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Check out Matthew Houston's work and buy Blobby Boys books from Koyama Press.
[body_image width='781' height='553' path='images/content-images/2015/04/14/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/14/' filename='iain-overton-gun-crime-book-body-image-1429012759.png' id='45745']A midnight death in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. All photos courtesy of Iain Overton / Canongate Books.
"There is this enormous, diverse world around the gun. Some is dark, some is light."
This is how journalist and activist Iain Overton presents his new book, Gun Baby Gun, to me. It's a romantic narrative, but one I can't help but question. According to the website gunpolicy.org, small arms kill as many as 1,000 people globally each day, and wound millions more. So far, in the US alone, there have been 12,124 incidents related to gun violence this year. What, exactly, about this is "light"?
In Gun Baby Gun, Overton approaches this issue—and the many other questions that abound over the issue of firearm ownership—not academically, but by taking us on a journey around 25 countries, where he investigates gun violence from a street level up. In his own words, the book is about "detailing a whole sequence of horrific moments and my responses to those moments."
I spoke to Iain on the phone just as he came out of a CCW ( Convention on Conventional Weapons) conference at the UN in Geneva, where he'd talked about the impact of IEDs (improvised explosive devices) around the world.
VICE: Hi Iain. What's the story behind the book?
Iain Overton: The AOAV [Action on Armed Violence group, of which Iain is Director of Policy and Investigations] focuses on measuring and monitoring the impact of explosive weapons around the world, but less on analyzing the spreading of small arms and guns. Somehow, their proliferation was highly debated 15 years ago but has slipped off the agenda. There's the Arms Trade Treaty, but it doesn't really address this particular issue.
I wanted to reinvigorate this debate. My book is a combination of past experiences as a journalist, lived experience—in terms of going out to countries as the writer of this book—and an overall analysis of the challenges the world has when it comes to combatting small arms. But it's by no means an academic book.
So your book is exclusively focused on gun-related issues?
Yes. The real harm comes from handguns; in the US, in 2013, they accounted for 91 percent of all firearm homicides where the type of gun was known. Explosive devices are used mostly in conflict zones, but the vast majority of armed-violence deaths occur in areas where it's "gangland" killings, or drug dealing-related deaths.
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Dark sacks in San Pedro's morgue
How did you pick the 25 countries you talk about in the book?
I traveled over the year 2014. I went to a dozen countries specifically for the book: the US, Mexico, Pakistan, El Salvador, Honduras, Iceland, Germany, France, Israel, Turkey, and Ukraine. The rest are countries I had been to before or during my career: Iraq, Colombia, Somalia, etc.
I picked Honduras because the city of San Pedro Sula has the reputation of being the most dangerous in the world outside a war zone [in 2013, the murder rate was 173 per 100,000, and there were just under six homicides a day in this municipal region alone]. I picked Mexico because Ciudad Juarez was, for many years, the most violent city on Earth. Ironically, it's also next to El Paso, one of the safest cities in America. Israel is the most militarized nation on the planet.
Ukraine—although I didn't go to the east, but to Odessa—is the epicenter of smuggling out of the Russian Federation. Since the fall of communism, Ukraine has emerged as the place to go for illicit goods and post-Soviet arms trafficking. There's a huge amount of small arms exported from Ukraine. I wanted to see what sorts of measures of control were there to stop the corruption, but it doesn't seem that there's very many.
How do you relate firearm violence and regulations on ownership?
It's illegal ownership of guns that pushes armed violence. Legal ownership pushes to suicide; the US has the highest per capita number of legally-owned guns in the world, and it's also got the highest levels of gun suicides in the world. Somewhere like El Salvador, instead, has much higher levels of illegally-owned guns and much
higher results of violence.
[body_image width='599' height='705' path='images/content-images/2015/04/14/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/14/' filename='iain-overton-gun-crime-book-body-image-1429013188.png' id='45749']A couple of sales reps at a US Gun show.
What do you think of the issue around private gun ownership in the US?
I'm not anti-gun, per se. I think there is a role and a place for hunting and sporting activities with a gun; the challenge is more about the regulation. For example, Iceland has one of the highest rates of gun ownership, but there are no gun deaths at all. This is because levels of control are high; there are processes you have to go through to get an application to own a firearm. They also have low levels of smugglings and criminality in general, and a liberal legal system—all of these things underpin why Iceland has no potential gun violence. The US instead has a punitive legal system, with the second highest levels of incarceration per capita in the world.
Gun ownership in itself is incredibly widespread in the US, and many people own guns without being registered with the state authorities. So people with mental health issues can sometimes get their hands on guns, and that's why you see those mass-shootings. I'm not anti-guns, but I am anti-lax gun control.
I also think the Second Amendment of the US Constitution is no longer a US issue, but is now a global issue: The right to bear arms has had significant consequences on the proliferation of American small arms in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. The US's policies also largely influence international policies at the UN, and the debate on small arms control.
For more on guns, watch our doc 'Guns in the Sun':
Looking at recent events, do you think there's an issue with the US police force using firearms abusively?
The US has a very heavy-handed approach towards responding to violence: a policeman will shoot if he feels threatened. There's clearly a huge amount of people
killed every year by US police. SWAT team actions have become much more frequent. There have been SWAT team raids on barber shops and gay bars. There is a sort of militarization going on, which increases terror on both sides.
In the book you talk about "porn starlets who appear as snipers in XXX films." What is that?
[Laughs] Yes, I was referring to Stoya, an American porn actress who was once portrayed as a sniper in a porn movie. She hates guns, but the director had told her it was a "male fantasy." I think guns are indeed a male fantasy. Men are questioning their role in society nowadays—there's that whole discussion around metrosexuality. If you google "babes and guns" you'll find lots of things. There was a whole thing in the 1980s of females in bikinis shooting with rifles. Generally speaking, the vast majority of people who shoot are men. I think there's a real fetishization in many conflicts about snipers. It touches on deep male insecurities; if you have a gun, you're the one in control.
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After an autopsy, San Pedro Sula.
What were the most shocking events you witnessed during your journey for the book?
I've been held up at gunpoint three times. Each one of them was an absolute moment of terror. In Papua New Guinea, my clothes were taken from me. I was really scared for my life at that point, so I personally experienced high levels of fear with feeling the barrel of a gun held up against your head.
I met child soldiers whose entire lives were predicated around the ownership of guns. I've seen 12-year-olds carry semiautomatic rifles. My experience in San Pedro Sula was one of the most powerful ones: Within five days I saw a dozen bodies lying around in different places. You realize how dramatically casual death can sometimes become. It's been a broad brushstroke of horrors.
What do you take away from your experience?
The gun changes people. When a man has a gun in his hand, he becomes somebody different—the entire power mechanism is changed. When someone pulls out a gun there's immediate electricity in the air. You're beholden to the guy because he could use it on anyone.
It's something I've witnessed again and again: When the police, militaries, and criminals use their guns, I've repeatedly seen a transformation in their face and their body movements. Guns are transformative objects—somebody in despair with a handgun is much more likely to blow their brains out, while somebody in fear is much more likely to shoot someone. A gun works like an accelerator and an intensifier of specific emotions.
[body_image width='580' height='432' path='images/content-images/2015/04/14/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/14/' filename='iain-overton-gun-crime-book-body-image-1429015669.png' id='45772']Graffiti in Bethlehem
What changes are you hoping to see in the near future?
My argument in the book is basically that there should be greater control on sales and that gun companies should be held to account. I think a lot more could be done around regulations to ensure that small arms sales don't happen in countries with significant rights abuses.
One of the challenges, though, is that attempts in the past to regulate sales have been compromised by the US, Russia, and China—the three biggest gun manufacturers in the world. I believe the debate about damages caused by small firearms needs to be raised again, and we need a global analysis of small arms harm. But the basic root to begin this debate is to know how many people are being shot—we don't.
Gun Baby Gun is out on April 16 in the UK
Follow Alice on Twitter.
People love to look back on the 90s for a very good reason: It really was a better time back then. The economy was humming along, the biggest government scandal centered around a blowjob (and not, say, torture or mass surveillance), and men with soul patches and bleached-blonde hair charmed the nation with power pop ballads about the struggles of being abandoned by their fathers.
I'm thinking of one songsmith in particular—Art Alexakis of Everclear, who scored major hits with tracks like "Wonderful" and "Father of Mine," which embody the sort of music you will love when you're 13 and your emotions are raging, distance yourself from at 18 in an effort to impress your peers with your taste, then quietly get back into when you stop reading rock critics and just want to listen to some pop-grunge twang.
Though Everclear has faded from public view over the past decade and a half, the band has kept on trucking along and has a new album, Black Is the New Black, coming out April 28. The new songs feel a little rougher around the edges and a little more grown up than the ones that made me feel feelings back in 2000, but "Sugar Noise," which we're premiering above, is still a solid rock song. This summer, the band will embark on the fourth incarnation of their Summerland Tour with Fuel and Toadies.
Preorder the new album here.
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Metroid Prime represents my awakening to what's out there in the world. At a time (2003) when I had no real hope of exploring any exotic territory, my investigation of Tallon IV represented the closest I would get to sampling the pure experience of discovery.
Since then, there have been times that the real world has got close to how I felt as Metroid Prime unfurled. While visiting the ancient city of Angkor in Cambodia, thousand-year-old temples looming over me, drenched in sunrise, I was still intoxicated at 5 AM after an hour's sleep post–Pub Street. Tears of awe were the only possible reaction to this sight. Yes, I cried. My tuk-tuk driver laughed when I told him that. No wonder—he was dealing with abject poverty, but this privileged Westerner on a three-month jaunt in Southeast Asia shed tears over these (admittedly impressive) ancient stone buildings, which he got to see every day. Yet my overriding thought from that first visit to this wonderfully preserved old-world city was that you don't see this sort of thing outside of video games.
To me, it was video games come to life.
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The entirely fictional planet of Tallon IV, the setting for 'Metroid Prime'
The limestone crags of Railay Bay, Thailand; the gleaming white hillside town of Mojácar, Spain; the torch-lit tour of caves in central Vietnam full of hand-sized spiders and their glinting jewel-like clusters for eyes; the volcano-pierced horizon of central Mexico; the humbling beauty and breadth of national parks in New South Wales, Australia—these all have similar proportions in my memory to Angkor, in that they compare favorably to what I've seen in video games. This probably means I haven't seen enough of the world and should get out more. But Metroid Prime certainly made me want to do that, if only to confirm that its vast natural spaces could indeed be outdone by reality.
From island to peninsula, mountain range to tributaries, gargantuan stone building to humble hillside dwelling, most of us—as crushing and sad as this is (and it is crushing and sad)—can't afford and won't ever be able to afford the cost, or even spare the time, to travel as much as we desire. What's the closest we can come to exploring an exquisite world to match our own? Yep. As much as we may moan, $70 for your latest visually spectacular epic is far more affordable than most mixes-'n'-matches of flights and accommodation. And a book just isn't as much fun. You can't throw your avatar off a cliff in a book.
Metroid Prime is one of the most absorbing solo gaming experiences I've ever had. It is immersive beyond the point that many video games fall short. And it was initially greeted—as with some of the best things—with outcry. "How dare you change this thing we love!" "Don't do this to us!" "We deserve what we want!" "Can't things go back to the way they were?" Nintendo's beloved Metroid series going first-person sounded awful to some. Despite the fact that both the Mario and Zelda franchises had successfully shifted to 3-D, going as far as to define 3-D gaming, people were skeptical that Metroid Prime wouldn't just become an empty, futuristic, brown-and-gray FPS.
But the end result was pure vindication. Those who played knew. I knew. But for me, it wasn't merely a world to puzzle out, to solve, to shoot things in. No. It was a world I wanted to be part of. It's something every game should strive for; crafting a place you (or anyone) is happy to play in, often. Samus's first landing on Tallon IV dropped me right into an ecosystem whose flora and fauna begs to be examined, occasionally experimented on (through substantial unloading of menacing arm cannon, usually) but ultimately (mostly) left alone to live and thrive. It wasn't necessary to nervously stalk around or blast everything in sight (initially, at least), but it invited fascination and a desire to crawl across every inch of the world in search of its secrets. Unearthing them may have coaxed peril but my efforts were bountiful.
Though at the beginning, it almost felt like exploring could wait because the most striking things were the simplest and most elegant. The first-person perspective afforded me a wonderful view of the planet's weather, as light raindrops blur your vision. What's more convincing than actual weather? Grass swayed seemingly of its own accord and luxuriant strata rose from the land, encircling me and dominating my view. The temptation to investigate came not from instruction, as weaker games might insist on doing, but both by the lack of orders giving you that all important freedom, and by the lush topography I saw. I could well have been in the alien equivalent of Papua New Guinea's untouched environment—not that I've been there or anything.
Tallon IV's environment—water dripping from the visor as I emerged from a sea; condensation from the heat of a magma-pouring cavern; the glare from craggy and luminous rocks in the Phazon Mines—imposed itself on me through the limitations of my perspective, increasing immersion. As I manipulated the scenery with more powerful weapons, it transformed around me like Autobot City/Metroplex in The Transformers: The Movie. The living things that defended their territory when I invaded their space ensured I was not alone, and through their movements, their attack patterns, their habits and habitats, I gathered evidence and stories of the world I now lived in.
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All the creatures had adapted to their surroundings—whether through natural evolution or using their newly corrupted, Phazon-induced forms. The details of each creature and mutation breathed life into every sight, making it seem as real as possible. Can you remember your breath hitching in your throat when you first spied the hazy splendor of Phendrana Drifts? I do. I immediately began scanning the icy cliffs for places out of reach, marking them for later. What about when you peeled open the Life Grove after grabbing the X-Ray Visor? It was like piecing together a city by walking through it after only traveling on the underground. It revealed new routes and unforeseen pleasures. A tingle ran though me when everything fell into place.
What also made backpacking around Tallon IV so special was being able to scan each creature (big or small), some plant life, and aspects of the landscape, giving a cold, scientific analysis of the planet. Thankfully, it was possible to learn as much or as little as I liked. I was rarely forced to scan anything beyond doors, bosses (to work out a strategy for defeating them, if it wasn't obvious), and some puzzle elements. I could stop and smell the flowers at any point, too—which I did often if I felt safe or wasn't under attack. And of course, discovering new abilities gave me access to even more beautiful decay or deadly blooming. The deeper I went, the more immersed I was by the sculpted game planet I'd been casually dropped onto.
There were cubbyholes, caves, underwater vistas, and huge collapsible caverns for when I felt hardy and compelled. The scale and scope to do this was previously unparalleled in the Metroid series, at least in terms of the reward: in crisp, gorgeous 3D, vertical and horizontal distances that incited exhilaration, and still do. I wanted to travel and to scour the land, sometimes in unexpected ways. I grabbed that rocket jump to propel myself to new heights; captured the Varia Suit and ventured underwater; learned how to time my morph ball bombs to launch higher into and through slim channels. It took time, technique, and patience. It took the heart and will of an explorer.
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Samus in her Varia Suit
Which is arguably what some gaming fans are, or have become. We have a hunger to travel and investigate these increasingly huge game worlds. It represents the evolution of our fantasies that science fiction and fantasy novels, films, and television used to provide. As games have become more refined, detailed and precise, we can almost infinitely clamber around ancient cities as in the Assassin's Creed series, tear through gorgeous jungle in Far Cry, terraform and build upon cubist landscapes in Minecraft, and pull a horde of friends together for adventuring to your heart's content in any MMORPG you care to mention.
For me, though, Prime reached into my suppressed inner desire to leave my bedroom with a few possessions and wander through jungle, temple ruins, pitch-black caves and past ocean views. It satisfied my needs for a while but was always going to leave this quiet, shy 20-something wanting more from life. Gaming has never resulted in anything more (and certainly nothing less) than fuel for grander storytelling, for further knowledge, for more living. That's why when games get it right—so right you still cite them as important to your perspective of the world 12 years later—I think they are capable of changing your outlook, improving you through stories and experiences you could never come close to you yourself, just as literature has throughout history. By the same method, it can also minimize, shrink, and narrow that worldview; it depends on how widely you play or read, and of course the variety of experiences on offer. There's a reason we're so enthusiastic about characters, developers, publishers, writers, and critics who are women, people of color, LGBTQIA, and of all different cultures and backgrounds being in or part of video games: because wider experiences broaden everyone's perspective.
The sequels to Metroid Prime were also excellent for the most part, but the first did something to me, igniting a dampened wanderlust, a now-perpetual belief in the power of curiosity. I will never be Indiana Jones, and I prefer to take somewhat trodden paths (though hopefully not trampled by hordes, but "touristy" doesn't mean "don't ever visit"). But within these deviously designed, though essentially linear, games—like Metroid, Zelda, Shadow of the Colossus, those not really susceptible to the mission-laden fatigue of truly open-world games like GTA or The Elder Scrolls; instead a path more akin to our skirting the edges of civilization—I've found the scintillating pleasures of orientating oneself in unfamiliarity, of capturing the elusive feel of otherworldly pursuits, and of pushing into enveloping nature, unsure of what I'll become at the end of it but caring enough to not stop moving.
Follow Brad on Twitter.
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This article originally appeared on VICE Italy.
Despite the fact that it's been ages since the official fall of fascism, far-right extremism is still pretty trendy in Italy. It's evident on Facebook, from the thousands of Likes racked up beneath pictures of Mussolini, but the real internet paradise for Italy's young and dickish is Instagram. Scrolling through hashtags like #fascistlove, #instafascio (Insta-fascist) and #duxmealux [translation: "Duce (Mussolini) is my light"], I found myself in a world populated by CasaPound militants (CasaPound is a party that charmingly defines itself as "third millennium fascists"), Lazio and Roma FC hooligans, as well as your run-of-the-mill Mussolini fanboys.
These, ladies and gentlemen, are the key tenets of what we in Italy call FascioInstagram:
The Roman Salute—or Sieg Heil, if you will—is the fascist's arm spasm of choice. Whether it's done in unison by a grinning racist mob or just some guy in a balaclava balancing on the side of his bunk-bed, Instagram loves a good Roman salute.
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Here's three lads saluting the fact that they've climbed up on a fence:
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So fascist, so happy. Not entirely unlike that ad with the soccer fans singing that Savage Garden song—just a whole lot more racist.
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Soccer stadiums are the choice arm-stretching venue of Italy's young fascists—in fact, just a couple of weeks ago, a court in Tuscany ruled that giving the Hitler arm at sporting events was completely fine.
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In Italy, it's very common for corner shops and newsagents to sell lighters with Mussolini's face printed on them. I've always wondered who actually buys theese things, but now I know: FascioInstagram fanboys! Just have a look at this emotional Insta-declaration to a Mussolini lighter: "It represents who I am :')" Yep, a Mussolini lighter has driven that poor smiley to tears of happiness.
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But why stop at lighters? Your child's bed will remain forever incomplete until it's coupled with a fascist baseball bat.
Or how's about a nice bottle of the world's best Mussolini wine? Not into boozing? Don't worry. You can always go for an apron with Benito's rugged square-jawed mug on it. There's something for everyone.
Related: For more on fascism, watch our doc 'Inside a Bike Gang Full of Former Nazis':
FascioInstagram is also full of tattoos that are more than a little politically suggestive.
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"Duce is my light." And a really cool axe.
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SS (società sportiva, or "sports club") is written here with Schutzstaffel lightning bolts. See what he did there?
Fascist art transcends tattoos, of course. It also adorns the street walls and shop facades of Italy as extreme-right graffiti. Because what's more hip than hating minorities?
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"Sex, alcohol, and gas chambers."
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"That's amore!"
And let's not forget romance:
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"I only surrender to you Julia, I love you." Yep, #fascistlove exists and it contains all manner of heart-wrenching, heil-inducing images.
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"..YOU ARE AS BEAUTIFUL AS MUSSOLINI'S SPEECH AT PIAZZA VENEZIA..." (<3)"
When love isn't sweet enough, there's also fascist gluttony. FascioInstagram has a section entirely dedicated to sweets and right-wing pastries.
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Here's CasaPound's leader Gianluca Iannone with a huge fuck-off fascist cake.
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"Black Heart." What's a caffé latte, if not straight #facistlove?
The life of your average fascist 2.0 isn't strictly bound to romanticism, pastries, and coffee breaks of course. It's way more than that. In the world of FascioInstagram, young neo-fascists often love to brag about just how tough they are—check out this chap in a rubber Hitler mask and an old Lazio FC jersey, for instance.
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It's of course really fascist to flaunt even the most minor of injuries. The fact that these bloody knuckles are tagged #fascistlove raises a few questions.
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But why merely punch your enemy, when God went and invented knives for you? FascioInstagram is equally obsessed with menacing cutlery.
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Overall, FascioInstagram is a perfect way to see just how deep this whole pop culture understanding of fascism has gone, and how this sort of imagery is still captivating youngsters across Italy.
According to Tom Stevens and Peter Neumann, researchers at King's College in London, Internet and social networks enable political extremists to create "a new social environment" in which "otherwise unacceptable views and behaviors are normalized."
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In their paper Countering Online Radicalisation—A Strategy for Action, they go on to say that when people are "surrounded by other radicals, the internet becomes a virtual 'echo chamber' in which the most extreme ideas and suggestions receive the most encouragement and support."
That's exactly the point I want to make here: even though it can garner you a few Likes, Sieg-heiling in front of the Altar of the Fatherland in Rome and sharing it on Instagram is far from normal behavior.
Follow Leonardo on Twitter.
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Photo by Kiana Wolfe-Godoy
It takes a lot to stop the fire-obsessed kids of Montreal.
Spring may finally be in full swing, but just last Wednesday snow fell in sheets in one of Montreal's largest municipal parks. Though famously verdant and animated in the summer, an unfriendly layer of ice now coated the ground, and the areas exempt were muddy and slick.
From the centre of this hostile landscape a dim, mysterious glow shone out from beneath the onslaught of snowflakes. Shadowy figures confidently manipulated whizzing lumps of kevlar beneath skeletal tree branches.
As I approached, a dreadlocked figure stoically took a swig of paraffin before belching out three feet of flame. Someone else, a bottle of fuel in one hand and a bag of powdered sugar in the other, followed suit.
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Photo by Kiana Wolfe-Godoy
There's no catch-all description for the group of around 15 people who gathered to play with fire on the wintery spring night. A girl who didn't look more than 16, septum piercing glinting in the flame, showed a stocky figure a new move with her "poi," two balls of flammable kevlar suspended on chains. While some in snakebite piercings and neon tights stuck out as rave-scene transplants, others give off a more traditional hippie vibe.
One of the latter was Fred Brabant, an endearing figure with shoulder-length ringlets and a hemp dashiki cut off at the shoulders. He'd been introduced to "fire-spinning" about a year ago in an alleyway and hadn't stopped since.
"My friend handed me a pair of flaming poi and told me to go for it. I smacked myself in the face," he told me with a grin. "It made me laugh, and gave me the taste for more."
The story was similar to what Samantha, a free-spirited Californian exchange student, once told me. She'd been practicing a new move in an abandoned Mile End factory when her pubic hair caught fire.
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Photo by Kiana Wolfe-Godoy
"It was singeing onto me, and I started freaking out and dancing around like a maniac, feeling violated. It was really embarrassing," she admitted with surprising nonchalance.
But even burning pubes couldn't keep her from dancing with flame. For her, and for most of the people I spoke with, playing with fire isn't a casual pastime—it's an addiction, a form of self expression with a guaranteed adrenaline rush.
"To have the fire spinning on every side of you, to feel the sound and the heat, it's really hypnotizing. You go into a trance," Fred told me.
One of the main organizers on the scene, "Marky Marc" Andre, echoed the description.
"It's magic. You flow, following the music. It makes you relax and enjoy the moment," he said.
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Photo by Brandon Johnston
I first met Marky Marc at an underground venue/living space. Given the ethereal nature of the fire-spinning community, it seemed fitting we met in an apartment complex turned commune in the Upper Plateau (a neighbourhood that, thanks to the proximity of a certain prestigious university, is a melting pot of condo-inhabiting yuppies, jaded hipsters and perpetually-intoxicated undergrads).
In winter, the fire-spinners retreat to less exposed areas. Lacking the enclosed spaces guaranteed by more traditional hobbies like tennis or pilates, the people keen on practicing regardless of the conditions seek shelter off the beaten path and away from police interference.
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Photo by Brandon Johnston
This often entails trekking to the outskirts of Montreal's industrial neighbourhoods, places taking baby steps towards second-wave gentrification but that, in the meantime, have remained resolutely sketch. Many of the crews' old haunts have been demolished, and others are so unsafe they hesitated to take me to them.
One spot has luckily remained reliable, and Marky Marc agreed to show me around. We met up on a particularly grey and drizzly morning, making our way through a maze of concrete overpasses and side streets before arriving at the shell of commercial production.
Dubbed frigo for its previous life as an industrial freezer, every inch of the structure's exterior is covered in tags and colourful murals. A tree-lined path over an obstinate coating of ice brought us to boarded-up double doors. Although previously people had unscrewed the obstruction with a screwdriver and a little persistence, this time the owner had done too thorough a job. We squeezed through a rusted metal side door instead.
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Photo by Brandon Johnston
The spot is at once derelict and homey. Light shone dimly through dirty skylights, illuminating towering walls covered in graffiti. The high ceilings and intact roof make it an ideal winter practice spot, and it's clear that people have made it their own—a dismembered car seat and full-size picnic table have been placed around the charred remains of a tiny Christmas tree.
Some dirty sheets lie on the floor next to a broken glass window, the remaining wall of what was once probably an office. Before there were a mattress and some couches, Marky Marc tells me. Just as I picture a grungy but comfortable party squat, he casually warns me not to step in the corner—there might be used needles lying around.
While the exodus to outdoor practicing grounds has begun, the sense of community fostered by meet-ups in out of the way places like this remains intact. At Tam-Tams, the weekly Sunday picnic when hordes of Montrealers from all parts of society flock to the Mount Royal mountainside, a group of fire spinners congregated.
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Photo by Brandon Johnston
Kiana Wolfe-Godoy had been on the edge of the fire scene for a while. Though she's hula-hooped seriously for quite a while, told me she was keen on losing her "burnginity" and using a hoop with flaming prongs attached for the first time.
She'd become involved just by asking a stranger at Tams to try their hula-hoop, and ended up doing it all day. She'd kept in contact with what she described as a community.
"People are really open. People are really caring," she told me. "Gas is expensive and it goes quickly, but even if you've never tried before they're still down to share."
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Photo by Kiana Wolfe-Godoy
True to her word someone offered to let me try out their staff. I held the metre-long stick while someone lit the kerosene-soaked ends with their own flaming instrument, and amateurishly twirled it a few times. The flame spun a foot away from my face.
Though I dropped it with embarrassing frequency, it felt good, entrancing. The smell of gas was in the air, and the love of fire seemed less a pyromaniac's domain than a given.
Follow Noelle Solange Didierjean on Twitter.
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Rob Nicholson. Photo via Wikimedia Commons
Things are going great in Germany, says Canada's foreign affairs minister.
"The mood was very affable and agreeable," Rob Nicholson told VICE on a phone call from Lübeck, Germany, that totally wasn't being tapped by the National Security Agency.
Nicholson is there for a G7 foreign ministers conference that definitely isn't being closely watched by the American signals intelligence community.
During meetings with his counterparts from France, Germany, Italy, America, Japan, the UK, and the European Union—which he was quite convinced wasn't being listened in on by agents of a foreign government—leaders discussed how to deal with the Islamic State (harshly), what to do about Yemen (endorse bombing it), if the Palestinian public relations campaign around obtaining statehood is a good thing (it is not), whether or not the G7 should embrace or exclude the Kremlin (the latter), and how to feel about the progress on nuclear negotiations with Iran (good).
The summit was also a chance for the foreign ministers to put their heads together and try to find a solution on how to stop the steady flow of foreign fighters from the West to the Islamic State. News came out this week that Canada's main spy agency, CSIS, has been passing along travel details about suspicious characters to its allies inside, and outside, the Five Eyes network.
The Five Eyes is a shadowy club comprising Canada, the US, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. The quintet share intelligence, and promise not to spy on each other. (Except when they do.)
Expanding the partners who can get that sort of intelligence is good news for G7 countries like Germany and France, who are usually just the targets of spying.
Forums like the G7 often become useful coordination points for intelligence sharing, which is something that Ottawa has placed a high priority on. They also serve as important venues for the NSA and its Canadian counterpart to record and log the communications of world leaders.
VICE asked Nicholson if he was at all worried about having his private phone calls collected, and whether he was taking precautions to thwart the NSA's data collection.
"No, I've got complete trust in my colleagues," Nicholson said.
"I can tell you that, you know, the mood was very affable, and you know, very agreeable. And this is my first one as foreign minister. I've been to others, of course—starting as justice minister. But you know, there was a good relationship between all of us. We're all on the same page."
Nicholson probably has no reason to worry—the Canadian government buys a lot of secure phone lines with encrypted channels. The top-of-the-line communications equipment is so good because it comes straight from the NSA.
While in Europe, Nicholson will also be attending a conference on cyberspace at The Hague, where he will be discussing online freedom, fighting online crime, and defending state systems against state-based cyber attacks (like the ones the NSA launches.)
Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.
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Russia is the biggest consumer of heroin in the world, and the Siberian region on the border of Kazakhstan has been hit the hardest. This week on City, VICE travels to a town in that region, Novokuznetsk. We visit the hub of the heroin trade, see religious cults disguised as rehab centres, and witness the effects of a bootleg drug called Krokodil, which eats its users from the inside out. And you thought getting a bag of bum weed sucked.
Tune in tonight at midnight.
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Manhattan Criminal Court in New York City. Photo via Flickr user Gerard Flynn
It's an unspoken rule of criminal justice in New York City: The summons system—the process by which people are ordered to show up in court—is slow as shit. The machine was clogged up by nearly 400,000 summonses in 2014, causing widespread, extensive backlogs that infamously left one kid on Rikers Island for over two years without a trial. It was only a couple years ago that the average time for a defendant to be arraigned in the five boroughs fell below 24 hours for the first time.
To say the very least, something needed to change.
Mayor Bill de Blasio was elected in 2013 on a platform of police reform, which included fixing the flawed summons system. But he quickly found himself in the middle of a political maelstrom created by the death of Eric Garner, the death of NYPD detectives Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, and the ensuing protests and counter-protests. On Tuesday, the city erupted once again, with a anti-police-brutality march across the Brooklyn Bridge that saw dozens arrested, and resulted in reports of cops being attacked—which, of course, the mayor immediately condemned.
Amid the yelling from both sides, though, de Blasio has made strides with police reform, tweaking the NYPD's training programs, banning solitary confinement for those under the age of 21 on Rikers Island, and issuing tickets for possessing small amounts of weed rather than bringing out the cuffs. The mayor kept it going Tuesday, when, alongside Jonathan Lippman—chief judge of the state of New York—he announced a city program called Justice Reboot, which will essentially try to modernize the summonses system so wait times are shorter and settlements are faster.
The immediate mission is to alleviate Rikers of the 1,500 inmates who have been there for more than a year without being convicted. But as the New York Timesreports, it "could have significant consequences for a far broader swath of the city."
Namely the thousands who are stuck in misdemeanor court for things like riding a bike on the sidewalk.
This is an admirable cause, one that seeks to resolve 50 percent of cases that have been pending for a year within the next six months, calendar all trials for these cases within 45 days, and overhaul at least half of all cases in New York via upgrades to technology and coordination. That will include a new scheduling and case-tracking system, easier access to information and reminders of trial dates (failed appearances led to warrants in 38 percent of summonses cases last year), and a new governing body made up of the mayor's office, district attorneys, and judges that will implement goals to be met.
You'll even be able to pay summonses online now.
"Justice Reboot is about rethinking the way we approach criminal justice in NYC," Mayor de Blasio said in a statement. "Today's changes are part of my long-term commitment to bring the criminal justice system into the 21st century, safely drive down the number of people behind bars, and make the system fairer."
Of course, advocates and activists—the progressives who helped de Blasio get elected—still want him to rethink broken windows policing theory. The approach focuses on the low-level infractions that made up half of all Criminal Court cases last year, and critics want the mayor to slow it down, not speed it up.
"It's a system beyond just the actual ticket and fine," Marc Krupanski, a program officer at the Open Justice Initiative, told me. "So, it's not one thing that can be mended by quick fixes, such as allowing people to mail in fines. These steps are important, yet they don't go far enough to also address problems of racial disparity in who is hit with summonses (thanks to broken windows policing) or the violations of due process (thanks to the overwhelmed, conveyor belt–style of the courts)."
Krupanski referred to the now-famous Department of Justice report on the Ferguson Police Department, which criticized for-profit policing and basically labeled the Department a collections agency. He thinks a version of the same thing is happening in New York right now.
"More than 25 percent of NYC's criminal justice revenue comes from summonses," Krupanski said. "This reality tears at the fabric of trust between police and affected communities and doesn't prevent crime or make us safer." (And as theTimes pointed out, just 27 percent of summonses issued in 2014 ended in someone actually getting convicted.)
"This is one step," Krupanski added, of summons reforms on a larger scale. "Making it easier to pay fines may relieve minimally the overburdened court system, but won't address due process or bias concerns or the profit-motive concern. It's also a good step to track ethnic and racial data of summonses —but then what will be done when the data shows what everyone already knows?"
Still, getting low-level offenders off Rikers Island as fast as humanly possible seems like something most of us can agree on. So I gave Norman Seabrook, the president of the Corrections Officers Benevolent Association and a major ally of Mayor de Blasio, a call.
Seabrook, who commended the mayor for raising funds for the detention complex, described Rikers to me as a " warehouse to many people—out of sight, out of mind," but also one where, of course, gang violence is prevalent. However, by having inmates leave cells faster, the window of opportunity to get involved in prison warfare will be closed.
"Individuals that are allowed to leave Rikers early probably shouldn't have to be there in the first place," Seabrook explained. "Landing at Rikers for jumping a turnstile because the bail was set at $1,000 bail, when, if they had $1,000, they probably wouldn't have jumped the turnstile, doesn't make sense."
"The justice system has needed a fix for a while now," he added, "and not just here, but around the country."
But to Krupanski, that fix shouldn't be monetary, but more big picture. Why is the kid getting in trouble for jumping a turnstile in the first place? And is our problem really that 400,000 summonses aren't processing fast enough, or that there are 400,000 summonses period?
"It's not people just saying, 'We want to give you our money more easily and quickly,'" he said. "If that's it to the City's fix, then they have the wrong idea about what people are upset about and what the problem is."
Follow John Surico on Twitter.
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A young homeless man in London. Photo by Tom Johnson
This post originally appeared on VICE UK.
There's a general election happening in the UK in a few weeks. This probably hasn't escaped your attention, because the media at large is doing all it can to make sure you know exactly what's going on every step of the way.
Pollsters and pundits are trying to work out what everyone thinks. TV shows are ushering undecided voters down rivers to illustrate that they're floating. Prime Minister David Cameron is discussing how many Shredded Wheat you're meant to eat for your breakfast. Somewhere in a marginal constituency's Aldi, Kenneth Clarke is doing the "Gangnam Style" dance down the frozen foods aisle in a highly misguided attempt to court the youth vote. All eyes, it seems, are on Westminster's corridors of power.
But what do the homeless people sharing Westminster with the UK's leaders think about the election? The borough of Westminster has one of the highest homelessness rates of anywhere in the country, and according to figures released by the Department for Communities and Local Government, homelessness has risen by 55 percent nationwide since David Cameron became prime minister in 2010—so I figured the homeless population local to his place of work would have plenty of opinions regarding how the country's being.
It's a little publicized fact that you don't need a permanent address to vote. The law was changed some years ago in an attempt to enfranchise the homeless, who can register "a park bench, a bus shelter, or the doorway to a high street store," according to Electoral Commission guidelines. Billy, a homeless man in his early 20s, may be doing just that for the first time this May.
"I've never voted in my life," he tells me in Parliament's Members' Dining Room, where YMCA—a charity that provides over 10,000 beds a night for homeless and vulnerable young people—has brought together a number of homeless people to put their experiences to politicians.
A young man named Romario interrupts: "I wasn't interested in politics until I got kicked out, but now I've learned about it 'cause I've been through stuff, and I want them to understand things."
But do politicians understand? Thirty-three percent of MPs were privately educated, compared with seven percent of the population. That figure falls, barely, to 31 percent of the candidates predicted to win in a few weeks time. One fifth went to either Oxford or Cambridge. This isn't to say that privately-educated people aren't capable of empathy, because that's obviously false. But it does speak to a level of privilege among the political class that could make it difficult to truly understand the issues affecting those they govern.
"If you're homeless and then watch the news, and the news is going on about third world countries and how they're doing, it winds you up," says Billy. "They're sending loads of stuff over to those countries but can't sort [our] own out first. In a way, it makes you angry."
Today, Billy and Romario aren't watching the news. They're meters away from the prime minister's dispatch box. I ask what they would do if they held power for one day.
"Nah, I don't want power, judging by the stress they get!" says Romario, hesitating for a second to reconsider. "You know what? I'd make everyone equal for that day. I'd love to sit there—as horrible as it sounds—and take all the people with the well-paid jobs and nice houses and swap lives with those who aren't so fortunate. Those who haven't been brought up with a nice trust fund or whatever. I'd just want them to see how hard it is from our point of view. Just for one day."
"I pity them, to be honest. In my mind it's like you've been fed through a silver spoon. You don't understand the true value of money 'cause you've got it all," says Billy. "I don't understand the computers and that—I like hands-on stuff. To me, that's hard physical work, but they're getting paid all the money."
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Romario in Westminster (Photo courtesy of the YMCA)
"I used to be one of those people who didn't want to know—I'd be like, 'Pfft, politics.' I'd have laughed in your face, honestly," admits Romario, before explaining how the YMCA had opened his eyes. "They show you how it works. They make you want to get involved. It's made me a better person if anything."
"I'd like to think I could be one of [the elite]," says Billy. "I do think some of them understand. But I probably will never be a banker or an MP or anything. It doesn't really happen to people like me."
Joanne is 23. One year ago her family lost their home. "It was very sudden. It was just gone and I had nowhere to live—my whole family. It made me pretty angry," she tells me.
The YMCA took her in, and she's now lived with them for a year. She's registered to vote, but not sure of the point: "I think some of them try to understand, but they just don't know what it's like—they haven't been through it."
During Joanne's day as prime minister, she would "build more houses! A lot more houses, 'cause there ain't enough. And youth groups, so that young people have somewhere to go to help them understand things. If I didn't have the YMCA—well, I'd be working hard to find myself somewhere. But the truth is, I'd probably be on the streets. There'd be nothing to help."
Julie Hilling has spent five years as the MP for Bolton West after a long career in youth work. And, understandably, she's angry with the way things are going.
"How can we be the sixth biggest economy in the world, and the biggest growth industry is food banks?" she asks. "It should be in statute that local authorities have to provide for youth workers so they've got somewhere to turn to. Some young people just can't afford to participate in education and things—that's how this happens.
"We need to say, 'How am I going to make sure that doesn't happen to any other young person?' I've been [in Parliament] five years and it's so slow, the legislation. I argue with another party and with my own side to get this change. But if young people don't speak up we'll end up in the same mess over and over again. It's time for these people to push and tell us the changes they need."
You can register to vote in the UK until April 20th. Read more about the YMCA's work at ymca.org.uk.
Follow Benjamin Butterworth on Twitter.
This article originally appeared on VICE UK.
Ever wondered what the hell goes on at your average, BAFTA-winning indie studio when brains need to blossom fresh ideas to take into new gaming experiences? Wonder no more, as VICE Gaming's got an exclusive insight into the creative processes of London's Roll7 crew, when the time came to put Not a Hero together.
The studio recently beat off competition from FIFA and Madden to win in the best sports game category at the 2015 BAFTA Games Awards—something worth celebrating, I'm sure you'll agree—and Not a Hero is their "now for something completely different" follow-up to the two OlliOlli games. It was also one of the best games I saw at March's EGX Rezzed expo in London. I'm pretty bloody excited about it, which is entirely apt, as it's pretty excitedly bloody, as games go—even when rendered in a throwback, pixels-aplenty style. It's positively soaked in the red stuff, which is OK by me as it's also generally hilarious. I know I laughed, and in public, too. Seal of approval.
This is part one of a documentary examining the work Roll7 put into Not a Hero, a not-at-all-for-kids 2D cover shooter—like if Hotline Miami was actually created by a renegade sect from Sensible Software sometime around 1996—set to come out in May for PC. Don't know about you, but there can't be all that many games where an airing cupboard plays a vital role during the project's foundational stages. Then again, how many games have I made? Zero, exactly. So I should probably just shut up and let you watch the video which (warning!) features scenes of office equipment destruction. Should any of you be sensitive to seeing printers attacked.
Oh, and boners for life, obviously. Obviously?
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Basing an 'Inquisition' character on Barack Obama, by user Tojo. Image via nexusmods.com
This article originally appeared on VICE UK.
Video games have a problem with accurate depictions of race. It's no fresh revelation that the medium has a problem putting the player in the boots of anything other than a buff, buzz-cut space marine—but it's important that we ask why that is. Over the last decade, film, television. and theater have increasingly been forced into thinking about how they represent people from different backgrounds in their storytelling. Now we should be asking: Why are there so few minority characters in gaming?
There's a short, somewhat glib answer to that poser: Because mainstream games aren't made by people from ethnic minorities. Art that exists in the commercial centre is by and large mono-ethnic, in its creation and representation. And gaming's problem with representing minority characters does not start with the designers in the studio, but what those creators studied to get there.
Culturally biased game design starts with a reliance on shorthand to build its mise en scène. More so than film, theater, and television, video games use visual signifiers to both depict and differentiate between characters and environments alike. One low-level example of this is how gamers see big red barrels as "shoot here and things will explode" targets, while more complicated examples rely on stereotypes in order to get across character traits.
Video games remains a young artistic medium, one that's still asking its creators to "design what you know, and make what people recognize." As a result, many of the black and minority (BME) characters presented in games are still simplistic. Rockstar's black male protagonists in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Grand Theft Auto V, while some of the most balanced and nuanced characters in Western gaming, still rely on storytelling tropes involving gangbanging in the hood.
However, the problems in BME representation run deeper than how many characters there are, or how those characters act. The uncomfortable truth it that BME characters in games often don't look like BME people in real life. For years, I have struggled to make a half decent in-game avatar of myself using create-a-character tools. Too often the customization options for minority characters have either been too limited or simply nonexistent to allow satisfactory realization.
In the past, this could be attributed (to some extent, at least) to limited processing power on consoles—it was difficult to properly render things like a fully jointed hand, every finger independent, so many avatars ambled around with permanently closed fists. Mario looks the way he does because, back in his Jumpman days, limitations on pixel numbers restricted what designers could accurately render. Similarly, it was hard to render "black hair" in games, so your character customization options for a black character would be either cornrows or an afro. A recent playthrough of 2003's Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic gave me two black male characters to tweak, both with the same skin tone and with only three or so hairstyles to flick through. Not great.
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Creating a character in 'KOTOR'
Yet in 2015, the problem remains. When starting BioWare's acclaimed RPG Dragon Age: Inquisition, I had great trouble creating an Inquisitor protagonist that looked like me. I couldn't get the head quite long enough, light bounced off him in usual ways, and it all felt a bit off. The result didn't look like a black man—it looked like a white man, colored black. This isn't to say that my design skills are bad or that Inquisition is a shoddily designed game, because on the whole it's anything but. Elsewhere, it makes great use of the new consoles' power, with some superbly rendered human and non-human characters alike. So why did mine appear so odd? Are black characters simply harder to make?
I decided to speak to some BME game art and design students currently at De Montfort University, Leicester, who provided some insight into the difficulties faced when creating minority characters. (All names have been changed.) "Robert," a first year student, explained to that the majority of guides used to draw people are based on an idealized set of proportions. And these rules—the eyes should fall in the middle of your face, your lip size should be in a certain proportion to your eyes, and so forth—are, for the most part, based on Caucasian characteristics.
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Franklin from 'Grand Theft Auto V' is one of gaming's more balanced black player characters, but his personality is still driven by stereotypes
"Eliza", another student, told me about James Gurney's "color zone" theory. Outlined in his 2010 book Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter, Gurney's theory explains how the colors that make up the face can be broken up into three zones based on blood flow and how light reflects off the skin. When painting, people are recommended to draw faces with a yellow brow, red cheeks, and a blue chin. The issue with this is that BME faces aren't going to be best realized using the same principle. When painting a black person, you need to use more purples, oranges, and greens to properly capture the differences in light reflecting against the various sections of the face. I had problems making my head in Inquisition not only because a person of my skin color doesn't fit idealized art proportions, but also due to skin color itself being rendered in subtly incorrect ways. I looked odd compared to other characters in the game, because the game was not built to take into account a character like me.
So how do we fix this? How do future games improve their depictions of minority characters? The answer seems to lie with education. As more BME people are getting into games design, more of them are making a fuss about how they look. It's essential that stereotypes are busted, and that ethnic minority designers stand up for their viewpoints on how avatars of their own appearance should be seen on screen. There might not ever be a book on how to paint black people in video games, but you can bet that, once the existing theory is proven ineffective in such circumstances, there'll be change nonetheless.
The increased graphical power afforded by new consoles will only help this progression. Despite the background flaws of many a current character creator, they are getting better in giving gamers ever-widening options. Greater contrasts in skin tone and more hairstyles creep into games year by year, as designers realize it's not such an impossible task to render Afro-Caribbean hair. Slowly but surely, the representation of minority characters is becoming a major topic in gaming's on-going evolution.
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Image via Flickr.
Some things in this world just make sense. Looking both ways before you cross the street, listening to Dr. Dre's The Chronic, reading the New York Times, and saving for your kid's college education are some of those things. Going to a restaurant where you catch your own fish and then eat that fish is not, but it probably should be. And if the people behind Zauo, a Japanese chain restaurant that takes the idea of "farm to table" and feeds it a barn full of meth, have anything to do with it, soon it will.
On a recent trip to Japan I ate lunch at a Zauo branch in Tokyo, located inside of the Washington Hotel in the city's Shinjuku district. The restaurant's centerpiece is a series of tables made to look like a giant boat, surrounded by a moat full of fish. It looks, I can say without exaggeration, cool as fuck.
Related: "The Japanese Love Industry"
From there, a waiter seats you and gives you the option of either ordering your meal from him or fishing for it. (It's cheaper if you catch your own meal rather than having an employee catch it for you, a price differential which Zauo's site explains thusly: "The price is reasonable because we would like all our customers to enjoy fishing.") I opted for catching my own lunch partly because of the price, but mainly because it seemed like a fun-as-hell thing to do.
My waiter baited live shrimp onto a rod that looked like a miniature fly-fishing pole and instructed me to set it in a section of the moat where a bunch of fish were gathered. Though I watched other people struggle to come up with something, a fish swam toward my bait pretty much immediately. I hooked him, and proceeded to drag him out of the water like the true angler I am not.
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Photo by the author
One thing they don't tell you about fish is that when you try to pull one out of the water, it's supremely pissed off. My catch began struggling with all of its paraphyletic might, flopping around and splashing the table next to me as I dragged him onto the deck/dining area. The diners next to me didn't seem to mind this, and actually clapped for me as the waiter put my fish in a net and escorted my girlfriend and I back to our table. We chose to have it grilled, though Zauo allows you to have your fish served sashimi, boiled, deep fried, or converted into sushi. In a blindingly short interval of time, the freshly dead fish was cooked and on the table, and soon thereafter in my stomach. It was, if you couldn't guess by the above photo, delicious.
The strange thing about Zauo isn't that it exists—Japan is known for its themed restaurants—it's that it's wildly popular. There are 14 branches of the restaurant in Japan, including four in Tokyo alone. In an email to VICE, Takuya Takahashi, a Vice President of Zauo, said the company is looking into opening locations in New York and San Francisco. Representatives of the company, he explained, are planning a trip to New York later this April with the purpose of "trying to find products and suppliers," as well as "investigating if we can procure live fish."
Takahashi credits the restaurant's success to the fact that cities in Japan, with their small spaces and busy pace, offer few opportunities for families to eat together. Zauo's large size—its locations generally hold about 200 people—and focus on "parent-child communication" through the shared activity of fishing make it something of an anomaly in the country. The company is very profitable, with an Earnings per Share point of 25 million yen (about $210,000 US).
It's easy to focus on the zaniness and novelty of Zauo. And don't get me wrong, there's plenty of that. A team of drummers appear to celebrate you when you make your catch, and the company's site boasts an interactive feature that lets you fish online. Still, there are advantages to catching and eating your own food. For one, there's the freshness aspect—you are not going to get a fresher meal than one you literally killed with your own hands like five minutes ago, and as a result, the meals are much tastier than those you'd get at, say, Bonefish Grill.
Another, more esoteric aspect of Zauo, is the philosophical implications of catching and eating your own food. It's an experience that, unless you're schlepping out to a lake, you're not liable to have. Even at a restaurant such as Red Lobster, which keeps an aquarium full of product at its front to remind you that yes, you are indeed about to eat some lobsters, it's rare to be given an opportunity to consider the value of life—taking it, and then consuming it for your nourishment. More than that, Zauo serves as an opportunity to show children where their food comes from by allowing them to catch it themselves. It's some real use-every-part-of-the-buffalo shit. "By preparing and eating fish that you have caught yourself," Takahashi explained, "you can be truly grateful for life."
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Members of the American Nazi Party listened to Malcolm X speak at a Nation of Islam rally in Washington, DC, on June 25, 1961. Contact sheet © Eve Arnold/Magnum Photos
On Sunday, June 25, 1961, ten members of the American Nazi Party arrived at a Nation of Islam rally in Washington, DC. The party's founder, George Lincoln Rockwell, led them inside the Uline Arena, a quarter-million-square-foot stadium that would later host the Beatles' first US concert. Ramrod-straight, square-jawed, and with a merciless, piercing gaze, Rockwell looked like a Hollywood villain straight out of central casting. ("How much taller he is than Hitler,"
Esquire noted in an otherwise withering essay. "And how much better-looking.") The Uline had nearly sold out. The Nazis were outnumbered 800 to one.
The fascists hadn't come to make a bloody last stand. Instead, guards from the Fruit of Islam, the NOI's paramilitary branch, frisked the men and ushered them to front-row-center seats. Their crisp brownshirt costumes and swastika armbands stood out against the suits and ties surrounding them. Despite the 90-degree heat, Rockwell and his men waited hours for the event's main attraction. There is no record of anyone cracking a smile at the situation's absurdity.
The night's keynote speaker, NOI leader Elijah Muhammad, canceled his appearance because of illness. According to historian William Schmaltz, Malcolm X delivered a speech, followed by an appeal for donations that singled out the few Caucasians in the audience. Rockwell contributed $20. When Life photographer Eve Arnold raised her camera to capture the Nazis, Rockwell—presumably alerted to her Jewish ancestry by the Muslims—allegedly rasped, "I'll make a bar of soap out of you." (She replied, "As long as it isn't a lampshade.")
Overt anti-Semitism, it turned out, was something the two groups could bond over. While Rockwell pushed his hatred of Jews to frothy extremes, Muhammad backed a range of racist theories, including the hoax that the Jews had financed the slave trade. (Malcolm X was cagier about his anti-Semitism, often deferring to Muhammad's conspiracy theories rather than offering his own.) To publicly rage against Jews in the summer of 1961 may have offended the general public even more than it would today. Six thousand miles away, the Adolf Eichmann trial, in Israel, had captivated the world and dramatically increased coverage of Holocaust atrocities.
Division of the races was another mutual bugbear. Malcolm X's speech that night was titled "Separation or Death." Inside the arena, Rockwell told reporters, "I am fully in concert with their program, and I have the highest respect for Elijah Muhammad." The question of where to send America's blacks—the NOI wanted a chunk of the US, while the ANP wanted a full deportation to Africa—was, he said, his only quarrel with the Muslims.
This wasn't quite true. The Nazis and NOI also disagreed over whether black people were human beings. Over the course of his three-year career as an open Nazi, Rockwell had repeatedly referred to African Americans as "ring-in-the-nose niggers," "basically animalistic," and "no better than chimpanzees." With the alliance, he'd suddenly slapped a massive asterisk onto his own white supremacy.
Remarkably, the NOI had a history of such partnerships. Six months earlier, Muhammad had sent Malcolm X to a top-secret meeting with the Atlanta Ku Klux Klan. In a throwback to Marcus Garvey's 1922 Klan summit, the two groups brokered a bizarre truce: local mosque safety in return for NOI support on racial separation.
But that meeting had served a purpose, no matter how tenuous. The alliance with the Nazis held no obvious benefit for the Muslims. The differences between Malcolm X and Rockwell were existential. Where the former had risen from a life of crime to national prominence, the latter had exerted himself—and destroyed his family and finances—to become a national pariah, sinking from a decorated Navy officer to a delusional Nazi commander in just six years.
The Washington summit would have provided a bitter contrast to Rockwell's normal, meager gatherings. An audience of 8,000 was something he could have only dreamed of. Even the building's imposing vaulted ceiling hinted at the fascist architecture he saw as his inalienable destiny (throughout his career, he made repeated references to controlling the United States by 1972). For the Nazi leader, the alliance served a fantasy rooted in grandiose absurdism. "Can you imagine a rally of the American Nazis in Union Square," Rockwell later wrote his followers, "protected from Jewish hecklers by a solid phalanx of Elijah Muhammad's stalwart black stormtroopers?"
And where Malcolm X was famously complex, Rockwell self-identified as a cartoon character. With the media controlled by Jews, he'd reasoned, mainstream political protest from the extreme right was doomed to failure through obscurity.
"I tried and nobody paid attention to me," he later told an interviewer of his pre-Nazi political activities. "But no one can ignore Nazis marching in the streets."
Following this logic, the ANP produced a variety of merchandise catering to the juvenile bigot. One item,
The Diary of Anne Fink (16 pages of Holocaust atrocity photos with jokey captions), was advertised in The Rockwell Report as "sick humor," an odd allusion to Mad magazine, Lenny Bruce, and a world of Jewish, "degenerate" comedy that the Nazis should, logically, have railed against.
One result of this oafish marketing was that Rockwell recruited exceptionally inept personnel, attracting hordes of Nazis he admitted were "unbelievably stupid." And yet he persisted in shooting for the lowest common denominator's lowest common denominator. The ANP mocked the anti-segregation Freedom Riders with a VW van dubbed the "Hate Bus." Some ANP picketers wore Groucho Marx glasses and rubber noses in their protests. Why would the famously disciplined NOI ally itself with such caricatures?
AMERICAN NAZI PARTY
The ANP was founded in 1959 by George Lincoln Rockwell in Arlington, Vriginia. Rockwell was assasinated eight years later by a former ANP member.
A possible answer came eight months later. On February 25, 1962, the ANP was invited to a second rally, this time the NOI's Saviours' Day convention in Chicago. Rockwell addressed the crowd after Muhammad. Facing an estimated 12,000 African Americans, the Nazi leader pulled no punches.
"You know that we call you 'niggers.' But wouldn't you rather be confronted by honest white men who tell you to your face what the others all say behind your back?"
As a public speaker, Rockwell was entertaining without being particularly authoritative (in cadence, he mimicked comedian Red Skelton). His was not the voice of a führer, and the Chicago International Amphitheater wasn't his Nuremberg Rally. Surely the irony of the moment wouldn't have escaped him; this was the largest crowd he'd ever addressed (and would ever address again).
"I am not afraid to stand here and tell you I hate race-mixing and will fight it to the death," Rockwell continued. "But at the same time, I will do everything in my power to help the Honorable Elijah Muhammad carry out his inspired plan for land of your own in Africa. Elijah Muhammad is right. Separation or death!" The audience teetered between polite applause and boos. Two months later, Muhammad, writing in the NOI newspaper, admonished his flock for their frosty reception: "If they are speaking the truth for us, what do we care? We'll stand on our heads and applaud!"
This mutual nod to "honesty" and "truth" gives us a peek at the possible foundation of the alliance. Rockwell and Muhammad saw each other as authentic, as people willing to speak the truth—their versions of it—no matter the cost. Their marketing to their constituencies depended on this image, and each man drew legitimacy from the appearance of being a straight shooter. Rockwell's existence was useful to the NOI as a recruiting tool, his physical presence a testament to Muhammad's own authenticity.
Malcolm X wasn't part of this legitimacy trap, and he made it known that Rockwell's high esteem wasn't reciprocated. When the Nazi was applauded in 1961 for donating $20, Malcolm X laughed into the microphone and said, "You got the biggest hand you ever got, didn't you, Mr. Rockwell?"
As the civil rights struggles of the 50s gave way to the triumphs of the early 60s, both men found themselves operating in the vast shadow of Martin Luther King Jr. The Nazis, challenged by the juggernaut of legislative triumphs following King's actions, dug in. Malcolm X, faced with a growing gap between his NOI rhetoric and the successes of nonviolent action, softened his tone.
After leaving the NOI in 1964, Malcolm X used the movement's alliance with the Klan as a charge against Muhammad. The following year, he sent a telegram to George Lincoln Rockwell:
This is to warn you that I am no longer held in check from fighting white supremacists by Elijah Muhammad's separatist Black Muslim movement, and that if your present racist agitation against our people there in Alabama causes physical harm to Reverend King or any other black Americans who are only attempting to enjoy their rights as free human beings, that you and your Ku Klux Klan friends will be met with maximum physical retaliation...
Within three years, both men were dead, allegedly assassinated by former allies.
But the ghost of the alliance lives on today. The Nation of Islam, under the auspices of Louis Farrakhan, maintains an open partnership with white supremacist Tom Metzger. And in the last decade, the American Nazi Party website established a "Non-Aryan Sympathizer Page," offering "a means for non-whites to aid in our struggle" with mail-in contributions.
Malcolm X's posthumous alliance was stranger still: mainstream acceptance by the white-supremacist society he fought against in life. The US government eventually awarded him a postage stamp.
If you've ever seen Steven Soderbergh's Erin Brockovich, you know the popular story of Hinkley, California. The movie is about a Mr. Burns-style utility company operating a gas pipeline in a small town, and leaking toxins into the groundwater supply. Lab tests showed that the chemical could cause breast, brain, lung, and other cancers, along with miscarriages, birth defects, and tumors.
But can the residents of such a tiny town ever stand up to the might of a huge utility company?
Enter our heroine, a young, self-made law clerk named Erin Brockovich. She's touched by the story, and stirs her recalcitrant law firm into action against the fiendish Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PG&E). David and Goliath comparisons are thrown around with reckless abandon, and in the end there's a $333 million payout—the largest direct-action, out-of-court settlement in the history of the US.
The movie version of that ending looked like this:
[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/ghl-E0O82ac' width='640' height='360']In the scene, Brockovich tells Donna Jensen, a made-up victim of the contamination, that the settlement is "enough for whatever you could ever need." It's a great story, because putting cancer in people's water is an unambiguously villainous thing to do, and the bad guys in the story lose.
But in November of 2010, PG&E publicly offered to just straight-up buy a huge amount of property in certain contaminated areas, which made it appear that something was suddenly wrong. The company had already been buying up property for decades. In fact, according to the San Bernardino Sun, they'd already turned themselves into Hinkley's largest landholder, and PG&E's insatiable appetite for Hinkley real estate at any cost was what originally clued residents in to the fact that something was awry back in the 1990s.
A growing number of residents have accepted offers in the past few years, and local business has really started to suffer. After all, PG&E isn't turning all that land into brand new condominiums. It looks like they're just knocking down the houses and saying goodbye to a big headache.
Residents told the Sun they've lost 60-80 percent of business revenue since the town's water issues began. Enrollment in Hinkley Elementary School shrank so completely that it closed altogether in 2013. Hinkley's post office also closed earlier this year. Now the only place to buy groceries and gas in Hinkley has announced that it's closing too.
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I grew up in California's Inland Empire, so I've driven through Hinkley a few times, but I'm not sure I've ever stopped there before. The last time I passed through, I was on my way to Owens Lake for a story. The lake no longer exists because its waters are now fed to Los Angeles via the Los Angeles Aqueduct. What I found on its former shores was a ghost town called Swansea, a formerly nice place ruined by the ecological indifference that allowed Los Angeles to come into existence.
Could Hinkley suffer a similar fate, but with natural gas instead of water? Was the hopeful ending of Erin Brockovich that far off? I visited to find out.
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My first impression was that the closures are devastating for the town's future. Aside from the market, there's not much in Hinkley other than a few scattered homes. As I walked along, I did pass one woman in her early 30s. She waved at me. "Hi," I said, and then I rushed to ask a question: "Sorry, but do you know if this neighborhood used to have more houses?"
"Yeah. That used to be a house," she said, and pointed at the empty expanse of desert behind me. If it had been acquired by PG&E, it had been successfully turned into nothing.
In a spot where there was still a house on the street, a water delivery truck backed into the driveway. Since they'd contaminated the local ground water, PG&E used to provide bottled water to every resident whose water was in the affected zone, but that stopped in October of last year. Jeff Smith, a PG&E spokesman, told VICE "In October of 2014, the state finally came out with the maximum con for chromium 6 [or hexavalent chromium], and since those areas were under the 10 parts per billion limit, that program sunset. "
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For now, people can buy something to drink when they're thirsty, along with basic items like beer, milk, and bologna at Hinkley Market. They can even pick up an item from their list of odds and ends, like a paperback book or a cat food bowl. Maybe most important of all is the ability to fuel up their cars without having to drive to the next town over, Barstow, which might be their only option soon.
When I stopped by Hinkley Market at around 11 AM, the store owner, Ali Abuhantash wasn't in yet, but the clerk immediately asked me where I was from, and seemed genuinely curious. I told him Los Angeles, and asked him if the place was really closing.
"Yeah, man. There's just nobody here anymore," he said, and told me there'd be one more week of business—maybe two. Abuhantash's cousin, who owns the property the store was built on, is taking a check from PG&E. "They approached us," Smith told me, clarifying that this deal took place after the property-buying program had officially ended.
When I asked what the clerk would do after the closure, he said, "to be honest, nothing, probably." I was prying, and he started to sound a little annoyed, like I would sound if someone asked me why I haven't done my taxes yet.
I changed the subject and asked him if he could point me toward Mojave Solar Project. I follow renewable energy news, so I'd heard that one of the largest solar installations in the world was on the outskirts of Hinkley, which isn't as much of a coincidence as it might seem, since PG&E buys the electricity that it produces. The Solar Project had just become fully operational in January. I wanted to understand why that didn't keep property values up. The clerk said I should just point my car north at the nearest dirt road, drive into the desert about 15 miles, and I'd just see it.
He was right.
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It's so expansive you really need an aerial photo to get a sense of it. I'd read that workers have to be there whenever it's generating electricity. That's not the sort of thing you associate with solar power, but the curved, mirror surfaces catching sunlight aren't photovoltaics, like the things you sometimes see on the rooftops of socially-conscious movie directors' homes. These particular solar panels reflect the sun's rays onto a water-filled tube instead. Yeah: hot water, during the worst drought in California history. Here in California, even our sustainable energy is unsustainable.
But working on a steam generator requires a staff, and a staff means customers for Hinkley's remaining businesses, like the Market and a neighborhood dive bar.
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The construction spared this stately home. To its left and right are solar panels.
Other than the sound of roaring turbines, there was no activity at Mojave Solar Project. A dozen cars were parked in the two massive parking lots, but it wasn't the bustle I would have expected for such a giant facility.
On the way back into the middle of Hinkley I happened upon the only other place to buy beer: Riley's Place, a roadside dive bar and spot for bikers to buy snacks. The parking lot was empty and for a moment I worried that it was closed, but the door was open so I went inside.
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It was a small place with a road house vibe, and random stuff stuck to the walls like in a TGI Fridays. The bartender on duty, Brenda McIlvain, looked at me like I was lost when I walked through the door. She poured me a beer and put the glass in a koozie—their weird little trademark according to Yelp. I asked why it was so quiet.
"When the solar plant was being built business boomed," she said. It turns out when construction was going on, there were 1,200 construction jobs, but that ended in January. It now takes 80 people to run the day-to-day operations.
"Well, I've met Erin Brockovich," she offered when I told her I was a journalist. "It's been years," she explained. "I met her twice when she used to come here. She even played pool at that pool table."
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Riley's was one of the spots that featured into the Erin Brockovich story—although it wasn't used in the film. According to Brenda, Brockovich came to the bar to meet with PG&E representatives and conduct legal business, although she couldn't tell me exactly which business, since she hadn't been eavesdropping.
I asked her if she'd seen the film. "No, it makes me too mad," she said. "I know some of the people who got money and shouldn't have." It seemed like an odd stance to take, since the bad guy here is PG&E, a really easy character to hate. But it sounded like things were more complicated than that for Brenda. "I didn't know it was going on, or I wouldn't have bought stock in PG&E," she said.
She had a hard time casting PG&E as the villain in the story of her life. Finding out the huge company that does business in town has been acting irresponsibly was a shock, but the contaminated water never killed Brenda. There was just a boom in business at her bar, a big media circus when some residents got huge checks, and then business slowly tapered off.
But PG&E did act irresponsibly, and watchdog groups would argue that they didn't stop acting irresponsibly after the settlement.
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Their operation in Hinkley is a natural gas compressor station along its main pipeline, which moves gas from Texas mostly to Northern California. The Hinkley operation started in the boom years of the 1950s, when science was exciting, and there was no EPA.
Hexavalent chromium was an additive that prevented rust in the gas cooling towers, and it was disposed of in nearby pools. Under ideal circumstances, the dangerous heavy metals would be filtered out and reclaimed. Instead, they were kept in unlined pools until 1966, and lined pools thereafter.
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Before 1972, PG&E dumped out 370 million gallons of hexavalent chromium—slightly more in terms of volume than the oil spilled in the 2013 Deepwater Horizon disaster. In 1987, they notified the necessary watchdog group, invested $12.5 million in cleanup, and in the early 1990s, they started offering to buy real estate in spots where the contamination was worst.
Hinkley resident Roberta Walker thought it was strange when she received a $60,000 offer for her little piece of real estate in the middle of nowhere, which was probably only worth $25,000. Since she didn't feel like selling anyway, she hit them with a $250,000 counteroffer, and they said yes.
Walker started asking around. Neighbors were getting huge offers too. Armed with a little bit of light research about water contamination, Walker went to the Law Offices of Masry & Vititoe, where Erin Brockovich worked. In 1992, Brockovich started gathering plaintiffs. What she did between 1992 and 1996 became so famous, "Erin Brockovich" was used as a verb on a recent episode of Better Call Saul.
After the ensuing settlement, the affected residents were swimming in money, which is good, because most of their pool water was probably contaminated. But safe water could be delivered, and the town still seemed like a place where people could live their lives.
[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/Euqo5QNkmJM' width='640' height='360']But over a decade later, new problems started to arise. A watchdog group called the Lahontan Regional Water Quality Control Board issued a cleanup order in 2008 which included the requirement that PG&E "prevent the chromium plume from migrating to locations where hexavalent chromium was below background concentration levels." Lisa Dernbach, a senior engineering geologist with the group, told the LA Times that PG&E then "let it get away from them and it started migrating toward other properties." In 2010, the San Francisco Chronicle revealed that the hexavalent chromium plume was spreading, and in 2012, PG&E was slapped with a $3.6 million fine.
According to Smith, it was a time of soul-searching for PG&E. "People had a lot of anxiety about the water they were drinking, even far from where the contamination was," he said, adding that the company had done a poor job of communicating the danger in plain English. "Spouting scientific jargon was what had gone on for several years prior to 2010. Folks would call and we would give them a bunch of data or tables. Being responsive to the fact that it was an emotional issue."
This was when the PG&E "whole house water program," as it was branded, and free water was distributed. But while there were people "committed to the future of Hinkley," as Smith called them, they only made up about 35 percent of the population when that program ended. The community made it clear, he said, that "any program that didn't include property purchase as a component would demonstrate that we weren't listening."
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But that year, the Environmental Working Group demonstrated that at least 31 cities around the United States had hexavalent chromium in their water, including my hometown of Riverside, California. Norman, Oklahoma, has an even worse hexavalent chromium problem, at 12.9 parts per billion, than Hinkley's estimated level in most of the community. In fact, most of Hinkley is below the new California limit (10 parts per billion) for hexavalent chromium. "Nobody is drinking water that is above the 10 parts per billion," Smith told me. "That relieved a lot of the anxiety, but by that point a lot of people had left."
In another strange twist, also in 2010, John Morgan, of the California Cancer Registry, found that Hinkley residents had developed fewer cancer cases between 1996 to 2008 than should have been expected based on the town's demographics.
But whether or not there's still contaminated water in Hinkley, the residents of those 300 houses are gone. Smith says PG&E is "committed to the future of Hinkley. We believe it has a viable future," adding that the company isn't planning to buy every house in town and level it.
Brenda, the bartender from Riley's, once owned a house, but she didn't get one of those sweet PG&E deals. She also never qualified for a payout, and she's now semi-retired. But for the time being, she hangs around until the evening shift when a guy named Dan relieves her. Every evening the pace picks up a little, and a night of boffo business can put as much as $245 in the till, she told me. It may not sound like much, but it looks like it keeps the lights on, even if things are leaner than they were in the best of times.
The town was once "full of such nice people," she said, having seen them all come through her bar over the years. "But I don't think Hinkley will ever be like it used to be."
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But it's not completely deserted. Granted, there are few jobs outside of PG&E, but Brenda makes do. There's no post office, but she pointed out that PG&E is trying to arrange for a temporary post office to be set up at their work site (Something Smith confirmed was in the works). Sure, Hinkley has no school, but there are two churches, and a handful of small farms. Kids learn a lot on farms.
It even has a graffiti artist named Hobo. Hobo paints the abandoned buildings in town, and sometimes spells out the word "Hinkley" in big, defiant block letters. As I passed one of Hobo's prouder-looking murals on the way out of town, I stopped to get a closer look. It didn't seem so proud when I got closer, because someone, maybe Hobo or maybe someone else, had written "RIP Hinkley."
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