundred pages later, Pamuk has written a book in multiple voices, lending his sympathy to each character. "I want the reader to care about people like Mevlut as much as they care about Erdoğan," he said.

No longer rattled by his past experiences with Turkish censorship, Pamuk knows the only place they can never censor him is in his novels. "Dostoyevsky wrote the greatest novels of humanity when he was being censored by the czar," he reminded me. "You watch your step when you criticize the government in real time. They'll take you to court for insulting the military, but I can do so much more with fiction. In my novels, I'll always say what I want."

VICE: At the Istanbul Biennial, many artists were openly discussing the issues that you were persecuted for ten years ago. Do you feel that Turkish censorship has eased in the last few years?
Orhan Pamuk: Political free speech in Turkey is full of ironies. People can speak more freely today about what happened to the Armenians and discuss the rights of the Kurds. If someone says today what I said ten years ago, they wouldn't have my troubles. Things have mellowed, but that still doesn't mean that Turkey is a free-speech country. Newspaper owners are being pressured by the government. Critical journalists are being fired, facing court cases, even beatings. But it wasn't better before the political Islamists, either. This has been ongoing. When they took over, they did so with the same authoritarian nationalist government policies.

"If a Turkish writer was only going to write about butterflies and roses, and nostalgia about the good old days on the Bosphorus, they'd have to have a screw loose in their head."

Why do you think the art world has been able to avoid the censors recently?
Not long ago Turkey tried to ban Twitter and YouTube, trying to control people's reporting, but it's impossible to do that. In fact, when a country is growing economically this much, and individuality is expanding, it's so hard to control it. This is the irony of Erdoğan's government. In the last 14 years, he expanded Istanbul's population, but now all of these people want their own voice and it's so much harder for him to stop that. He can't put pressure on everyone in Istanbul that's tweeting. And because of this, I'm optimistic. The Turkish people are growing economically, and thanks to the internet, can still see what real free speech can look like. They won't submit.

So in this climate, do you feel that artists have a responsibility?
Tough question. Probably the eternal question of my life for the last 50 years. I think it's a matter of measure really. I've seen some of the best writers waste their talent just because they wanted to serve their nation, they did not give enough energy to the quality and beauty of their prose but rather attacking the government. But I've also seen people try to avoid the inevitable, and if a Turkish writer was only going to write about butterflies and roses, and nostalgia about the good old days on the Bosphorus, they'd have to have a screw loose in their head.

Related: VICE Meets Karl Ove Knausgaard

In the past you've lamented that "anyone who is in trouble or feels that the government is not doing well for them wants me to represent their problems." Do you still feel that way?
Let me clarify: I'm not lamenting. This had always been the case, but after the Nobel Prize, it became much harder. There is a lot of political dissent in Turkey, but it's not internationally represented. The political opposition wanted me to raise my voice—and I am with them—but they wanted me to raise my voice more than I wanted. I was happy to criticize current policies and lend my voice to that cause, but in the end I'm a literary person, and once you venture to that role of secular political opponent of Erdoğan's party—and I am—that was all anyone ever wanted to talk about.

I understand your reservations about speaking for other people, but now you've written a book about some of the most underrepresented communities in Turkey. Have you just accepted this role?
Yes, but it's a self-imposed role now. For years, I said, "One day I'm going to write a novel not about the bourgeois, but about the lower class." The art of the novel works best if we not only tell our own stories, but can see the world with different lenses: gender, class, religion. I'm writing through the point of view of a street vendor. I wanted to write about the town through that point of view so I could explore those areas.

It was essential for me to include cousins who were AKP and Erdoğan supporters, political Islamists, or ultra-nationalist sympathies, but then also give Mevlut a Kurdish friend, with revolutionary leanings. Given Mevlut's economic circumstances, his interactions with these parties differ from my own, but I have to navigate both sides.

A Strangeness in My Mind really stands out from past books because it centers on the lives of the poor. Was this more challenging?
I teach a course at Columbia University called "The Art of the Novel," and one thing you learn from the history of the novel is that it's developed to represent the middle class, upper-middle class, and aristocracy. Most of the time, lower classes are background or just entertaining tearjerkers. All of my effort went into making my character convincing without any melodrama. I wanted to explore Mevlut's full livelihood across 40 years, looking at the city through his eyes.

So I started going to villages for interviews, and talking to boza sellers like Mevlut, and more and more people told me their stories. As soon as someone saw me there, all the 80- and 90-year-old boza sellers wanted to talk to me. I loved it. I love chronicling. I have piles of interviews. I regret not doing it 40 years ago. I had the whole history of migration: coming to town, making your house, getting married.

You've also written these characters to chronicle Istanbul's rapid urbanization. Do you share their anxiety about these changes?
Mevlut's experiences are parallel to mine. When I was born in Istanbul, it was a city of one million. Now it's a city of 17 million. There was an immense transformation, but it did not happen overnight. Occasionally, my character is aware of these changes, just like me, and starts to feel like he doesn't belong there anymore. The novel chronicles how this area went from homes like Mevlut's to skyscrapers.

Is there a clear problem of gentrification in Istanbul the way it exists here in New York?
Of course. In the book, Mevlut lives in the neighborhood Tarlabaşi. It used to be a Greek neighborhood, then it became a poor Turkish neighborhood, now presidents live there. If you rent in Istanbul, you'll only continue to be pushed farther and farther away.

Most of the Istanbul of my childhood is demolished, and I've come to realize that a city doesn't have essential qualities that go unchanged. Cancerous, mushrooming high-rises will continue to grow because the government sees more profit in it. Truthfully, it was the same with the previous government. They'll keep destroying historic buildings, because there is a sentiment that we must eat the past to improve today.

In the book, your description of what happened to the Tarlabaşi neighborhood reminds me of what happened to the Black Bottom neighborhood of Detroit. In both cases, the government built a highway that cut through the town, forcing the community into worse conditions.
Yes, roads like these are built to serve the upper classes. The fixtures of life for lower classes are never respected, and this is common in all big cities. But nostalgia can't be our only reaction. I try to spend my time understanding what happened. This novel was an attempt to make sense of it by seeing it through the eyes of a man who lived it. I want people to care about people like Mevlut as much as they care about Erdoğan.

On VICE News: Teen Arrested for Insulting Erdogan on Facebook as Crackdown in Turkey Continues

This book really illuminates how this corruption doesn't just exist in the government, but in places like the construction industry as well.
It's not just the construction industry—it's everywhere now. Political bribery has become part of the lifestyle. It's why so many Turkish people want to join the European Union: that kind of regulation could stop much of this corruption. I spent some time, especially between 2003–8, propagating the idea that it would be good for us to join the EU. I still feel that way. It would force us to be a full democracy.

How do you see Turkey as a "partial" democracy?
There is a lot of disrespect for the separation of powers. Erdoğan's executive branch pressures the courts, and the independence of the court system is in trouble. We may be an electoral democracy—I'll give him that—but we aren't a full democracy. You have to have free speech, and a separation of powers. Courts need to be separated from the executive branch, but they aren't. The government shouldn't be able to pressure the media, but it does. That's why I call us an electoral democracy but not a full democracy.

"Technology has really helped Turkey in the fight for free speech. Now, anyone with internet access can be informed. Attempting to stop us from Twitter won't work—you can't silence us."

Given that it's an "electoral democracy," what do you expect from the snap elections scheduled for November 1?
I'm hoping Erdoğan doesn't get what he wants, but even if he does, I'm optimistic. The only tangible, positive development of Turkish free speech in the last 12 years has happened in the last few months. Free speech has become a legitimate topic for debate. Political parties are asking for free speech for the sake of free speech. Fifteen years ago, opposition parties would criticize the government for giving too much free speech to Kurds, Alevis, Christians, and other minorities. That's not happening at least. Well, there is still one party saying that, but just one. So here's my attempt at being positive: This is clearly an improvement.

Do you feel more relaxed about your own free speech?
Yes. I do, but I still have to have a bodyguard. But so many journalists are saying much more than I say, and have more to worry about. I can make political comments in anti-government newspapers now, but I am protected. Ten years ago, when pro-government newspapers attacked me, I worried someone might shoot me. I don't face the same threats. Technology has really helped Turkey in the fight for free speech. Now, anyone with internet access can be informed. Attempting to stop us from Twitter won't work—you can't silence us.

Are you on Twitter?
No, but I read other people's Twitter all the time. People tell me to join, saying I will have a million followers, but what would I say?

Condensing a great thought to 140 characters is hard.
You think so? Maybe, but tweets can be beautiful too. So many people in Turkey can get the news from Twitter, but it's more than that. It can be like poetry. Who knows, maybe this book is really a lot of my tweets.

Follow Mary on Twitter.

A Strangeness in My Mind by Orhan Pamuk is available in bookstores and online.

Read more comics by Lauren Monger at her Tumblr and Twitter.

All photos courtesy of Jörg Buttgereit/Nekromantik

Hayden (not his real name, for reasons that will become obvious) is 18 years old and he will never forget the moment when he first realized he was a necrophile. He was 14 years old at the funeral of a girl who had been a close friend—it was the first time he had come in contact with a corpse.

"I could feel the chill of her skin on my hand for hours is to contact a psychiatrist or psychotherapist. There are a number of strategies that can be employed to help them."

Hayden's therapist initially suggested he attend a help group for various paraphilias, but Hayden said that only aggravated the anxiety and awkwardness he felt about his desires, so he soon stopped attending. The biggest source of support in coming to terms with his taboo desires, he added, has been his girlfriend.

"She reads all the poetry I write, my stories involving necrophilia, even sends me songs or writings she finds about the subject," he said. "She's always told me that it's not abnormal—people have different attractions, and mine just happens to be to corpses."

In the Psychopathia Sexualis entry for necrophilia, Krafft-Ebing writes that whether or not a healthy mind can demonstrate necrophilic tendencies is an open question, worthy of further inquiry. In the 150 some years since its publication, it seems as though the psychiatric community has declared this question answered, with a resounding "no."

It makes sense: History is rife with brutal tales of necrophilic acts, and the simple reality of fornicating with a corpse is enough to make most people nauseous. But as Valentine and others are keen to demonstrate, there may be another side to the story, where necrophilia is not something to be feared and ignored, but may very well open up fruitful discussions and provide valuable insight into the true nature of our cultural attitudes toward sex, love, life, and death.

Follow Daniel Oberhaus on Twitter.

All images courtesy of Slug Street Scrappers

I came upon the Slug Street Scrappers internet video juggernaut thinking it was merely an online oddity. Here's a man, Micah Brock, kicking his "Crazy Ex Girlfriend" in the crotch and playing it for laughs. I had the reaction that you might have: Is this asshole for real? Then I discovered that there are four episodes totaling over three hours and that, yes, Brock is very much for real.

Slug Street Scrappers, if you're not among the series' 55,000 YouTube fans, tells the story of Bruiser Bom-Bash (Brock), his ex-girlfriend Peaches (Katelyn Brooke) and has a winding story full of bizarre mythology, double crossing and (obviously) lots of fighting. It's identifiably amateur but charmingly so. The series' basic structure of some talking, some fighting, more talking, then more fighting resembles that of a porno, except instead of having sex people engage in hand-to-hand combat.

Now, anyone with access to the "Social Justice" part of the internet can easily tell that SSS's attitudes towards women are, er, problematic. But Scrappers ended up charming me. Maybe it's the lo-fi locations—it's mostly shot on a dam or in the California high desert scrub—or the fact that most of the major action takes place off-screen. Or maybe it's that some of the actors, Brooke in particular, are really good. And the fight scenes are, too. They're shot in a straightforward, unpretentious style that makes you feel the impact of every hit. I ended up watching the whole thing.

The story borrows heavily from fighting games like Streets of Rage and the acting would be cheesy even for a Tekken title, but it kind of works. Actual story events are confusing and the narrative is long, but rest assured that a hapless group of ninjas, randomly appearing goddesses, someone called "Mr. Sexy" and a woman that communicates only in signs all get ample screen time. It might be funny in a "so bad it's good way", but after talking to Brock, I get the sense that that's the point. Brock's a professional YouTuber in Southern California, who does martial arts demonstrations on his KWONKICKER YouTube channel and seems like a overall decent person. He told me about the idea for Slug Street Scrappers, his life as a professional YouTuber, and what it's like to pretend to fight a woman.

VICE: What was the genesis of the Slug Street Scrappers project?
Micah Brock: I was in Thailand preparing for my first professional fight at the time, and I was inspired to do the series. My buddy let me know that a fan had done a remake of the original Streets of Rage series. It was a PC version and it combined all three Streets of Rage games into one mega-game. He sent me a download link for something to play during my off-time. I started it, and it was awesome. It made me, when I got back from Thailand, want to do sort of an homage to Streets of Rage. Back then, copyrights on YouTube were really strict and finicky, so instead of doing a direct fan film, I decided to do something that paid homage to that, that was its own sort of intellectual property.

You're a professional fighter?
I haven't fought professionally in a while. This Scrapper thing kind of exploded and I fell headfirst into filming after my first fight. So it really put my fighting on the backburner. My last pro fight was in 2011.

Was it just the one fight?
That was my first fight under those rules. I had fought many times before under the Olympic style of Tae Kwon Do. A few amateur matches in full-contact kickboxing. That was my official switchover to the professional circuit.

What's the response been like to Slug Street Scrappers?
I was surprised. It was really just supposed to be the one 15-minute short film. But it got a really good reception. We did the second episode and the fanbase skyrocketed from there. Once we did the third one, things exploded to the point where when we did the IndieGoGo for the fourth one, we got like 500 percent of our target funding goal. The fans are die-hard. It's cult status. Mini-cult web status.

What's the fanbase for these videos?
It's martial artists and gamers mostly. Gamers who grew up in the Sega Genesis, Nintendo era. So I think older gamers and younger martial artists.

What are your ambitions in the filmmaking arena?
Originally, it was to keep making bigger and better things. Like, "Ah, next I want to do a feature. I want to do something on the big screen." But as the Scrapper series progressed, being able to interact with all these fans who love it. For whatever reason: nostalgia, they identify with the characters, it reminds them of their childhood. Whatever it is, that's the kind of stuff I wanted to make. I wanted to keep making web series or TV shows that really hit home with people. So that's more my goal. To make good content that will impact people rather than produce stuff with higher and higher production value. To go the traditional route.

Who is the cast for these movies? Friends? Professional actors?
It's sort of both. I have my network of close friends and then we progressed from there. As we got better, we started networking with other professionals. And then they come in and become your friends. Then they bring in their friends and it sort of spirals and grows. Next thing you know, you've got a big pool of potential people to work with, who are also your friends.

There are a lot of male-female fight scenes in Slug Street Scrappers. Is that uncomfortable?
No. When it comes to martial artists and combat sports in general, you quickly realize it's not about male or female. It's all about weight and experience. So, if you're doing a fight scene with someone who has the same experience as you and they're in the same weight class, there's no, "Oh, I might hurt this person because it's a girl." No, this is a trained fighter. They weigh just as much. We're at equal ground. None of that gets in the way.

It never enters into your thinking?
It's not even part of the thought process. At least for me. But it seemed to do pretty well. Everyone worked really hard. We rehearsed the fight scenes and everything came out injury-free. Nobody got hurt.

Is the fight scene choreography all you? Is that collaborative?
I'm the head fight choreographer, so most of the time I'll choreograph the whole thing. But if I don't have time to choreograph the whole thing, I'll put together a skeleton and pass it along to one of my friends who I know can choreograph according to the style I need for that scene and trust him to fill in the gaps. Or if I really trust the person, I'll have him choreograph the whole fight. They bring it back to me, I make changes that I need to and we go from there.

Is that something you write out? Is that a storyboard process?
It used to be that I would just write it out on paper. Before we had fancy phones that could record stuff and tablets and all that, I'd write in in sentence form. "This person throws a kick, this person blocks like this." Et cetera, et cetera. Eventually I was able to grab my phone and do the sequence in the air and film myself. Then I grab a partner, rehearse the fight scene, get it down. On set if we didn't have time to rehearse, I'd pull out the tablet. "Actress A, this is you. Actress B, this is you. Here's the sequence, memorize it, we'll practice it a couple times." Then, we record.

We do a very specific style (of fighting). It's more a rare style, especially here stateside because it's more dangerous than speed-based stack choreography. What I mean by that is most Hollywood stuff is camera tricks and reactions. The style that we employed for the most part is a Thai style that's based on hard contact to safe places on the body or having the actors wear padding that's concealed in certain places. And then going all out. Boom, hitting hard. You get that real impact. The audience feels it. That can be dangerous if the actor isn't trained properly or somebody isn't comfortable with actual contact. That's why it's important that all the actors I chose for the roles have actual full-contact fighting experience. So they understand how to control those hits, how to take the hits. Stuff like that.

Follow Michael on Twitter.

By 10:30 AM on Saturday there was a large and rapidly growing crowd getting organized in Washington Square Park. Some people were passing out literature, asking for petitions to be signed, others were headed to the chapel in Judson Memorial Church. This was part of a series of protests called Rise Up October; though speakers included Cornel West and Quentin Tarantino, the real stars here were the dozens of families of victims of police violence who had come to New York to march for an end to state-sponsored terror.

As we marched north up Sixth Avenue to Bryant Park, the hundreds of protesters stretched out over several city blocks. The NYPD created some confusion with an impromptu location change of the second rally, attempting to guide the large crowd away from Bryant Park to Madison Avenue, cutting some protesters off from the main group (arresting seven) while the main contingent broke through the detour and reunited on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 42nd Street. Taking turns speaking from the back of a truck rigged with loudspeakers while a NYPD helicopter hovered above, members of the families shared their experiences as well as their demands for justice. Once the permit expired, a fraction of the once-massive march continued on to Times Square.

By then, tensions between the protesters and police were rising. A woman was arrested for climbing on a sculpture, as was a man who was standing on a bench with his daughter on his shoulders (the protesters afterward helped the daughter reunite with her mother). After some chanting and a song about the victims of police terror, the rally ended and the crowd dispersed.

Peter Voelker is a photographer and frequent VICE contributor based in NYC. You can follow his work here.

If only, am I right? Photo via Flickr user Michael Fleshman

All across the country, students are taking loans. Loans to pay for school, living expenses, food, and credit card bills filled with bar tabs. Regardless of which province you live in and how frugal you are, the cost of living as a post-secondary student can be a real struggle on your own.

According to the Canadian Student Loans Program's (CSLP) look at the 2012-2013 school year, 472,167 students across Canada took on full-time student loans, with the exception of Quebec, Northwest Territories and Nunavut, all of which run separate loan programs from the federal-province system.

With each student taking on about $8,000 in debt per year, the average owing amount upon graduation for somebody who borrows all four years is around $27,000, which can add up to about $40,000 after ten years due to interest payments. Overall, the collective student debt across Canada in 2012 clocked in at an absurd $28.2 billion.

Currently, the split between provincial and federal loans is about 60 and 40 percent respectively, with both levels of government providing a six-month grace period after graduation/leaving school before asking students to start paying back their debt, according to the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS).

Where the issue of student debt gets tricky is when you compare how each provincial government deals out the dough. Some provinces, such as Newfoundland and Labrador, have completely eliminated repayable loans in favour of non-repayable grant systems. Other provinces, like Ontario, are still absolutely brutal with their interest rates and loan-to-grant ratios.

This past election, the issue of student loans became an important issue among the running parties. Out of the three main parties that contended for power, only the NDP and Liberals proposed initiatives for student debt relief (although the Conservative did propose a weird, non-effective increase to low and mid-income RESP funding).

The NDP's approach involved slashing federal interest rates to zero and investing $250 million over the next four years into federal education grants, but they didn't win, so that's out the window. The newly-elected Liberals plan for student debt involves $3.3 billion in grant funding over the next five years and a freeze on interest until the graduated student is making at least $25,000 a year—which is a pretty low threshold. Considering this is just marginally higher than what the average minimum-wage worker makes at 40 hours a week, the $25,000 a year figure basically just ensures the person has a job before having to pay back their debt.

To clear up the confusion that surrounds this whole ordeal, we broke down the best and the worst of loan systems across the country (except for the Yukon, Nunavut and Northwest Territories, due to lack of data).

The OK: Newfoundland and Labrador, Quebec and Manitoba

Truly the Holy Trinity of places from which to get a loan, the systems in these three provinces are easily some of the best for students to finance their education from.

Starting in Newfoundland and Labrador, the province not only holds the lowest tuition rate in the country, they were also the first province to completely eliminate their loan system to replace it with non-repayable grants. This means that students taking money from the Newfoundland government only end up paying back (plus interest) on the federal portion of things, which can save students thousands of dollars of debt, depending on how much was taken in the first place.

With the next lowest tuition rate of $2,774, Quebec also has a pretty sweet deal going on for students taking out loans. With an interest rate of only 0.5 per cent plus of the prime bank rate, it's the next best province beside Newfoundland and Labrador to borrow money from, although it should be noted that the current loan climate probably has something to do with the fact that students have led giant protests anytime the government has attempted to fuck with the system.

Finally, Manitoba swings by with a higher average tuition fee of $3,729, but makes up for it with a zero percent interest rate on loans that was implemented just this year.

Imagine this, but just, like, so many more of these. And they all go from your bank account to the loan sharks who helped you get an education. Photo via Flickr user Sara Long

The Not Quite OK: Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island

While Nova Scotia and PEI haven't eliminated loans just yet, they were some of the first provinces to drop provincial loan interest to zero. Tuition in the provinces is still pretty high, coming in at an average of $5,934 and $5,470 respectively, but it's arguably better than having to pay interest on top of a slightly-cheaper tuition.The two provinces only accounted for roughly 19,000 students out of the 472,167 that borrowed money in 2012-2013, so they're not the biggest offenders in this category.

The Bad: Saskatchewan, New Brunswick, and Alberta

Alberta comes in with having the third-most students borrowing at 49,114. They also have some of the higher tuition rates in the country—$5,883 per year (although the province's NDP has froze rates for the next two years)—which is just below their neighbour Saskatchewan's average tuition of $6,017. New Brunswick sits snugly between the two tuition rates with the average being $5,917. Similar to British Columbia, all three of the provinces require their students to pay back a prime interest rate of 2.5 percent. These are not places you want to take loans at.

The God-Awful: Ontario and British Columbia

Out on the west coast, British Columbia currently hands out the second-most students loans in the country, with 60,158 given out in 2012-2013. They also require students to pay back with one of the highest interest rates per province, sitting at an annual rate of 2.5 percent on top of the bank prime.

On average, BC students pay $5,015 per year for their tuition, which pegs them as having the fourth-cheapest education costs among the 10 provinces and one territory included on Statistics Canada's most recent data from 2013. Despite this, BC students expect to graduate with the highest debt of any province at nearly $35,000.

Finally, at the centre of the world, Ontario comes in with the most heinous numbers in any place across the country. Not only does Ontario account for the most students borrowing a year at 302,355 in 2013, but they also have an average tuition of $7,180—over $1,000 higher than the next highest in Saskatchewan. Their repayable interest is slightly lower than the other two aforementioned, with a slightly-relaxed 1 percent prime (meaning minimum allowable) rate.

It also should be mentioned that, in cities like Toronto (where over 35 per cent of all Ontario students go to school) and Vancouver (also housing almost half of the province's student population), living costs are the highest in the country. It was found recently that the average price of a house in Toronto now tops over $1 million and that the city ranks as one of the worst in the world for overall cost of living, with rental costs being around upwards of $1300 a month for a bachelor apartment in the downtown core, and Vancouver is similarly expensive, clocking in at around $1200 for the same deal.

The Worstest: Federal Loans

The federal loan system, which is distributed by the National Student Loan Service Centre (NSLSC), runs on a slightly-different system than the provincial ones do. As stated above, federal loans make up about 60 per cent of all loan programs and, according to CFS national chairperson Bilan Arte, are responsible for roughly $17 billion dollars of the collective student loan debt in Canada. The federal and provincial loans both also give a grace period to students borrowing money, meaning that those who take a loan don't have to start paying it back until six months after graduation/leaving school.

The main differentiator between the two systems is that the federal loan program allows students to choose between a fixed interest rate of five percent on top of the bank prime (note: this is absurdly high) or a floating interest rate of 2.5 percent on top of the bank prime (currently 5.20 in total). For example, a student with $25,000 of loan debt will end up paying around an additional $8000 on top due to the 5.2 percent interest rate at the end of ten years, while a student repaying at the fixed interest rate of 7.5 per cent will end up with an additional $14,250 within the same period of time.

Either way, both interest rates are significantly higher than flat mortgage rates you can get from most banks (which are meant for working adults who can, y'know, afford homes), and the last major report published on student loans by the government projected the net amount being paid back in interest to be $443 million by the 2015-2016 academic year.

Yup, Canadians are paying nearly half a billion in interest so they can find a good job and pay the government taxes.

Follow Jake Kivanc on Twitter.

Satellite image of base building on Fiery Cross Reef. Image via Google Maps

For months, China has been piling rocks and dredged soil on top of reefs and islands in the South China Sea and using this reclaimed land to build military bases. As you can imagine, this is making the rest of the world a little bit uncomfortable.

About a fortnight back, Australia agreed to aid the US in challenging China's territorial claims. That means that if American warships start prowling the waters around these new bases, Australia would presumably offer support. But there's still a lot of ambiguity about what support will look like, or even what the US plans to do.

To find out, VICE caught up with Professor Hugh White, an expert on Asia-Pacific security issues and defense strategy with the Lowy Institute. He gave us his thoughts on Australia's efforts with the US, as well as some analysis of what might happen should it all go pear-shaped.

VICE: Hi Hugh, let's start with China's claim that these islands are theirs. Is this a legally valid argument?
Professor Hugh White: In international law there is nothing inherently wrong with China developing contested features that it occupies. A country that occupies land that is claimed by another country is entitled to develop it.

So what's the issue?
It's the fact China claims a 12-nautical-mile zone around some of these new features. China is entitled to claim 12-nautical-miles around islands that it occupies, even if that claim is contested. But some of these features they've built, for example off Fiery Cross Reef, don't count as islands or rocks. If they're submerged at high water than they count as reefs rather than rocks and under international law, they don't qualify for a 12-nautical-mile zone.

So to be clear, China claims 12 miles of Chinese territory around each new base and the US wants to challenge these claims. How will they do this?
This is very unclear at the moment. There are reports that Australia will not actually accompany the US through China's 12-nautical-mile claims. But if we did, one possibility is that the US will conduct a freedom of navigation transit with a coast guard vessel rather than a navy vessel. In Australia's case, we don't have that kind of vessel so we might use a warship. But then the Chinese could accuse the US of militarizing the situation. The Chinese could say what we are doing is provocative— We are claimants to these islands and we occupy them. You are not even a claimant and you are sailing through our zones. That line wouldn't be absolutely unjustified.

Related: Watch our documentary on naval hardware, 'The Future of Amphibious Warfare'

Given this prospect, why are we keen to sail through the SCS?
Because in international law if a claim doesn't get contested, it becomes accepted. So, if we don't believe China is entitled to claim territory around islands built on reefs, then sailing through their 12-mile-zones demonstrates that we don't accept the claims.

Where does Australia sit in all this?
The problem for Australia is that we want to support US primacy but we don't want to find ourselves backing up a weak and ineffective US response and pissing off the Chinese. Although reports suggest a decision has already been made, I don't think this is right. Senior US officials, such as the Secretary for Defense speaking at the AUSMIN last week, are being very careful not to commit to a particular time and it's far from clear that the US have made a decision to go ahead. The chance of it ending well for the US is not high.

How will this affect our relationship with China?
You've got to pick your fights. My view is that this isn't the right place. The legal argument is too weak and it is too unlikely that we will have satisfactory outcome. You don't want to pick fights you're unlikely to win, and I don't think Australia and the US can win this one.

What will this mean for future disagreements between China and the West?
That's the big question. The big underlying issue here is that the US and China have different visions how they think things should work in Asia over the next few decades. America wants to keep the old system where they're in charge but the Chinese want to build what President Xi Jinping calls a new model of great power relations in Asia. This means China would be in charge, or at least that the US wouldn't.

Essentially the US and China have very different aims. Really mutually incompatible aims and unless both shift from their respective positions towards some sort of mutual accommodation we can expect the rivalry between the two will escalate. This whole scenario in the SCS is really just a symptom of a deeper rivalry. These islands are just chess pieces on a board.

So hypothetically speaking, if an American or Australian was attacked, what could we expect?
That's the challenge. The government would be faced with a limited number of very unattractive options. One is to return fire, in which case you're starting what could be an escalating conflict and no one knows where that'll end or who will win. Or you can sail away looking weak.

Either of those outcomes would be very bad for everyone. If China and the US find themselves in a shooting conflict there would be a significant risk of escalation. Most people would think it would be mad to allow for a small clash like that to escalate but once fighting starts it's very difficult for either side to back down. Although you'd hope sober thinking prevails, you wouldn't want to bet on it. Big wars have started from less.

Follow Dan on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Gage Skidmore

Read: Pulp Fiction Was the Film That Made Me Realize I'm Not Cool

Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino spoke out against police brutality on Saturday, referring to some cops as "murderers" during a rally in New York City.

As you might expect, he pissed a lot of powerful people off in the process.

Now the president of a key New York City Police union—the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association—is calling on city residents to boycott his movies, as the New York Daily News reports.

"I'm a human being with a conscience," Tarantino was quoted as saying at the rally. "And if you believe there's murder going on then you need to rise up and stand up against it. I'm here to say I'm on the side of the murdered."

Lynch said in a statement that cops aren't "living in one of depraved big screen fantasies" and that the director is a "cop hater."

It's probably for the best that police officers are not, in fact, living in one of Tarantino's movies, given how things turned out for that one cop in Reservoir Dogs and all. But the cult favorite chose a bit of an awkward moment to make his move: Last Tuesday, NYPD Officer Randolph Holder was killed as he responded to a firefight at a Harlem housing project; on Sunday, the gun linked with that killing was found in the Harlem River.

In fairness, Tarantino has admitted the timing of the rally was "unfortunate" and called Holder's death a "tragedy." But that didn't stop NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton from unloading on him Monday.

"Basically, there are no words to describe the contempt I have for him," Bratton said.

Illustration by Armando Veve

When I recently met Neil deGrasse Tyson in his office inside the American Museum of Natural History, where he serves as the director of the Hayden Planetarium, the first thing I noticed was how very happy he was. Despite being at the end of a day of press interviews promoting StarTalk, his show on National Geographic, he was positively oozing pep and energy. Tyson was excited about getting dinner and going to the theater with his wife later that evening—"We're both foodies," he admitted. The 57-year-old astrophysicist loves Gershwin, and they were going to see An American in Paris. His office is an easy place to be happy: To get there, you ride a glass elevator to the top of the planetarium, overlooking the Hall of the Universe, where museum-goers, tourists, and school groups can check out a meteorite, a chunk of moon rock, and a swirling gas sculpture model of a black hole. Tyson's office itself, lined with bookshelves and strung with twinkle lights, is so full of model rockets, model planets, and antique scientific instruments that it could double as a hobby shop. To even the mildly inquisitive, it's a pretty magical place. For Tyson, who fell in love with astronomy in this very planetarium—growing up with the less-than-crystalline night skies of the Bronx—it must be even more so.

According to Tyson, the ideal sound bite should be "informative, tasty—like, 'Yeah, I like that'—and maybe make you laugh, and make you a little happier for having learned it."

I'd spent the morning reading about those possible alien structures orbiting some distant star, and planning how I will someday tell my grandchildren that I got to talk with Dr. Tyson on the very day the public first read about the existence of our alien overlords. But he hadn't heard about it. "They have kept me locked up in this office," he explained, gesturing to the three publicists sitting across the coffee table from us. "So maybe I missed the discovery of the century. But I'm thinking that if today we discovered alien intelligence, I would have been all up in it." We talked about the discovery of water on Mars instead. Or rather, he talked, launching naturally into teacher mode, explaining it wasn't the presence of water on Mars that was surprising—there was already evidence of ancient rivers and deltas —the surprise was finding water in its liquid form oozing out of a crater wall. "It was salty liquid," he pointed out, "which means it has a lower freezing point."

Tyson, for all intents and purposes, is the public face of astrophysics. As of this writing he has 4.45 million Twitter followers, a number that increases by about 2,000 every day. On both his podcast StarTalk Radio and his TV series StarTalk, he interviews serious celebrities: Not just those with obvious geek bona fides like original Star Trek castmember George Takei or evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, both of whom have been guests on the podcast, but also Larry Wilmore, Bill Clinton, and Susan Sarandon, all of whom appear in the new season of the television series.

Tyson talks about his fame as if it's an accident. When I asked him how he came to focus on science communication, he explained, "It's not like I wake up in the morning and say, 'How can I communicate today?" throwing his deep voice even deeper with faux self-importance, "No! No, no, no. It's because I get called to do so." At first I thought he meant called, as though he has a calling, a vocation—but no, he meant called on the phone. "If you're going to call me for an interview, or call me to be on the evening news, I'll come, because it's duteous, it's a responsible thing to do as an educator and a scientist. Plus we're in New York City, so I'm local to all the news—I'm an easy date!"

But it's more than location that has turned Tyson into the public ambassador of astrophysics. His combination of cheerfulness and knack for condescension-free explanation helps. He also does voices, and is kind of a ham. But plenty of sixth-grade science teachers have these qualities and don't have their own TV shows. Tyson has also applied a very analytical approach to his media appearances.

"The first time I was ever asked on an interview, I gave my 'best professorial reply,'" he recalled, throwing erudite air quotes around the words with his voice. "I had come from the classroom. And then it came out as a sound-bitten thing, 20 seconds long. I thought, Hmm, I could call them up and complain. Or, the next time, I could hand them sound bites." When media people told him not to worry, he could talk as long as he wanted, and they'd cut to get what they needed, he thought, "No, I'll pre-cut myself." According to Tyson, the ideal sound bite should be "informative. Tasty—like, 'Yeah, I like that,'" he said, making a nibbling sound like he's sampling a particularly good snack. "And maybe make you laugh, and make you a little happier for having learned it."

"I've worked at this!" he exclaimed, and recalled the prep he did before his first appearance on The Daily Show, back in 2007. "I studied how many sentences [Jon Stewart] lets his guests speak before he jumps in with a comedic quip, and I said, "Well, if I have an idea, that's my time limit, because if I only get it out halfway and here comes the quip, I'm stuck dangling there, and now we're laughing at half-information and there's no way to put the pieces back together... So if I want the cleanest interview that still respects his comedic wit, I'm going to parcel it, and I did, and there it goes."

Tyson often talks about what it means to think like a scientist. "Many people just receive the world as it comes to them, whereas the scientist queries the world. That's why, when I see a film, I'm analyzing what I'm seeing at all times." In Forrest Gump, for example, he said he noticed the actor playing Lieutenant Dan shifting his body in a way that betrayed the presence of full legs, even though the actor's legs had been green-screened out below the knee. "They could make his legs disappear visually, but the couldn't cheat the physics."

Tyson no longer conducts his own research, though some of his work at Hayden helps him "keep a foot in the research world." He says he is in a "possibly delusional dream state" that one day he will get to spend all day conducting research, but these days his time is mostly devoted to a combination of media appearances, fundraising, collaborating on educational projects, science talks with colleagues, reviewing others' manuscripts, and working on his own writing—he has published ten books and is working on more. But he misses it. "I miss it entirely," he said. "If I were in complete control of my life that's all I would do, I would never go out to the public or appear in the media, I would just stay in the lab. I derive extreme pleasure from staying in the lab."

"The metaphorical lab," he was quick to correct himself, explaining that astrophysicists can work from anywhere, looking at the data on a computer, which is sent digitally from the telescope (though "we have someone there to make sure it doesn't break"). "There's a little bit of lost romance there," he lamented. "Back in my day, through planes, trains and automobiles, it would be a like a pilgrimage to the mountaintop, and you'd be communing with the cosmos from the mountaintop: you, the telescope, and the universe, alone." His voice went dreamy with vocal hushed awe.

On Motherboard: A Mysterious Piece of Space Junk Is Headed for Earth, and Astronomers Are Stoked

In his own research, Tyson has focused on the births, lives, and deaths of stars. But his interests rove to broader questions: "Is there life elsewhere in the universe? What was around before the Big Bang? Are there multiverses? These are deep, interesting questions that don't happen to be my area of expertise. But I have questions shared by many, because I'm a human being."

Tyson has said on StarTalk that there are only about 7,000 astrophysicists, and since there are seven billion humans on Earth, everyone in the field is "one in a million." When I bring this up during our interview, he quickly corrects me—there are closer to 10,000 astrophysicists, so each one is really more like one in 700,000. But there are only a few that anyone outside the field can name. Meanwhile he introduces himself on StarTalk as "your personal astrophysicist." I wondered whether his high profile made his colleagues envious. "I've thought about it," he said. "And here's an answer that I'm pretty sure is right: When I'm asked to explain someone's result, I say, 'No! Go interview them. Then come back to me, and I'll tie a bow on it, I'll say why it's relevant or why we should care.' So my colleagues see themselves, and then I come after that, and all boats are lifted. So I think the respect I receive has been preserved because of this effort." It makes sense—probably not too many people go into astrophysics looking for fame.

When one of the publicists mentioned we had 30 seconds left and asked for any final short questions, I asked Tyson why space exploration matters. "In 30 seconds? You're calling me out!" he replied, having just described his philosophy of sound bites. But he was up for the challenge. "Bring it on," he said, wagging his fingers, and delivered this: "Right now, four-tenths of a penny of every tax dollar you spend goes to NASA. That pays for the space station, astronauts, all the NASA centers—activities that discover our place in the cosmos. And so I ask you this," he said, dropping his voice to sci-fi-movie voice-over low: "How much is the universe worth... to you?" The publicists and I applauded, and Tyson let out a James Brown-style howl, whirling an arm and kicking up his legs, pantomiming—and really seeming to feel—like a rock star.

Follow Rachel on Twitter.

StarTalk airs on Sundays at 11 PM ET/10 CT on National Geographic.

Photo via John Kobal Foundation/Getty Images

If you're of a certain age—say, over 30—and grew up in the States, you've at some time encountered those TV programs that feature vintage horror movies. You know the gist: There'd be a horror host clad in cape and Kabuki make-up who'd present a B-movie monstrosity, or maybe a Hammer gore-fest slathered in color, or perhaps an offering from the classical Universal black-and-white canon.

One of my most soul-drenching early memories involved walking in on the scene in 1931's Dracula when monster hunter Van Helsing, peering over the outstretched neck of a female corpse, identifies two tiny pin-pricks. This was akin to voyeurism for a kid, looking in on a world that was so off-kilter, a world that you weren't supposed to see.

Much as I loved Dracula, I knew, even at an early age when I first saw it, that there was no horror film like James Whale's Frankenstein, from that same year of 1931. Whale was far more artful of a director than Dracula's Tod Browning, and Boris Karloff's performance as the monster was why everyone would go on to conflate scientist and creation. So it was with even more amped-up excitement that, a year or so later, I first viewed Whale's follow-up, Bride of Frankenstein, on Creature Double Feature, my local horror host program.

For starters, Bride of Frankenstein, which is now marking the 80th anniversary of its release, was funny, and yet scarier still. That unnerved me. The film opens with Elsa Lanchester's Mary Shelley saying, to a recumbent Lord Byron and her husband, that she's not quite done with the whole monster deal after all—there's more to tell. Everyone rolls their R's with great overemphasis in this reimagining of one of literature's greatest nights, a sleepover party on Lake Geneva that led to a writing contest that birthed both the Dracula—with Byron and his physician, John Polidori, handling vampire duties—and Frankenstein archetypes.

Whale didn't want to return for Bride. Karloff, in keeping with that theme, also didn't wish to come back if the Monster was going to talk. Never mind that in Mary Shelley's novel, the Monster is the very picture of loquacity, equal parts Proust, with his love of talking in periodic sentences, and Silicon Valley's Erlich Bachman, for his attendant bullshitting. All this only makes it more unlikely that Bride is that one horror film that can stand blow to blow with American cinematic heavies like The Searchers, Vertigo, and The General.

Colin Clive, who is wonderful, reprises his Frankenstein role as Dr. Henry Frankenstein (it's Victor in the book, but, ah, screw it; the Bride novelization, which adds a goodly amount of backstory, retains Henry). Clive hated horror films, too. And it's that attitude that is apt in conveying distaste in doing what he's put upon, in character, of course, to do. Which is to say, give the monster what he wants: a mate, similarly made of dead tissue.

VICE Talks Film: Talking to the Directors of the Austrian Horror Film 'Goodnight Mommy':

Paul Morrissey's 1973 Flesh for Frankenstein would take the idea to its visual conclusion, after stating its infamous line about how if one is to know death, one must fuck life in the gallbladder (which is even acted out). But this unhinged dead versus living setup of Bride works because of Ernest Thesiger and his necrophiliac pederast Dr. Pretorius.

Dr. Pretorius is easily one of 1930s cinema's most shocking characters, which is no small accomplishment. Back then, censorship was inconsistent and dodgy, but it was a good time to be an envelope-pusher if you were clever enough. Thesiger did a variant on the Petrorius role in 1951's Scrooge as a zealous undertaker. But in Bride, he is the film's warped conscience, its motor, the tempter of both the Monster and Henry. He's a man so at ease with his plans that in a world of stranglings and attempted crucifixions and marauding villagers and stitched-together hunks of human flesh, he might as well be settling in for an evening of Downton Abbey viewing.

He has some homunculi in jars, and if the sex wasn't overt enough, there's a libidinous little king who is constantly trying to mount the other little beings that Pretorius keeps in these bloated test tubes. Henry, who you'd think had seen it all, is repulsed, but Pretorius has a way of saying, basically, "Come on man, calm thyself. We all know what we're doing here."

Not a lot of films make you feel all-in. But Bride does. The more it goes along, the more the comedy gives way to the twisted, and what Karloff, not being a fan of the term "horror," would describe as outright terror. It's very Shakespearean, really, with the porter going to answer the knock at the gate while joking about having to relieve himself, before the laughs chill, and the spirits sweep in.

On Broadly: In a New Horror Movie, Helen Keller Is a Zombie-Fighting Sex Goddess

In what may be the most outrageous scene in a film full of them, Pretorius meets, and has a kind of business meeting with the Monster in a crypt, where he is hanging out, drinking, and getting himself bombed. The ghost-story writer M. R. James was a master at suggesting the olfactory unpleasantness of the tomb, conjuring the very specific odor of damp earth mingled with limestone. It's that that Jamesian smell that permeates this scene and the rest of the film.

The laughter is over at this point. Elsa Lanchester, stripped of her Mary Shelley garb, now makes her return in the laboratory as the brought-to-life, shock-haired Bride, a doozy of a dual-role. We've had our comedy, we've seen how it can feed into terror, and now we move from external terror to a terror of a different kind: the ones that affect the heart. For the Monster's would-be Bride wants nothing to do with him, and Lanchester—who took her inspiration from a pissed-off cat—hisses her complete repulsion, as though the Monster is not even worth a garbled sentence or two.

The Monster then refuses to even try to argue, essentially telling his creator to get the hell out of Dodge before he blows everyone up—himself, the Bride, and Pretorius. The knock on the film—such as there is one—is that after being so desperately insistent on finding something even a reanimated corpse could call love, the Monster makes his deathly decision in an instant. Which is to say, his actions give voice to the feelings so many of us have had, that emotional explosion from which it feels there is no return. The unpredictable nature of the human heart is, sometimes, the scariest thing of all.

Colin Fleming's fiction appears in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Boulevard, and Black Clock, and he also writes for the Atlantic, Rolling Stone, and the Boston Globe. His newest book, The Anglerfish Comedy Troupe: Stories from the Abyss, is out from Dzanc, and he's also a regular contributor to NPR's Weekend Edition.

We've all contemplated what we would do if we were cornered by the police while committing a crime: run for it, blow our brains out, hang our head and submit quietly. On Monday morning, outside a Chase branch in downtown Los Angeles, a suspected bank robber appears have taken a different route altogether: the one where you go full Jordan Belfort, and toss the spoils of your crime, read: money, all around in your last precious moments of freedom.

Not surprisingly, the robber doesn't look very jolly letting all that paper float into the street. Most people who engage in this grandiose behavior do so when they've just come into the windfall of a lifetime, and money no longer means anything to them. Instead, the robber looks kind of mad at the money.

According to local news station KTLA, there was a film set nearby, so onlookers thought the whole thing was a scene coming soon to a theater near you.

But then, as LAPD spokesman Drake Madison told KTLA, "officers arrived and met with that suspect outside of the location, and less-than-lethal force was used to take him into custody." By less-than-lethal force, he means a beanbag gun.

A bomb squad arrived shortly afterward to examine the suspect's money suitcase, as he had reportedly claimed to have a bomb, and, according to ABC News, had demanded the weirdly specific sum of $250,000. Why name a specific number if you're just planning to throw the money all over the sidewalk?

ABC had a news chopper in the air at the time, which gives us another angle from which to view the start of this guy's career as a folk hero.

After the incident, the suspect was reportedly taken to the hospital with unknown injuries.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

It's 1868, I am in the shadow of St. Paul's Cathedral and a woman named Bloody Nora has just challenged me to a full-blown gang war. That meaty challenge, from my improbably-named opponent, is the culmination of my actions as twin assassins Evie and Jacob Frye in one of the side missions in the just-released Assassin's Creed Syndicate. (Colon, or no colon? You decide.) A little earlier I freed some children from forced labor, and in the process bumped off the foreman of the dingy factory in question with a swift slash to the throat. (And, at the risk of sounding like I'm on day release from a mental institution, I will say that it was particularly satisfying.) I have done a bit of bounty hunting, chucking an informant into the back of a carriage and delivering him to be taken God knows where. I have flown across London on a zip-line, like a Victorian Spider-Man. And now, I need to dispatch a woman named Nora.

So here I am, and Nora has blocked the streets with her gang. Around me, members of my own gang, the Rooks, jeer and wave their guns. I lob a Voltaic bomb and stun the ten rival Blighters—yes, they like picturesque names in this game—that have surrounded me, their red coats soon to be soaked by their own crimson. I hammer square and quickly cut down the two nearest to me with a concealed blade. As they come, thick and fast, I counter their blows with perfectly timed presses of circle. Sometimes they put up their arms and block my attacks, but I break their defense with a head butt worthy of a pissed-up football hooligan stereotype. After, when Nora has fallen, my twin sister and I clamber on top of a carriage and call on the Blighters to join the Rooks. With applause and cheers ringing out, I have taken the City of London.

The latest entry in Ubisoft's historical murder simulator series is a definite contender for the best installment so far, for me. And yet it has polarized critical opinion like a Christmas game of Monopoly. It might not have the charm that the pirate-themed Black Flag of 2013 possessed, but its mechanics have changed, which might hint that this heavyweight IP is slowly course-correcting after last year's dismal, French Revolution-set Unity (which, to not put too fine a point on it, was really shit). Now, you can zip-line across rooftops rather than laboriously leaping from one set of slippery tiles to the next. You can drive a horse-drawn carriage, really fast, right through a gaggle of pedestrians, if you like. Character faces no longer fall off randomly as they did in Unity, which is nice (albeit not quite so amusing).

For most of the game you play as one of two protagonists: Jacob or Evie Frye, assassin twins who come to London on a stolen train, which they proceed to use as a mobile hideout for their growing gang. The Templars, the Assassin brotherhood's nemesis, have London in a headlock. Crawford Starrick, a typical Ubisoft villain, controls the city. Over the course of eight sequences lasting approximately 15 hours, the player assassinates various lieutenants in order to get closer to the kingpin himself. At the same time, through refreshing side missions, the Fryes take over London's organized crime world, crushing areas controlled by the Blighters in an attempt to gather an army to free the capital.

The story is heavily centered on the politics and personalities of Victorian London. Players escort Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli's wife, and the corgi in her handbag, to visit the Devil's Acre slum, and you get to go ghost hunting with Charles Dickens. Florence Nightingale requires your help and Alexander Graham Bell supplies you with upgrades. Oddly these don't seem overwhelmingly out of place in this fictionalized vision of Victorian London—perhaps because Doctor Who's time-hopping adventures have often ended up there, familiarizing sci-fi fans with such sights. Either way, it's pretty cool.

While the main missions involve particularly ingenious assassinations—mostly fulfilled as Jacob, unfortunately, as playing as Evie is probably more fun—optional activities bulk out the game's content. Which isn't to say the plot-following core objectives are in any way dull—they've often got more potential paths to take than a jellyfish does tentacles. For example, an early mission sees you infiltrating Lambeth Asylum in order to assassinate John Elliotson, the man behind a drug that Starrick has Londoners hooked on (and, in real life, a medical practitioner who did indeed die in 1868). One option is to find a nurse to unlock all the Asylum doors; another sees you lying on the cadaver's slab to be hoisted up to the surgical theater, where you then can assassinate Elliotson in a particularly gory cut scene.

Syndicate's theater is London, and the city has never been so beautifully realized.

It's in moments like this that I feel like I'm actually hell-bent on unpicking Starrick's regime, piece by piece. And, like Black Flag's pirate-based fun, the flexibility of the game's central structure is the best part of Syndicate.

The twins are arrogant and bicker as much as I used to with my brother—that is, pretty much all the time—and playfully fight and tease one another throughout the game's story. Jacob is focused on knocking Starrick off his perch, but Evie is intent on investigating the location of another Piece of Eden—a McGuffin core to Assassin's Creed lore. (Every now and then there are modern-day cut-scenes, but the contemporary component of Creed's past has definitely been moved to the backburner.) The two characters play differently, with Jacob more of a muscular brawler and Evie being cobra-like, launching swift attacks that suddenly leave three men sliced and diced at her feet. Players gain experience points by completing missions and can use these, along with crafting resources, to upgrade their gear, unlock improved weapons, and provide new skills to their ever-growing gang.

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Syndicate's theater is London, and the city has never been so beautifully realized. The level of detail is astounding. The city is alive here—living, breathing, and wheezing in the Victorian gloom. It took a whole studio, Ubisoft Singapore, to design only the Thames, which is bustling with ships that you can scale, parkour between and, pleasingly, sabotage the cargo of. The train stations are populated with guards and passengers as steam-belching behemoths come and go. Homeless people gather around cans in alleyways, burning rubbish. Gangs meet beneath the railways arches to plot.

There was one moment when I accidentally left the game playing with my character standing by a street-hawker wearing a sandwich board, flogging polish. He waved his giant bell: "Come see the latest sales and deals," he crooned. "Come 'ave a look, I'm 'ere for your benefit." After a while he paused, putting his hand on his back—strained by the weight of the board. "You've got a job to do," he said to himself. "Come on." It's a small thing, but it's an amazing piece of detail.

But no, the game's not perfect.

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Combat's improved compared to the previous games, but it's still clunky and there's some noticeable slow-down when too many enemies fill the screen. Evie and Jacob get snagged on bits of scenery, seemingly at random, while scaling buildings. Enemy and ally AI isn't always entirely realistic. But these are issues that I can mentally gloss over. To me, there's joy enough to be had here that the quirks and glitches can be mostly forgotten. The side missions are great fun, the main campaign is fulfilling and the atmosphere is never less than completely impressive.

Assassin's Creed games have always felt overstuffed for my liking. But Syndicate strips away a lot of the driftwood that choked previous titles. Unlike Unity, which used an app on your phone to lock off some content in the form of chests, the whole of London is here for you to unlock without any second-screen gadgets. And the recycled missions here are surprisingly fun: I've booted up my game exclusively to free some kids from a wicked foreman, like it's a new hobby. What amounts essentially to copy-and-paste liberation missions within the context of Victorian London are a lot more interesting than they've any right to be.

With that, and so much more, Syndicate is a success. Ubisoft, you've converted me.

Assassin's Creed: Syndicate is out now for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, with a PC version expected in November. The game was tested on PS4, with a copy provided by the game's PR.

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The closest thing in real life to the deadly labyrinth of King Minos—or, if you prefer, the one from the movie Labyrinth—is a network of tunnels under the city of Odessa, Ukraine. They're the backdrop for the tragic tale of Masha, an innocent partygoer who ventured down into the depths with some friends, took a wrong turn or two, and got lost forever.

But despite being passed around the internet as fact, there is little documentation to support the legend of Masha. Like most information about these catacombs, only Ukrainian cave explorers even claim to know the details.

According to the 2009 forum post on Urban Explorer's Resource (UER) by a catacombs explorer named Eugene Lata, who brought Masha's story to the English-speaking world, the tale begins late on New Year's Day (or possibly New Year's Eve) in 2005. It was a foggy night with temperatures hovering around freezing. Masha went out with a large group of friends to celebrate and probably get drunk. It's not known if they were former students of Odessa's School Number 56, but according to references to the story in Russian news, that's where they found the entrance to the mines.

Clearly, this was a bad idea. The only Ukrainians who have any official business down there are workers in active mines who still dig for limestone. However, that hasn't stopped many people from making the same trip Masha apparently made. There are stories of industrious winemakers and mushroom growers who go down there regularly to leave their product to age or grow, confident no one will find it and interfere.

We don't know for sure what Masha was looking for when she went into the catacombs with her friends. They could have been looking for treasures that night, considering there are rumors that somewhere below School 56 there's a solid gold replica of the Titanic a few inches long. Or maybe they were looking for bodies. There is a rumor that the catacombs contain the stacked corpses of murdered Jews from World War II. There's also evidence that they were used for the summary executions of Nazi soldiers.

All photos by Wikimedia Commons user Полищук Денис Анатольевич

The catacombs are not easy to navigate, especially when you're drunk like Masha might have been that night. By some estimates, they span 1,550 miles, making the network a little longer than the whole Pacific coastline of the continuous United States. The next-largest network of catacombs is in Paris, and that's only one-fifth the length of Odessa's.

They're not the safest places to be either. Some sections regularly flood with groundwater, others have ceilings precariously propped up with ad-hoc support beams, or they've had their ventilation systems completely dismantled. They're also a pretty good place to stage a murder. Last month, a guy in his 20s was sentenced for reportedly murdering his teenage girlfriend in the catacombs with an ax. In 2011, a male murder victim was found by chance in the catacombs after he had been dead for three to six months.

But being murdered and having your body dumped in the catacombs is a vacation compared to what is rumored to have happened to Masha.

The teens are said to have stayed down there all night. In the morning, they braved the morning cold to get back to hearth and home. But in their foggy states, they absentmindedly—or maliciously—left Masha in the catacombs.

If she'd wandered into isolation, maybe to find a secluded spot to relieve herself, it's easy to imagine she was beyond screaming distance. Maybe her path forked a few times, and she lost track of the pattern. It's not unlikely that she drunkenly forgot to leave a trail of breadcrumbs.

If the area near School 56 had no groundwater—or clandestine wine or mushrooms—there would have been nothing for her to eat or drink. There also would have been nowhere to stay warm, since that area is also not deep enough for it to have been much warmer than the chilly surface weather that night.

It would have been utterly black. But even with a light and a map of the catacombs, it would have been hard for someone ill-prepared to make it out, because the maps that exist are a maddening, brain-like scrawl. Assuming Masha brought a battery-powered flashlight or lantern down into the depths, it would have died after a few hours, making it harder to continue the search for warmth and water.

If she was lucky, she died quickly from the cold. If it was too warm to freeze, and she was exerting herself trying to survive, dehydration would have become severe in perhaps only two days before the symptoms became debilitating. She would have gotten delirious, convulsed, and slipped irreversibly into a coma around the third day, not that she would have noticed the days passing. She couldn't have lasted more than a week.

"During the time she was inside, her 'friends' didn't try to take her body out," Lata wrote, guessing that they were "frightened."

About four months after New Years in April of 2005, word spread among cave explorers that there was a fresh body down there, Lata wrote in a his UER post in 2009. The most famous photo—one that Lata told VICE in an email that he was involved in taking—shows three blank-faced boys who look like they're in their early teens, posing like they've just stumbled upon the body in a narrow, curved section of the cavern. In the photo, Masha is unidentifiable beyond simply being a human. She lies on her left side, legs curled like she's sleeping, while the upper half of her decomposing body has lost its form altogether, and has begun to turn indistinguishable from the cavern's yellow limestone floor.

Two years passed, and no one retrieved the body, Lata claims. He recalls that a piece of writing by a friend he says is a "famous journalist" was delivered to government officials. It's not clear what the journalist wrote, but Lata claims the government got moving and removed the body less than 24 hours later.

Kostya Pugovkin, who identified himself as a veteran of Ukraine's Antiterrorist Operation based in Odessa, claims to be the one who personally hefted the body in that photograph out of the depths. His recollection is different from Lata's.

According to Pugovkin, someone else had vanished in 2004: Janis Stendzenieks, the son of a newspaper magnate named Armand Stendzenieks. Pugovkin told us the elder Stendzenieks was offering a reward to anyone who could find his son, and some people he called "diggers"—manual laborers—had tipped off the authorities about a body two to three miles from an entrance to the catacombs.

With his heart set on a possible reward, Pugovkin says he crawled into the depths and eventually stumbled upon what he called "bone soup." The rest of the process wasn't exactly CSI: Odessa. "I wrapped it in a bedsheet, and dragged it back," he told VICE through a translator. "It was hard to get to the top of the shaft—it was like nine floors, tiers with skinny ladders between them."

He told us he then dragged the body to the police medical examiner's office, about five miles from the entrance Masha would have used. But he claims that when Armand Stendzenieks ordered a DNA test, it wasn't a match. The mystery person was of no value at all, Pugovkin says. "The diggers determined it was a Satanist who got lost."

"They say it was a girl," he adds.

But according to the official Odessa Catacombs website, the whole story of Masha is a lie. "Besides the original photographer," a post says, "there isn't one person, civilian or law enforcement, that can confirm the story. We believe it is just a practical joke and the corpse is fake." It would be a strange, unfunnny practical joke.

Lata says he was there when that photo was taken, but he can't retrace the photo to its origin. "There were four of us on the day when these pics were taken," he wrote, "and I really don't know where I can find these guys nowadays." Oddly, Lata told us the person responsible for the official Catacombs website—and the one calling him a liar—is "one of the most experienced Odessa catacombs explorers and my best friend." Since the organization is in charge of fielding inquiries about the Catacombs it "probably prefers to stay out of this business, just as I do," Lata theorized.

Version of this photo sourced directly from Eugene Lata

So it's a photo of a body that will—it seems—never be positively identified, and it immortalizes the last moment of someone's life. Whether that person is an innocent partygoer, a Satanist, or a Ukrainian drunk who took a few steps too many into the darkness, it sends imaginations soaring because it conjures the exact kind of nightmarish, lonely death everyone fears the most. The photo proves that Hell is a real place, and it's about nine stories beneath Odessa.

Even after the "Masha," episode, Lata continued to explore the catacombs. His descriptions of his journeys into the dark were tantalizing tales of adventure. In a post from 2010, he claimed that he used to take trips that lasted over a week, and that he'd fill his "catacombs bag" with food, camping equipment, diving gear, and mapmaking tools to prepare for long trips.

By 2012, he had begun to sound less like the internet's ambassador to the catacombs. In his last post, he wrote that the place was pretty much charted, and claimed that there's not much left to explore. Then he added that a young boy had just been lost in an accident, and his body was still missing. Also, he wrote, "five explorers lost or died during this year."

"That's why I really beg you not to try to walk underground in Odessa itself. It can be really dangerous," he wrote, adding "here are some new pictures of our catacombs. Enjoy."

Jules Suzdaltsev contributed reporting to this piece.

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Photo via Flickr user Stuart Conner

Tim Lee's sex addiction clinic is inside one of those nondescript beige buildings right outside Penn Station. If you've ever been in New York, you've probably walked right by it without a second look; I've used the bathrooms in both the restaurant and the hotel lobby in the building's first floor and never would have guessed that a few staircases above me, people were pouring out their hearts and darkest secrets. Lee's clinic is called New York Pathways, an intensive outpatient facility where people seek treatment for compulsive masturbation, sex addiction, serial monogamy, and escort use, among other things.

Even as admitting to being an addict has become more socially acceptable over the years, sex addicts are still stigmatized, even mocked. Even though people eat up programming like Californication and fawn over Shame, both of which featured sex-addicted protagonists, the idea of someone actually suffering from sex addiction is preposterous to many people. For a sizable portion of the public, when they hear about high-profile celebrity sexhounds like Tiger Woods their reaction might be summed up by an incredulous headline on an Australian news site: "Is sex addiction really an excuse to cheat?" Marty Klein, a sex therapist and writer who is perhaps the term's biggest opponent, wrote a 2012 takedown that what we refer to as sex addiction is "a special weapon now used by the religious right to combat perceived liberalism, to ignore science, and to ignite fear."

I didn't know very much about so-called sex addiction or how that kind of compulsion is treated, so I popped by Pathways to speak with Lee, who has a master's in social work, a mousy appearance, and a pretty good sense of humor about his business. Besides sharing with me his own tale of bad behavior, he insisted that sexual addiction was not only real, but becoming more prevalent.

"I've been a therapist for ten years," he told me. "I'll tell you what—the apps and the internet has really brought people down to depths they never thought they would go."

Here's the rest of our interview:

VICE: We're here to talk about sex addiction, but I'm not even sure that it's a real thing. Can you clear that up before we begin?
Tim Lee: So, first of all, the term sex addiction kinda sucks. I like it because it brings me business. I can put "sex addiction" on my website, and people will google it because that's the keyword that's out there. But medically speaking, no, it's not a thing. Sex addiction is a term used to define a specific type of treatment. The term "addict" is a stereotype. Also, you can do better than that. Everyone asks that question. I think it's really corny.

OK, so if it's not technically addicts who come in here, who does?
We treat about 100 people a week here—there's probably two or three guys here who were arrested for putting mirrors on their shoes to look up women's skirts and charged with unlawful surveillance, which carries a felony and a ranking on the sex offender registry.

There are also people who are traumatized—usually sexually—and then they recreate the behavior in a certain way. For example, there's a guy I worked whose thing was taking pictures of people performing oral sex on him and posting them online. I started talking to him, and I asked him if there was any abuse in his background. He said no. I asked him about the first time he masturbated. He thought about it for a second ago goes, "Oh, I remember. My father gave me a picture of mom performing oral sex on him and told me to go masturbate." And for the fucking life of him, he couldn't connect the two.

What people who go out and have sex with five different people a week? If that doesn't bother the person, and they're not hurting anyone else, is that necessarily problematic behavior that requires therapy?
OK, so, not necessarily. But what if this person says, "I had a couple drinks, and I didn't use a condom. Not going to do that again." But they go out again, have a couple drinks, don't have any condoms, and say, "Fuck it." Then they contract an STD. Then there's the emotional consequence of shame. Versus the person who's on there swiping and hooks up and feels fine about what's going on.

So, it's fine until you get an STD?
Or you say, "Shit, I wanna settle down. And I can't settle down doing this." There's always a person who meets great person, but then wants to meet another great person. They think they have two, but they have none. That's a classic set up. The consequence there is that they'll never have a relationship and they aren't trying to work through the anxiety and the intimacy issues. They don't wanna stay with one person because it kicks up too many grief issues of one of his parents who died as kid. So it get a little tricky.

Can you give an example of someone who's young and not married who might require treatment at a place like Pathways?
Well I can tell you, I had a client in here yesterday and we were going over his sexual history, and the guy's doing great. He's finally found a long-term committed girlfriend, and he's anxious as shit about the whole thing. We're going over it, and he's in his 20s, and there was this woman he hooked up with in graduate school.

They had this arrangement where she would come over, they would cook a great meal, they would have sex, and she would leave. And they had a rule that the first time anyone said, "I love you," it's over. So this went on for about a year. And he said they were having sex two or three times a day. And she called and said, "I love you." They break up, and he starts having panic attacks. So they get back together, and he was probably going through a dopamine withdrawal, and so he reported a lot of depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts. They had a tumultuous, shitty thing together. But it was all based on sex.

But what was the consequence there?
The anxiety and depression that came after they ended it.

But with any dissolution of a relationship, there's going to be anxiety and depression.
For him, it was the whole addictive nature of the relationship. He didn't really respect her, love her. Also, his previous girlfriend, they were not having any sex, and he would just smoke pot and masturbate to pornography. And then she would go to bed, and she could only have sex in one position, and she had a sexual abuse history. They had no sex life, or when they did, it couldn't be spontaneous. That relationship ended and he got right into this thing, which was destructive.

When someone comes in to be treated for compulsive sexual behavior, what's the goal? Never jerking off? Is it like AA or NA where you simply are not allowed to do the thing that gets you off, in this case quite literally?
In AA abstinence is easy to define—you don't drink. Same thing with NA—you don't use. With sex therapy, there are five different programs based on how you define sobriety. In SA, which is the most rigid, they define sobriety as no masturbation and no sex outside of a marriage, and marriage can only be between a man and a woman. It's pretty intense. It serves its purpose for the Hasidic Jewish guy, for instance. Or the devout Catholic guy.

SRA broke off from SA. Their bottom line is no masturbation and no sex outside of a committed relationship. Then you go more down the pike and there's programs like SAA and SLAA where you define what your behaviors are that you wanna abstain from with the help of a sponsor. But to answer your question, a lot of them have what are called bottom-line behaviors, which are like masturbation, pornography, one-night stands, commercial sex, massage parlors, going on the apps.

I would think if you were having unprotected sex all the time and seeking refuge in these programs, they would want to like, encourage masturbation.
There are also two types of guys—those in relationships who can't stop cheating, and the type of guy who's addicted to the internet and masturbation and has no relationship history. For those guys it's about getting into a stable relationship, which they set as a goal. There's very few of those guys who prefer to masturbate to porn. They wanna be committed but they're hooked on this thing called the internet.

Think of the different programs like they're like political parties. For instance, SCA is predominately gay men, and in that one they have a sex plan. It might be going to bathhouses and having sex, but it has to be protected, and I can only do it once a week. It's a harm-reduction type model.

Is it possible to have too much sex? Like, if you drank an entire bottle of vodka every day, everyone would think you had a serious problem. But if you have sex every day, no one would think you had a problem, right?
If I had sex every day I would feel kind of groggy and foggy and not really up to my game. But maybe once or twice a week? A balance, right? Or if I'm stressed out and I wanna have sex with my wife just to get off, I kind of feel like shit afterwards. I feel selfish. So people are different, and it's very self-defined. I'm in recovery myself, and I used to go to SLAA. You define with a sponsor what your bottom lines are.

Can you talk a little bit about your personal experience with addiction?
I was having sex with folks, and I didn't really want to be in a committed relationship with them because they were either married, or they were just not people i would want my friends to see me hanging out with. So I liked SRA, because the no sex outside of a mutually committed relationship bit cut out a lot of monkey business for me. And they really pushed the 90-day assistance period of no sex or masturbation or nothing. I went a year. The clarity I felt—I was able to process a lot of past issues around mom and dad and trauma issues and grief and loss. This is my third career. I've wrecked two others by acting out.

How can a sex addiction ruin your career? Were you leaving the office to have sex with prostitutes?
I moved here from Georgia and was gonna make it here. I went to Hunter College and busted my ass in the theater department and started doing well. I became a light designer. The more success I had, the more anxiety I had. It got to a certain level where I just couldn't show up. Meanwhile I was involved with someone who was just as crazy as I was. We were having sex two or three times a day. I was having one-night-stands. I couldn't focus. I stopped showing up. There was a distinct point at which I messed up a really good opportunity. She thought I should have been a lawyer, and I had an opportunity to work with a Tony Award-winning designer when I was 22. That's a pretty big fucking opportunity. I didn't show up.

Because you were too busy having sex? I still don't follow.
I was influenced by her saying, "No, theater isn't a good thing for you. I really wanna be with a lawyer." She would tell me shit like that, but in my sex-addict mind, the sex was better than me standing up for myself and saying, "You're crazy." If I had to do it all over again, I might have had sex with her a few times and realized, "Holy shit, this is a toxic thing." But I put my relationship first and then it tanked. Then I became a graphic artist, and the same thing happened with somebody else.

So what's your ultimate goal with people who come in here? Is it getting them into a marriage? Or is that beyond hope for some of them?
A lot of people I work with are very stressed out from living a double life. They waste a lot of money and time. There's a lot of emotional consequences because of missed time with their kids. Lot of remorse around that. They have a whole new life. Not all, but many clients feel like, "What was I thinking?" In fact, I had a client the other day tell me it was his two-year anniversary after he had been discovered. He said he and his wife didn't want to celebrate it, but they did look back and memorialize how rich his life was because they weren't having any sex, and now they're intimate. He was afraid to have sex with his wife, and now they have a kid. He has a better job, too.

That's the other thing—a lot of folks live mediocre lives because they're so caught up in their addiction. It just varies from person to person to person. I would say that, more than anything, it's about saving someone's sanity.

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