The VICE Reader: What It's Like to Get Exonerated of Murder After 21 Years in Prison

In the following exclusive excerpt from VICE contributor Alison Flowers's new book, Exoneree Diaries: The Fight for Innocence, Independence, and Identity, out June 7, the action is centered in Chicago's Cook County, wrongful conviction capital of the United States. The book explores what happens to innocent people when the state flings open the jailhouse door and tosses them out into the unknown. The below chapter takes place just as the murder conviction of one man, Jacques Rivera, is suddenly overturned after more than 20 years. Upon release, he's greeted with much media fanfare, only to find himself paranoid and overwhelmed by freedom.

Jacques Rivera slid a butcher's knife under his pillow.

The 46-year-old man was tucked away in a second-floor apartment bedroom at his sister's bungalow on the northwest side of Chicago. He couldn't fall asleep. The hours crept past midnight.

The previous day, October 4, 2011, had been a remarkable Tuesday. He had finally gained his freedom, 7,841 days after being convicted of first-degree murder. He had been a few weeks shy of his 25th birthday when he was sent to "Hotel Hell"—Stateville Correctional Center, a maximum-security prison in Joliet, Illinois, just southwest of the Chicago metro area. For more than 20 years, that was his home. A 33-foot wall, his picket fence.

On the Tuesday morning in 2011, Jacques's family and friends occupied the rows on both sides of the courtroom. From the state's side of the room, they could get a better look at him, or so they had learned during the hearings leading up to this one. In the third row, Jacques's three children sat together. Near them, Jacques's older sister, Jeanette, was breathing heavily, praying next to her mother, Gwendolyn. In recent weeks, the two women had shared dreams that Jacques's release would be imminent. In the dream, he would tell them: It'll come. It'll come. Wait. Wait. Wait.

"All rise," the bailiff ordered.

Cook County Judge Neera Walsh began the hearing with a stern warning: "I know I don't have to remind anybody in the courtroom that there will be no outbursts of any kind, regardless of what happens today, right?"

Jacques's supporters looked at each other, trying to decode the judge's words. Did this mean he was going to be freed? Or would he be sent back to Stateville for the rest of his 80-year sentence?

"Okay. And if anybody does have a cell phone, they need to turn it off. Not on silent, not on vibrate, but off. And if you don't, there will be consequences, okay?" Walsh instructed.

The state proceeded. "Motion State nolle."

"It would be a motion State nolle prose," the judge repeated.

Jacques had never heard this legal term. Nolle pros or prose, short for nolle prosequi, is Latin for, "We shall no longer prosecute."

The moment fell like dust in a split-second, one of Jacques's sons describes.

"Mr. Rivera, you are released. Good luck to you, sir," Walsh said.

The crowd gasped, trying not to make too much noise. Managing the shock, Jacques shook his head. He didn't want to move around too much, fearing the bailiff would think he was going to run.

Jacques was free, yes—but not quite. There was, of course, paperwork to be done, and he would need to be processed out of the jail where he had been waiting for his new trial on appeal.

Unable to stifle their excitement any longer—like children about to explode into laughter in the middle of church—Jacques's family and supporters burst through the courtroom doors and began to scream, cheer, and hug one another in the lofty hallway. They took out the cell phones they weren't supposed to have in the building and started calling and texting, spreading the news.

Jeanette, who had complied with the no-cell policy, hustled outside to her parked car, where she opened the glove compartment and grabbed her brother-in-law's phone to call her daughter and husband.

"He's free," she said.

Hanging on to receipts had become a longstanding family joke. What's your alibi? Where you at? What are you doing? Got your receipts?

Inside the jail, correctional officers escorted Jacques about, buffering his every move. Should he trip and fall or become injured, the Department of Corrections could be held liable.

Jacques had no property. The staff found some jeans and a T-shirt that would fit him. The outtake process lingered for hours. They wanted to be sure, Jacques thought.

In the waiting room at the sheriff's office, his attorneys, Jane Raley and Judy Royal, were waiting for him. Jacques started to weep when he saw their beaming faces. Jane had taken an interest in Jacques's more than a decade earlier, and she handed him a Chicago Bears sports jacket, a gift from one of his sons, who was waiting outside.

A correctional officer asked if they were ready. As they headed toward the door, Jacques started hyperventilating. He stooped to catch his breath. "It's okay," the officer calmed him, patiently. "If you want to go back, we can wait."

"I've waited 21 years," Jacques told him. "I'm never going to go back. I'm moving forward." With his head slightly down, clasping his mouth to contain the nausea, Jacques walked through gates and chilly air, flanked by his two pillars—Jane and Judy.

A shaky, 14-second cell phone video captured the moment at dusk when, amid a cheering and whistling crowd, TV news cameras, and bright lights, Jacques looked up and saw the world before him. Greeting him first, three of his four children—Jacques, Jr., who was almost 29; Richard, 27; and Jennifer, 23—ran to him, defying orders from officers who had advised the crowd to stand back. As they ran, arms extended, they reached for their sobbing father. Can't nobody stop us now, Jacques Jr. remembers thinking.

After breaking free from a string of embraces, Jacques stopped to pose for a picture with his children. Their stance mirrored a Polaroid photo taken of them during a prison visit shortly after his 1990 conviction. In that family snapshot, Jacques held his baby girl Jennifer in his arms, with his younger son Richard to his left, and Jacques Jr., the oldest, to his right.

"Real strange how that was, you know?" Jacques says of the two photos, which now hang juxtaposed in his bedroom.

Illustration by Matt Rota

News cameras clicked and flickered as Jacques hugged his sobbing mother, her cries ambient in the TV footage. "I was afraid somebody was going to pinch me and say you're dreamin'," Gwendolyn Rivera told reporters as her son draped his arms over her shoulders, as if to stabilize her or soak up her pain. "But"—his mother gasped for breath between tears—"it's a dream come true."

Six microphones with news flags appeared before Jacques. His supporters hovered behind him. Friends toted poster boards featuring fuzzy mug shots of a younger Jacques, in his early 20s. Now his face appeared gray, bearded, exhausted.

"The City of Chicago needs to know the truth. I didn't kill that young man," Jacques shouted over the microphones, his voice brimming with an angry sadness. "And that's the bottom line."

The cameras turned to Jane, and she offered some of the protracted backstory of appealing the case. "I thought, My goodness! This person should not have been convicted in the first place," she told the reporters. "And then it took us ten years to find the eyewitness."

Reporters asked Jacques about the eyewitness, a young boy who testified against him at his original trial for the gang killing of a neighborhood teen. The witness, now a man in his 30s living in a different state, had come forward to say it was all one huge, haunting lie.

"I love Orlando Lopez," Jacques said. "It wasn't his fault. He was a 12-year-old boy. He was misguided. He was manipulated."

Throughout the press conference, Jacques also collected laughs from the crowd, frequently praising his lawyers. "America had a 1996 Olympic dream team. This is my dream team!" he said.

Jane beamed her wide, effusive smile that could delicately stretch over her face in a split second and then vanish into seriousness.

The news photographers followed Jacques as he piled into a car with his kids and ex-wife, Sophia. He hadn't seen or talked to her much since their marriage in prison in the early 90s and subsequent divorce a year later, during his incarceration. But with a fumbling, awkward grace and some small talk, they cut through their ambiguous past, checking the rearview mirror as TV news trucks followed their caravan of cars.

Waiting back at home, Jacques's sister Jeanette ran barefoot from her house to the corner so she could see the makeshift motorcade driving toward her sister Rose's place.

"He was like the president," Jeanette remembers. "He was like an important person."

The honking and wailing of the caravan crescendoed with the approach. Jeanette ran three houses down to fetch her shoes, scuttling back a third time to wait for her brother on the sidewalk. Emerging from his son's car, Jacques embraced his sister.

"Oh my god, I can't believe it," she said. "You're free. You're here."

Overwhelmed, Jacques choked out the words: "Yep, sis. Yep, sis."

Check out our short doc about the ex-con working to rein in gang violence in Chicago.

Neighbors started popping out of their houses, as though a movie were being shot. An unusual sight, tripods and lights were splayed on the block.

Inside the house, pizza had been delivered. Jacques took only a bite or two, to be polite. He was sweating, and his stomach was cramping into nervous knots as the house packed with people, snapping photos with their smartphones, LED lights ablaze.

They handed him various mobile devices to say hello to old friends.

You sure you don't want a steak or something?

"You could tell in his face," his son Jacques Jr. recalls. "He was like, What am I experiencing?"

A news crew knocked on the door. "Nah, tell 'em to leave me alone," Jacques said.

Back in the family kitchen, Jeanette gave her brother some advice. For starters, he'd need an ID card. She told him to make sure to keep all his receipts this time around. Hanging on to receipts had become a longstanding family joke. What's your alibi? Where you at? What are you doing? Got your receipts?

Then, Jeanette became very serious. "Don't hang around the old block," she told him. "Watch your shoulder. Watch your back." They had lost him once. They didn't want to lose him again.

"I know, I know," Jacques assured her. "I'm a grown man. I can take care of myself."

A look of concern spread across Jeanette's face. "Yeah, but this is the real world. It's like you've been sleeping under a rock and all of a sudden you've come back to life."

His family didn't want to leave him, but they planned to reconvene for breakfast the following morning. For the time being, Jacques would live with his mother in his sister Rose's loft apartment.

It was time for bed. Rose studied her brother. "To be perfectly honest, he looked homeless," she observed. "He looked frightened, scared. He was out of his element."

They headed up to the small, confined space through the separate double entrance. "Are you going to put bars on the windows?" Jacques asked her. "You know, people can get in these windows here. Are you going to get an alarm system?"

"Jacques, no one is going to get in here. You are safe here," Rose told him.

Jacques locked the inside door to the double entrance, even though it was made of glass. He figured he would at least hear the shattering noise if someone broke in. Meanwhile, two Chihuahuas, Tigger and Roo, would be on guard as well, yapping if anyone approached the door.

Unable to fall asleep, Jacques pondered finding something to protect himself. He retrieved an instrument, a kitchen butcher knife and, blade in hand, promptly returned to bed.

Alison Flowers is an award-winning investigative journalist who focuses on social and criminal justice. This essay is adapted from her new book, Exoneree Diaries: The Fight for Innocence, Independence, and Identity, available June 7 from Haymarket Books. Follow her on Twitter.

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An Expert Explains What Happens to Gorillas After They Die in Zoos

Photo of a gorilla in the UK's Bristol Zoo via Wikipedia

By now, you've probably heard about Harambe, the gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo who was shot to death on Saturday by workers in order to save a small child who had fallen into the zoo's gorilla enclosure. There's an ongoing criminal investigation, but prominent zoo experts have called the killing justified, and at this point everyone, even Donald Trump, agrees that the whole story pretty much sucks.

The boy is reportedly fine, and after a brief hospital visit to treat injuries sustained by being manhandled by the gorilla, he went home with his family. But what happens to the gorilla's body?

Ape corpses are extremely rare, and there are scientists out there who would love to get their hands on one. VICE called the Cincinnati Zoo to find out what they were going to do with Harambe's remains, but their media relations department was unable to provide an answer.

So we turned to Adrienne Zihlman, a professor of physical anthropology at the University of California Santa Cruz—and dissector of many, many gorillas—to ask where gorillas go when they day. She explained that there's an opportunity for scientific discovery underneath this tragedy.

VICE: What happens to a gorilla like Harambe when he dies?
Adrienne Zihlman: Some of the zoos actually burn them, or make them into skeletons and give them to museums or universities. I don't know what does with their animals.

Why don't all gorillas get donated to scientists?
You never know when an animal is going to die. Sometimes they're ill, and sometimes they just die very suddenly, so it's a matter of having a network. Otherwise it's really, really difficult to get these animals. My success with getting animals—especially bonobo chimpanzees and gorillas—has been working with zoos where you're known.

How does Harambe's body compare to other gorilla bodies?
It's such a valuable animal. He was obviously so beautiful, and in prime condition. He was also young , because male gorillas are just barely adults by the age of 15. They really don't reach their prime until more like 20.

Is it rare for a gorilla of Harambe's age to get dissected?
In general it's rare, because they're so taken care of and they're very healthy. It's a waiting game.

Are you looking into dissecting Harambe?
I got an email from one of my former students saying, "Shall we try and get it?" I said, "I'm at the point of trying to get things written up, not collecting more data." It's the most incredibly physically taxing project, and I'm not as young as I used to be.

Related: Watch our documentary about gorillas in the wild

What's a dissection like?
You have a scalpel and a pair of forceps. You take it apart, and you weigh every single thing in the whole body. There's all of the skin, there's 230 muscles individually. You can use your imagination. It's several of us working day and night for a week. We dissected them fresh. They weren't in formaldehyde. We had to keep them frozen, and then un-freeze them and get busy. You're working fairly quickly.

Why is it worth all that work?
We just don't know very much about the anatomy of these animals, and when you get older animals, they're different. After I was able to dissect several male silverbacks in their 30s, I got a 27-year-old who was in prime condition and dropped dead of heart failure. He wasn't sick. He was in perfect condition. That's the value of this particular animal if people know what to do with it.

What did you gain from that younger specimen?
It changed what I thought I knew about gorillas by having that particular younger animal. That's the value of having a sample size. You can learn about the effects of age and disease and nutrition and things like that. In humans, the aging process is that you lose muscle and gain fat, or if you have a disease you lose weight and muscle. If you are in your prime and you fall over dead, everything about your anatomy is frozen at a good point in time.

Is it a problem for dissection that Harambe got shot?
It wouldn't make any difference at all.

And what would you say if his body wound up getting burned?
I would just say it's a lost opportunity.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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The 35-Year-Long Hunt to Find a Fantasy Author's Hidden Treasure

Lake Park, Milwaukee, where many believe one of the hidden casques is buried. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

There is a treasure buried somewhere in Milwaukee. Not just in Milwaukee, but in nine other North American locations, including (possibly) New York, San Francisco, and Montreal. And it's not so much "treasure" as hunks of ceramic encased in Plexiglas. But one man's trash is another man's marketing strategy.

The treasures were hidden in 1981 by publisher Byron Preiss, as part of his plan to promote his new book, The Secret. Preiss's fantasy paperback (which predated the identically titled self-help book by a quarter of a century) included a series of puzzles in the form of cryptic verses with matching images. If solved, they'd lead readers to a real-life ceramic bin, or "casque," containing a key to a safe-deposit box, which held a gem worth roughly $1,000.

The contest was inspired by a similar book—Masquerade by Kit Williams, published in 1979—which offered a golden rabbit figurine to any reader who could decipher its location from clues in the text. The challenge remained a popular mystery until it was solved in March 1982, less than 90 days after the release of The Secret,and helped spawn a literary genre known as "armchair treasure hunts."

While The Secret never sold as many copies as Masquerade, it did achieve a cult-like status among a dedicated group of puzzle solvers. Within months, 700 people wrote to Preiss claiming to know the location of the bins. It wasn't until the following year that a casque was actually recovered by three teenagers in Chicago's Grant Park.

"We didn't really care who found the treasure, we just wanted to solve the puzzle." — Brian Zinn

The next puzzle wasn't solved until 2004, when an attorney named Brian Zinn tracked down a casque in Cleveland from a verse that mentioned Socrates, Pindar, and Apelles (all three names are etched into a pylon at the Cleveland Cultural Gardens). After four hours of digging holes, he found the casque buried next to a wall marking the perimeter of the gardens.

To date, the Cleveland casque is the last known resolved puzzle. "Byron Preiss, according to family and friends, figured all of them would be found upon publication. I don't think he realized how difficult the poems were," said James Renner, an author and filmmaker who's working on a documentary about the book.

Preiss died in a 2005 car crash at age 52, and never disclosed the locations of the remaining casques. His publishing house went bankrupt and was acquired by a rival press. Many people viewed the sale as the last chance to redeem the gems, suggesting now, there may only be empty bins.

But 35 years later, people are still searching.

John "Michaels" Pivonka, one of The Secret's dedicated treasure hunters. Photo by the author

After Zinn's big discovery, an army of armchair treasure hunters began congregating online, mainly on the forum quest4treasure.co.uk. For years, the group worked en masse to tease locations from the vague hints in the pictures and text. Forum members living near potential burial sites delved into local history for insights and, for many, it became an obsession.

"We didn't really care who found the treasure, we just wanted to solve the puzzle," Zinn told VICE. "So we were posting all of our ideas freely on the internet for all of us to see."

Related: The Heyday of Treasure Hunting Might be at Hand

John "Michaels" Pivonka, a Milwaukee-based audio engineer who got involved in the hunt a few years ago, became one of the forum's most active users.

"I'm 42 years old. From age 39 until now, this has preoccupied my life," he told VICE.

Pivonka teamed up with another Milwaukee area searcher, Betsy Grueninger, to scout real-world locations. When they felt they were getting close, they scoured the image archives of the Milwaukee Historical Society. Eventually, they even rented a ground-penetrating radar device to scan potential burial sites.

An image from 'The Secret,' which some believe is proof of a casque buried in Milwaukee

There are some convincing arguments to suggest the existence of a casque buried in Milwaukee. A close viewing of one image from the book suggests solid connections to the city: There's a towering building capped by two spires, the outline of which is an exact match for Milwaukee City Hall. The foreground depicts a cloaked juggler tossing a millstone, a walking stick, and a key, alleged to be a rebus puzzle spelling out Milwaukee. The unnatural position of the juggler's hands even mimics a prominent bronze relief of Milwaukee's founder, Solomon Juneau.

And then there's verse eight, which tells the reader to, "ascend the 92 steps." Most searchers take it as a reference to the Grand Staircase in the city's Lake Park area, which has exactly 92 steps.

Pivonka's team found a dazzling array of less obvious, circumstantial evidence linking both the juggler image and verse eight to Lake Park, including a map of a park footpath outlined in the juggler's hand and a distinctive three-trunk mulberry tree woven into the folds of the juggler's cape. With Grueninger, Pivonka created and buried a replica casque in order to determine if it could be picked up by metal detectors. It could. But so far, no treasure.

The replica casque, created by Betsy Grueninger and John "Michaels" Pivonka. Photo by the author

Part of the problem is the passage of time. It's easy to think of a park as a static space, but the area has undergone a significant transformation since Preiss supposedly buried a casque within its confines. Paths have been rerouted. Ravines have been redeveloped and statues restored. The ecology, too, has changed dramatically: Insects are destroying nearly all the park's Elm trees, and the early effects of climate change are altering the range of species that find this area habitable. Part of verse eight refers to a "young birch," which, if referring to a tree, would now be well into maturity, if it still exists at all.

Related: Searching for Forrest Fenn's Gold

And then there's the question of permission. Pivonka claims he dug a dozen times near the mulberry tree until one day he was stopped by a park official who told him he needed a right of entry permit.

To this day, the local parks department is irritated, if not openly hostile, to attempts to look for the casque, worried that treasure hunters will damage the park in their pursuits.

"It should never have been buried there in the first place," said Kevin Haley, a landscape architect with the Milwaukee Country Department of Parks, in an interview with VICE. Haley is in charge of granting right of entry permits to would-be searchers. He hasn't given out any yet.

That's not to say he wouldn't. He'd rather have the casque found and publicized so people will quit digging without authorization, and he's open to granting a permit to anyone that can convince him they've found a good spot to dig. So far, those who've approached have requested wildly different dig locations, which hasn't inspired confidence in him that it will ever be found.

"I'm not convinced that it's even still there," Haley said, suggesting a casque would have been destroyed or removed by one of the park's many renovations over the last 35 years.

Others find the whole thing very annoying. "It's just a gimmick for somebody to play games" said Gil Walters, a member of the community organization Friends of Lake Park, in an interview with VICE. "I don't want a hundred people coming in here with their spades digging around hoping they find something that's very valuable in terms of prestige."

"Out of all the things I've done, nothing in the last ten years has got me as excited or as involved personally as this." — John 'Michaels' Pivonka

Despite the many obstacles blocking the expedition and recovery of the remaining ten casques, few of the searchers seem ready to give up.

"Believe me, there are so many times where I've thrown this thing down and I said, 'I'm never going to do this.' And then a couple weeks later a team member says, 'Oh hey we found this.' And you're right back in it,'" Pivonka told VICE.

"I think part of the fun of it, at least from Byron Preiss's point of view, is he knows that people would have to sneak around to dig up these things, sort of like an Indiana Jones-type of thing," Zinn said. "Unfortunately, we live in a different world today. I don't know if I can make a case as to why we should be allowed to dig because I don't know if that case really exists."

As for the gems, which were believed to be confiscated in bankruptcy proceeding after Preiss's death, Preiss's widow Sandi Mendelson told VICE they're safely in her possession and will be available to the first people to recover the remaining casques.

"If somebody would find something, yes," said Mendelson. "I haven't done anything with them, so they're still around."

Follow Zach Brooke on Twitter.

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The Lonely Island Knows 'Popstar' Won't Be as Good as 'This Is Spinal Tap'

If the early days of funny videos on the internet is akin to a pitch-black Neolithic cave, then anyone who stumbled upon the Lonely Island in 2002 must have felt like they'd discovered fire. Back then, if you knew about these guys—the comedy trio of Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer, and Jorma Taccone—it was probably because someone in college sent you a link to one of their songs over Hotmail account. By 2005, these three had not only revolutionized sketch-comedy in general, but through their influence (and the fact that they were hired by SNL) pushed comedy into the digital age.

Their biggest videos usually center around famous faces—Justin Timberlake in "Dick in a Box," T-Pain in "I'm on a Boat," Michael Bolton in "Captain Jack Sparrow"—but Lonely Island is more than the sum of their celebrity cameos. Their bread and butter is parodying hip-hop cliches and mocking the disconnect between glossy music videos and the everyday lives of the people watching them.

While the casual fan might know Lonely Island only for those SNL hits, their early material is far stranger. Under the guise of their first faux-rap ensemble "Incredibad," the group created the song "Stork Patrol," a ridiculous slow-jam about guys who all apparently want to fuck and marry a paper-mache stork. Not only is it just as funny as the Lonely Island's more mainstream output, it's also proof of how intelligent and layered they've always been.

The group's latest project is Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, a transgressively hilarious feature film about a performer named Conner4Real (played by Samberg, with Taccone and Schaffer playing his original musical partners). It's a sort of update to This Is Spinal Tap (the inevitable comparison), with modern pop replacing metal, though the theme of celebrities living life in a weird ignorant bubble runs through both mockumentaries. (At one point, Conner4Real raps about meeting a girl who wants to be fucked the way "the US government fucked Bin Laden.")

I recently sat down with Samberg, Schaffer, and Taccone to figure out the motives behind the creation of their fictional pop star, how the film relates to their own biographies, and whether Taylor Swift could actually get away with murder.

VICE: Throughout all your work, from early stuff like "The Heist" to "Just 2 Guyz," to "I'm on a Boat," there's always been a thing where one dude seemingly gets excluded from what's going on with the other two. It happens in Popstar, too. What are you guys saying about male friendship?
Andy Samberg: In those songs, it's genuinely that one of us wasn't there.

Jorma Taccone: "I'm on a Boat" was that I was spending a weekend for my wedding anniversary and I came back and I was like, "What the fuck!" It's like one of our best beats, and you made a hit! And I was like, "Let me get on it." And they were like, "No."

Samberg: There wasn't room for you!

Akiva Schaffer: Also, you said you didn't think it was very funny.

Taccone: You're confused. I said it was a hit, right off the bat.

Samberg: Regardless, he wasn't there and you snooze, you lose.

Schaffer: But sometimes you snooze, and you don't lose. Sometimes the two of us will write a song and leave space for the other one and they come back and it's like a gift. And they get to come back and be like, "Wow, you just wrote parts for me that I get to do without having done any of the work."

Taccone: Right. Avika and I started a song called "Perfect Saturday," and then Andy came back and we said,"We gave you like the best part."

Schaffer: He got to come fart all over—

Samberg: Yep. I show up at a party and just fart.

That reminds me of another throwback, "Ardy Party."
Samberg: That was another I-wasn't-there-song. And we never released a song called "Jorm Left the Room." That was one we wrote in about 40 minutes when Jorma left the room.

So, we're talking about this autobiographical stuff, which is fascinating to me because in the new movie Popstar, we've got one guy who was part of an ensemble, who breaks away from the other two. How much of the writing of this movie is autobiographical? Is Conner4Real the Lonely Island's version of Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight? Did the Lonely Island have a falling out at some point?
Taccone: I hope that people can tell that we didn't because we made a movie about this. That this is not our real lives.

Samberg: It felt like a good story mechanism. And also, we worked with Judd Apatow on the movie and he really liked that; the way that fame and crossover success can splinter relationships. It became about friendships and how important it is for people who achieve a lot of success to maintain good relationships with people that they knew before that success.

Schaffer: It's us without self-awareness and the way things could have gone if we were different people. We're close enough to it in our experiences, being at SNL, seeing real pop stars come in every week. We're just big fans of it, watching all the docs and stuff, but also being in the world where you do press junkets like this. It's partially our real lives enough to give us a base of authority to write about it. And it's also not our real lives, because it's a character.

Taccone: But there certainly are moments on a red carpet where people who are taking photos are like, "Now just one with Andy!" That does happen.

Samberg: To be fair, it's my dad. He's a photographer.

Taccone: He loves Andy.

Fundamentally, Popstar is a mockumentary about a delusional musician. I know you guys were influenced by a few contemporary documentaries, but while watching it, I was wondering what has happened between This Is Spinal Tap and Popstar to make this feel urgent?
Samberg: I mean, a huge thing that's changed is obviously social media and the media system and the access people have to pop stars—

Schaffer:—what they expect out of their celebrities... I wanted to say entitlement, but that's not it. It's like the amount of access that they expect out of their stars.

Samberg: And also fun, little things like corporate tie-ins being so normal.

That was a great line from the film: "If you don't sell out, people will assume no one ever asked you to!"
Taccone: You can logic your way into any kind of selling out. Like, why it might be appropriate to be fairly shallow.

Samberg: Also, there's so many things happening that it's really hard to cut through, and we're saying suddenly, "Well, it will be in every appliance," or "You'll be in a commercial that airs fifteen times during the NBA Playoffs." But you just have to have this product along with it or whatever, like the rules have definitely changed. And especially in music, because of streaming services artists are making so much less in record sales.

Schaffer: Which has been happening for ten years.

Samberg: So, it's like all the sudden, well shit, if I just let them use my song...

Taccone: Like, now you'll hear a song in a Bud Light Commercial and you'll be like, "Oh, good for them, they got paid." Because you know they're not going to get paid any other way.

But, back to your question: One of the biggest changes between something like Spinal Tap and this movie is that the amount of media there is has just sped up our lives so much and that is really reflected in the speed of the storytelling.

Schaffer: Or just the speed in general in which someone can get chewed up and spit out...

Taccone: Sure, but I mean, literally, in the editing of the film.

Schaffer: Let's be really clear. Spinal Tap is like the gold standard. We set out with the idea that "Well, we'll never get to that level, that's just always going to be over there. We'll just do our own thing." We'd actually been debating an idea like this for years and were worried that it would just get compared to Spinal Tap and nothing will ever be Spinal Tap. But there was something about this year and Judd being like, "Hey, I think that's a good idea," that made us think, Oh hey, maybe it has been long enough. And the world has changed enough that there is enough new stuff to mine.

Samberg: Also,the difference between a rock doc and a pop doc is that it feels and looks different and moves at a different pace. We felt like we could do something that differentiated it at least.

Schaffer: Right. And ours is like propaganda, made by the camp. Which isn't new, but it is newly popular. The Beatles had stuff like this. But the Bieber documentary is the most successful documentary of all time. So the pop documentary had gotten in the zeitgeist or whatever.

Samberg: And it's different because we rap in it. And there's a dick in it.

Toward the end of the movie, Conner4Real is asked to perform on an awards show because Taylor Swift gets arrested for murder. In the alternate universe of Popstar, who did Taylor Swift murder?

Samberg: Great question! I mean, don't spoil it... but.

Taccone: I don't think we thought that a far...

Any candidates?
Samberg: You'd have to ask her! Let's just say this... someone who deserved it.

Schaffer: The public will rally behind her, because she did the right thing.

Taccone: Let's be honest, she beats the case.

Ryan Britt is the author of Luke Skywalker Can't Read and Other Geeky Truths and a staff writer for Inverse.com. Follow him on Twitter.

Popstar is out in theaters nationwide Friday, June 6.

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America Started the Summer Off with a Massive Wave of Gun Violence

Read: Warmer Weather Could Mean More Mass Shootings

Every year, US media outlets report on the phenomenon whereby people holed up inside their apartments are apparently less likely to murder on another than they are during the summer, a notoriously violent season. But this weekend was a particularly nasty one––with seven mass shootings taking place within a two-day span––raising the question of whether summer 2016 might unleash a uniquely grisly spectacle of gun violence across America.

Early Sunday morning, several unlucky people in Trenton, New Jersey, were shot just before 1 AM while making their way to a cookout. They never even saw the shooter. In a different area of the same city, a woman standing on a street corner having a conversation was shot in the leg during a drive-by shooting. A man later showed up to the hospital and said he had been shot in his toe, apparently during the same incident.

By 3 AM, the violence had shifted to America's Midwest. Police in Indianapolis heard gun shots and found two men suffering from bullet wounds in a parking garage, and another two in a nearby alley. In that case, the men were apparently able to at least provide enough details about their assailant that the cops pulled over a car they believed to have been connected to the shooting. Inside, they found guns and ammunition; three people are now facing charges.

A few hours later, the insanity made its way to the Southwest, where a group of two men and two women walking down the street in Las Vegas spotted two men arguing. After an exchange with the group, one of the two men reportedly went into a white Lexus and produced a handgun, which he then used to shoot all four of the people who happened by.

At 10:15 AM Sunday, 25-year-old army veteran Dionisio Garza III allegedly killed one person and injured six more––including two police officers––at and around an auto detail shop in Houston before being taken down by a SWAT team. The suspected gunman's father told a local NBC affiliate that he believed Garza, who served two tours in Afghanistan and had been acting erratically as of late, was suffering from PTSD. He also said that "signs" were there that his son might snap, including that he tried to get his family to go live on a compound and had expressed concern that the economy was on the brink of collapse. A Twitter handle bearing Garza's name suggests he kept tabs on far right-wing politics and conspiracy theorists.

Finally, that afternoon in the Pacific Northwest, hunters in Washington state shot five orchard workers who were obscured by trees, presumably by accident.

Unfortunately, the holiday itself wasn't much more peaceful than the day preceding it. In both Baltimore, Maryland, and Sacramento, California, cars pulled up to barbecues and opened fire. Five people were injured in each incident, although no one was killed.

Even though a total of 35 people were shot in mass shootings over the course of those two days, only one man in Houston died as a result. That's not to mention the many other Americans––like the man in Trenton who was shot in the toe––who were victims of gun violence on a smaller scale. The panic about what all this portends is particularly acute in Chicago, where homicides were already up about 50 percent on Friday morning compared to the same time last year, and at least 62 more people were reported shot this weekend.

"If something doesn't change, if we don't get jobs for these kids, if we don't change the economic situation, I'm worried that we could be looking at a blood bath," a pastor in the city's South Side told the New York Times.

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We Investigate Zambia's Damaging Child Marriage Practice Tonight on VICELAND

Tonight on an all new episode of WOMAN—a VICELAND show from feminist activist and writer Gloria Steinem that explores issues affecting women around the world—we follow a 14-year-old Zambian girl through a pre-wedding ritual before she's taken out of school and married off to a 48-year-old man to understand how child marriage threatens the economic growth and well-being of the entire region. Check out a preview above and make sure to catch the full episode tonight on VICELAND.

WOMAN airs Tuesdays at 10 PM on VICELAND.

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The VICE Guide to the 2016 Election: Donald Trump Interrupted His Own Press Conference to Complain That the Press Asks Too Many Questions

On Tuesday, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump held a press conference, where he was meant to explain what happened to the roughly $6 million he allegedly raised for veterans earlier this year. But in classic Trump fashion, he quickly derailed his own trail of thought to call an ABC News reporter named Tom Llamas "a sleaze"—and to voice some complaints about the press in general.

Back on January 28, days before the Iowa caucuses, Trump skipped a Republican debate in the Hawkeye State, and instead, held his own event, which he claimed would raise money for veterans. Since then, it has never been entirely clear how much money the event raised, or whether most of that actually went to any groups supporting veterans. Consequently, at many points over the past four months, quite a few reporters (including Llamas) have asked questions like, "What ever happened to all that money Trump raised for the veterans?"

Tuesday's press conference—during which Trump stood at his usual Trump podium, with a handful of veterans standing behind him—appeared to be an attempt by his campaign to put these questions to bed once and for all. Kicking things off, Trump claimed that he and his supporters had donated "almost $6 million" (At the fundraiser in January, which I attended, Trump placed the total at over $6 million, but hey, close enough).

"I'm not not looking for credit," Trump continued, "but what I don't want is, when I raise millions of dollars, have people say—like this sleazy guy right over here from ABC; he's a sleaze in my book." At this point, he gestured directly to Llamas.

After the conference, Llamas took to Twitter to offer a possible reason why Trump might single him out, pointing to an exchange in which the reporter suggested that the $6 million figure was an exaggeration.

The exchange that led Trump to call me a

— Tom Llamas (@TomLlamasABC) May 31, 2016

Trump and Llamas have publicly traded barbs in the past. On Tuesday, when Llamas asked why Trump had called him names on TV, Trump replied, "You're a sleaze because you know the facts, and you know the facts well."

According to Trump, the media's sleaziness doesn't stop with Llamas. "The press is so dishonest and so unfair," he told the room full of reporters. "What I got was worse than credit, because they were questioning me." Trump added that he had "never received such bad publicity for doing such a good job."

From there, the conference meandered around to such news events as the death of Harambe the gorilla. Trump also sarcastically called Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol a "real beauty," and said he was a "loser." Then he called Mitt Romney a "fool."

Regarding the actual substance of the press conference—as in, where all that money went—Trump described a sort of vetting process for the veterans organizations that received funds, and proffered a list of groups he claims received funds, along with the amounts allotted. The list doesn't mention when the checks were written.

The document also notes that while $100,000 has been earmarked for one group called "Project for Patriots, Inc.," no check will actually be cut until tax documents are released. Trump has repeatedly declined to release his tax documents, but his campaign, unlike Project for Patriots, Inc., is receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations in the meantime.

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A Vegan Cafe Was Attacked by Meat-Wielding Neo-Nazis

The Kiwi Café in Tbilisi, Georgia. All photos by Beth Ann Lopez

The Kiwi Café in Tbilisi, Georgia, is a hipster enclave in the city. It's located on a rundown street at the edge of the old town and is known for its veggie burgers and falafel. But this weekend, the cafe became the target of an attack by extremists, who reportedly ransacked the cafe and bludgeoned its patrons with meat.

Around 15 people brandishing meat skewers showed up at the business on Sunday and began shouting at customers, throwing pieces of meat at them and into their food, according to Kiwi Café staff.

"They were wearing sausages on their necks," 20-year-old Giorgi Gegelashvili, who works at the cafe and seemed slightly traumatized by the event, told VICE. "They were yelling, 'We know your face, who know who you are.'"

The counter at Kiwi Café

Gegelashvili and other staffers told me the attackers were members of a local neo-Nazi soccer fan club who had harassed patrons of the Kiwi Café a month earlier.

According to Kiwi Café staff, as the yelling and abuse spilled into the street, over a dozen neighbors noticed the ruckus and joined in. They claim that the neighbors were yelling that the cafe's customers and staff were "punks" who were "not Georgian" and "had no respect for traditional values."

According to Kiwi Café's statement on the incident, a female cafe worker's face was shoved onto the street, while a customer's face was cut after a man hit him with a walking stick. A brawl reportedly ensued, with about four of the cafe's staff and patrons receiving some kind of injury.

"Our neighbors do not like us, maybe because we have piercings and tattoos and talk about peace," Gegelashvili told me.

A patron inside Kiwi Café

Kiwi first opened in July 2015 and is run by a cooperative of vegans, most of whom sport dreads, tattoos, and piercings. The place is a symbol of counterculture, decorated with posters that say things like, "Not your mom, not your milk!" In New York or San Francisco, such an establishment would hardly cause a stir. But in Georgia, it sticks out like a sore thumb.

"I do not like that Kiwi place," a small business owner on the same street as the cafe told me, although he said he knew nothing about the recent events. "They put things in their hair, their skin..."

The attack dovetails rising concerns in the country over the far right, and particularly the status of sexual minorities and immigrants. Earlier this month, a massive anti-gay conference was hosted in Tbilisi, and during Independence Day celebrations last week, hundreds of ultra-nationalists marched through Tbilisi chanting "Georgia is for the Georgians!"

Vegans and others with "alternative lifestyles" are often lumped together with gays and immigrants by the extreme right, according to Shota Kincha, a researcher at the Tbilisi-based Human Rights Education and Monitoring Center.

"Obviously, those who work or frequent were and are identified as dubious or deviant in terms of their lifestyle and expression," Kincha told VICE.

Artwork inside Kiwi Café

According to Kiwi Café's statement, the chaos ended when police arrived at the scene.

It appears that police are investigating the incident. When I visited Kiwi on Tuesday, several of the cafe's staff members were meeting uniformed police officers and being driven to the police station for interviews.

Mariam Tabatadze inside Kiwi Café

No arrests have been reported so far, though Kiwi staff claim to know the identities of some of the sausage-wielding attackers.

For its part, Kiwi Café has promised to remain open "in spite of... everyday negative attitudes to us and other people who visit us." The cafe has also received support both online and offline, although that has been tempered by some anti-vegan vitriol on its Facebook page as well.

Earlier today, David Vashadze, who works as the Georgian Film Commissioner, came to Kiwi for a coffee and to show solidarity with the establishment. He was with a friend who denounced the assault as un-Georgian.

"That was very stupid," Vashadze told me, "and I'm not even vegetarian."

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The Artist: The Artist Goes to a Sad Party in Today's Comic by Anna Haifisch

Look at Anna Haifisch's art and comics on her website and Twitter.

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The VICE Guide to the 2016 Election: People Hate Trump and Hillary, but Will They Actually Vote for a Libertarian?

Gary Johnson outside the Utah State Capitol in Salt Lake City. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer, File)

Spend five minutes with a Libertarian and chances are they'll start talking about what's wrong with the Federal Reserve, taxes, speed limits, the War on Drugs, national borders, gun laws, and any number of other government intrusions on personal liberty. Spend ten minutes with a Libertarian and they'll let you know that everyone agrees with them. Most Americans are socially liberal but fiscally conservative, the argument goes, so those people are actually libertarian-leaning already—they just "don't realize it," as Libertarian Party (LP) presidential candidate Gary Johnson told me in 2012.

They sure didn't realize it that year. Johnson got about 1 percent of the national vote in the 2012 election—not bad for an American third-party candidate, but well short of the 5 percent that the LP needs to qualify for federal funding, and less than half of the percentage Ralph Nader got for the Green Party in 2000.

Four years later, things are maybe, possibly looking up for Johnson and the Libertarians. Multiple polls this month found him with double-digit support in a hypothetical three-way race with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. This might be a sign of how hated the major-party candidates are rather than a outpouring of love for libertarianism. Johnson himself admitted to Politico that if "Mickey Mouse were in a poll, he'd be getting 30 percent." But for whatever reason, the LP is suddenly in the spotlight, and it's a strange and uncomfortable place for the party to be.

The LP convention, held this past weekend in Orlando, Florida, ended with the nomination of Johnson and his running mate William Weld, a result that should have made the party seem serious. Before he became a pot entrepreneur, Johnson was the Republican governor of New Mexico, and Weld is a former Massachusetts governor who is so mainstream that he's disliked by many Libertarians. Compared to Trump, Johnson and Weld are a boring pair, the sort of candidates that a third party in search of legitimacy should be nominating.

Coverage of the convention, however, focused on the nutty sideshows. Libertarianism at its broadest is just a dislike of government intrusion into people's private lives, but in practice, that can range from "I should be allowed to smoke pot and own guns" to "I should be allowed to drive a tank around my survivalist compound, which, by the way, I have mostly filled with sex workers, endangered animals, and unpasteurized milk."

At the LP debate, Johnson's support for the 1964 Civil Rights Act and driver's licenses drew boos, but his proposal to legalize drugs was a position presumably shared by most of the audience. As Slate's Seth Stevenson reported, Johnson's competition included the wild-eyed, woke-as-fuck software pioneer John McAfee; a guy who only takes campaign contributions in the form of cryptocurrency and precious metals; and a medical doctor who delivered his debate statements in a form closer to slam poetry that is actually pretty good, I think? Also, at one point a big guy with a beard stripped down to his thong.

This is the space most third parties exist in. They're perpetual benchwarmers who know they'll never be asked to step in for the starters, and are free to goof off, to dream big and get wacky, to wear suits with sneakers and T-shirts with blazers (another big thing that libertarians support). The difference for the LP in 2016 is that people are treating it seriously, and the combination leads to a lot of negative attention.

Stevenson wrote that "the Libertarian Party isn't close to ready—or maybe doesn't ever want to be ready—for political prime time." Ian Tuttle of the National Review made some of the same points in his convention writeup, saying, "the Libertarian party is a reminder that no one truly grows out of Dungeons and Dragons.... Organization-wise, it's the political equivalent of the cantina scene from Star Wars."

Beyond the weird anti-nerd burns, it's true that small, underfunded political parties aren't as slick as the Democrats or Republicans. It's also unfair to show up to a convention for a lost cause, then dismiss the crowd as losers. And were any of the assembled weirdos at the LP stranger than, say, Ben Carson?

Meanwhile, as people who hate both Trump and Clinton consider Johnson, they'll have to actually look at his positions, which may very well turn them off as well. Earlier this month, conservative pundit Erick Erickson wrote that the LP needed to "grow up" by pandering to #NeverTrump Republicans who hate gay marriage and abortion. Others on the right might have problems with Johnson saying that "religious freedom" laws are often pretenses to allow for discrimination against gay people. As for leftists and liberals unhappy with Clinton, they might look at the LP's stances on gun control (boooo) and climate change (not the government's problem, generally), and decide that the Green Party's Jill Stein is a better protest vote.

Johnson will need to get 15 percent in five national polls to qualify for the general election presidential debates—a tall order, since his name isn't even included on all surveys. Even if that's impossible, getting 5 percent of the vote nationally would give the LP a boost in 2020, and maybe attract a better class of candidate. This is a chance, as nearly everyone has said, for the Libertarian Party to grow and turn into a true political force. But 2016 will be a tipping point either way. If, despite a pair of unpopular major-party candidates and this wave of exposure, the LP can't get more than a couple percentage points of voters to sign on, it won't be the beginning of a new era for the movement—it'll be the end.

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Soldiers Who Fought Each Other in the Falklands War Are Now Sharing a Stage

The cast of 'MINEFIELD,' Lou Armour is sitting bottom right. Photo by Manuel Abramovich

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

In 1982, Corporal Lou Armour had just arrived on the Falkland Islands when the Argentines invaded. A photograph that was taken as he led his unit out of Government House became an iconic image of the conflict in Argentina.

Thirty-four years later and 8,000 miles away from the battlefield on which he fought, Lou Armour is performing alongside men who were once his enemies, in a play devised by Argentinian artist Lola Arias. MINEFIELD merges documentary theater, film, and re-enactment, while bringing together veterans who fought on opposite sides of the Falklands War and having them share first-hand experiences with one another.

I talked to Armour—now a special needs teacher—about life on and off the battlefield, and what it's like to share war stories with the very people he fought against.

VICE: When and why did you join the Royal Marines?
Lou Armour: I was 16-and-a-half when I first joined the Marines in 1974. I wanted to escape from the place I lived in Warwickshire, and the Marines seemed like a good idea at the time. I was a young lad and I was pretty bright, but I was in trouble a lot because I was running away from school. I wasn't doing things like smoking or going down the shops—the truant officers would usually find me in the library or at an art gallery.

How did you come to be in the Falklands when the Argentines invaded?
I was supposed to be there for a year as part of a detachment. I like a bit of painting and stuff like that, so I fancied going out there and seeing a bit of wilderness. But I got there and, four days later, the Argentines invaded and tried to kill me.

To cut a long story short, I had a running battle with a bunch of Argentines in armored vehicles who were chasing me and my section back towards Stanley. When we eventually got to Government House we were taking fire from three directions: the Argentines who were attacking the house, both behind and in front, and our own guys, who were in the house and thought we were another Argentine snatch squad trying to get in. So that was a bit hairy. An Argentine was killed that day and a few more wounded.

Photo from the 'Times,' Lou is the guy at the front.

Tell me about that iconic photograph you feature in.
We were in the house and it was totally surrounded by armored vehicles. The Governor said, "Well done, lads, good effort, but we're stopping." As I led my section out of the house, a Times reporter stepped forward and took that photograph. But I don't remember it being taken.

Why did you want to return to the Falklands to fight the war?
Well, first of all they asked for volunteers. And, you know, I was a young man and my friends were going back. I wanted to be with my friends.

What did you and your friends make of the politics behind the war?
On the way down we knew that Galtieri had been in trouble at home and that's why he invaded the Falklands. We knew Thatcher wanted to kick back because, politically, it was the right move for her to make. She'd also been in trouble at home and it was her chance to stand up and show the world that she was a strong leader. We weren't interested in Maggie, the Queen, or any of that—we just knew that we were going back to have a fight with some guys who had once tried to kill us.

"We tried to kill you, and we did, we killed lots of you. You started a war. We finished it by killing more of you than you killed of us."

What was it like when you returned the Falklands?
I landed on May 21 at San Carlos, which at the time was nicknamed Bomb Alley, and we were bombed day-in, day-out for five days until we started to gain air superiority. I was watching ships being bombed and ships firing missiles at aircrafts—it was like watching a Second World War movie.

Then I went to Goose Green on May 28, where a lot of people had been killed and wounded that day. Myself and the rest of the troop were flown in to replace them. I didn't actually have to fight there, because they surrendered the next day. Because of the weather and lack of equipment we just had to carry all our heavy equipment back to Mount Kent, instead of being flown there. That was psychologically the toughest thing I'd ever done. You're walking and falling, walking and falling—some of the lads carrying up to 100 pounds—and if you fell over it took two guys to lift you back up. Then there was the lack of sleep, the wet, the cold, the diarrhea. At the end I took part in a night-time battle on Mount Harriet. There were 400 British and Argentines dead and wounded that night. Two days later I was back in Stanley putting the flag back up, right back at Government House where I'd started.

How did you feel when the war ended?
I think I went a bit kind of daft, to be honest with you. I stayed until 86 and I tried to join Special Forces. Some of it was a bit demanding—that's about all I'm going to say. I didn't make it, for various reasons, and sometimes I do think to myself, Why did I do that?

So I bought myself out by selling my medals. I had my rucksack on my back and some money in my hand, and I walked into a pub and met a couple of teachers who were playing pool, and I moved into their place that night. After that I did an access course and then went to Lancaster University. I studied politics, sociology, and art history, and ended up writing a PhD on the logical grammar of color concepts. I now teach boys with ESBD—emotional, social, and behavioral difficulties.

Lou Armour (middle) with Marcelo Vallejo (left) and Gabrial Sagastume (right). Photo by Tristram Kenton

Did you find it difficult to adjust to civilian life?
I kind of buried it all. Certainly when I came back I didn't want to take part in any of the celebrations. I just thought the sense of pride was misplaced. I'd just been to war and people had been killed on both sides—that's nothing to cheer about. I don't think any soldier would celebrate that.

Has it been difficult to revisit some of those buried memories for this play?
This whole process has been quite emotional, and I'm not frightened to admit it. It's been a kind of gradual release, I think, and a gradual telling of stories. When I heard the stories of the Argentine lads, I thought, Shit, why did they choose to have me in the show? Because their stories are truly terrible. I mean, what they have to say is heartbreaking. My experiences have not been like that. To be honest with you, I've felt like a bit of a fraud and I still do.

What's it like sharing stories with people who were once your enemies?
Sometimes I can compartmentalize their experiences. So when Rubén were infantry guys, so their experiences—on the ground, in the mud, in that weather—I can empathize with those because I experienced the same things.

Just occasionally, when the script changes and something new is introduced, suddenly the elephant in the room appears. There are a couple of elephants: one of them is politics, which I'm not really interested in, but the other is: "We tried to kill you, and we did; we killed lots of you. You started a war. We finished it by killing more of you than you killed of us." It only lasts for a moment, but there's that recognition.

Has this process made you think differently about war?
I've always known that wars are fought by human beings. And I knew that the Argentine foot soldiers were going to be pretty much like me. Intellectually, I knew that we were the same. When I saw them dead and wounded on Mount Harriet I knew that. I definitely know it now that I've had meals with them, been to their houses, been to their schools, spoken to them about their experiences in the war.

What do you hope your audience takes away from the production?
I hope that it gives them a better understanding of how ordinary people can face each other as fighters, but overcome that to become friends. I also hope the British Forces forgive me for having to use the "I" word a lot of the time. Sometimes I've felt like saying, "I didn't win this war on my own, you know." We're all trying to speak on behalf of whoever was in the war—especially those that didn't return. But it's theater.

How is MINEFIELD relevant to younger people who have no memory of the Falklands conflict?
Growing up, I used to think wars happened either in far-away places or a long time ago. But when you think of the turmoil in the Middle East and some of the wars that have been going on in Eastern Europe—they're impacting on all societies in all kinds of ways. And they are close to home because the internet and media are bringing them into our homes. There's a lot of barbarity going on in the world at the moment, and we have a story about some guys' memories that overcome barbarity and refuse to engage in it.

Is there anything you would say to people today who are thinking of joining the Army?
I'd say, "Don't go and fight people like the Argentine lads. Go and fight ISIS. Don't go and fight people that have been forced into war-like situations by politicians who are just working for short-term gain. Go and fight people who have no respect for humanity."

MINEFIELD runs at the Royal Court Theatre from June 2 to 11 as part of LIFT Festival.

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The Artist Who Fights Authoritarianism with Doodles

Dan Perjovschi. All photos by Andrei Radu

This post originally appeared on VICE Romania

On January 7 the whole world was in mourning after the shootings at the French satirical mag Charlie Hebdo. A day after that, a frightened Romanian government spoke of instating a big brother-esque law, forcing cell-phone providers to retain their clients data and hand it over to the authorities when asked. While the law was being debated in the government's Victoria Palace, a couple of young protesters holding some signs that read "Freedom of Expression" staged a demonstration. Another protester held a drawing of a man being shot with machine guns. Both drawings were by artist Dan Perjovschi.

Drawing by Dan Perjovschi made during the protests in Gezi Park

And they weren't the only ones. From the Roșia Montană marches against cyanide mining in Romania, to the Turkish protests in Gezi Park, and the social movements against the Brazilian World Cup, Perjovschi's drawings have been printed out and used as banners all around the world.

But his work has had the strongest impact in Romania, because for a long time nobody cared about youth movements in his home country. The media refused to cover them, considering activism, as a whole, irrelevant, unless it was done by the major political parties. When Perjovschi, an internationally renowned artist, backed the local protests with his art, it began to convince a lot of people of the importance of fighting for a cause you believe in.

Perjovschi's drawings make you laugh at first. Then, slowly but surely, they leave you with a bitter taste. To find out more about the man behind the drawings, I arranged a meeting.

"I was born in 1961, when the Berlin wall was built," Perjovschi tells me. "I come from the side which didn't have any graffiti on it."

Ever since he was a child, Perjovschi loved to draw. At ten years old, he took his first step into the world of Soviet art when his parents sent him to art school in Sibiu.

"I didn't realize that things were so bad. I was young living in Sibiu—a nice city with girls, love, and Lia," said the artist remembering the young woman who would eventually become his wife. "We were in the same class when we were ten. We became friends in the eighth grade, then had a nasty break up, and found each other again right before the end of high school, when most people were splitting up."

Perjovschi in Bucharest

But it wasn't long before he started to find out what it meant to grow up in a repressive regime that frowns upon freedom of speech. "I was in high school and when I opened my textbook, I noticed somebody had drawn a moustache on Ceausescu. I thought to myself, 'Wow, what if the professor sees it?' So I discreetly tore the page, slowly, so nobody would hear me," remembers Perjovschi.

But the teacher caught him and called the principal and the school council. She wanted to kick him out of school. "And I wasn't even trying to act like a dissident, I was just trying to cover my ass."

Because he didn't tear up any other photos of Ceausescu, Perjovschi graduated and went on to art college in Iași. If you ask him now to tell you about his early work, he just makes a sour face, as you've just offered him a rotten apple. "I always hated painting," he tells me. "I ended up majoring in it because there wasn't really an alternative. I did some absolutely horrible paintings. Some sort of boring surrealism."

After college, Dan Perjovschi married Lia and moved to another city, Oradea, where he took a job as a museum curator. There he joined Atelier 35 Oradea, a platform for young artists. "I got there with my crappy painting style and those men influenced me. They worked with photography, they experimented. Meanwhile, my wife had gone to college in Bucharest and she exposed me to new ideas. That was my true education."

A drawing linking the Olympic torch in Sochi and the burning of Kiev under the Euromaidan protests.

Perjovshci knew each of his works or exhibits would go through the filter of communist censorship. He had to invent his own language, something which couldn't be a protest against dictatorship, but which also would not respect the status quo of paintings of flower pots and apple baskets. That's how he started making "little people."

"I was doing a sort of pattern; I would do a grid on paper and draw a little man in each square. The people in charge of censorship didn't get it. I would tell them 'It's about industry, working men, whatever.' They figured out that I was pulling their leg, but they needed me to go through this act. In Oradea, we were a young group of experimentalists, but we couldn't attack the system. We were basically playing with our dicks in the sand and they let us do it. But we were playing, not hiding."

Despite the Iron Curtain's closed doors, Dan Perjovschi's art left Romania before he did—in an envelope. He would send his work to foreign artists and they would, in turn, respond with their artwork.

A drawing by Perjovschi in which he states that government transparency sometimes just means that riot police use transparent shields

"There was an entire alternative trend in the West against the art market. I would send art to you, you would send art to me. Some even did entire exhibits in their workshops with what they received in the mail. Other works, which were more complex, were called visual poetry and they were shown in museums. That's how I had my work exhibited in Sao Paolo back then. I would send my drawings of little men," explained the artist.

The rebellious streak came later for Dan Perjovschi. "Back then, I didn't do what I do now. I started fighting the dictatorship only after it was over."

A drawing by Perjovschi about the situation going gaga in the Gaza Strip

When the communist regime fell in 1989, Perjovschi was spending his Christmas with his family in Sibiu. That was the same city in which dictator Ceausescu's son resided, so it was full of security and armed forces. It became the scene of pandemonium, a city under siege, where nobody knew who was firing at who.

"History was changed by the corpses of the people who marched in the streets. I will never forget that a thousand people died so I can speak now," says Perjovschi.

A sculpture with hundreds of little men, a society

He's not a theoretical man, but one who likes to experiment. "I look at something and think: does it make sense, doesn't it, does it say something? These objects are slightly strange, they function in a minimal setting, but if you look carefully, you could see more. They are like a society, so if you pull them, they bend, but you cannot break them," he says about his little wire men, a sculpture he's working on when we meet.

We arrive at the Regional Francophone Centre of Advanced Research in Social Sciences (CeReFREA) in Bucharest, where a curtain of little wire men hangs in the library of a classroom. Nearby is the lavish villa of the former Romanian PM, who just got released from prison.

Perjovschi remembers the last time he was in the Parliament: "I will never visit that horrible building again. This symbol, which has nothing to do with culture, dominates Romania—the Parliament is currently housed in Ceausescu's former palace, which is one of the largest structures in the world. It's become sympathetic. Robbie William put on a concert in front of it this year. These things make it sweeter, they humanize it. I say that in my representations: It's on fridge magnets now. You stick the building on the fridge. It's a rare perversion. It's called the People's House, but the people have to buy a ticket to visit it!"

On the walls in CeReFREA, Dan Perjovschi puts the People's House where it belongs—in the background. The building is reduced to a blotch under his marker. The library is also decorated with some of the little men he made out of paper at the beginning of the 1990s, when he was in Germany on a scholarship. "Sometimes I have no mental strength left, so I let my hands do the work. I am ashamed to just sit around, because I'm an artist. This kind of activity helps me clear my mind, it helps me relax."

What do they represent? "You can imagine whatever you want about these dudes." And indeed you can: some seem to dance, others seem to fight. Their creator takes each one and makes them face each other, just like he convinces his audience to pay attention to his drawings.

To get a bigger picture about Perjovschi, I spoke to several people who knew him, from both the art world as well as activists and protesters.

"I saw something which made me freeze on that wall. There were hundreds of figurines drawn on paper, layers and layers of them. The work was signed by Dan Perjovschi," says Olga Stefan, an ethnic Romanian curator, who was born in Chicago and lives in Switzerland.

The young woman was studying art management at the University of Chicago. Her Masters term paper was about the relationship between art and the development of civil society. It was the first time she heard the name of Dan Perjovschi and she decided to contact him.

"He became my mentor for the Master's degree. He helped me, he opened my eyes," says Stefan who, later, became a curator for his exhibits. "Dan Perjovschi's messages work on several levels. They leave conventional space, they go from museum walls to the street."

One of Perjovschi's wall drawings

In the spring of 2013, Dan Perjovschi received a message. It was from Mihai Bumbeș, a former history student and a founding member of NGO Spiritual Militia, whose mission is to mobilize civic consciousness.

These were the first days of the Occupy University movement, where students from several universities around the country refused to leave their classrooms as a protest against the poor funding of the education system and government negligence.

The students from Bucharest invited Dan Perjovschi to support them. His drawings ended up covering the classrooms.

"He is an artist who constantly uses anti-systemic political messages in his creations. He is a well-trusted person, and his 'minimalist' message has a strong impact upon society, especially in the marginal intellectual groups. Also, he's very modest. Success never got to him," says Mihai Bumbeș.

Dan Perjovschi's drawings move people and are used everywhere from amphitheaters to protest fliers, because they are "smart, critical, concise, edgy, ironic, subversive, and in flux", says curator Simona Nastac, who currently lives in London. She organized Perjovschi's exhibit, Drawings in the Factory, in May 2014, in the city of Suceava.

"He creates a space for critical reflection and convinces the public to participate, to enter a dialogue. Dan creates new drawings every day, he keeps you in check with what is happening around the world and he inspires you to answer—to react," says Nastac.

It will come as little surprise then, that when the protests concerning the Roșia Montană mining operation started, Dan Perjovschi couldn't just stand by. These were basically the first large youth protests in Romania since the early 1990s, and no major media outlet was talking about them, even though thousands of young people occupied the main streets of Bucharest and hit the asphalt with plastic bottles filled with pebbles to wake up the blazed city. On September 7, which was the seventh day of the protests, he told the protesters "Keep calm and smash the plastic bottles" on Facebook. "The noise those bottles made, the rhythm made by hitting the asphalt with them was like a subliminal chant. I've seen soldiers with riot shields who stomped the same rhythm with their boots," says Perjovschi.

A drawing through which Perjovschi expressed the fears of the protesters, that the Roșia Montană mining operation would destroy several mountains in northern Romania

"I would receive thousands of messages per day. I don't want to brag—I can't handle protests anymore, I had my fill in December 1989 when the regime fell. I couldn't imagine that such solidarity could exist again. For me it was a great surprise and I admired their protest. I grew up with another type of protest, where we were isolated in the middle of the city and the government surrounded us, so we stewed in our own juices."

Dan Perjovschi produced a lot of slogans for the Roșia Montană protests. Again, his drawings had spread through the streets. Just like they would spread in 2015, on January 8, when a protester could barely feel his hands from the cold after holding two papers with Perjovschi's messages. The protester, Alexandru Alexe, told me that he chose those messages because they underlined the essential points and anybody could understand them. "A drawing by Perjovschi helps everyone understand why we are protesting and what we want."

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