Quantcast
Channel: VICE CA
Viewing all 38002 articles
Browse latest View live

Comics: The Patio Is Under Siege in Today's 'Ruby' Comic


Why 2015 Was Another Good Year to Be a Geek

0
0

Photo by Michael Marcelle for VICE

Last year I took a look at all the reasons it was good to be a geek in 2014, and I'm back at it this year with massive video games, a TV cult classic's return, kickass superheroines, and more. Isn't it a classic nerd cliche that we geeks like to waste our time with toys and ephemera? Well, fine, I'll buy into it: Here's a year's worth of cool, geeky stuff that occupied, distracted, and delighted me during the planet's latest trip around the sun.

MAGIC: THE GATHERING, COMMANDER 2015

Magic: The Gathering is a collectible card game where you cast spells, fight monsters, and try to destroy your opponent before they destroy you. It's often looked on as an intense, competitive, complicated card game... but it doesn't have to be so complex. Sure, you can slug it out in tournaments and spend a small fortune on ultra-rare cards, but there's a more casual way to play the game, too. It's called Commander, and the variant is meant to for people who don't want to dive straight into a card game that can be intimidating for newcomers. This year's release of Commander 2015 introduced new cards and pre-built Magic decks to ease people into the casual side of the game better than ever before.

EVERYTHING STAR WARS

"Yeah, no shit, Giaco." When I wrote this, The Force Awakens hasn't come out yet. But hopes are so... damn... high....

Whether or not the movie lives up to the hype, it's been a damn good year for geeky Star Wars stuff. Say what you will about new Battlefront video game (the VICE Gaming review wasn't too positive) it's got all the right visuals and sounds. Gaming company Fantasy Flight has the market cornered on good SW tabletop games, releasing the intense Imperial Assault board game in the last few days of 2014 and the Force and Destiny roleplaying game this year. There's never been a better time to roll dice and pretend you're a Jedi.

MEGA-LONG VIDEO GAMES

When I sit down to play a video game, I want to know I'm sitting down to a 60-hour-plus investment. I don't want a quick run-and-gun game I can breeze right through, I'm looking for an in-depth, story-heavy, interactive experience that knocks me back in my chair. Luckily, this year's been so jam-packed with long-ass video games I haven't had much time to do anything else. Hideo Kojima's time-sinker Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain had my character creeping around Afghanistan for hours. The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt brought heavy, heavy story to a game about killing monsters. And my favorite of the year, Fallout 4, engrossed me in its post-apocalyptic retro futurism to the point that I'm playing again so that I can make different decisions. If you're setting an alarm at 6 AM so you can creep out of bed and play a video game while your partner's still asleep... well, either you have a serious problem or it's a seriously good game. For an exhaustive list of all the good games that came out this year, check out VICE Gaming's rundown of the 20 best.

'Mad Max: Fury Road'

Even though Avengers 2 and Jurassic World didn't really do it for me, the year wasn't a complete waste for geeky movies. Mad Max: Fury Road came out swinging, starring Charlize Theron as the impossibly badass Imperator Furiosa. With some pretty progressive gender politics for a big-budget car smasher, Fury Road went above and beyond what's expected of a geeky action flick.

For more on the movie, you can check out VICE's interview with the director here.

'Mystery Science Theater 3000' Returns!

It's been over 16 years since Mystery Science Theater 3000 was on the air, but that didn't keep a fervent fan base from demanding more. The show, in case you don't know, featured a hapless human host and his robot sidekicks as they were forced to watch cheesy movies. Known for its classic silhouette at the bottom of the films, MST3K was a certified nerd classic. Now the show's original creator Joel Hodgson is bringing it back, thanks to a Kickstarter campaign that raised an incredible $5.7 million (and $600,000 from outside Kickstarter).

I used to trade old VHS tapes of this show in the mail, back when the internet was a laborious and terrible thing, and I've been a diehard MST3K fan ever since. So clearly, I'm freaking out over the prospect of 14 new episodes.

Marvel Relaunch

I wrote earlier this year about what Marvel's push for diversity among their superheroes could mean for the comic book world. But social progress aside, were the comics any good? Hell yes! From the devastatingly charming Unbeatable Squirrel Girl to the powerful, emotionally realized A-Force ladies, Marvel's making good on a lot of their promises from earlier in the year. Want to read a good Marvel comic? Just pick up an issue that doesn't feature a character you've recently seen on the big screen.

'Signal to Noise' by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Set in Mexico City in 1988, this novel follows the life of Meche, an awkward teen who learns she can cast spells. She and her friends stumble through adolescence, and then the book jumps 20 years into the future, when an adult Meche returns to Mexico City to piece together what went wrong in her youth. This book tows that wonderful line between nerdy and hip, balancing good music, cool magic, and fumbling teenagers.

'Jessica Jones' and 'Supergirl'

Two of the best additions to comic-inspired television came out this fall, each giving the angsty The Flash and the routine Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. a run for their money. Jessica Jones, which was released on Netflix, follows the titular hero as she attempts to solve crimes in Hell's Kitchen. The show takes a hard look at abuse and gives viewers a startlingly realistic portrait of a flawed superhero. Supergirl, on the other hand, is a bright, cheerful, girl-power-centric CBS action series starring Superman's cousin. Both different, both great, both filling a gap in superhero TV.

'Steve Jobs'

My favorite movie of the year was essentially a three-act play starring Michael Fassbender as an asshole. The cast, especially Kate Winslet and Michael Stuhlbarg, crash through this movie, barely keeping it on the rails. And the script by Aaron Sorkin was tight and frantic at the same time. I wasn't expecting to be moved by movie about Steve Jobs as he launched three major products over the span of his career, but here I am. It didn't make much at the box office, but I think it'll be one of those films that stays with us for a long time.

Board Games Galore

I'm finishing off this list of great geeky 2015 arrivals with a total cheat. I couldn't pick just one board game to showcase as the best because there have been tons of them. From the "mafia"-style party game One Night Ultimate Werewolf Daybreak (what a name, huh?), to the resource-management title Gold West, from the massive, strategic, horrifying, stressful-in-a-good-way $400 Kingdom Death: Monster, to the mythic greek set collection game Elysium, it's been a damn good year for board games. And that made 2015 a damn good year.

Follow Giaco on Twitter

This White Dude Was a Boss in the Chinese Mafia

0
0

Images courtesy of John Willis and BenBella Books

They called him "Bac Guai," or as the FBI translated it, White Devil. He was a kid who grew up in Dorchester, a hardscrabble Boston suburb, and played hockey like the other Irish Americans denizens and blue-collar workers who dominated the Charlestown and Southie locales. Boston is a town steeped in deep-rooted traditions, proud of its colonial history, sports teams, and even its crime legacy. But the man born John Willis, the "White Devil" who would become a crime boss for a sect of the Chinese Mafia, ended up loyal to a group of people far different from the Boston natives he grew up with.

Willis's father left by the time he was two and his mother passed just after he turned 15. He had some relatives around town, but they didn't take in the teenage orphan. Like any kid feeling hurt and alone, Willis looked for acceptance. When he didn't find it from his own people, he gravitated towards a community that did. Surprisingly enough, that group was a Chinese gang called Ping On.

From the mid-80s to the late aughts, Willis's rank grew within one of Boston's larger mob groups, starting as a loan collector and body guard before he became the trafficker behind a $4 million oxycodone ring (though the he's claimed it was "10 times that"). In 2011, he was sentenced to 20-years in prison for drug trafficking and money laundering. Scott O'Donnell, the FBI Agent whose task force eventually caught the White Devil, was quoted saying he had "never seen" a criminal quite like Willis , due to his high status within the Chinese mafia underground.

In early January, BenBella Books will release a book detailing the life and crimes of the Boston mobster titled, fittingly, White Devil. Written by Bob Halloran, a news and sports anchor at Channel 5, the ABC affiliate in Boston, White Devil chronicles Willis's rise in the mafia, including thoughts and anecdotes from the gangster himself. Though Halloran is better known for being a sports announcer who worked at ESPN, the award-winning journalist is no stranger to true crime. He's published Irish Thunder: The Hard Life and Times of Micky Ward , which was turned into the Mark Wahlberg movie, The Fighter, and Impact Statement: A Family's Fight for Justice Against Whitey Bulger, which Halloran wrote after meeting Steve Davis, whose sister was killed by the Boston gangster and his cronies. I called up Halloran to learn about his prison visits with John Willis, as well as how a Dorchester kid got into a Chinese gang and climbed the ladder to become the White Devil.

VICE: To start, how exactly did a white kid from Dorchester end up in a Chinese gang in Boston and New York?
Bob Halloran: A lot circumstance and fortuitous events. Willis got lucky in some respects. When he was 16, he lied and said he was 18 so he could work as a bouncer at a bar near Fenway Park. He was already into steroids and body building at the time, so he was a big kid. This was a bar where a lot of Asians would show up. One night there was a fight and he helped one of the Asians get out of a big jam and that guy—Woping Joe—gave him a card with a phone number on it. He said John should give him a call if he ever needed help.

And he ended up calling it, of course.
Right. One night John was particularly in dire straits—he was broke and sleeping on a dead family member's apartment floor—and he decided to call this number when he needed a lift, not knowing exactly what to expect. Suddenly a car showed up outside the phone booth he made the call, and six or seven Chinese guys got out and made room for him before driving him to a house filled with Chinese people, including mothers, children, and other guys in their gang, which was called Ping On at the time. This group controlled a large sector of Boston's illegal gambling dens and massage parlors from the 70s to the mid-80s when they met Willis.

He had dinner with them, and the next day they gave him clothes, started showing him the ropes, and welcomed him in. It sounds so simple, but he doesn't have a tremendous explanation for being accepted into the gang, except that he showed them respect and they showed him respect in kind. Over time, a bond was formed. He was basically trained up in the gang, starting by traveling up to New York to collect money from gambling dens and work as a bit of a bodyguard for a crime figure in New York.

Was there a language or cultural barrier Willis had to navigate?
When he was in New York, the gang used to go out to Chinese places and try to pick up girls. There were mostly Asians there, and one of his good friends that he was training with in the gang told him he needed to learn Chinese if he wanted to pick up women. He learned by paying attention during group conversations, as well as watching Chinese movies and listening to Chinese music. He became really fluent, including correct grammar and a spot-on accent. That was very important as he moved along with the gang, he had to deal with a lot of first generation Chinese that didn't speak much English.

Image courtesy of John Willis

He joined the gang as a kid, but why did they continue to accept him in the criminal underground once he got older?
He would semi-brag that he was the only white guy in a Chinese gang. At first, I took it with a grain of salt, but when I asked the FBI about it, they told me his position was extremely rare. The Chinese are very insulated. They do not trust outsiders and John was about as far outside as you can get. I think that the way he was brought in as kid, being an anomaly, led him to get ingrained over a long period of time. He also became a talking point because his boss thought it was interesting that this white kid could speak Chinese.

Most important, though, he was willing to do whatever it took, whatever was asked of him, and he succeeded in task after task. He was trustworthy and loyal. If he was introduced to the gang as a 28-year-old criminal, I don't think it would have gone as smoothly as it did being introduced to the gang as a 16-year-old wide-eyed kid. I think that helped him a lot and he was not a trailblazer because there weren't any white guys who followed him into this mob group. He was the only one.

He was an enforcer and collector at first, but how did he advance in the gang's hierarchy?
After training in New York in the early 90s, he was shipped back to Boston to work for a man named Bai Ming, who was not that high up on the list of gangsters in Boston's Chinatown at that time. He was probably sixth or seventh. But soon enough, the gang leaders in Boston were taken out of the picture, one by one. One escaped back to China, a couple of them killed each other, and suddenly Bai Ming was the number one guy in Chinatown and John is his right hand man. He was his bodyguard, the guy who checked the car in the morning for bombs, the guy who took him safely into restaurants and public places, plus the guy who collected money from the gambling dens for him.

He was the second in command of the Chinatown gangs because he was the assistant to the leader. When he went to New York and learned how to speak Chinese, he rose in the ranks because he could communicate, but also because he was bigger and stronger than everybody else, plus willing to do whatever dirty work was required.

How did he eventually get caught for the 20-year sentence he's serving in the feds?
In the early 90s, when he was very young, his boss Bai Ming ran mostly gambling dens and some prostitution rings, but was not into drug dealing. John went to jail at one point and came out with a few connections that got him involved in selling marijuana. Soon it became large quantities of marijuana, and then it became cocaine. John's boss told him not to do it. But he did it on his own, outside his crew, and started making a lot of money doing that. For a while, he kind of drifted away from strictly working for the Chinese gang, but he still maintained a strong connection there.

He did a couple of more stints in prison, and after the last one he came out with a connection in Florida that allowed him to get his hands on large amounts of Oxycotin. He started trafficking this from Florida to Massachusetts and selling in Cape Cod and the Boston area. There was a year-long investigation that started in Chinatown with a couple of other targets. John got associated with those targets, which led to his ultimate bust.

One of the first things that Willis pointed out is that gangsters kill gangsters and criminals kill criminals. He said that idiots killed civilians. — Bob Halloran

What was it like going into Federal Correctional Institution Cumberland in Maryland to interview John Willis for the book?
I interviewed him in a small room outside his prison cell. I spent seven hours with him over a two-day period. Though it may sound horrible to say, I grew to like him—or at least to understand him. He doesn't ask for forgiveness because he's not convinced that he did anything wrong. I don't know that I need to be the one forgiving him, but as he sat there telling his story from his own perspective, there was definitely reason to empathize with him, but also reason to dislike the way he went about his life. If you met him and didn't know his background, you would think there is a real smart, engaging, interesting guy that thinks things through, has varied interests, and reads a lot.

I didn't know what to expect because he has committed some violent crimes, and was a drug dealer for many years. I don't meet a lot of criminals, so I didn't know exactly how that was gonna go. Sitting down with him, he was extremely pleasant, almost docile. He never raises his voice and there's a semi whisper to his dialogue. I found him very interesting and captivating and he didn't intimidate me once we started talking. Even when I'd challenge him, he didn't get upset.

Do you remember what you talked about during the beginning of your meeting?
One of the first things that John pointed out is that gangsters kill gangsters and criminals kill criminals. He said that idiots killed civilians. I think he could have used a stronger word. What he meant was that when he was in the gang, they fought other gangs for turf and the rights to take money from this gambling den or that prostitution house. It was important to him that I knew he didn't hurt innocent people.

What humanizes him to you and how will you remember him?
We haven't talked at all about his wife and daughter. When I interviewed him, the real tears came when he talked about how much he missed them. It was stunning to me because I thought that he was cold, insensitive, and hard. I don't want to throw the world psychopath out there loosely, but he had no remorse or regret for the crimes that he committed. He lived in denial with those types of things. But when it came to love and relationships, he kind of lost it in front of me for a minute. That really stood out to me because it was in contradiction with every other facet of his personality, as well as his criminal history.

White Devil is on January 12 through BenBella Books.

Follow Seth on Twitter.

Art in the Time of Gentrification: Can NYC's Culture be Saved from Its Economy?

0
0



Image via Flickr user Jeffrey Zeldman

Mention the word gentrification to pretty much any artist in New York City, and you can see the anxiety well up. The word conjures fear from two directions: It calls to mind the city's ever-rising rents, and it brings up the contentious debate artist have been involved in for decades over whether packs of young creatives moving to cities actually encourages gentrification.

But it's a topic that artists will have to increasingly face in New York if they want to stay here and produce work. Rents are rising rapidly—tripling in just a few years in many Brooklyn neighborhoods, and spaces for artists are closing left and right.

Last week, artist and curator Devin Kenny held a panel discussion at MoMA PS1 (located in a rapidly-gentrifying section of Queens) about art and gentrification. The panelists were other artists and curators, and all of them had decided to no longer be passive participants in the process of gentrification, coming up with creative solutions to work within the constraints of a gentrifying city—whether that means organizing events explicitly for people of color,creating galleries with a mission to activate local communities, or curating shows that feature unknown and underrepresented artists.

But it remains to be seen whether these creative solutions to, and ways to work within, gentrification can stem the tide of artists vacating New York.

To figure out exactly how gentrification is affecting culture in New York City, I spoke with three experts: Kenny, Becky Amato, a professor at New York University who teaches courses on cultural displacement, and Sarah Schulman, a City University of New York professor who wrote perhaps the most well-known book on cultural displacement in New York City, The Gentrification of the Mind . They shared their thoughts on the complex, systematic processes that catalyze gentrification, as well as how blaming artists for changing a neighborhood is short sighted.

Image via Flickr user Jeffrey Zeldman

Devin Kenny, artist and curator

VICE: Why'd you think it was important to hold the PS1 panel discussion?
Devin Kenny: I've been working with this musician named Drag Lomax and his music is kind of folk music but also very trap-inflected. It's like black folk music. And some of his music talks a lot about gentrification within New York and also brings up links to folk music history developing in New York. There were these major banjo factories and guitar factories, which helped solidify this city as a kind of hub for folk music even though it's an urban center. So just on that is like how do we address those intersections? Having a panel discussion with other contemporaries that are dealing with those same issues and dealing with it in a constructive way—trying to make constructive, positive solutions—seemed like a good way of doing that.

Yeah that seemed to be unique. Everyone there had a kind of positive way of interacting with or combatting gentrification, not just complaining about it.
Part of that is that all young artists who are not originally from New York City are now aware that gentrification is an issue. But unfortunately too often it becomes a thing where people just become really downtrodden and stop resisting it. So thinking about people that are trying to do something about it either obliquely or directly seemed like a good kind of approach.

Do you think artists have a responsibility to combat gentrification if they are gentrifiers themselves?
It's complicated because gentrification is not a super-linear process. There are lots of different agents that enact it. When I was first coming to New York and I was a teenager, I was really into the downtown thing. At the time, there were all these buildings with closed down stores in front. People would call the number, talk to whoever owned the building and say, "Hey I want to have an art show here." And the reason that the storeowner or building owner would agree was because (a) it's super low overhead for them, and (b) it brings attention to the building, which could encourage developers.

The artist doesn't give a damn about the building selling. They're just trying to create opportunities for the work to be received. Artists aren't the ones trying to rename the entire South Bronx " The Piano District."

How exactly can artists help combat gentrification?
I think one way that artists or anyone who's new to these historical neighborhoods can be less virulent would be to support local businesses: Going into restaurants, talking to your neighbors, voting, going to community boards, all those kinds of things where you're actually viewing yourself as part of the neighborhood and larger ecosystem. And listening. Not just being like, "Oh yeah, it'd be really great if they have this fucking juice bar here," you know what I mean?

So, final dramatic question: Can art survive gentrification?
We're just going to see a whole new class of banker-artists. I don't necessarily think they're at odds with each other. "Artist" isn't necessarily a class position. There are rich artists, poor artists, there are middle class artists, and there are art students who are also producers in a particular way within the economy. The changes in neighborhoods in terms of raising cost of living, raising rent, fewer opportunities for people of working class backgrounds to be able to have mobility, have been taking place in America for a long time. And people still make art. People will figure out a way. But I think that it is also important that in certain cities or certain countries, there's a lot more state-based support of cultural workers. I think that makes a difference and it's a good thing. I think even some of the things De Blasio is doing in terms of trying to make some lotteries for affordable housing for artists are steps in a good direction.

Image via Flickr user Jeffrey Zeldman

Dr. Becky Amato, professor

VICE: So let's get this out of the way: Are artists themselves gentrifiers?
Becky Amato: I think it's a more complicated question. Yes, I think artists can be gentrifiers, just like teachers can be gentrifiers, and lawyers can be gentrifiers, and anyone can be a gentrifier. But the profession is often not the determinant of whether one's a gentrifier or not. I think the question that you're asking often comes from the supposition that artists are in the vanguard of gentrification, that the artists arrive, and then they make the place safe and interesting for the next wave, for the culture hounds. One thing those of us who study gentrification have noticed is that this is often the case, but there are often artists who are part of these long-standing communities already, who aren't recognized as artists in that formulation of artist-as-gentrifier, right?

The second issue is that those artists who move into these disinvested neighborhoods, or low-income neighborhoods, seeking a place to live, are often themselves pushed out of those places quite quickly. Gentrification affects those artists as well.

That all makes sense, but I also think there's a reason some are wary of artists. They can signal this big shift that's about to happen in a neighborhood.
Certainly. It has a lot to do with what kind of community the artists are bringing with them. There are lots of different ways of looking at that, but I'll mention two. One is whether the artwork the artist is producing has relevance for the community that they're moving into. Are they really speaking to a kind of audience that has no relationship to that neighborhood, and does their artwork seem kind of alien? The second thing is that there are artists who are very interested in quietly producing art within a community, or integrating into the communities that they're in.

Then there are artists who are seeking places to show their work and who attract or help to cultivate the commercial culture of art in their neighborhoods. Williamsburg and Bushwick are great examples. Bushwick seems to have a huge concentration of galleries and new spaces like that, where it's not just that the artists are living there, but there's this whole culture of artistic production that's for fine arts production or commercial production—to be the kind of artwork that is internationally recognized, as opposed to being kind of the quiet artwork of the quiet artist who is concerned with community involvement.

If you look at the history of bohemians in New York, almost all of them were selling out at the same time that they were producing what we consider authentic work. I think it's an eternal complaint. — Dr. Becky Amato

Do you think there's anything particularly unique about the way in which artists in gentrifying neighborhoods operate in New York, or is it kind of similar across gentrifying cities?
I think it has a lot to do with the New York economy. There's been a bohemian class in New York that's been sustained basically since the 1950s. It's one of the attractions of New York. So the New-York-as-creative-hub mythology is actually not that mythical. People really are attracted to the city for that reason. But New York has also become a commercial hub in terms of advertising and publishing and TV production, film production, all of these different things, and for that reason, you could be kind of an everyday artist, but you can also end up getting a job in the creative industries. That linkage, I think, between being somebody who produces art because you love it, and somebody who can also get a job and get paid for it, or paid for producing creative work, is a linkage that doesn't exist in such concentration anyplace else, except maybe San Francisco.

Isn't that kind of a double-edged sword though? It's also an expensive city, and you might have to have jobs like that—in the more commercial sectors—in order to do your art instead of just being an artist.
Yeah, absolutely. I taught this class called American Bohemia that was all about these bohemians and intellectuals and artists moving to New York, and there was this common conversation about what's the moment at which one sells out. You're producing things because you're authentic, and you're living for the art, and then because you have to pay your rent, or because you have to eat every day, you end up quote-un-quote selling out.

But if you look at the history of bohemians in New York, almost all of them were selling out at the same time that they were producing what we consider authentic work. I think it's an eternal complaint. They may be making more money these days in their selling-out jobs than they would have before, in order to pay the extravagant rents, but I think that's the condition of living and people adapt.

Do you ever worry that culture will fall apart and just die because of the influx of money?
No. I'm not worried that New York's culture will die. I think New York's culture will change. Culture will never go away, but we will adapt to whatever that culture is. Whether it's a culture that we think is as good as the culture we have now or had 50 years ago is another question. There was the David Byrne article a couple years ago where he discusses moving to New York decades ago when it was this incredible place because the rent was cheap and all sorts of creativity was happening by virtue of the fact that it was an inexpensive place to live. But I'm not totally convinced that there is no creativity if the people who don't make a lot of money can't live here. It's just a different kind of creativity. It's maybe not my kind of creativity, but it's still creativity. I would prefer there to be more David Byrnes in the world, personally.

Image via Flickr user Jeffrey Zeldman

Sarah Schulman, author of 'The Gentrification of the Mind'

VICE: So, are artists gentrifiers?
Sarah Schulman: No, I think that that's absolutely false because gentrification is policy. It's not just this weird natural turn that is created by fad. It's systematic. First they stop building low income housing and then you get corporate welfare which is tax breaks or luxury development. Everything follows from there, plus the classic role of lack of commercial rent control. To blame something on artists moving into a particular neighborhood is very short sighted.

OK, but do you think there's a reason residents might be worried about artists moving into neighborhoods, as kind of a sign of things changing?
First of all, the role that artists have played has changed over time. There's been a systemic disinvestment and reinvestment in cities. The way I understand it is after World War II there was the G.I. Bill. This was the federal government putting money into the hands of developers through the bodies of veterans. These developers were building suburbs, which are a new kind of culture. There had been small town culture before, but there had never been suburbanization. This is when you see "white flight." It's not because black people weren't veterans—they were, but the suburbs were not open to them. And that basically created a culture of non-ethnic suburban whiteness. Basically, you're creating this whole new kind of culture of racial stratification, class stratification, privatized living, car culture, consumerism, all of this.

Why do you think this is so noticeable in New York?
Gentrification is primarily about making money, but it's also about social control over urban space. When they started giving tax breaks to luxury developers and you start to see condo conversion and construction of new real estate for high income people, the target audience is the children of white flight, people who have some kind of emotional connection to the city because their parents grew up there or their grandparents lived there or they would take the train into the city to buy pot or whatever. They were raised in these brand new suburbanization phenomena with suburban values. When they come back to the city, they enter it differently than any group of people has ever entered the city before.

People used to come to New York to become New Yorkers. They came to New York to have sex, to get away from religion, to be able to live in a more unpredictable manner because the experience of being an artist was an eclectic experience. — Sarah Schulman

In the past, when people came to the city—whether they came as immigrants from abroad or whether they were like refugees from small towns in America—they came to become New Yorkers. When artists came and moved to neighborhoods with low rents, they came to become citified. This new group, the children of white flight, they came to change New York because they had grown up without any exposure to difference. They came in with an orientation, an emotional orientation toward control and comfort. They bring this gated community mentality. Suddenly they want more police. They view difference as frightening. Then the discourse gets controlled by their point of view.

If a neighborhood that was very mixed and it's being gentrified in a way where the people who have lived there are now in danger, it's called "getting better," even though it's getting worse from the point of view of the long-term residents. This group wanted to reproduce certain kinds of suburban aesthetics like chain stores. I was born in 1958 in New York City and I never saw a chain store in my life. I didn't know what McDonald's was. We didn't have malls. The children of white flight came with a taste for that; they brought this kind of aesthetic with them.

What else is different about this "new group" of people who help spark gentrification?
People used to come to New York to become New Yorkers. They came to New York to have sex, to get away from religion, to be able to live in a more unpredictable manner because the experience of being an artist was an eclectic experience. Each individual artist would have different influences; they would trod a different path. They would develop an individuated voice. What you're seeing today is quite a very different thing because of MFA programs and the professionalization of the arts. Now, people who come to be artists, many are the product of this kind of streamlining, homogenizing project.

This new group tends to be people who have much more access to resources, who are much more normative, that fit in better with institutions like graduate school. When those kinds of artists move into a neighborhood they want to change it. Instead of going to the local Latino business, they go to the five dollar white coffee place. They don't know the names of their neighbors. They don't join tenant associations. They're not involved in the neighborhood. They isolate, they segregate themselves, and they reproduce suburban conditions.

In that way, even though they're not responsible for the gentrification, they carry on a certain kind of social gentrification that they do based on their own internal value system. There's quite a bit of difference there. The original accusation that gay men and artists caused gentrification is totally false. It was caused by policy.

So does that mean that all people who want to move to the city and be artists are inevitably part of this process?
It depends on how they live. Do you know all your neighbors? Do you know their names? Do you support local businesses? Do you give back to the community? Do you teach kids how to read? Or are you just looking for the other white person who's like you?

Gentrification is a political problem. It can be solved by political will. If we had 500,000 affordable housing units in New York City, there would be no more gentrification. If we had commercial rent control, if we fined people for buying to flip versus buying to live, if we made chains pay a different tax than small, independently owned businesses, we could completely turn around gentrification.

So what's the role of the individual gentrifier in that political sense?
Organizing. I've had millions of conversations with young gentrifiers and they're so clueless. It's really amazing. They haven't done the work to understand how their own value system is constructed. The centerpiece of any kind of white supremacy is seeing oneself as neutral and objective and that's what they feel—that they just exist here without a system around them. The question is do you have to live near power, can you treat other people in your neighborhood as though they're equal to you, can you get involved in ongoing neighborhood apparatus instead of imposing your own?

Follow Peter on Twitter

The Powerful Union Official Standing Between Rikers Island and Reform

0
0

President of the Correction Officers Benevolent Association Norman Seabrook in Manhattan last year. Photo by Anthony DelMundo/NY Daily News via Getty Images

In early December, when New York City's Department of Correction inducted 600 new officers, Mayor Bill de Blasio was there to welcome the recruits before ducking out of the graduation ceremony early. That's when Norman Seabrook, the boisterous president of the Correctional Officers Benevolent Association (COBA), the union for these latest additions to the city workforce, took the stage.

"How dare you?" roared Seabrook, referencing the mayor's departure. In patented fashion, Seabrook then delivered a lengthy rebuke of de Blasio and his reform efforts, dismissing the mayor and his correction commissioner, Joseph Ponte, as out of touch with the rank-and-file keeping tabs on New York City's incarcerated. It was a hell of a welcome for a group of officers who had just been tasked with helping bring about change to a system whose main jail, Rikers Island, was deemed to have a "deep-seated culture of violence" by US attorney Preet Bharara in a scathing report last year.

"Mayor de Blasio made me feel under-appreciated," Seabrook, who presides over the largest municipal jail union in the nation, said in an interview with VICE. "Because he doesn't leave the police officers' graduation early, doesn't leave the firefighters' graduation early, he doesn't have respect for us. Not even to say goodbye, to our graduates and our families, is a little bit insulting."

The acrimony between the jail guards' union and City Hall is playing out just a year after the feds sued the city over conditions at Rikers Island, the hellhole of the New York City jail system, where thousands of men and women—mostly people of color —rot while they wait for a trial. But change has slowly begun to make its way to the island. From new rules on solitary confinement to more services and support for the mentally ill, the reforms are an attempt to break the cycle of abuse and mistreatment. But in the rhetorical war over fixing this well-documented nightmare, one of the loudest and most effective voices belongs to the union leader standing in the way of change.

Many involved in the reform process see Seabrook as a proud and obstinate advocate for the status quo. (Seabrook, for his part, insists he does favor changes at Rikers Island—just not many of the ones being advanced by city officials.)* The ongoing overhauls include new rules regarding use-of-force aimed at limiting the most severe methods correctional officers use to restrain and control incarcerated people, including strikes to the head, groin, or kicking an individual.

"I certainly think the new use-of-force training will make Rikers a more dangerous place," Seabrook told VICE. "The inmates, most of them, are already very, very dangerous."

In November, a Rikers Island guard, Raymond Calderon, was attacked by multiple inmates, who slashed Calderon and left him "within an inch of his life," according to Seabrook. While City Hall believes that serious incidents of violence has been decreasing in Rikers as a result of reforms, which have cut back on punitive segregation—otherwise known as solitary confinement—and established separate housing for younger inmates, Seabrook argues that Rikers is more violent than ever.

"Absolutely, Rikers is becoming more dangerous, because we can't put an inmate in punitive segregation who threatens a correctional officer," Seabrook told me. "What do you do to an inmate that puts an officer in the hospital? What do you do to an inmate that assaults or murders another inmate in jail? What do you do to an inmate that sexually assaults a civilian employee of the Department of Correction? There needs to be some consequences for what that inmate does."

In a new advertising campaign, Seabrook's union has been blasting images of injured inmates and correctional officers at Rikers Island above the tagline, "Safer Jails Matter," a play on the Black Lives Matter movement. VICE asked Seabrook whether the campaign was implying that the BLM movement—which has sparked protests nationwide against police brutality—was somehow contributing to violence in the jails.

"I was at a Board of Correction meeting, and I had a white man, I believe his name was Cohen, and he shouted at me, in front of an auditorium full of people, 'Black lives matter.' I then said to him, 'Don't all lives matter?'" Seabrook, who is black, told VICE. "It matters from wherever you're from. Blue, green, gay, straight—it doesn't matter. I don't subscribe to the Black Lives Matter movement. This isn't about black lives matter-ing. This is about the safety and security of everyone in the New York City Department of Correction."

Seabrook has presided over COBA for 20 years, during which he has amassed a level of power perhaps greater than that of the correction commissioner, a New York Times investigation found last year. For decades, he has vehemently resisted efforts by the city to investigate wrongdoing by his union members, even going so far as to have his members shut down the bridge to Rikers when an inmate was set to testify about brutality at the jail. The inmate later was allowed to testify, but the correctional officers involved were exonerated.

Seabrook tends to place the blame for violence in Rikers on unsafe conditions for corrections officers—a contention flatly rejected by local criminal justice reform advocates.

"The notion that asking for better conditions for individuals in jail creates more dangerous situations for corrections officers is an attempt to blame the victims for an unfair and dangerous system," said Robert Gangi, director of the Police Reform Organizing Project, who has been working on these issues in New York City for over 30 years. "Saying that the jail inmates on Rikers are the worst-of-the-worst is just way off the mark. Most people are there for very low-level infractions."

While Seabrook has long battled New York City mayors over treatment of guards, insisting that violence against COs hasn't been treated seriously enough, the COBA president now finds himself facing off against change while negotiating a new union contract with City Hall. Like his counterpart Pat Lynch, the boisterous head of the largest NYPD union, Seabrook has capitalized on dramatic occasions of inmate violence to declare that DOC commissioner Ponte must be removed—while also demanding a better contract for his members.

"I think that I have a great relationship with the mayor, and we need to work together to better the city of New York. But we're not even meeting in the middle," Seabrook told me.

Seabrook believes the de Blasio administration has left the union completely out of the reform process, sullying the prospects for change at one of America's largest jails.

"I believe that when you look into reforms, you need to be talking to the people on the ground," he said. "When you talk about reform, you need to talk about reform on both sides. You can't talk about one-sided reform because that's not reform."

The Department of Correction, on the other hand—whose advisory and compliance board passed a series of new rules aimed at reforming Rikers on Wednesday night—seems bullish in changing the culture at Rikers. And city officials are hyping the inclusive way in which it believes it's achieving those reforms.

"The commissioner did a full review of all the issues that had been building up at the facility for decades," said Jeff Thamkittikasem, the chief of staff to DOC Commissioner Ponte. "He did a ton of time doing focus groups and surveys of the staff, and even sent our staff out to jurisdictions across the country to learn best practices. What he found was that there had never been a ten-year plan for Rikers, or even a five-year plan. So Commissioner Ponte didn't want to do a reform that was focused on a single issue—he wanted to pull together a comprehensive reform of Rikers."

The plan, which includes everything from recruitment of new, better-qualified COs to increased use of surveillance cameras, is in the process of being rolled out now. But efforts to include the input of correctional officers in the consideration of the new order hasn't smoothed over relations with the union. Indeed, just last week, COBA filed a second petition with the city's Board of Collective Bargaining to stop the roll-out of the new use-of-force policies.

"We're looking to be treated fairly and like everyone else," Seabrook told VICE. "I want the City of New York to put safety first. Doesn't matter what side of the bars you're on. You need to be treated with dignity and respect, and you need to be safe."

Follow Max Rivlin-Nadler on Twitter.

*This story has been updated.

We Joined Britain's Last Deep Pit Coal Miners for Their Final Shift

0
0

Britain's last deep pit coal miners completed their final shift on Friday, marking the end of the industry—and their way of life—in the UK. The last piece of coal hauled to the surface from the depths of the now-closed Kellingley Colliery in west Yorkshire will become a museum exhibit.

"Everybody knows we've got to decarbonize and go green, we know that. But we're not ready for it," said soot-covered miner Gary Ward, a few minutes after he emerged from the pit mouth.

Though the majority of the 450 miners don't dispute that burning coal is a major contributor to climate change, they point out that the UK is still reliant on vast amounts of the stuff. The decision to close the mine has been particularly galling, because the power station seven miles away will continue to burn 4 million tons of coal each year for at least the next decade—only now it will use cheaper imported coal that has the added environmental cost of being transported halfway across the world.

Regardless, Kellingley's miners know that after more than 200 years, the deep pit coal mining that powered the industrialization of Britain is dead and unlikely to be resurrected. They have found themselves in the same position as 180,000 of their colleagues following the breaking of the strikes in the 1980s. The gutting of the mining industry may have taken place 31 years ago, but the UK's coalfield communities, which make up 9 percent of the population, are still struggling and in need of assistance.

For Kellingley's miners, the immediate effect of the site's closure included the end of treasured working relationships forged in hot, dangerous, and claustrophobic conditions nearly seven miles from sunlight. The work bred characters and camaraderie and even though it was hazardous and often fatal, people loved doing it.

Colin Thwaites, 52, introduced himself as "a living legend, God almost." As well as being a miner for 35 years, he told me that he's a lifeguard, ballroom dancer, and has his diving papers.

"My dad were here before me and my son's here now. I wanted to be here until the end of my working career but I've had to go out and find another job. Luckily I've got one but I wanted to be here until the end. My wife says that we're elitist, and we are elitist because there's not many people that can do what we can do—I know it's sounds like bullshit but it's true," he said.

"It's a very hard job, the conditions are atrocious. You'll be working in a tunnel and the roof will be falling in. When you drill a hole, water seven times the salinity of sea water gushes out at you and it burns. It's not nice—unless you're adept at it and then you can get away with anything. It was fantastic and I loved it but it's finished now. It's sickening."

Colin worked with the same team for nearly 20 years."Our kids grew up together and we, as a team, grew up together." Like many of the miners he spoke about their relationships in the same way people in the army do. Similarly, he wondered how some of his mates were going to cope with life on the outside. It was a train of thought 50-year-old Chris McConnachie was following as well on the last day of his 34 years at the pit.

"I've put down for my Class 2 HGV license , but it's not something I want to do for long. I'm used to working with a close tight team and having men around me all the time. The thought of sitting in a cab by myself all day—it's a million miles from what I want to do," he said, visibly upset.

"It's given us a good life, there's no doubt about it. But it hasn't been easy. I've lost a lot of friends, killed at work. It brings the bond in, I suppose. It just pulls us tighter and tighter every time we lose one of our own. The nearest thing you're going to get to this out there is the forces. People put their life on the line for you and you do the same for them. I've seen it and I've done it. You go to any other factory and show me a memorial like we've got outside our canteen for the 17 people who've been killed here."

It's also easy to find tales of mine-inflicted injuries at the pit—emphysema, broken backs, necks, legs, feet, arms, and fingers. In fact, disabilities affect an above-average amount of people across all of the UK's coalfields.

The 2014 "State of the Coalfields" Sheffield Hallam University report found that 7.9 percent of the 5.5 million coalfield residents claim disability living allowance, compared to the national average of 5.6 percent. Incapacity claims in the region's were found to be a "sky high" 8.4 percent. With an average of just 50 jobs for every 100 residents of working age throughout the coalfields, unemployment is also well in excess of the British average.

The lucky ones at Kellingley have skills they can transfer to other jobs, are financially secure enough to retire, or are young enough to pick up sticks to areas with better prospects. However, there are those who are heading into environments where low paid and insecure service jobs and a breadline reliance on shrinking government assistance are a fact of life.

At present, the trajectory for most coalfield areas is continued economic and social deprivation, explains David Parry, the principle policy officer for the cross party Industrial Communities Alliance. "There's not been any significant replacement of the older industries with sustainable new industry. Combined with the impact of welfare reforms these areas have been hit disproportionally hard. There needs to be targeted policies to change the situation," he said.

"We seem to be losing our way as a country that can manufacture or produce anything, apart from operating in the services or financial sector. It's a major shift that's been ongoing in this country for a few decades and seems to be carrying on because of the negligence of a number of governments."

Regarding Conservative governments, some of the miners believe it wasn't negligence that destroyed their way of life, but a vendetta. "Everyone knows it's been planned. Cameron's just finishing off what Thatcher wanted," commented third generation miner John Knowles. Others referenced the ongoing crisis in British steel production and the continued struggles of other domestic manufacturing industries as a vision of the future.

"They just shut pit upon pit upon pit. After the strike that was it. The steelworkers and power stations will be next, then they'll start with the car workers," said John Marsh as he clocked off for the last time. "They don't want us, they'd rather import stuff wouldn't they?"

As the miners left the colliery for the final time, it was clear that their friendships would continue for many years to come, as will the important democratic and social traditions that deep pit coal miners contributed to British life. In the end, their hard-fought legacy remains even if their industry doesn't.

Photos from Spain's Deadlocked Election

0
0

Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias and fan

This article was originally published on VICE Spain

It seems like bipartisanship died in Spain last night—at least that's been the feeling across the country since last night. The only clear message coming from the results of Sunday's general election is that the Spanish people have grown tired of the conservative Partido Popular (PP) and the center-left Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) running the government in rotation for the last 30 years.

Challenging that establishment were the newly formed, anti-austerity Podemos and liberal Ciudadanos. In the end, the PP got 28.72 percent of the vote, the PSOE 22.0 percent, Podemos 20.66 percent, and Ciudadanos 13.93 percent. Since PSOE hardly got a majority, all four parties must now begin the negotiations necessary to form a coalition.

A little before the first results started rolling in, we made our way to the Madrid headquarters of each party: The PP had set up shop in Calle Génova, the PSOE in Calle Ferraz, the Ciudadanos in the Hotel Eurobuilding, and the Podemos in Plaza Reina Sofia. All around, the mood was somber—no one really expected to win, which is exactly what happened. Except in the Podemos headquarters, that is—for a party that was only founded in March 2014 to compete that closely with the old guard is a big feat.

Here are some photos we took on the streets of Madrid last night.

VICE INTL: The Life and Sex Scandal of Chinese Star and Streetwear Icon Edison Chen - Part 3 - Part 3

0
0

A decade ago, Edison Chen (a.k.a. EDC)—a Canadian-born Hong Kong pop star and streetwear entrepreneur who introduced hip-hop and street culture to the Chinese mainstream—was a cult icon for many of the country's young people.

But in February 2008, he became known for something entirely different when a series of his intimate photos with various female celebrities hit the internet after a computer technician leaked them online. As the photos made the rounds online through email and on forums, the scandal inspired the very first moral debate over celebrity privacy in China's pre-social media era.

Chen stepped away from Hong Kong entertainment industry due to overwhelming public pressure and started focusing on his streetwear brand and, more recently, art collections. Almost eight years later, VICE China followed EDC on a 19-day shoot, revealing his business routines, reminiscing abouthis influences from hip-hop music, and discussing the irony of stardom in Chinese show business.


Arun Kundnani on the Propaganda War Against Muslims

0
0


Arun Kundnani

"Muslims have to cure this disease, this cancer in their communities."

"Muslims need to open up their mosques so we can see what's going on inside."

"This is why we don't trust Muslims. Because they lie."

These statements don't need to be placed in context to be understood as racist. Nonetheless, some context is instructive: they weren't discovered scrawled in shit on the cubicle walls of an English Defence League-friendly pub; they were broadcast on CNN last week, when the British writer Arun Kundnani was invited to debate with two very angry American commentators, Scottie Hughes and Kurt Schlicter. The seven-minute segment below is difficult to watch.

The conversation was supposed to be about Donald Trump's presidential campaign. However, after Kundnani made the simple observation that Trump's rhetoric about Muslims—he's said that all Muslims should be surveyed and called for a halt on all Muslims entering the US—isn't an aberration from the norm but an articulation of already-existing domestic policy since 9/11, Hughes and Schlicter start foaming at the mouth.

The content of the racist diatribes that follow is unremarkable and historically well-worn—they metaphorize Muslims as sub-human, animalistic, pathological etc.—but what's terrifying is the violence of the delivery and the perceived impunity with which they speak.

The whole episode could have been a footnote from Kundnani's excellent book The Muslims Are Coming! (Verso)—a radical critique of the west's willful misinterpretations of jihadist motivations and violence, and the different forms of anti-Muslim hysteria generated as a result.

Since the book was released in 2014 there's been an intensification of Islamophobic attacks in Britain and the United States, complicated and encouraged by changes in foreign and domestic policy and the attacks in Paris. Kundnani writes that this kind of Islamophobia is "sustained through a relationship with official thinking and the War on Terror," so now seemed like the perfect time to discuss that relationship, Britain's infamous "Prevent" anti-extremism program, and the real meaning of multiculturalism as he sees it.

VICE: Firstly what did you make of that CNN interview?
Arun Kundnani: I thought it was quite unusual for CNN. You expect that stuff on Fox News. I received racial abuse on social media over the following 24 hours.
It shows the nature of the conservative subculture that Trump is tapping into. They react very aggressively to facts that they don't want to hear: 45 people have been killed by Muslim terrorists in the US since 9/11 but 48 have been killed by right wing terrorists. These are basic facts that put the shootings at San Bernardino in perspective and undermine how the Republican Party's trying to frame things at the moment.

Since the Paris attacks there's been an increase in Islamophobic reprisals in the UK. Was this to be expected?
I think we've come to expect that in the aftermath of incidents such as Paris the ways in which we mediate those events create the climate in which racist violence is likely to follow. When these events happen the way we make sense of them is through media frameworks that aren't reflective of the nature of the event but reflect a pre-set framework that assumes certain kinds of violence are more significant than others. Paris became a symbolic event in a way other terrorist incidents around the world did not.

The perpetrators of these far-right attacks are often presented as "lone wolves." Is that fair?
We're not consistent in how we think about far right violence compared to jihadist violence.

Before Lee Rigby occurred, EDL leaders were saying that if there is another terrorist attack in the UK then they will hold the Muslim community collectively responsible and take out revenge attacks against them. And in the aftermath, you had a huge number of incidents of mosques being attacked around the country but there wasn't one formal organization engineering those attacks. But was it organized? Yes: informally through social media networks and the circulation of a particular view of the world in the same way that jihadists coordinate what they do.

Since the Paris attacks the UK government's Prevent strategy has received renewed attention. Prevent has been in place for almost ten years—is it an effective policy?
It's been counter-productive. If you go back to the opening claims of what this policy was meant to achieve when it was first introduced in 2006 it talks about "building trust" and "partnership" with communities. And that's as good a measure as anything of its achievements. And what's the record? There's no policy in Britain more generally distrusted by Muslims.

There is little that feels like partnership: it's the government imposing, in a top-down way, a policy that's been designed by civil servants and influenced by neoconservative ideas. Communities are not partners but simply given the opportunity to receive funding if they sign up to a policy that is against their interests.

Specific incidences of this are described in The Muslims Are Coming! It's like the British colonial policy of indirect rule: you let seemingly autonomous community structures exist but use them to manage populations.
It's correct to see the colonial analogues here. The idea is that, when you have a population that is rejecting your political authority and is insurgent, there's a set of techniques to use to prevent it from achieving its objectives. The Muslim population in Britain has been seen as an insurgent population within policy-making circles for a decade.

There is a propaganda war but it's no good having government ministers articulate that propaganda, so people within communities have to be found who will do that instead. And that's really what the government was up to when it was paying £1 million to promote the Prevent policy.

What did you make of the recent allegations that the Quilliam Foundation paid the EDL's former leader Tommy Robinson to leave the group?
It wasn't really surprising. The idea that Quilliam might be able to de-radicalize anyone, let alone Tommy Robinson, is preposterous. As an organization they are a creation of the government—they were made in Whitehall. They have no grassroots history. The idea that they are somehow opposed to extremism in all its forms is contradicted by the people on their board of management. They've had militarist neoconservatives on there.

Like Michael Gove?
Absolutely. Michael Gove, whose cranky and strange book Celsius 7/7 advocates a new cold war and a denial of civil liberties. In it, he advocates that we assassinate people we consider to be extremists to "send them a signal"; this is extra-judicial killing for symbolic purposes. This is called terrorism in the objective definition of the word.

One of the underlying subjects of your book, the cultural ideology that made programs like Prevent possible, is multiculturalism. It was posed by liberals in the early 2000s as a meaningful answer to the question, "What is Britishness?" but is now discredited: what do you understand by it?
To the liberal elite, multiculturalism always meant: "We will try and enable communities of color in Britain to enter into the mainstream as long as it's done on our terms."

So it was never really about distributing power more evenly—it was about having selected community leaders coming to represent ethnic identities in a way that is, again, reminiscent of the old colonial arrangements.

The term becomes part of the discourse after the urban uprisings of the early 1980s. That's when you see an increase of black and Asian faces on TV, in parliament and so forth. The system wanted to absorb the acceptable face of Black and Asian Britain and exclude the faces that wanted to bring about a radical change, the people who understood that institutional racism in Britain was a symptom of a deeper set of problems to do with the way British society worked.

The Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's recent visit to the UK was an example of multiculturalism being weaponized to protect a dangerous and Islamophobic politician. His rally at Wembley Stadium, attended by David Cameron, was full of performances of Indian culture.
Absolutely. Don't look at the 2000 people killed in Gujarat in 2002, just smell the samosas and enjoy the saris, right? That's the logic there. We should be honest that there is a constituency amongst Asian communities in Britain that totally signs up for this, and is very comfortable when Samantha Cameron attends an Asian millionaires' dinner wearing a sari. This is delightful for them.

So how are British Muslims supposed to organize and resist Islamophobia without being deemed "extremists"? You've written that British Muslims "need their Malcolm X's."
Part of the effect of Prevent is to discourage assertive, dissenting politics from emerging in Britain—not just amongst Muslims but more broadly. But that doesn't mean that we don't see that kind of thing happening.

In Britain there have been powerful, dissenting leaders come out of the Muslim community, someone like Salma Yaqoob. In the US we have people like Linda Sarsour who come out of that radical tradition as well. Of course, Malcolm X was constantly under surveillance by the FBI. The point of these policies is to make radical community politics less likely but, ultimately, you can't neutralize resistance.

Tina Fey and Amy Poehler Are America's 'Famous Best Friends' Again in 'Sisters'

0
0

Photo courtesy of Universal Pictures

Paper Source, the national chain of stationary shops and high-end craft suppliers, sells a white card with red and blue lettering by the company Farewell Paperie. The card comes with a purple envelope and reads, "You're the Amy Poehler to my Tina Fey." If you Google Image search "famous best friends," Fey and Poehler appear twice in the first four results, outranking other famous duos such as Buzz and Woody, Wayne and Garth, Lucy and Ethel, Thelma and Louise, Bert and Ernie, Oprah and Gayle, C-3PO and R2-D2, and Damon and Affleck. When Poehler was pregnant with her first child, she memorably said, "I don't care if it's a girl or a boy, I want it to marry Alice Richmond, Tina's daughter."

The 22-year bond between Fey and Poehler is one of the most celebrated friendships in pop-culture history. At the end of their five overlapping seasons at Saturday Night Live, they were the first female duo to anchor Weekend Update (and they will host tomorrow night's episode together). Early this year, they concluded their three-year stint co-hosting the Golden Globes. Surprisingly, Sisters is just their second film together (the first was Baby Mama in 2008, the year they graced the cover of Vanity Fair with Sarah Silverman as opalescent goddesses, with Poehler's hand shielding Fey's breast from Annie Leibovitz's lens). And although they resemble each other in no way physically, they can pass for siblings because of their mutual charisma, which radiates from whatever size screen they share.

The plot of Sisters is simple: Impulsive Kate (Fey) convinces priggish Maura (Poehler) to finally let her "freak flag fly" at the last rager in their childhood home. Veteran SNL scribe Paula Pell wrote the film specifically for her two stars; Pitch Perfect's Jason Moore directs; and both stars executive-produce. From first glance, it's just a Baby Mama role-reversal (in which Fey's infertile straight woman was foiled by Poehler's out-of-control "surrogate"). Yet once Maura is reunited with her kin, her inner exhibitionist unfolds: She relishes the chance to read old diary entries aloud, smoke joints, and dance to J-Kwon's "Tipsy."

Despite the easy rapport between the Sisters, the two strongest scenes are each between Poehler and a secondary co-star. In a moment of do-goodery gone awry, Maura attempts to forge common ground with her pedicurist (Greta Lee). Later, Maura, a nurse, fails to soothe her injured love interest (The Mindy Project's Ike Barinholtz) in a scene that forever ravages the song "Für Elise."

However, Fey's verbal barbs add much-appreciated moments of social commentary from the onscreen duo who once told America that Hillary Clinton is a "bitch" (as are they), and that's why she deserves to be president. In an early scene, Kate—a cosmetologist—preps a first-date hopeful played by Chris Parnell ("Lazy Sunday") to meet a PYT. "Good for you, because ladies your age are gross, right?" she asks. In real life, Parnell is 48 and Fey is 45; although Kate seems to believe what she says, the statement is tongue-in-cheek coming from a proud feminist like Fey. The line was reminiscent of a dig Fey took at a 52-year-old leading man during the 2014 Golden Globes: " is the story of how George Clooney would rather float away into space and die than spend one more minute with a woman his own age [Sandra Bullock, now 51]." Still, there are instances in which Kate's comments about other women sound downright disorienting, like when she refers to an ex-grade school friend as a "hoe," a line that could have easily been lifted from Fey's 2004 screenplay for Mean Girls.

To answer the immediate concern of my friends, sadly, Sisters is not as good as the year's other R-rated comedy about clashing female siblings, Amy Schumer's Trainwreck, which last week received two Golden Globe nominations. While both films are arguably love stories, Trainwreck is ultimately about the complicated attachment of sisterhood while Sisters—contrary to its title—emphasizes the devotion between parents and children. When scavenging their former bedroom for keepsakes, Kate and Maura find their marching-band batons, with which they mime various sex acts. But at the end of the film, their mother (Dianne Wiest), exasperated by her daughters' perpetual adolescence, laments, "We keep trying to pass you the baton," in a moment needlessly spoon-fed to the audience. (Side note: It's good to see the double Oscar recipient back onscreen, especially as a sexually viable Baby Boomer. Early this year, Wiest told the New York Times that she was struggling to sustain herself as an actress.)

In an earlier scene, we're also shown a roomful of clocks as a reminder of the constant foe of aging for all the women in the film. While in Trainwreck, Amy Schumer's character was mostly at war with herself, these Sisters are too busy overcoming outside forces (like levels in a video game) to concentrate on improvement from within. Over two brisk hours, Kate and Maura try to thwart their parents (Wiest and James Brolin), a pair of yuppie prospective homeowners (Britt Lower and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend's Santino Fontana), a high-school rival (Maya Rudolph), the police, a melee of their drunk and high peers, mother nature, and each other, in a mud-strewn brawl.

Although Sisters will share its opening weekend with Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Poehler and Fey have each had massively successful professional years. Poehler completed the seventh and final season of Parks and Recreation, voiced the lead role in the third-highest grossing film of the year (Inside Out, the first Pixar film with a female protagonist), and appeared in the Wet Hot America Summer series on Netflix. Meanwhile, Fey served as co-creator and showrunner of Netflix's Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, was named the third-best Saturday Night Live cast member in history by Rolling Stone, and cameo'ed during the finale of The Late Show with David Letterman. To paraphrase Fey herself: Bitches continue to get stuff done.

Follow Jenna on Twitter.

Sisters is in theaters nationwide.

Habits: Clementine Can't Change in This Week's 'Habits' Comic

Watch a Web-Exclusive Clip from Our Doc 'Countdown to Zero' About HIV Treatment in South Africa

0
0

On December 1, HBO premiered Countdown to Zero, VICE's hour-long special report about the progress of HIV and AIDS prevention and treatment. The full documentary is available to watch online now, but we also wanted to share some footage that didn't make the final cut.

In this web-exclusive clip, VICE co-founder Suroosh Alvi traveled to South Africa, the country with the highest number of HIV infections in the world, to take a look at how doctors and rural clinics there are fighting to stem the tide. Give it a watch above.

For more information on Ndlovu Care Group, check out their website.

The Year in Male Tears

0
0

2014 was the year that misandry became chic. That January began with the reminder from Madeleine Holden, creator of Critique my Dick Pic, that "dick is abundant and low value," a Tweet that resonated with the power of a 140-character manifesto. The movie release of Gone Girl and Taylor Swift's video for "Blank Space" made misandry aspirational. Etsy samplers emblazoned with "men are scum" and Café Press mugs reading "male tears" proliferated. The year ended with feminazis opening their 2014 Misandmas presents with glee, finding copies of Bitch Planet and Bad Feminist.

Then there were the thinkpieces analyzing the new misandry chic. Amanda Hess claimed that "ironic misandry functions like a stuck-out tongue pointed at a playground bully" in Slate. Jess Zimmerman took up the cry and informed men that they needed to get with misandry jokes because "not everything is about men's comfort, not anymore." And Time's Sara Begley voiced the backlash, telling us, "inherent in this word 'misandry' is hatred," as if that's a bad look.

On the whole, however, 2014's misandry was flavored with wry bemusement and detached irony. We women joked around a lot about liking men like we liked our coffee—ground up and in the freezer—but we didn't seem serious. We splashed around in kiddie pools filled with male tears, and we wore our "misandry" nameplate necklaces; we held hands and chanted "ban all men" at our coven meetings; later, we recited the Misandrist's Prayer while looking at pictures of cats.

But in 2015, misandry changed and chic got real. Misandry isn't as simple as hating men. Just as misogyny is less a dislike of women and more a network of practice built on the oppression of women, misandry is a seething rage against patriarchal power, not just a dislike of men. And maybe it was born in irony, but it has hardened with.

Watch the bros of SantaCon explain how to get women:

It's hard to put a finger on exactly what made misandry go from fun, fearless flirtation to feminist praxis, but Bill Cosby helped. For Americans who were born in the 60s and 70s, Cosby's animated series Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids epitomized innocence in its antic, faintly hallucinogenic primary colors. For those born in the 80s and 90s, the Cosby Show was inescapable. And if you missed those shows, somehow, you knew Cosby from his idyllic enjoyment of pudding pops. It was all good, clean, safe fun.

At least two generations of women had grown into adulthood calmed by Cosby's colorful sweaters and soothing voice. No matter our backgrounds, skin color, family situation, or geographic location, we saw protection in the Cosby persona. Whether the animated universe of the Cosby kids or the cosseted bosom of the Huxtable household, we recognized a place that was a better version of home. But by the end of 2014, about 20 women had come forward to accuse Cosby of sexual assault. By July of 2015, the number had grown to 35, and by December of this year, it had swelled to 55. Cosby has denied it all.

As every new accuser told her Cosby story—that she had been slipped a drug; that he had spiked her drink; that she had woken in his bed, confused; that he had forced her to her knees; that she had been raped—women across America felt the airbag illusion of safety deflate. Our hearts hurt for the victims; our pain turned to rage. It's all fine fun to make #killallmen jokes on Twitter, but Cosby's betrayal of our trust eroded any irony with each new iteration.

Less prominent was the example of Charlie Sheen, who announced his HIV-positive status on the Today Show, blaming "the companionship of unsavory and insipid types." That interview showed NBC's Matt Lauer repeat Sheen's "unsavory and insipid" and Sheen lob it back; it wasn't enough that Sheen, a man with a robust history of allegations of domestic abuse, tell us that he's HIV positive; he had to blame women when he did it.

And then porn's "boy next door," James Deen made three. Thanksgiving weekend, Deen's ex-girlfriend and sometime scene partner Stoya, performer, entrepreneur and essayist who has written for VICE, alleged that Deen raped her in a pair of tweets. Within a week, eight more women came forward to say that Deen had sexually abused them, too. Deen gave his side of the story to Aurora Snow; the interview reads like a long, sloppy soul kiss to a man whose love of rape jokes is well documented.

So what's a chick to do when she sees a man she'd looked up to, a man she'd thrilled to, and a man she's fapped to betray women? She looks around, and she fears every man, for every man feels implicated in the blank-faced denials of these famous men. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to misandry. And misandry leads to some pretty amazing social action, not to mention some great pop culture.

Writer and sex worker Charlotte Shane expressed her frustration with the limitations of jokey misandry in Matter, saying, "For me, the insistence that misandry is mostly only a joke undermined its most potentially subversive quality: women's unequivocal assertion of their own rage." Misandry-as-meme, Shane suggests, lets people off the hook because of its jokiness, its exclusivity, and its ironic impotence. But Shane sees a future for misandry as praxis: "My larger hope," she says, "is that we find a way of engaging with each other that uses misandry's cathartic power, condemnation of masculinity, and emphasis on female strength towards a more long-term restorative end."

Twitter answered this call. While Twitter may appear to be a microblogging platform, it's really a petri dish for growing movements as disparate as Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter illustrate. Building on this history, Twitter users LaurenChief Elk, Yoeshin Lourdes, and Bardot Smith devised the hashtag and the movement #GiveYourMoneyToWomen, a radical—and controversial—concept that women deserve to be paid for emotional labor. The idea behind it, Chief Elk explained in a VICE interview, arose from her activist views that abusers be financially responsible to their victims. Chief Elk explained that the idea "came out of just thinking about what women have to do all day every day, whether that's in marriages or relationships or work environments."

What misandry Twitter wrought, pop culture celebrated. Gone Girl may have ruined men, but Mad Max: Fury Road killed them, and Imperator Furiosa never once concerned herself with being a "cool girl." All steely glare and useful strength, Furiosa embodies the radical notion of indifference to masculinity, but Fury Road is one part in the misandry double feature of 2015. The second movie in this double feature is Magic Mike XXL. Because here's the thing: A straight woman in the audience of MMXXL gets to feel like a straight guy in every movie. She is pandered to. She gets to ogle the beautiful outside and the caring inside, wrapped in the pneumatic skin of a stripper buddy movie. Above all, MMMXL shows that real misandry means making men feel bad about their bodies.

Music and television also clad themselves in misandrist armor. Rihanna drenched her video for "Bitch Better Have My Money" in the blood of Mads Mikkelsen; in her video for "High by the Beach," Lana Del Rey made shooting down a paparazzi helicopter with a gun look languid, disaffected, and cool; Taylor Swift's squad goals in her "Bad Blood" video included kicking men in the throats and groins.

Misandry is nothing new, even if the word has only been in common use since 1946—also the year that the first season of Agent Carter, which debuted on ABC in January 2015, takes place. Agent Peggy Carter's superiority to the men around her is a given, as is her long-suffering attitude. This superiority is echoed and amplified by The Fall's Detective Superintendent Stella Gibson, played by Gillian Anderson, known feminist; Jezebel called The Fall the "feminist crime show we've been wanting." Netflix offered not one but two series about toppling the patriarchy: the subtle and optimistic Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and the obvious and brooding Jessica Jones. Both of these shows kick powerful men to the curb, Jones literally.

Misandry, 2015's rich, bitchy, delicious evidence suggests, is not a fad. It's in your music and on your television; it's at the movies and in your Twitter stream. It's shaping culture and it's influencing women. If your #MasculinitySoFragile that you've got a problem with that, let me refer you to Hillary Clinton's near-audible eye-rolling at the Benghazi hearing, to Ex Machina's sweetly homicidal Ava, or to New York City's 2015 manspreading misdemeanor. Misandry's here to stay, boys. Get used to it.

Chelsea G. Summers writes for Adult Magazine and many other publications. Follow her on Twitter.

On Our New Documentary About Rob Ford's Sobriety Coach

0
0


Sobriety coach Bob Marier.

On the December 14 episode of Daily VICE, we ran a clip of our new documentary that gives an unprecedented look into the life of Rob Ford's former sobriety coach Bob Marier (which you can watch here). Our episode of Daily VICE included a clip wherein Mr. Marier made a particular allegation about Rob Ford's alleged drinking habits.

Since running that clip on Daily VICE, Mr. Marier is no longer able to verify his claim, and the Ford family disputed his comments. We have removed the episode as a result. And, given that we are unable to independently verify his allegation, we also removed that clip from the final edit of the documentary.

Inside a Class That Trains Cops to Use Words Instead of Guns

0
0

A cop in Minnesota holding his gun. Photo via Flickr user Tony Webster

"Cuff and stuff" doesn't work, Bill Micklus is explaining.

After 20 years as a SWAT commander, Micklus now trains police officers to de-escalate—to use words, not guns, to resolve sticky situations. De-escalation training is the go-to reform when things go wrong; virtually every task force on law enforcement calls for more of it in this era of increased police scrutiny. So when shocking things like the chokehold death of Eric Garner, or the shooting of Laquan McDonald, result in widespread outrage, Micklus's phone at the Upper Midwest Community Policing Institute (UMCPI) in Woodbury, Minneosta, starts ringing.

When I meet up with him in April in Titusville, Florida, Micklus has recently been to a St. Louis suburb—"for obvious reasons," as he puts it.

With fellow Minnesotans Wayne Shelton, a retired chief of police, and Marine Gunnery Sergeant-turned-lawyer John Baker, Micklus teaches a two-day course: public safety de-escalation techniques for military veterans in crisis. Day one's goal is to "provide tactical tools to effectively defuse potentially life-threatening situations." Day two is all about "training the trainer," or taking yesterday's students and turning them into tomorrow's teachers.

I'm not a cop, but as a doctor who has treated veterans with PTSD, I know that when in crisis, too often the first call is to law enforcement—and too often those calls end in violence or death. As I see it, how law enforcement is working to reorient police officers to become the first responders to society's most intractable social problems is as much a medical issue as it is a policing one. If they can do this for veterans, a population many officers have a natural affinity for, perhaps those lessons will influence their work with the public.

PTSD is the signature wound of modern warfare, by some estimates affecting nearly 20 percent of soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq. As a comparison, PTSD is thought to hit 7 percent of the general population, but disproportionately affects citizens in crime-ridden urban areas. Characterized as invisible, it is easily recognized in veterans whose lives are bracketed by alcoholism, drug abuse, homelessness, intimate partner violence, and frequent contact with the law.

Of course, poverty, mental illness, substance abuse are not the problems police academies train their students to handle. Theirs is a combat curriculum that stresses mental toughness and survival in battle, according to Micklus. Cadets train in gun safety, defensive tactics, and practicing "shoot, don't shoot!" scenarios. Force becomes the language of authority, and authority is sustained by force. But it's a wasteful deception, as almost all calls for service—the term used for each unit of police work—do not require force.

"There's no de-escalation chapter in the warrior book," Micklus says, the irritation palpable in his voice.

The Barbara A. Pill Law Enforcement Facility that hosts the training squats low along route 405 in Titusville. It's named for a deputy killed in the line of duty three years ago. I arrive early, and fortunately, there is coffee. The room, which could be a community college classroom, has been configured so that several round tables form a half-oval with a podium as the far focal point—a re-arrangement meant to foster conversations. Nelson Mandela's quote, "Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world," decorates one wall. Soon, the 20-odd remaining chairs will be filled with Sheriff's deputies from Brevard and a few surrounding Florida counties, and one officer with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. More than half have served in the military, and almost all have close to 20 years experience each in law enforcement. Many have crisis or hostage negotiation team insignias embroidered under the image of a Sheriff's shield on their polo shirts.

How often do you get called in as a crisis negotiator, I ask my table-mate. "Well, never—except every day on the street," he quips.

It is an older, more skilled and perhaps more open group than Shellum, Micklus, and Baker are accustomed to. They typically try to reach officers about five years out of the academy, who may be starting to re-evaluate the, "I'm a cop, do what I say!" mantra. Still, even with a long-established culture of training in law enforcement, de-escalation is a tough sell. "One person screwed up and everyone pays," is what Micklus heard outside St. Louis. In New York City, after the widespread protests over Eric Garner's death, 20,000 police officers took a three-day, $35 million training that was labeled by some as a "waste"—and not just because officers were issued breath mints to suck as a deterrent to cursing. The program apparently lacked any tactical training. If you want cops to listen, talk tactics, but if you want them to learn, talk tactics that work.

New York City police officers graduating from the academy at Madison Square Garden last year. Photo via Diana Robinson

After a brief welcome, Shellum turns the microphone to Micklus, a burly man well over six feet tall who carries a mustache comb in his pocket. He and Baker will do most of the heavy lifting. There will be a pre-test for every module, slides we must get through, in order, and a test afterward. Cops trade in epigrammatic knowledge; one deputy distills four hours of training on blood-borne pathogens into, "If it's wet and not yours, don't touch it."

It makes me wonder how successful six hours of power-point slides are going to be.

Every slide and each page of the 151-page participant guide have been specified by the US Department of Justice Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS). Created in 1994, the program had spent over $14 billion to keep police on the streets and "to enhance crime fighting technology, support crime prevention initiatives and provide training and technical assistance to help advance community policing." The UMCPI is one the regional community policing institutes created by COPS to train police officers side-by-side with members of their communities. The hope was "to establish a standard for dealing with issues of public trust and personnel accountability." By 2001, there were 28 of these RCPIs, but today only a handful remain—victims of funding changes and, perhaps, the growing militarization of policing. They may never have been able to overcome the initial perception that community policing was, as Micklus put it, "hugs and kisses to bad guys."

At the first break in the class, I ask Micklus why he's doing this. De-escalation is an essential skill for 21st-century policing, he says, and "I want to be on the right side of history."

The real work of the class begins with the trailer to Restrepo, Sebastian Junger's and Tim Heatherington's still-urgent 2010 documentary about a group of soldiers in Afghanistan's Korengal valley. It's a place where, as Junger wrote in War, "almost every problem could get settled by getting violent faster than the other guy."

This is every officer's fear: explosive, unexpected, deadly resistance. And it's made even more potent by the understanding that many returning vets are better trained to kill than any police officer. It's not a fair fight when they meet, and that puts everyone in the room on edge. De-escalation is not hand-holding, but a necessary tactic to even the odds.

When facing suspects who resist, police officers are trained to view them as threats. Their responses are guided by a "use of force continuum" that begins simply with their physical presence in uniform, includes verbal commands, and ends with lethal action. The word continuum suggests a smooth shifting of gears, but that's not how it works in practice. Officers respond to threats, both actual and perceived, in ways (hopefully) commensurate with that threat. There is no need at the class to step through increasingly more violent options. De-escalation exists in opposition to this; force is not met with greater force, but with empathy.

As a class, we read a case study: A jumper is on a roof in New York City. One cop faces off with the man, an angry, suicidal former marine. The crisis ends when the officer makes a connection over loss: "Fourteen of my buddies died" on 9/11, he tells the jumper.

This is why using veterans with PTSD as the model for teaching de-escalation is so valuable. Veterans are different, their troubles seen in the context of sacrifice and shared kinship: the call to service, the daily reality of facing death, and a credo of strength, honor and bravery. Most police officers, veterans or not, identify with this. So the path to empathy is less tortuous than it might be normally, and the release of biases—about mental health, substance abuse, or homelessness—less fraught.

The greatest challenge is rebalancing the native antagonism between authority and empathy. One trick is to frame empathy as evidence of strength, or as one slide put it, "Understanding human emotion can give law enforcement an edge." Another is to help officers become aware of their "conceptual baselines," their "beliefs that don't have a basis in fact," which outside COPS training manuals are commonly understood as prejudices. (Racism is never mentioned during the training, though same-sex marriage is.)

The trailer to Restrepo is just one of six videos we'll see, each linked to a different teaching module. There will be modules on the converging conditions that put soldiers at risk for stress-related disorders, the disorders themselves, reintegration challenges faced by veterans, and then the actual de-escalation tactics, which will be taught by having us run through case studies in small groups.

The case studies come after our lunch break, but before we get to them, we watch an NPR video about a multi-officer high-speed car chase that ends in a showdown in a pasture in North Dakota. At one point, captured in unexpectedly cinematic dash-cam video, Brock Savelkoul, an apparently suicidal veteran, comes within a few feet of one of the officers. He is brandishing a handgun, his AR-15 somewhere near his out-of-gas truck. "I don't know how he didn't get shot," says Megan Christopher, the only officer interviewed for the story. Everyone in the room agrees, dumbfounded.

In the video, we hear her de-escalating, using the techniques we're trying to learn: active listening, emotional labeling, mirroring, and encouragement. "Why was she was the one doing all the talking?" I ask. Because she was probably the only one whose vehicle had a working PA system, is the consensus. That may have been an asset, but it just underscores how equipment problems, communication errors, and inaccurate information from dispatchers can have devastating consequences that no amount of de-escalation training will fix.

In groups of five or six, we read the case studies and formulate responses for various situations: a violent veteran in a mall, a domestic abuse incident, a veteran assigned a menial job by a demeaning supervisor, a veteran fighting with his parents with whom he lives, a road rage incident, and a depressed veteran possibly going "postal." It is the least effective part of the day, perhaps because it comes near the end, but also because it is more thought experiment than physical learning. De-escalation needs to be practiced outside the classroom—train the way you fight is the SWAT mantra—in uniform, with guns, with the requirement to make the right choices. Sometimes de-escalate, sometimes not. Teach officers to use force in the context of problem solving, not how force solves problems.

A SWAT Team in Boston, Massachusetts. Photo via Flickr user matthrono

Even with the best training and intentions, another hurdle is what my classmates call "hurry-up policing." Officers are under constant pressure to close calls as fast as possible. Good policing, like good medicine, takes time and adequate resources. So unless innovative programs—like Portland's Behavioral Health Unit, which pairs police officers with mental health workers—can become as commonplace as SWAT teams, the perverse incentive of quickly arresting someone and letting the system figure out what to do with them will remain.

By the end of my two days in Titusville, after talking with officers who themselves suffered from PTSD related to their military service and others who witnessed gruesome crime scenes, I come to appreciate another juncture of policing and medicine. Our steepest challenge is not how to catch dangerous criminals and solve crimes, nor to resuscitate failing hearts and cure cancers. Instead, it is how to protect and to grow our shared humanity on the job.

Will lives be saved by Shellum, Micklus and Baker's work? It may be impossible to know, because they are working below the line, on the denominator, trying to make sure police officers never make headlines. "We are going to concentrate on veterans today, but these skills can be used on anyone," Shellum says in his introduction.

I hope everyone there heard him.

Stuart Lewis is a General Practioner whose writing about medicine has appeared in the Guardian, Columbia: A Journal of Arts and Literature, and several medical publications.


Cops Say a Woman Intentionally Plowed Through Pedestrians on a Busy Las Vegas Strip

0
0

The Las Vegas Strip. Photo via Creative Commons

On Sunday a bit more before 7 PM local time, police say a woman intentionally drove her car onto a sidewalk full of pedestrians on Las Vegas's famed strip, killing at least one person and injuring dozens more before taking off, as the New York Times reported.

The woman, who is in her 20s, had a three-year-old child inside the 1996 Oldsmobile she was driving, according to CNN. She plowed onto the sidewalk on South Las Vegas Boulevard near the Paris hotel and casino, one of the city's busiest intersections, at an estimated speed of 30 or 40 miles per hour. Police took the woman into custody shortly after the crash near Flamingo Road and Koval Lane, the intersection where Tupac Shakur was shot and killed in 1996. The driver is now being detained, and she was set to be interviewed and tested for alcohol and other controlled substances, according to the Times.

Her name has not yet been released.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: CBGB Is Being Reborn as a Newark Airport Restaurant, for Some Reason

0
0

Photo via Wikicommons

CBGB closed up shop on Manhattan's Bowery Street nine years ago, taking an entire legacy of New York punk and new wave along with it, but soon you'll be able to visit the grimy club that helped birth the Ramones, Patti Smith, Blondie, and countless others once again—but only if you're stranded in Newark airport during a layover and want to grab a bite to eat.

Gothamist reports that CBGB will open in the airport as a restaurant very soon, perhaps before the end of the year. They also noted that Grub Street picked up on this news in November of last year, reporting at the time that the restaurant will feature "American fare in a fun environment recalling the legendary music venue." According to the menu tweeted by WFMU below, part of that "American fare" meant to remind patrons of the venue that famously sold chili from a kitchen with a resident rat is seared togarashi tuna with wakame seaweed salad, for $16.

The restaurant will follow in the footsteps of some other recent appropriations of the CBGB name, like the limp CBGB Festival that takes place around Manhattan every Columbus Day weekend. An official opening date hasn't been announced, but if the rumors are to be believed you just might be able to scarf down some CBGB-branded deviled eggs for $9 on your way home this holiday season.

Gothamist called the whole godawful plan the "final nail in the coffin of CBGB, the Bowery, punk, everything," but the building that once housed CBGB has been a boutique clothing store for a decade and the Rat in Boston is a shitty hotel now, so the dream has been dead for a while already.

This Family Has Been Trying to Access Missing Daughter’s Medical Info To See If She’s Still Alive

0
0


A photo of Roxanne hugging her nephew. All photos courtesy Roxanne's family unless otherwise noted.

More than once, Angeline Courtorielle has thought about impersonating her granddaughter, Roxanne Marie Isadore. But each time, she reconsiders. She'd imagine calling Health Canada or the band office, say, "Hey, can you tell me where my medical was last used?" And they'd probably ask her why—if she's actually who she says she is—she doesn't know the answer herself... and what would Angeline say then?

So, she's never tried.

"I got scared," she says. "You know what I mean? So I didn't."

But Angeline is convinced that information will give her closure. She's convinced it will help to answer the question her family has asked over and over for years, relentlessly but without resolution: Is Roxanne alive, or is she dead?

Alive, Angeline thinks. Alive, she hopes.

Angeline is 70 years old. She and her husband are raising five kids—not her own—on nothing more than their old age pensions. They live in Valleyview, Alberta. She has five of her own children, 24 grandchildren and 35 great-grandchildren, the youngest barely a month old. Her "babies" remind her that she's old, but they keep her feeling young.

"If I don't see her with a baby in her arms," says Dorothy Blue, Angeline's daughter and Roxanne's mother, "it's not her."

Roxanne was one of Angeline's babies. She was born October 14, 1982—a Libra—in High Prairie, Alberta. Dorothy was 17 and already a mother to her eldest, her two-year-old daughter Nikki. "We're more like sisters," Dorothy says, speaking of her daughter. "I was a child myself."

Dorothy with her three daughters, Nikki (left), Rollanda (middle), and Roxanne (right).

When you're a teenager, it's hard enough to be a student, let alone a student who's a mother of two. Angeline visited from Chetwynd often. During these visits, toddler Roxanne would crawl up beneath her grandmother's shirt and settle in.

Eventually, Angeline took her home to northern British Columbia. She nicknamed her "my skin." Roxanne kept crawling up under her grandmother's shirt.

"She would roll up like a fetus," Angeline says, "like she was in the womb."

Safe.

***

The drawings, papers and certificates that mark the passage of childhood fill Angeline's drawers. Over decades of raising her children, then her grandchildren, and now her great-grandchildren, she's kept them all.

She has many drawings from Roxanne because Roxanne liked to draw. She also liked to play. "She was," Angeline says, "a really loveable kid."

When she was five years old, Roxanne began waking up screaming from nightmares. She would be frantic if the light was off and the bedroom dark and shadowy. Angeline slept in the same bed with her to chase away the bad dreams, to soothe her.

"It was a guy with a beard, a guy with a beard," Angeline would hear Roxanne say, over and over when she woke. She didn't know what to do. It was the first time Angeline realized someone in her family had been abused. Angeline brought Roxanne to native counseling. For a while, they had to go every other day just to cope.

This—the revelation that her sweet girl had been molested—gutted Angeline.

"I collapsed for three days," Angeline says of the initial confirmation in counseling. A guy with a beard, a guy with a beard. Roxanne is one of the 25 to 50 percent of Indigenous women who are sexually abused as children, per data compiled by the Canadian Department of Justice. For non-Indigenous women living in Canada, that range is just 20 to 25 percent.

Roxanne would go on to be "a joyful little girl," Angeline says, her eyes on the kitchen table, now littered with family photos: Newborn Roxanne in her mossbag. Roxanne, almost four, wearing a fancy dress and with matching pale blue beads looped around her neck. Roxanne hoisting, and in the next photo hugging, her younger cousin. Roxanne in her white graduation gown, blue cap atop her head.

But despite the joy, the dark shadows remained.

"I don't think they outgrow it," Angeline says, "they take it with them."

***

A photo of Roxanne, undated, as a teenager.

The family last saw Roxanne in 2006, and the last they heard from her was a 2007 phone call. That was the year Edmonton Police picked Roxanne up on charges relating to prostitution (she pled guilty, and some of the charges were later dropped). Until that time, according to her family, Roxanne had been calling weekly—or at least monthly. After that, the calls stopped.

At the time, Roxanne was 24. Her daughter Gail was four years old, her son Connor a toddler, and her youngest son C.J. just a baby. Angeline didn't even see Roxanne after C.J. was born. Roxanne called from Edmonton to say he was born and in care and Angeline went to fight for custody (she was given it).

After being molested as a child and abused repeatedly by her longtime boyfriend over the years leading up to her disappearance—Dorothy recounts once finding her daughter, cowering in a closet and several other instances where she was beaten so badly she required hospitalization—Roxanne struggled with men and boys.

"She didn't like... I don't know how to put this," Angeline says, wearily but without judgement, "she might have loved her sons in a way, but she didn't want to see them because they were boys."

The trauma is part of why Roxanne's family thinks she could be alive, somewhere. But where, and what happened between her last phone call in 2007 and 2013 is mostly a mystery.

Angeline says she was told the RCMP picked up Roxanne sometime in 2011 on a prostitution charge in Fort St John. The photo of Roxanne shared widely on the news is from that incident, Angeline says, and is the last picture she has of her granddaughter. However, an RCMP spokeswoman says that never happened. The courts have no record of any charges stemming from it. It's another mystery Angeline is trying to unravel.

The family's only reassurance that Roxanne was somewhere alive and okay came from vague updates from friends and family who called and professed to have seen her.

After 2013, even these reports ceased. That's when Roxanne's family really started to worry. On September 24, 2013, they reported her missing to their local RCMP detachment in Valleyview. Roughly a month later, the Edmonton Police became involved and they have since become lead on the case.

As of this writing, there is nothing new for the police to report. Roxanne could be anywhere. Roxanne could be dead. To know, one way or another: that's why Angeline sometimes holds the phone and imagines being Roxanne.

***

Roxanne is Cree from Driftpile Cree Nation, which runs along the shore of Lesser Slave Lake several hours north of Edmonton. She has Indian Status, a government designation under the Indian Act, which is rooted in assimilation and has been likened to apartheid law.

Roxanne's Status is proving problematic for the investigation into her disappearance. Because she has Status, the responsibility for providing some of her health benefits and maintaining some of her medical records lies with the federal government (as it does for eligible Inuit people as well). As a result, it's much more difficult for investigators to access those records.

This means that Roxanne's family hasn't been able to use health records to track her down the same way any other Albertan family could track a missing member. They haven't been able to see when or where—or even whether—she's accessed her medical benefits or filled a prescription at a pharmacy or gotten her teeth cleaned, a cavity filled.

"If she's alive, she'll use it," Angeline says. "If she didn't use it—well, she's gone."

***

Angeline points at the picture of Roxanne's first Christmas visit to Santa. Photo by Adam Dietrich.

In 2011, Alberta passed the Missing Persons Act. Some welcomed it for the new tools it offers investigators working on missing-persons cases, but others criticized it, concerned about how those tools might be abused.

The Act allows police to apply to the courts for an order giving them access to phone and text records, video records, GPS tracking, health, financial, and other information. For police to apply, they must have already conducted "reasonable efforts" to find the person missing and they must be concerned about that person's "safety and welfare... given the individual's physical or mental capabilities or the circumstances surrounding the individual's absence."

One mother, whose son has been missing for years and whose attempts to gain access to his records through the courts were unsuccessful, welcomed the news. "Maybe it doesn't pertain to us," Melanie Alix told the Edmonton Journal in 2011, "but it might pertain to the next person and it might be crucial to save somebody's life."

Versions of the Act now exist in British Columbia, Manitoba, and Nova Scotia.

With respect to the health care records available now per the Alberta Missing Persons Act, Edmonton Police spokeswoman Patrycia Thenu said, "the typically utilizes the Missing Persons Act to obtain information."

With respect to Roxanne, Thenu said, "a check was done with Alberta Health Services in 2013."

Roxanne's sister Rollanda Thomas (left), grandmother Angeline Courtorielle (centre), and mother Dorothy Blue (right) around Rollanda's table and photos of Roxanne in Valleyview, Alberta. Photo by Adam Dietrich.

But Roxanne's basic medical coverage—including drug prescriptions she might fill or refill—isn't provincial; it's federal. Like nearly 97,000 of the more than 116,000 First Nations people living in Alberta, per a 2011 Statistics Canada report, she has Status, so those records are maintained by Health Canada.

A spokeswoman for the RCMP—which has since relinquished control of Roxanne's case, but which has assisted the Edmonton Police by sharing Roxanne's missing-person bulletin—said via email, "it is standard practice for investigators to look into any data source that may help them which in some cases involves request for judicial authorization to get access to information related to missing person's use of government services." (Emphasis hers.)

But federal information, said Thenu, "is not easily accessible as it doesn't fall under our authority." So the Edmonton Police haven't checked Roxanne's records nationally, meaning they haven't tried to access Health Canada records, meaning they don't know when and where Roxanne has used her medical benefits—or if she even has.

According to Thenu, the provincial Missing Persons Act, which came into effect in September 2012, is beneficial because it requires a court order, but not a warrant. But it doesn't provide a means for accessing the federally-held medical records of Roxanne and other missing Indigenous women who rely on the federal government, not just the provincial government, for medical coverage.

Angeline sits at her granddaughter's kitchen table and looks at photos of her other granddaughter, Roxanne, who has been missing for years. Photo by Adam Dietrich.

Police could file for a criminal search warrant for those records, Thenu said, but they would need information "suggesting an individual's disappearance is criminal." Without such information, "It can be difficult to obtain a search warrant."

But to not even try? Jo-Anne Fiske finds that reasoning problematic. She's a professor in women and gender studies at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta and has spoken out before about the Missing Persons Act, particularly in how it could exclude indigenous women. In 2011, she criticized its emphasis on assets—such as phones and bank accounts—that many marginalized women, like Roxanne may not have.

"Listen," says Fiske now, "She hasn't been seen in eight years; why would you not think something had gone wrong?"

***

If you're an adult, you're allowed to choose to vanish. Some do. They leave to escape abuse; they leave to fight addiction and mental health issues; they leave because they're being crushed by financial debts or family struggles.

The difficulty is in determining whether someone has disappeared of his or her own volition, or whether something awful has happened. But jurisdiction issues can keep families like Roxanne's from using some of the tools that might provide answers.

It's unclear exactly how many of the hundreds of missing Indigenous women across the country have Status or are Inuit. A national spokesman said the RCMP did not break down "Aboriginal" into First Nations (Status or not), Métis, or Inuit while compiling data for its 2014 report on the epidemic.

Where applicable, families can put in requests to obtain the health benefits information, said a spokeswoman for Health Canada. The department will then review the case "against the requirements of the Privacy Act" and make its decision. It's unclear if this happened in Roxanne's case.

Police are also able to make requests, the spokeswoman said. These, too, are weighed against the Privacy Act. But, "this information is not easily accessible," the Edmonton Police spokeswoman said, "as it doesn't fall under our authority."

Such justifications are maddening, says Dawn Lavell Harvard, president of the Native Women's Association of Canada. "We constantly hear, again and again, from various police forces and various agencies, 'well we can't do that because it's not our jurisdiction,' 'it's a jurisdictional issue,' and girls are going missing, girls are gone forever while people argue that it's too difficult because of jurisdiction."

Angeline says she was advised by someone within the federal government—she is uncertain whether it was Health Canada or the department of Indigenous and Northern Affairs—to get a lawyer and fight for the information in court.

This is exactly what Melanie Alix told the Edmonton Journal she did years earlier, albeit at a provincial level. She was unsuccessful.

There's another, more fundamental impediment to this plan. A family raising five kids on two old-age pensions, with aunts chipping in when they're able? "We can't financially," Dorothy says.

Roxanne at her high school graduation.

There needs to be a workaround, says Lavell Harvard, some piece of legislation that would allow police to check that information without having to prove the disappearance was criminal to obtain a search warrant.

"They're missing... how does one prove criminality if they're gone?"

Jo-Anne Fiske notes that talking about privacy and police investigations has never been a conversation Canadians are particularly adept at having.

"There is always that apprehension of state surveillance, but I also think that that can then be used – this whole question of privacy—it can be used as an excuse for any number of things that are going on in the sites of power that are not in citizens' best interests."

For Roxanne's family, it boils down to eight years with no word.

They continue to reach out to her. They set up a Facebook group to search for her. There, someone routinely posts this message: Please come home, kookum's number hasn't changed, please let us know you're alright.

But the last time Roxanne called Angeline's number was when her youngest was six months old, Dorothy says, and "C.J.'s nine now."

It's about closure now, says Rollanda.

"We want to know: is she alive? Or did she pass on?"

Follow Jane Gerster on Twitter.

Protesters Keep Shutting Down the Line 9 Oil Pipeline

0
0

An Enbridge pipeline in Alberta. Photo via Flickr user jasonwoodhead23.

This morning, three activists entered a fenced-off valve site along Enbridge's Line 9 pipeline near Sarnia, Ontario, and manually shut the valve wheel to stop the flow of oil from western Canada through the line. The protesters locked themselves to infrastructure, including the valve wheel. All three have been removed and taken into police custody.

If this seems like deja vu, it is. The action was almost identical to the incident where three other activists shut a different Line 9 valve two weeks ago at the Quebec-Ontario border.

Today, activists arrived in the rain, broke into the fenced-off valve area, and closed the manual wheel of the valve around 7:30 AM. Enbridge employees arrived shortly after 8 AM, followed by police. A locksmith showed up and, before 10 AM, the three activists were taken away from the site.

Both actions were undertaken in protest of Line 9 going operational on December 3. That was the day Enbridge's 40-year old pipeline had its flow reversed to bring western crudes, like light Bakken and tar sands bitumen, to eastern refineries and shores. The line is running at a reduced capacity this first year, and full capacity is expected to be 300,000 barrels of oil per day. Line 9 runs from Sarnia, ON, to Montreal.


A protestor is arrested and escorted by police. Photo via Rising Tide Toronto Twitter.

Those involved in today's action, including an Anishinaabe woman, claim that the operation of Line 9 is a violation of Indigenous sovereignty and treaty rights. "It's clear that tar sands projects represent an ongoing cultural and environmental genocide," said Vanessa Gray in a statement. "I defend the land and water because it is sacred. I have the right to defend anything that threatens my traditions and culture."

Gray is from Aamjiwnaang First Nation, located near Sarnia. The reserve, created in 1827 as part of Treaty 29, originally delineated an area of over 10,000 acres. Over the next hundred years, through a series of illegal land transfers, and transfers made legal through the Indian Act, Aamjiwnaang was reduced to its current size of 3,100 acres. Much of this land went to the city of Sarnia and to a number of large industrial companies, like Dow Chemical. The area surrounding Aamjiwnaang, including on lands that were theirs as per treaty agreements, is now known as the Chemical Valley. It is there that Enbridge's Line 9 starts pumping.

Further east along the pipeline route near London, ON, the Chippewa of the Thames First Nation is taking the issue of consultation around Line 9 to the Supreme Court of Canada. Judges sided by a count of 2 to 1 against the Chippewas in a Federal Court of Appeal this summer.

The Chiefs of Ontario support the Chippewa of the Thames in their legal battle. The Chippewas are one among 18 First Nation communities along the pipeline route.

At the valve site this morning, protester spokesperson and Aamjiwnaang (one of those 18 First Nations) resident Lindsay Gray told VICE, "there has been little to no consultation with us on the was shut off" after protesters were removed and that Enbridge employees were wondering what to do.

The protesters have a bail hearing tomorrow at 10 AM, according to Gray, and are being held in police custody overnight.

We Got Star Wars Newbies to Review 'The Force Awakens'

0
0

Few things in our culture are as monolithic—or as profitable—as Star Wars. Since the first movie's release in 1977, George Lucas's sci-fi series has broken box-office records, launched acting careers, and spawned one of the most devoted and obsessed base of super-fans in any galaxy.

When we learned some of our staffers had never seen any of the Star Wars movies before, we were surprised, amused, and a little appalled. We asked them to go see Star Wars: The Force Awakens with everybody else in America this weekend and report back. Here's what they found out. Spoilers ahead.

Hanson O'Haver, Social Editor

It's pretty easy to not see a movie, I think. I haven't any Lords of the Ring, nor Titanic, nor Avatar, nor Casablanca, nor The Sound of Music, nor American Pie. I had to look to number 13 on this list of the highest-grossing films to find something I'd seen. A lot of movies have been made, so it really shouldn't come as a surprise that I missed a few here and there. But for whatever reason, people have consistently been shocked by my blind spots, especially when they find out that I'd never seen a Star Wars movie. It wasn't like I avoided seeing them; it just never happened. My parents never saw them so they never showed them to me. As a kid, I mostly watched Comedy Central and avoided anything that involved the imagination. I tried to watch the original film in college, but it felt like a Muppets movie so I shut it off after 20 minutes. I don't take pride in ignorance, though, so when Star Wars: The Force Awakens was announced, I decided I'd see it in an effort to fill in some of the gaps in my cinematic knowledge.

First things first, I think the movie was pretty good, but I don't really get what the fuss is about. Maybe Star Wars is the most popular cinematic franchise in history because society needs something to be the most popular, and Star Wars is as good a choice as anything else. Like Book Four of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle series, the new film functions perfectly fine on its own, but I highly doubt that people would be making such a big deal about it were it not a part of a larger narrative. The acting was good and the special effects were not bad. (At what point will the ease with which computers can create special effects render special effects pointless?) Based on audience cheers whenever a character from yesteryear entered the screen, the plot seemed to satisfy the mega-fans while not alienating Star Wars virgins like myself. Occasionally I felt a sort of Pavlovian sense of love and comfort and wholeness that reminded me of going to Disneyland with my family as a child, which must have been my only prior exposure to the world of Jedis.

In many ways, my experience with Star Wars: The Force Awakens reminded me of another film that I recently saw for the first time: Tom Cruise's Top Gun. I left the theater exhilarated by the good guys' victory, but also with more questions than answers. For example, why are they fighting? How do the planes know when their missile locks on to another plane? Is there a reason that the good guys are good, or are they just good because they're the protagonists? And are there seriously people who find extended sequences of planes going fast and shooting stuff entertaining? I guess I could probably watch the rest of the Star Wars series to find answers to these questions, but the next time I'm in the mood for a movie, I'll probably just re-watch A Weekend at Bernie's again.

Zach Sokol, Weekend Editor

I sometimes feel like I'm living a lie: I've spent the last several years of my life writing about arts and culture, but I've never seen any of the original Star Wars films. This is the type of pop-culture offense people should probably have to warn their employers about before starting a job.

I've only seen the third installment of the prequel trilogy, and I watched it on a plane while intoxicated. I still cried when Ewan McGregor yells, "You were the chosen one!" to Anakin Skywalker who—spoiler alert—ends up becoming Darth Vader.

That said, Star Wars is obviously the type of cultural touchstone where it's easy to delude yourself and believe you've basically seen the originals thanks to sheer omnipresence and secondary references in other media.

Fortunately, the new installment was such a crowd-pleasing nugget of entertainment—jam-packed with both stars and wars—that I felt welcomed into fandom, despite being a straight-up poser. I whooped when Han Solo appeared on screen. I blurted, "Oh shit!" when one of the spaceships leaped into hyperspace for the first time. I even understood a bunch of the Easter eggs, like that one scene where George Lucas makes a cameo.

I'm not going to even try and explain why I think this movie has been so well-received by both critics and the heads. But from the perspective of a first-time Star Wars watcher—I believe this was my first 3D movie too, woof—I think people will like this reboot for similar reasons why people like Adele. The lyrics to "Hello" aren't great poetry; no one is going to mistake The Force Awakens for Cassavetes. But however cheesy or unchallenging these monuments of mainstream pop culture are, they have the capacity to tap into really powerful, universal emotions. It made me feel many types of ways, at least while I was the theater—sipping a Coca-Cola Icee, fidgeting with the ill-fitting 3D glasses, generally consumed by the spectacle. (It may have helped that I sucked down a spliff beforehand, I admit.)

I guess I'm saying I was surprised how the movie simultaneously felt so simple and familiar, but also so titanic—awesome in the old sense of the word . That rare balance is probably essential to any type of iconic world-building in fiction.

Helen Donahue, Social Editor

I've never seen Star Wars. My dad had the first three on VHS and, because I knew him to be more of a Trekkie, the box set remained packaged in the back of our movie cabinet. These movies may as well have been in black and white—that's what little interest I had in watching them as a child. I didn't have a thing for blonds until my 20s, so Mark Hamill* (everything with an asterisk is something I had to google) wasn't looking too hot and Harrison Ford was Indiana Jones to me. Plus the franchise appeared to be lacking in dogs (Chewbacca* is not a dog, right?).

But I am aware of how popular Star Warshas been as a franchise, as I've been alive over 25 years and have heard uncountable references to the films. I know Luke Skywalker is an average Joe who finds the Force* (which sounds like something Ram Dass talks about in Be Here Now— another gem from the 70s) and kisses his sister—Princess Leia—who then starts dating Luke's best friend Han Solo*, a cheeky, unavailable bastard. They go on an adventure with a few emotive robots until Luke meets his dad, Darth Vader, and has his hand sliced off by a lightsaber. I don't know why Darth Vader bothered to tell Luke he was his father if he was just going to slice off his hand.

As a little girl who openly denounced the sanctity of marriage and was, in general, kind of afraid of men, the whole Jabba the Hutt* thing turned me off. I know the scene in which Carrie Fischer, as Princess Leia*, is shackled to this big, slimy fucker, half-naked and clearly enslaved in what's become an iconic Halloween costume. I had a feeling this repulsive blob forced Leia to suck his dick every night. Why were there action figures of this revolting thing? How did Leia deal with the PTSD of enslavement? I imagine shackled Carrie Fischer was also super hot to basement nerds in the 70s, which creeps me out more.

I should also disclose I played Shadows of the Empire* on N64 when it released in 1996. There was no sentiment behind this; I was pretty much handed a game that gave me instructions. I was also five years old—my missions required no explanation. I'd lasso the legs of these giant metal dogs with my aircraft until they'd fall and explode in the snow and was continuously searching for someone called Boba Fett, who my older brother told me was a bounty hunter (this still means little to me). I remember nothing else from this game.

I do remember when the three prequels came out, but I wasn't paying attention, and I don't know that anybody else was. I DO know who Jar Jar Binks is because he became the biggest meme of the 1990s, but even google is having a hard time telling me why he exists.

Anyway, I decided to seeThe Force Awakensin 3D, and I decided to see it mildly stoned, which is as out of character for me as seeing Star Wars at all. I took notes, which now allows me to chronicle what went through my head during the show.

I am—and will remain—confused by the droid, whose safety the entire plot of this movie revolves around. It makes a lot of bleep-bloop sounds, and humans and creatures alike somehow understand it. The droid belongs to a pilot named Poe who's obviously from Brooklyn and would have made a great sub-character on Seinfeld as one of Elaine's boyfriends. I guess the droid saves an essential hologram for Poe, who supposedly explodes in this Tremors-esque desert with his new best friend Finn, who I wasn't sure was a robot or not until he took off his stormtrooper* mask. He and Poe instantly remind me of Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum kicking alien ass in Independence Day, so I'm bummed when it looked like Finn's going solo following the crash. Finn apparently fled the First Order. For a defector, he has a surprisingly good attitude about things. After years of intense indoctrination, Finn woke up one day, said, "Fuck this," and decided to become good.

Finn meets a girl (Rey) who's way too hot to be bargaining for meal rations in the desert. She lives alone in a hut, and I saw the ruins of a metal dog buried in the sand and knew, from my experience lassoing them on N64, I am indeed watching a sequel. Finn and Rey find a decrepit spaceship, and everyone in the audience starts applauding. I have no idea why because NOTHING works on this ship, but the girl has moxie and legitimate piloting skills (super believable), so she saves the droid and Finn and transports to another galaxy. I should note Finn's kind of obsessed with Rey. When he tries to hold her hand a second time, after she firmly requests he stop grabbing it and then asks if Rey has a boyfriend back home, I wondered if he'd be helping her out at all if she did.

Next, old-ass Harrison Ford walks in as Han Solo and, while he's a total dick, the crowd goes apeshit over his dad jokes. From pop-culture references, I assumed he was frozen, so I was unsure what to think—he looked in good health to me. He had his best friend Chewbacca with him, who carries a crossbow and complains a lot in an untranslated language.

Straightaway, Han doesn't believe a woman can pilot any type of plane in this movie. Was this a reference to the plot of Six Days Seven Nights, when Harrison Ford encourages a barred-out Anne Heche to take the wheel of a two-person-plane and direct it safely back to the South Pacific island of Makatea? Either way, I'm thinking David Schwimmer should make a cameo.

About an hour in, we meet some dude (spoiler) with an overwhelming Scottish accent. While it's pretty hot, I'm left wondering how a Scotsman got to whatever galaxy they're on. I guess the Force really is awakening.

Take a Look Inside New York's Premier Jedi School in Today's 'Daily VICE'

Speaking of the Force, I'm confused when Carrie Fischer says, "May the Force be with you" to Rey because Rey doesn't reply "and also with you" back and shake Carrie's hand like in church.

Leia shows up with something called the Resistance—people and creatures opposing the First Order—and she and Han exchange a lot of banter and old-person sexual tension. They apparently have a child together, but he's gone rogue. I realize their son is the dude the film had panned onto in the first few scenes. He looks like Darth Vader, with the same weird asthma-inducing helmet, except he's wearing Hood By Air. I didn't know what to think until I realize it's Adam Driver under the mask, who I can't take seriously unless he's asking Lena Dunham for apple juice and being the poster man-child for selfish assholes everywhere on HBO's Girls. Even so, I actually think he's a brilliant stage actor, and I'd fuck him, so I was nervous to see him in a Star Wars movie. This film could pigeonhole him as an emotionally unavailable bad boy forever... or is he actually playing one in The Force Awakens? When he kidnaps Rey I initially couldn't tell if they were going to get it on or not, but her ability to harness his power when he attempts mind control should have been a clear and instant turn-on. This says a lot about my relationships, as I clearly envision unbridled hatred sparking an immediate sexual connection between two people easier than love between Rey and the dude who's working his ass off to save her.

I think Adam Driver is pissed Rey has the "Force" and he doesn't, but at one point he does say, "Let me be your teacher," which is essentially pre-foreplay dirty talk. No girl can resist that kind of language—I would have fallen for it. Fuck the dude trying to save my life.

Adam Driver's name in this movie is unclear to me, but when Harrison Ford confronts him on an excruciatingly narrow open walkway above the pits of hell, he yells "BEN" at the top of his lungs. I'm both astonished and disappointed considering all the wacky names I've heard since the Force awakened. Adam Driver starts fake-crying and impales his dad with a lightsaber. Han is a fucking idiot for thinking he could talk his estranged son into coming back into the "light" with a 30-second speech. Driver's character is addicted to this bad guy shit. What bothers me most about this scene is Han's last gesture of grazing a hand gently across his son's face as he dies, impaled on Driver's lightsaber. Did we learn nothing from We Need to Talk About Kevin? You can't choose your kids, only to have them. That one's on you, Han.

The movie ends with Rey fighting Driver (instead of fucking him... booooring) and running up a hill, where she finds a disgruntled old man in a hooded burlap sack that is, of course, a super run-down Mark Hamill. I can't say I expected much else after 30 years, but he looks kind of like a Yoda. But maybe that's what Jedis* become after a couple hundred years. Rey doesn't say anything and just holds Luke's lightsaber up to him, which he doesn't take a single step toward. Is Rey Luke Skywalker's daughter? With whom? What's the plot twist here? Who fucking knows, but the look on his face when the camera zooms in reads, "Please let this be over."

Follow Hanson, Zach, and Helen on Twitter.

Viewing all 38002 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images