Screen grab via 'South Park' on YouTube

Next Wednesday, the 19th season of South Park will air on Comedy Central. Millions of people will watch it, millions of others won't. At this point, the show is a genuine cog in the chuckle-wheel that is the comedy establishment, almost rote in its quest to offend and prod. But things were not always this way.

I grew up during the tail end of the 90s culture wars, so of course South Park was verboten in my conservative household. My parents had long ago forbidden The Simpsons, believing it turned an obedient child into a rude one, like those other kids down the street. The ones who said "damn" and "ass" and threw rocks at the windows of vacant houses. This, of course, made it 50 times more alluring.

But by 1997, The Simpsons was already winding down its run as an exciting, controversial cartoon. It had already turned obedient kids into rude kids. But where The Simpsons advocated a mannered, TV-PG hooliganism, South Park was anarchy. In my parents' eyes, it turned kids who were already corrupted by rudeness into the type of kids who ended up in jail.

No matter how much cultural noise was generated by the reign of Jon Stewart and the rise of Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central doesn't owe its legacy to them—it owes it to Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

In other words, the early days of South Park crossed the moral Rubicon. I was scared to watch it. When I inevitably did, it seemed like my parents were right. The older kid who showed it to me may very well be in jail right now. He used to just recreationally steal things. He would go into grocery stores, go up to the liquor bottles, and walk them right out of the store. His secret was his lack of shame. He would simply stroll out as if to say, "It's OK, don't freak out, I'm just stealing this." Of course he loved South Park.

When you step back from South Park as cultural touchstone and look at South Park as a TV show in 1997, it's shocking that it lasted so long. Its cardboard cutout animation was primitive, and not in a cute way. Those early episodes look dirty, uninviting, and disreputable. They made Hanna-Barbera's loveless "were these drawn by counterfeiters in a warehouse?" productions look downright glitzy. It had some of the most grating, belligerent voice-acting ever on television. Its tone was pervasively filthy, scatological, and amoral.

But the fact that my parents, and parents around the nation, knew about it and found the time to hate it meant it must have been an unprecedented hit. And it was. Almost overnight, it was the hottest thing in town. It only took five months to become Comedy Central's biggest show ever, averaging more than two million viewers per episode. The debut of its second season got 6.2 million viewers. (And the television landscape is totally different now, so I hold this up for cognitive dissonance rather than comparison, but Stephen Colbert only got 400,000 more viewers than that on his first episode of Late Night.)

Point is, no matter how much cultural noise was generated by the reign of Jon Stewart and the rise of Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central doesn't owe its legacy to them—it owes it to Trey Parker and Matt Stone. They single-handedly pulled the channel out of a black hole of Absolutely Fabulous reruns and a Craig Kilborn-helmed Daily Show. They defined the network. They gave Comedy Central a reason to exist.

Without that historical context, the things South Park got away with and continues to get away with look impossible. They were able to jump right over the usual ascent to mainstream credibility. They were a multimedia franchise, with toys, T-shirts, and a movie in the can by 1999. They got Joe Strummer to sing for them in an episode. They got George Clooney to play a dog in another. Hell, they got Norman Lear to consult on the show in 2003.

On Noisey: Noisey Would Like to Be Shit on by South Park Too, Please

And while it's easy to reduce the sordid story of Isaac Hayes's role in the series to the Scientology fiasco and the grotesque way his character was killed off, the fact that he was on the show for a decade is ultimately insane. Isaac Hayes is the man who co-wrote "Soul Man," "Hold On, I'm Comin'," and "When Something is Wrong with My Baby" for Sam & Dave. Without Isaac Hayes, Sam & Dave might not have even happened. Isaac Hayes is the man who made Hot Buttered Soul, the album that saved Stax after Sam & Dave's departure from the label and the death of Otis Redding. Isaac Hayes had to follow Otis Redding, and he succeeded. That's impossible. Then he wrote the theme from Shaft, a song so good that writing it should have been impossible, too.

And here he was in 1997, agreeing not just to be on the same planet as Trey Parker and Matt Stone, but agreeing to say whatever they wrote for him to say. Within a year, that meant recording the defiantly vulgar novelty song "Chocolate Salty Balls," produced by Rick Rubin of all people.

What's crazier still is that this isn't even in the ballpark of the most controversial things the show's ever done. That impossible high-water mark was cleared routinely, owing to its week-long production schedule, which made South Park the first cartoon that could get in the news cycle and kick the hornet's nest at will. Take, for example, "Hell on Earth 2006," which joked about the death of Steve Irwin just seven weeks after the fact.

It lent the show a hyper-topical relevance that no other cartoon had. The get-it-out-in-six-days policy gave Parker and Stone a platform where, if they wanted, they could just up and force people to pay attention to them. They changed the whole idea of the significance a half hour show on cable could have. They had escaped the curse of instant obscurity afforded much of the era's original cable programming, like, say, HBO's Dream On.

But what makes the show an institution, in spite of its persistent danger of being so topical that it becomes ephemeral, is the internet. Parker and Stone inadvertently future-proofed the show against the decline of cable. South Park was perfectly suited to internet consumption in a way no other 90s shows were. They had the early internet's dispassionately antisocial aesthetic locked down before the internet took over. The jokes and pace were loud and fast—it said what it wanted to say as crudely and conversationally as possible. The show's rudimentary animation style meant you couldn't ruin its intricacies with digital compression, mainly because there weren't any intricacies to ruin. This was an enormous priming force toward the mainstreaming of internet distribution. Back when Blockbuster still seemed like a viable brick-and-mortar business, a year before the Lewinsky scandal, people were already pirating episodes of South Park.

As huge as the show was for cable, it's on the internet where South Park makes the most sense. All the moral panic and 90s culture-war opposition seems quaint in the age of streaming pornography. Saying "shit" 162 times in a single episode is not novel in a venue where saying "shit" 162 times in a row constitutes a perfectly valid sentence. What once seemed shocking on television becomes more clearly the work of two college friends trying to make each other laugh. It's all suddenly normal, devoid of any shock potential.

Now that theirs is the prevailing cultural sensibility, Parker and Stone can safely say they got here first. So even if South Park somehow gets erased from Comedy Central or syndication tomorrow, that means it'll be around forever as a historical artifact: a show for the internet before anyone even knew what that could possibly mean.

Follow Kaleb Horton on Twitter.

Photo by Wikimedia user David Shankbone

This is the first installment in a series of pieces exploring the lyrics of Kanye West by legendary hip-hop writer Toure. Today, Toure analyzes West's verse on "Smuckers" from Tyler, the Creator's Cherry Bomb, line by line.

In Kanye West's lecture at Oxford University earlier this year he said, "That's one of my favorite ones: to be called crazy." Being crazy is liberating. I (and Kanye) mean that colloquial sense of the term, like the way some people say Kanye is crazy despite knowing full well there ain't nothing wrong with that man's mind. But once you've been deemed "crazy," you're expected to be unpredictable. We know we don't know what we're going to get from you and thus you're allowed to exist outside of societal norms. If you don't care about people calling you crazy, you can get away with whatever you want. And from that exchange comes a sort of liberation. You can live outside the lines, untethered from societal norms. It allows you to be whoever you really want to be.

Because Kanye is considered, by some, to be off his rocker, when he says he's running for President in 2020, people are on the proverbial edge of their seats. Is it that Kanye's so crazy that he just says whatever grandiose fly shit that comes to mind in the midst of a stream-of-consciousness quote-unquote "rant?" Or is it that Kanye's so crazy that he will mount some performance art project that centers around him running for President in his own way? I could believe either one. We have to stay tuned to find out and that's empowering to him as an artist. Having "crazy" as part of his brand means all eyes on Kanye.

All of that and more is why it's so powerful and so compelling when he says, "They say I'm crazy but that's the best thing going for me," on Tyler, the Creator's "Smuckers" (also featuring Lil Wayne.) It's exactly the sort of simply said yet sociopolitically explosive line that Kanye loves. And it made me want to deconstruct the rhymes surrounding it: West's verse is fascinating, and it brings up a lot of classically Kanye contradictions.

Kanye is not a really great rhyme-sayer—his voice is distinct but not buttery or smooth or bassy and he doesn't do the slick, technical elite MC flow and delivery sort of stuff that you expect from Nas, Jay, or Kendrick. But Kanye is an extraordinary writer who never utters a boring verse and sees every line as a chance for a big punchline or a bodacious statement. His verse on "Smuckers" is one of the more interesting of the year. Almost every line starts with the word "I" and/or is a statement about Kanye. It's like an ad for himself, announcing all that's great about him.

Why, why, why? / Why don't they like me?
I love how he begins by invoking the ghosts of disapproval and dislike as if he needs to remind us, "A lot of people don't like me." Being disliked and misunderstood is a central part of the Kanye West brand and it allows him to have an enemy to rage against.

Cause Nike gave lot of niggas checks / But I'm the only nigga ever to check Nike.

The author's idea of the modern spinster: Oprah Winfrey. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

To put my dating life in perspective: Charles Manson got engaged before I managed to find someone willing to semi-commit to me for longer than three months. My relationship status has become a Mad Lib of sorts. Every few months I find myself writing in a new series of verbs and nouns for the phrase, "We're [description of partnership]"—open relationship, casually dating, friends with benefits, not labeling things, just hanging out, good cop, bad cop, blah blah blah.

I've been single most of my adult life, and have not been afraid to air my frustrations about it. But I'm starting to realize that it's not actually being single that irritates me. In fact, I'd be perfectly content keeping my laptop as my sleeping partner for the rest of my life. Instead, it's this irrational fear of what would happen if I were single and alone forever—or, in other words, a spinster.

The term spinster refers to a woman who is past marriageable age. Contemporary culture often depicts these women as sad, eccentric aunts. You know the type: She owns a bunch of cats, smokes too many cigarettes, and collects porcelain figurines she calls her babies.

Unlike her male counterpart, the bachelor, the spinster is not to be envied. She is pathetic, undesirable, her life in shambles because she never married. She is a crazed shut-in like Miss Havisham, who just can't seem to get over that one time her fiancé left her at the altar. It's not that she chose this life. No one wanted her.

These are the things I hear from my mother, a Jewish immigrant raised on Old World values, who is perpetually embarrassed that I can't seem to get into a relationship, let alone stay in one. Every Friday she lights the Sabbath candles then calls to tell me that she prayed for me to marry soon (cue: Fiddler on the Roof music).

Except, that's all changing. In 2014, more than half the US population is single. We're seeing more examples in real life of women who are refusing to let the social pressure of marriage weigh them down, and have gone on to lead fulfilling lives. In fact, single women are even reclaiming the word spinster. Earlier this year, Kate Bolick published Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own, an homage to the single life; Rebecca Traister's forthcoming book, Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation, plays to the same theme. One Urban Dictionary entry on spinster redefines the term as "a woman who can stand independently and doesn't need a man for her life." We are living in the age of the single woman.

"I don't see any biological reason why women should marry or have children. It's mostly a cultural construction," says Berit Brogaard, a philosopher, neuroscientist, and author of On Romantic Love: Simple Truths About a Complex Emotion. She is also a happily unwed mother of one. "Biologically, we probably weren't meant to be together for a long time. The reason romantic love often fades after a few years is probably that coupledom was only evolutionarily beneficial until children had been conceived and were old enough to survive without two parents living side by side."

Hence the many relationship iterations that are not long-term monogamy. In this brave new world, single women aren't sexless old maids—they're just not wifed-up either. "I think more and more people realize that a relationship isn't just something you have, it's something you do," said Broggard. "Relationships take work. Lots of work. If you want to focus on a career, it's a lot simpler to remain single."

That part is definitely true. According to a study from 2010, young single women earn up to 8 percent more than young single men—but that financial boost goes away if they get married or have kids.

Another reason to stay single: To avoid America's multibillion-dollar divorce industry.

As I get older, my heroes are changing. I now seek out women in popular culture who have chosen to be alone—and are even more badass because of it. Elaine Stritch did not remarry after John Bay, her first and only husband, died. She didn't want to. Author Vivian Gornick is a self-proclaimed "odd woman" who renounced marriage after experiencing two brief, failed ones. Gloria Steinem didn't marry until she was 66 years old. Oprah, who has never been married and probably never will, is the best example of all. Oprah is not a bitter, chain-smoking cat lady. She's a fucking billionaire.

These are now the women I find myself wanted to be, outspoken and unabashedly alone. My best friend and I frequently discuss the likelihood that we will live together in our later years as platonic life partners, a la The Golden Girls. Over the years, this plan of ours for the future feels less like a joke and more like an eventuality. One that I am becoming more and more OK with.

Young heterosexual women are also facing a time of sexual openness and liberation that makes traditional marriage even less necessary. We don't need him to put a ring on it in order to gratify us sexually (unless it's a cock ring). We're engaging more in casual sex as well as non-monogamous relationships, and because of this are also dealing with a vast number of heterosexual men who are less willing to commit than ever before. We'd rather stay single than settle for men who are perpetually unsure of their readiness to be in like, a relationship relationship.

I want to be a woman who knows her wants and her needs, and prioritizes them over what others dictate to her what her wants and needs are. There is a good chance that a man might never come my way who meets my expectations for long-lasting monogamous love. There is a good chance that my attitude and my outspoken nature makes me unloveable in the eyes of most heterosexual men. That's perfectly OK. I prefer this over being subdued.

Of course, I'm not trying to denounce marriage altogether—for myself or anyone else. But I'm tired of thinking about marriage as my singular goal. Being single all these years has given me so much valuable time to pursue my own projects, and overall just be my own person. I've used my alone time to figure out who I am, without worrying about outside validation from a romantic partner. I've met so many different kinds of men I wouldn't have met if I was coupled up. I've gone on dozens upon dozens of both disastrous and adventurous dates, and have a wide array of stories to entertain all the basic couples with at dinner parties because of it.

I've been moving my life forward—not putting it on hold—waiting for a man to come my way and validate my existence. In fact, I'm looking forward to staying single. You know, so I can finally get to chapter two of that next great American novel I've been sitting on for six years (or, more importantly, so I can keep staying awake until 5 AM watching Korean dramas, judgement free). What could be better than that?

Follow Alison Stevenson on Twitter.

Jeremy Corbyn and his mate John McDonnell when they were just Labour back-benchers. (Photo by Jack Pasco)

Newly elected Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, socialist destroyer of worlds, killer of first borns and ruinous lunatic, if David Cameron's social media account is anything to go by, has shaken up the party by choosing his new shadow cabinet.

Among them is John McDonnell, a man who once said he would "swim through vomit" to vote against benefit cuts, appointed as shadow chancellor. He is somewhat of a lightning rod for controversy, saying things like he'd "assassinate Thatcher" if he could travel back in time, and that IRA terrorists should be "honoured" at a Bobby Sands memorial.

It wasn't so long ago that McDonnell and Corbyn were a couple of back-bench stirrers. When VICE interviewed them before the election, McDonnell said "you can't change the world through the Parliamentary system".

Tom Watson, elected deputy leader, is a more contemporary choice. A large figure on social media, Watson was a big player in the inquiry into the phone hacking scandal, which cost many people their jobs after the News of the World was forced to close as a result of it. He is also a prominent voice in trying to tackle what he has called an "epidemic" of historical sex abuse.

Something which many media outlets are picking up on is a distinct lack of women in the party's top positions. Shadow chancellor, home secretary, foreign secretary and deputy leader are all occupied by men. This is strange, considering Corbyn's stance on wanting "half of MPs to be women", and strong ideas about fixing the gender pay gap and mooting the idea of a women's only train carriage to protect against sexual assault. However it's also strange that nobody's pointing out that, with the full list yet to be announced, Corbyn's team has as many women as the current Conservative cabinet.

Among the women appointed are Angela Eagle as shadow business secretary, Heidi Alexander as shadow health secretary, Dianne Abbott – who lost out on the deputy leader position earlier this year – is shadow international development MP. Shadow chief secretary to the Treasury is Seema Malhotra and former aide to John Prescott Rosie Winterton has been made chief whip.

In a sign that Blairism and old-fashioned hierarchy haven't been completely swept away, Tony's Blair's former flatmate Lord Falconer has been appointed shadow justice secretary.

Your boy David Cameron is currently in Lebanon at a refugee camp, probably telling them why he doesn't want them in Britain, which he's trying to make Great again.

Far-right protesters clashing with anti-fascists in Dover

On Saturday, as tens of thousands gathered around the UK to declare that "refugees are welcome here", a couple of hundred neo-Nazis rioted through Dover. They were taking part in a demonstration organised by far-right groups the National Front and the South East Alliance, demanding that Britain closes its borders entirely and forgets about helping people who are fleeing barrel-bombs in Syria. I guess morals and ethics don't play a huge role in personal reasoning when you're a white-supremacist who fantasises about a Holocaust 2.0.

The far-right demonstrators were opposed by a slightly smaller number of anti-fascists, who tried to block their path. Violence broke out as missiles were exchanged between both sides. People chucked bricks, bottles, beer cans and heavy metal padlocks that had presumably been brought along for the occasion.

I arrived at a large car park, where there was a stand-off between the Nazis and anti-fascists, with a couple of lines of riot cops acting as a buffer in between.

There had already been some pre-match skirmishes before we'd arrived; anti-fascists had blocked the depressing pub that was supposed to serve as a starting point for the far-right march, and when fascists tried to take it back, it all kicked off.

I spoke to an anti-fascist who had a bandage attached to his bleeding face. "There's not much to tell, really," he said, before telling me that the fascists had been throwing glass bottles. One had hit him in the face and split in half, and before long he realised his scarf was covered in blood.

Things had since calmed down a bit, and there was an edgy stand off between the two groups. On one side, flags fluttered on a continuum that ran from the Union Jack to White Power. On the other, red and black flags, and banners reading, "Nobody likes a racist."

The anti-fascists chanted: "Say it loud say it clear, refugees are welcome here," and the chorus of Sham 69's "If the Kids Are United". Meanwhile, the fascists chanted the slightly less catchy, "No more refugees!" and, for some reason, "Paedos, paedos, paedos."

To give you an idea of the make-up of the far-right demo, this guy was holding a flag with an SS Totenkopf on it, venerating Combat 18 – a neo-Nazi murder squad.

Then there was the National Front banner using the Mein Kampf-inspired "14 words".

The crowd seemed to range from the kind of ten-a-penny bigots who would have been slurring incoherently about Muslims at EDL demos a few years ago, to people happy to make their nostalgia for the Third Reich alarmingly public.

They weren't to be Blitzkrieg-ing anything quite yet, though. The left-wing activists were at the opposite end of the car park to the racist demo, linking arms to form a solid wall and block the march.

Before long, however, the word got round that the police might let the racist march take a different route towards its goal: the port of Dover. So the anti-fascists, all dressed in black and with masks covering their faces, linked arms once more and formed a human battering ram, breaking through police lines.

They ran along to the next junction, which they thought would now be on the march's route, and made a wall of linked arms, flags and lumps of wood with nails bashed through them.

Soon, the far-right march appeared from around a corner. It slowly surged forward as the police struggled to contain it, with fascists shoving against them. It was a bit like watching a bunch of hornets trying to escape from inside a sandwich bag.

Confusingly, some right wingers wear black bloc gear now, which used to be solely a left-wing thing

Marchers sporadically began to break out of the first line of cops to run forward, wave their flags and give the finger to the waiting left-wingers.

They got ever closer, until the police made them go around the side of the anti-Nazi road block. This did not turn out to be public-order policing best practice, as it bought the two groups into close proximity again. With a thin line of police and some police vans separating them, a hail of half-bricks, the sticks from placards and beer cans started flying towards the anti-fascists, and before long they were being hurled back towards the Nazis. A padlock fell from the sky at one point, as did a particularly noisy banger.

As the fascists circled, the two sides peered through the police vans, jeered at each other and called each other "scum". Activists and Nazis bounced off police officers like sumo wresters as they tried to get at each other.

With the path now clear, the march was able to continue to its rally, but not before turning around to do some more giving-it-large and chucking shit.

The police then got their dogs out to make sure the two groups were well and truly separated. They brought them forward, shouting, "Get back, this dog will bite you! Get back, this dog will bite you!"

A traumatised child standing near me started repeating, "That dog will bite you! That dog will bite you! That dog will bite you!" looking on in terror.

At the rally, a speaker blamed the crisis – or "invasion", as he called it – on an orchestrated conspiracy by "Zionist Jews". Of course!

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The anti-fascists, meanwhile, ambled off to the nearest park, where a local retired man in a suit called Patrick Carey came up to them started thanking them. I asked what he thought about his town being targeted by the far-right, as Saturday's was the third fascist demo the town has played host to in the last year.

"I'm very pleased to see these people here. I'm completely hostile to the neo-Nazi movement," he told me. "That's the second week they've been here. Last week I stood alone by a traffic light and shouted at them; there was no one else around. I think it's because of this long connection with refugees. Unfortunately there's been a deliberate focus on Dover to encourage racism and acts of violence against immigrants. I've seen it grow. I've read letters in the local papers. I spoke to a couple of girls today – working class girls – and they were on the side of the EDL. That's a worry for me."

A spokesperson for the Anti-Fascist Network told VICE: " What happened in Dover on Saturday needs to act as a wake-up call to the left, who have largely underestimated the capacity for street violence the extreme-right have been developing over the past few years. But it should also be reassuring that militant anti-fascists took the far-right's rendezvous point, stood our ground when attacked by fascists and succeeded in delaying their march. Had we had greater numbers there is no doubt we would have prevented them from marching entirely."

Meanwhile, Nazi social media pages have been chalking this one up as a victory.

On VICE News: Breaking Borders

Kent Police were more sanguine in a statement, commenting that they had managed to "facilitate a peaceful protest", which is weird given that "One police officer suffered bruising to his shoulder and some parked cars were damaged in Russell Street after various items were thrown but the protest passed without major incident. There were no arrests. Kent Police would like to thank the community for its co-operation."

In the last couple of weeks, the zeitgeist seems to have swung away from migrant-bashing to getting behind the refugees. But it wasn't so long ago that David Cameron thought it was cool to talk about "swarms" of migrants and headlines asked, "How many more can we take?" rather than demanding something be done. In any case, the thing about zeitgeists is that they're fickle and fleeting and don't take account of what might be bubbling under the surface – those bullshit anti-refugee memes that are swooping around the internet are enough to tell you that.

Unfortunately, one thing definitely bubbling under the surface at the moment is the re-emergence of an increasingly violent neo-Nazi street movement.

@SimonChilds13 / @owebb

More times fascists and anti-fascists have thrown things at each other:

English Fascists Were Totally Humiliated in Liverpool

English Fascists Took a Beating in Dover

The Far-Right Attacked Some Football Fans in London

Yes they do, horribly ('Mutant League Football' screenshot via vgmuseum.com)

As a kid, I was obsessed with larger-than-life figures. Why settle for Batman, who merely represented the upper limit of human potential, when you could have Superman, who wasn't human at all? Every battle had to be a clash of the titans; every encounter had to be like something out of Erik Larsen's Savage Dragon comic series, which consists of nothing but fistfights between enormous alpha beasts. Even when it came to sports, I wanted to watch only the strangest of the best: mutants, freaks, cyborgs, and other hyper-real specimens competing against one another in arenas where the normal laws of physics were suspended.

And no, I'm not talking about performance-enhanced athletes like baseball outfielder Barry Bonds and UFC heavyweight Alistair Overeem, although both were impressive at their respective sports. I'm talking about the bizarre characters that populated early-1990s games such as EA Sports' Mutant League titles, Konami's Base Wars, and SNK/Tradewest's Super Baseball 2020. I used to live and die for games like these, even if they weren't always all that great, and only with the passage of time and Maddens (Madden 2016 marks the 2016th instalment of that series, I believe) have I been able to realise why.

A screenshot from 'Mutant League Football', via Ryan VGD's YouTube channel

This isn't specifically an examination of sports games, which thanks to the likes of EA and 2K Games have reached a once-unimaginable level of development, or of games involving monsters and robots, of which the same might also be said. In point of fact, gaming today is better than it's ever been: the competitive games are the most balanced, the retro-styled games are superior to the ones that inspired them, and even the worst releases don't descend into Action 52 territory. All that the contemporary video game market of slick sequels and perfectly crafted remakes might be said to lack are limitations. In other words, when almost everything is possible, not everything seems worth attempting.

Once upon a time, Electronic Arts published without much fanfare every manner of game: a few were good, a few were bad, and most were simply oddball offerings that fell somewhere in-between. Madden, its various NBA playoff simulations, and NHLPA (later simply NHL, once both the league and player association licenses were acquired) ranked among the company's best releases during the early 90s; Mutant League Football and Mutant League Hockey added a considerable amount of gameplay variety to Madden and NHLPA, respectively. The Mutant League franchise also happened to originally be exclusive to the SEGA Genesis/Mega Drive, because SEGA, despite its 16bit system being inferior in many respects to the Super Nintendo, far exceeded Nintendo in its willingness to license "Mature Audiences" games (the first Mortal Kombat for the SNES didn't even have blood!).

Now imagine this happening today: EA or 2K looks at one of its signature franchises and says, "hey, let's Space Jam the heck out of this!" It's inconceivable. Yes, there's a pretty good Blood Bowl high fantasy football remake available via Steam, but that's not a signature property of any kind and, though quite good, is really just a colourful visualisation of Games Workshop dice rules. And yeah, you might still see something like NFL Street, but that sort of gameplay isn't exactly on par with Mutant League Football's all-everything star Bones Jackson accidentally killing a referee during a pileup.

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Mutant League Football is one of those aforementioned very good EA games, by the way. It spawned an animated series and should've kept generating medium-budget sequels right up to the present (though it should be noted that Mutant League Football creator Michael Mendheim is trying to piece together a DIY follow-up). But it didn't, and neither did Mutant League Hockey – which was even more fun to play, in principal part because the NHLPA series on which it was modelled was perhaps the best 16bit sports simulation ever created. The Mutant League games constituted bricolage at its finest, their development perhaps born out of necessity yet nevertheless capturing and then distilling the cartoonish essence of professional sports: demon goalies exploding into flames, slug zambonis eating the dead bodies of fallen players, defensemen brandishing horsewhips, right wings wielding chainsaws. We don't just want to see amazing feats from our pro athletes – for them, the amazing is commonplace. We want to see ludicrous ones, which is why the WWE remains a billion-dollar business and the Harlem Globetrotters have been around for nearly a century.

In that vein, Konami's Base Wars imagines a dystopian baseball future in which owners have decided to cease meeting the salary demands of their ostensibly overpaid players and replaced them with a variety of high-performance robots (the game is set in the 2400s; some recent research suggests that automation may lead to the replacement of vast swathes of the workforce far earlier than that). The game features a lot of Konami-style theatrics, including fights between fielders and baserunners that call to mind the widescreen set-tos in its classic NES hockey title Blades of Steel. In some ways, the limitations of the NES maximise the value of Base Wars' vivid colours and choppy movements: it's much easier to track the fluorescent futuristic ball in this game than it is to follow the regulation baseball in the R.B.I. Baseball series.

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'Base Wars' artwork detail, via Classic Game Room

Base Wars wasn't anything special: I rented it many times, and it usually held my attention for a game or three, but it wasn't transcendent. Which is fine; not every video game needs to be the best you've ever played. SNK's Super Baseball 2020, set in the fast approaching but still space age-sounding year 2020, is more ambitious and a bit better. In my youthful naïveté, I assumed that the latter was a sequel to Base Wars, failing to realise that Base Wars' backstory is set several hundred years after both Super Baseball 2020 and the events of the Mass Effect series. Super Baseball 2020 straddles the line between past and present: both male and female cyborgs as well as Base Wars-type robots are available as players, with the chief difference between the two being the fact that robots can explode from overuse. You can actually earn money and enhance your players in real time over the course of a nine-inning game, a feature I wish had been included in one of the many Major League Baseball releases of the past decade (for example, Jose Canseco or Sammy Sosa slips away to the locker room for a celebratory shot of testosterone after cranking a tape-measure home run). It too lacks the replay value of the Mutant League games, but there's still something here that isn't present in most of today's sports offerings.

What you had in these four games, as well as in related releases like Pigskin 621 A.D. (Pigskin Footbrawl on the Genesis) and slightly more conventional games such as NBA Jam and NFL Blitz, was organised sport not simulated perfectly, as is the case today, but boiled down to its primal, ludic elements. These were sports-as-games, intended solely as wild fun because there wasn't yet the technical know-how to provide more than that. Real sports, the sports on which these games were modelled, evolved more slowly albeit in a similar vein: efficient record-keeping and scientific training ended the golden age of impossible, sui generis athletes like boxing champion Jack Johnson and Yankees star Babe Ruth. We can't go back, because the Maddens can only advance in quality and sophistication with each annual roster update, but we should pause occasionally to consider what has been lost.

All bets are off when it comes to rugby, of course. There's never been a rugby game that wasn't utter rubbish, and as long as there remains no easy way to model ruck mechanics, there never will be. Sigh.

@MoustacheClubUS

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At half-11 on Saturday, the Kendall-maniacs were not out in force at the Refugees Welcome march. As everyone clustered round a PA blasting 5Live's broadcast from the Labour Leadership Special Conference, it seemed they'd all hit snooze on the alarm clock, that they were having five more minutes in bed with the NHS internal market, dreaming of PFI deals chasing Serco contracts up flights of stairs.

In fact, when Liz's numbers finally came in – a rather disappointing 18,000 votes – not even a tenth of Jez He Did's 256,000 – no one could even hear them being read above the cheers for the third candidate, alphabetically.

No, it turned out that the sort of people who made it to refugee protests were the sort of people who love Jeremy Corbyn. Who knew?

As the numbers are read, a sole party popper is let off. Some blokes with t-shirts saying "This Charming Man" beneath a picture of Jez clasp each other's shoulders. A girl is on her boyfriend's shoulders. One walrus-shaped man has to be lead away through the crowd because he's blubbing so hard. It's not quite pandemonium, but it's a good start, subsiding only as Jez's voice comes down the line from the QEII Conference Hall.

His speech is boilerplate, maybe. It's his hundredth of the campaign trail, and by and large it doesn't seem to have been structured as a piece of oratory. More as another efficiently utilitarian lecture in what needs to be done next. You were sick. Now you're well. And there's work to do.

He describes the past three months of the campaign – essentially being piloted off to fucking Mars on a political rocketship – as "a fascinating experience", as though he spent the summer fossil-hunting for ammonites on the Devon coast.

He even cracks a joke. "We've decided to form an Abba tribute band" – him and the other three leadership contenders. I can definitely imagine Andy Burnham unhappily married to Yvette Cooper. I can even imagine Jez We Can writing "The Winner Takes It All", and then getting Liz Kendall to sing it on their final album as a bittersweet lament to thirteen years of New Labour compromise. He thanks Liz effusively – just as Jesus Christ once wished Pontius Pilate all the very best, no hard feelings. "The late night train rides will never be the same again," he nudges, without explanation. Then he mentions one of his first acts as leader will be turning up at the Refugees Welcome march, and everyone explodes again.

And there he finally is – The Messiah – four hours later, after more than 50,000 people have wended the traditional processional from Hyde Park Corner down via Green Park to Parliament Square.

A great cheer goes up as the crowd realise he is amongst them – people pressed everywhere, Jez merely a spot in the distance, issuing his sermon on a very low-lying Mount.

"He's much shorter in real life", the middle-aged lifelong Labour woman next to me muses. This is exactly the hounding he can expect in the right-wing press in the coming weeks. "Hypocrite Corbyn Dances Round Toadstool While Claiming He Is Seven Foot Basketball Superstar".

He is also much more inaudible in real life, because the organisers only brought a sound system made of baked bean cans. Halfway back, no one can hear a word. A girl sat on her boyfriend's shoulders is relaying bits to the few people in our corner.

"He's saying that it's a tragedy of global proportions."

"Yes?"

"Driven by economics."

"..."

"...By politics and environmental degradation."

"And what else?"

"He says he's wearing split-crotch trousers". She and her mates collapse into giggles.

There's a crushing sense that the reality of historic moments – from Spike Island to Woodstock – so often doesn't match the fantasies of historians. No doubt the Gettysburg Address was also pretty inaudible, full of people at the back going. "Four score and WHAT?" "What was that bit about fathers again?"

Yet despite this, it remains one of those rare moments where you can feel Tony Blair's famous "hand of history" visiting us. The crowd are hypnotised as he opens by standing there, silent for about 30 seconds, holding an Amnesty International placard saying "Refugees Welcome". It's a piece of protest theatre that takes years of training, and Jez has his Equity card in that.

"The real fun starts here," says the middle aged lifelong Labour woman. "He says he's against the third runway. But Labour's already committed itself to honouring whatever the outcome of the Davies Report was. And it was a third runway."

By the time she's said these words, 12 senior Labour MPs have already ruled themselves out of Jez's shadow cabinet. There's a rumour going round that he might not have enough MPs to take all the posts on offer. There's another rumour that Unite have already been phoning up MPs and begging them to take any job going.

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Also obliterating his sound – a helicopter buzzes overhead. Does it contain the marksmen of The Establishment? Are we about to witness the real world version of A Very British Coup?

Chris Mullin's classic airport thriller was about a privilege-foreswearing salt o't'earth Labour leader who wants to get out of Nato and abolish the Lords, but is overthrown by third forces in the aristocracy and military. And while no one can yet see the red laser dot on Jez's forehead, if I were his security detail, I wouldn't let him visit any Hindu temples any time soon.

A man who wants to abolish private schools and the monarchy, who'd probably build a Refugees Welcome centre on the playing fields of Eton, is now 50 swing seats and an SNP collapse away from getting to do exactly those things. If you thought there was an almighty stink about tuition fees, wait till you see what it's like when the Duchess of Caernarfonshire is being sent off to live on an estate in Middlesborough.

The folks on the Refugees Welcome demo know full well why banning nukes and talking to Hamas might be a decent idea. The sort of people who launch petitions for Wootton Bassett to become "Royal Wootton Bassett" don't. And for all the vast numbers who've turned out today, there are still far more of these sitting at home clicking through repeats of Noel's HQ.

Jez's speech seems rousing to the few dozen who manage to catch it. Applause ripples outwards. Then Jez and Billy Bragg sing "The Red Flag", which younger readers will recognise as a kind of "Freak Like Me" bootleg version of "Oh Christmas Tree" with all the words changed to reflect international socialism.

This, then, is exactly where we are now. The anthem of Oldest Labour, that Ed Miliband famously didn't know the words to, is reinstalled as a central rite in the New Old Labour that Corbyn seeks to build. Blair is turning in his grave. Liz Kendall lies martyred upon the fields of mass-participative intra-party democracy. The worm has turned. The Militants have won, and in the end their revenge was sweet yet mild.

The afternoon's speaker's list is eternal. After Shami Chakrabarti, after Natalie Bennett, after 85-year-old MP Sir Gerald Kaufman, after Dianne Abbott, it all blurs into one long choir-preach about how cool and awesome refugees are. How they have more vigorous sex than everyone else. Better dental hygiene. Less cellulite. We want a million. No, we want five million. Give us ten and we'll call it square. They can have Wales. Have it, outright. Really.

(Photo author's own)

Gradually, the crowd starts to slip away into the early evening. A stag-do in morph suits jogs down a Whitehall that an hour earlier thronged with marchers. They lark about having boozy pictures taken with Refugees Welcome banners. The lines between the purity of protest and the grubbiness of the real world are starting to blur again. For the Jez We Cans, those lines are going to finally become ever more apparent in the coming weeks.

@gavhaynes / @Jake_Photo

Still from llachlann's 'True Detective' video (see below)

Because it's Monday and you're probably not working properly yet, here are some more distractions to keep you from that spread sheet that's been open on your screen since a minute past nine this morning.

Firstly, look at this lovely new thing, uploaded yesterday by YouTube user llachlann. It's the introduction to the first season of True Detective – you remember, the good one, the one that people liked, the one that people told you about so then you watched it and then you told your pals that it was great and they should watch it, too; only then the second season came out and took an almighty dump on the reputation established by that first season and now you can't look at a photograph of Vince Vaughn without crying (like you could before, come on now, after that Psycho remake) – but made using the Rockstar Editor mode on Grand Theft Auto V.

Back in June, YouTube user Mitch L (who has also made videos in homage to Blade Runner and The Thing) remade the trailer for No Country for Old Men using the Editor, and look, it's completely great. This treatment was always inevitable, too, given the vanilla GTA V features a whopping great Easter egg based on the Cohen brothers' 2007 movie.

Remember the film adaptation of Watchmen? Wasn't quite all that it could have been, was it – but that intro sequence, set to Dylan's "The Times They Are a-Changing"? Awesome, wasn't it. Now imagine a sequence documenting one man's life, created using the Rockstar Editor, set to the same song (albeit a cover), cut in a very comparable style, and dedicated to its maker's late granddad, who fought in the Vietnam War. And now, imagine no more...

Reservoir Dogs, that's a film. One you've watched. You probably had a poster, or the soundtrack on CD (or taped off a mate), before you ever watched it. We all did. Here, some bright spark has remade the opening moments of Tarantino's breakthrough movie using the Editor, albeit with a bet-you-didn't-see-it-coming twist. Except, you might well have seen it coming. Because it has "dogs" in its title.

Keeping things on an introductory slant, YouTube user El Serp published this Editor-made opening to Popular Television Show House of Cards back in May. I've never actually seen said programme, though, because it's not on Normal Telly, so you'll have to judge its accuracy for yourself.

Terminator 2: Judgement Day was definitely also a film. A very good one, despite the fact that much of it makes no bloody sense whatsoever. And this remake of its Terminator in a truck chasing a boy on a motorbike who is also being pursued by another Terminator on a bigger bike is really quite good, too – and made prior to the Rockstar Editor even being available. Excellent work, John Chapman.

New on Motherboard: Play Pokémon in Real Life with 'Pokémon GO'

Did you know that there are also planes in Grand Theft Auto V? And planes mean only one thing: Editor-made videos of jets and motorbikes based on Top Gun. Here's one example, courtesy of denouille. No geese were harmed in the making of this. Probably.

And to finish, as your boss is definitely about to come over, tap you on the shoulder and say, "Hey, Steve, mate, seriously, I know she left you the other night but pull yourself together, man, accounts can't wait until after three for these figures, and you know I'd lean on them if I could," here's something sad. Jackass was more tragedy than comedy, right?

Thanks for wasting some time with VICE Gaming. More articles – proper ones, about proper games – can be read here, later, when you're not on a deadline. Cheers.

@VICEGaming

Photos by Allyce Andrew

Surrounded by sage smoke and honking geese at the base of Mount Si, we spread our arms out like crosses as Aubrey Rachel Violet Bramble, a witch dressed in an elegant white dress, blesses us. "Let the sage do the work," she says. Her good friend Kat Terran, a shaman, opens up the basket of corn muffins and rose tea prepared for tonight as an offering to the spirits—Mother Moon and Father Sky, the god and goddess, whatever you want to call it. In the world of magic, tradition is important, but ultimately, you create your own paradigm. Do what thou wilt.

An elaborate altar is laid out before us on a blanket surrounded by candles. A crystal ball, an antler, a feather, a shell, each object a stand in for an element or a goddess to be praised at tonight's mixed shamanic/pagan ritual. "Needs more Earth," Bramble mumbles, rearranging the menagerie of ornate objects she and Terran brought with them.

"OK, kids," she says, satisfied with the elemental balance of the display. "I'm going to call the circle now." An incantation begins: Perfect love, perfect trust. The circle is open but never undone. Terran and Bramble, each in their respective traditions, invoke and praise the four cardinal directions, the elements, the Great Mystery. The Earth, the water, the fire, the air: return, return, return. Gratitude prayers are offered, not only to the Earth, but to loved ones, to people in need, to ancestors. May all souls be nourished.

Tonight serves two purposes: It's both a late Imbolc observation (the Pagan holiday honoring the midway between the winter solstice and spring equinox) and a new moon ceremony—great occasions for setting new "intentions." As we later learn from the long list of Seattle-based witches and shamans I'll meet, "intentionality" lies at the root of most modern conceptions of magic.

Photographer Allyce Andrew and I are here at this ceremony in Snoqualmie, not far from where Twin Peaks was filmed, because some time in the middle of last year, we realized every other person we met in the Seattle art scene—poets, musicians, event coordinators—was a professed witch or shaman. I met Bramble and Terran through their music. They're both singers in popular Seattle bands (the gothic Golden Gardens and desert rock outfit Wind Burial, respectively.)

A certain level of nature worship is built into the culture of the Northwest. If you live out here and haven't had your mind blown by the beauty of an ancient old-growth forest, you're kind of missing the point. But in the "spiritual but not religious" Northwest, it seemed like many Seattleites were taking that casual reverence to the next logical level.

I would define magic as the purest form of love and joy and sharing it in a way that is intentional, that thrives. —Lily Kay

We entered into this world through art events that kept cropping up—events that often had mystic or pagan undertones. For instance, on the night of the winter solstice, we had two different Yule events we could choose from—a Cascadian metal festival in Olympia, or an electronic/noise showcase in Seattle in a loft called Teatro de la Psychomagica. In April, a mystically-inclined local composer named Garek Jon Druss performed an ambient synth piece in a church, accompanied by a lecture on alchemy by William Kiesel, owner of esoteric book publisher Ouroboros Press. Events like these happen fairly regularly in Seattle, with varying degrees of authenticity.

"An artist or performer can find some seasoning and burn it in a superficial ritual like manner or even dangle some stones of unknown origin and 90 percent of the audience is so hungry for some sort of spirituality or alternative path that it is accepted as significant," Druss tells me, alluding to the recent surge of popularity in all things witchy. This cultural phenomenon is perhaps best embodied by Urban Outfitters affiliate Free People's widely panned Spirituality Shop, which began offering a $68 "Cosmic Stick" (a large stick with thread wrapped around it) and $75 "Dark Mystic Boxes" (a small box with a fern printed on it, containing some sage and a crystal) late last year.

But Druss also acknowledges the Northwest's unusual bona fides in this area: "Here in our community there are so many strong individuals who are true in their actions and [mystic] study—we all benefit from it."

Kiesel says the strong, mystically-inclined population here is just part of the town's history.

"Beyond the Native American roots in the area, in the early 19th century, Seattle saw a Theosophical Society Lodge open downtown [it has since moved to Capitol Hill]. Not long after, an occult organization called the Light Bearers, founded by Eugene Fersen, became active in town. They had a mansion on Capitol Hill across the street from Volunteer Park. While there has always been some kind of occult or witchcrafting going on here [at least since the turn of the century], we seem to be having another renaissance of sorts," Kiesel says.

In an effort to extend past the glut of trendy "hipster witches" in the area and glean some real understanding of what true, modern, urban witchcraft and shamanic practice in Seattle looks like, we interviewed seven such people about their spiritual practices, how they arrived at them, and why they believe the magical community is so strong in Seattle.

VICE: Why do you think Seattle is experiencing a resurgence of interest in witchcraft and shamanism?
Imani Sims: This ground is so sacred. Seattle is a Pisces city, it's really watery and feely and I really want to dig into the things that don't normally happen—that's Seattle, so it's just a good place for that kind of thing. Another theory is that they just started building the light rail and digging up the city to build this type of transportation, and I think that really woke up the ground. I think it started something huge.

What does ritual mean to you?
I think the three biggest things are consistency, connection with your own spirit guides, whomever they may be, and totems—things of significance for you, whether that be images or stones or plants or people. My spirituality is very Earth-based. I'm into stones and the power that they carry, and how that then fuels my life forward.

How do you define magic?
Kat Terran: Magic, to me, is when we get little glimpses of just how big and astronomical this thing is, this enormous experience we're all a part of. It's almost like we can only handle it for a couple of seconds when we see it, because of how intense and how crazy it feels. Anything that opens just enough so we get kind of zapped by it, is what I'd call magic. It's a medicine tool, it's a healing tool. It's ancient technology.

What did you mean by "ancient technology"?
They are a little different from place to place, but things like rattling or drum work, these are very consistent, and are what I call "ancient technologies," things people from around the world in many different cultures have used to get in touch with spirit and their own ancestors. That's part of what we're experiencing in the Northwest, people are reconnecting with these tools because they connect us with nature, but also ourselves. Gratitude prayers are also one way of doing that. Gratitude prayers constantly. Being connected all the time to how much there is to be thankful for.

AUBREY RACHEL VIOLET BRAMBLE
Singer in local band Golden Gardens, Owner of Swan Children Apothecary, and Witch

How did you get into witchcraft?
Aubrey Bramble: I grew up in Florida and got really into witchcraft in the South when I was in middle school. There are a lot of Wiccan communities in Florida, strangely enough. It's very Southern Baptist, but there are a lot of swamp people who do witchcraft. In the south they were very traditional, by-the-book wiccans or "Oh, we only do voodoo," but here there is a lot more crossover. The program I'm in now is traditional Eastern European witchcraft and Wicca melded with Native American shamanism and things in between.

How do you define magic?
For me, magic is the manifestation of an intent. Say I have an intent, like... I want to carry myself with more grace or kindness. You use your spell, your ritual. Some people will use candles, some will use herbs, some will use meditation and mantras. Personally, I really like to use my crystal ball. I do a ceremony to charge my crystal ball and invoke its energy in the name of a goddess I admire. I turn to my crystal ball after I've set up my altar and candles and gaze on it, meditating on an intent. I can visualize it in the crystal ball. Perhaps I'll chant. When I complete that, I'm able to carry myself with more grace and kindness after the fact because I've really visualized that intent—that ritual manifestation is magic.

You were saying earlier that science was the biggest influence on your spirituality. How do science and magic dovetail in your mind?
Meagan Angus: For me, it begins in a really fundamental way with astrology and geology, and understanding that all of our life comes from the planet. Understanding these basic biological systems illuminates things on a spiritual level too. The depth of how integrated these systems are. When you switch back to a metaphysical level, you can begin to think about things like "Wow, crystals continue to grow even when you cut them from their source. That's crazy." To me, magic was an extension out of humanity developing awareness of ourselves and our own biological processes. There's a reason Pagan holidays are based on seasons—our systems literally wax and wane with the sunlight.

How do you modernize these ancient practices?
Magicians always have their elements around them. There's always Earth, air, water, fire. There's always the four directions, up, down. Can I go out and carve my protection symbol into a piece of granite? No. But I can go get a "Hello My Name Is" sticker like all the other graffiti artists and slap my sigil up on the electrical box outside of my house and it's exactly the same thing. There are a lot of sticker sigils on Capitol Hill because there [are] lots of people actively attempting to control the reality paradigm in the neighborhood to combat all the gentrification happening here. A lot of witches and magicians have been getting together and saying "We're just going to try and make this building invisible for the next several months so nothing happens to it." It's sort of like magical community activism.

How do you define magic?
Lily Kay: Intention. And seeing the love and connection that exists in this world. I would define magic as the purest form of love and joy and sharing it in a way that is intentional, that thrives. Honestly, the most powerful lesson I've learned is just being open and receptive and trying to be better and more intentional about considering things, like, "Oh, I kept dreaming about blue things the other night. I'm going to remember that." Letting those things guide me.

Why do you think Seattle has so many witches?
I think Seattle is small and there are a lot of fucking freaks. It's fucking freak city. And by no means am I saying you have to be a freak to be spiritual or into witchcraft, but also, I think Seattle is so special. I was talking to my friend earlier, who just moved from Seattle to New York. She was saying there was nobody there like her, she'd go to a party and go, "What intention did you set on the new moon?" and people would be like, "What?" She couldn't even ask people what their signs are. So it's also definitely just cultural here, it's not that abnormal to talk about these things or think like that.

How do you define magic?
Bri Luna: Magic is nature. I don't really think it's a supernatural thing, it's just nature, it's the beauty of our planet. I also believe that your intentions strongly affect what you are doing. Again, I don't think it's supernatural. It's learning to work with your mind and how to create things on this material plane with that mind. Any ritual or practice you are doing, it is about the intent behind it. Magic is energy, and so is intent.

Why is there such a strong magical community here?
I think a lot of it has to do with this area originally being native land. Magic is already in the land from the indigenous people who lived here before us. We also have access to so many beautiful places, beautiful mountains, and forests, so you'd have to be crazy to not want to go and dance naked in the forest.

Why do you think the Northwest has become a hotbed for magical communities?
Mykol Radziszewski: Seattle is a wonderful cauldron from which purpose can take form. There's just such intense intentionality here, and the focus of energy is really powerful. If you look at the lay lines here, this place is full of lay lines—hundreds of energetic veins originate and end here. Some of them correspond with water, some with mineral deposits, some with really interesting nothingness.

How do you actively work to experience or create magic in what you call "shamanistic witchcraft?"
How I would define magic is: a trust in the natural, in our own nature, trusting myself to be accountable to that. I know when magic is present because I wake up and feel like an animal. Magic is whatever wakes us up to the profundity and beauty of life. Magic is a ceremony of remembering. It's a daily thing. Magic and shamanism, these aren't religions, they're not something you practice certain days of the week and then move on from. It's something you also do in the in-between times. Magic is when you do yourself the way spirit made you—that's powerful magic. What does it take to remember that? The work of a witch as a healer, and that's perhaps a shamanic approach to witchcraft, is to help people remember themselves.

Follow Kelton on Twitter.

Image via Wikimedia

Shearing may be an iconic part of Australian history, but it's a dying industry. During our golden age of wool—which was pretty much any time before the 1980s—there were an estimated 30,000 shearers. In 2013, there were 3,200.

My former roommates subdue my raccoon.

Right after college I lived in a house that my mother liked to call "the Locker Room." It was full of boys who liked to drink whiskey and smoke meat at 1 AM and smash Palmetto bugs with hammers. SportsCenter was always, always on, even when everyone in the house was asleep. My mom didn't visit very often.

I slept in a sort of cottage that was next to the Locker Room and shared the common areas and address with it—so I wasn't in the midst of the chaos, but it was usually happening in the nearby vicinity. As you might imagine, this was a fairly lonely time for me. Graduating college leaves a lot of people feeling aimless and anxious. And even though I lived with some of my best friends, I was often an outsider among them—at the risk of sounding like a buzzkill, sometimes I didn't feel like setting off fireworks inside the house; I certainly never shared their pervasive, all-encompassing passion for ESPN.

So I decided to get some pets.

Luckily—or so I thought at the time—I didn't have to look very far. I was drinking a PBR on my mini-porch one day when a baby raccoon timidly approached.

I understand that some people think of raccoons as vectors for rabies or garbage cats, others have borderline-obsessive affinities for these critters. For whatever reason, people across the South have a weird history of domesticating them, or making videos of them being adorable. Just watching this video of two raccoons playing in a pool makes my heart melt. The way I feel about these little guys is how I imagine women are supposed to feel about babies.

Naturally, upon seeing that raccoon baby, I went inside to spread the good word. Standing in front of the TV, I literally waved my arms in excitement and mentioned my new friend. Now I don't know if it was because I was interrupting SportsCenter or because my roommate had had a bad experience with raccoons in the past, but he immediately went and grabbed his gun.

For obvious reasons, my excitement turned to horror. I begged and pleaded as he ran to my porch and searched for the thing. Thankfully, the little guy was afraid enough of people that he had already run off.

Related: How to Make a Suit of Feral Raccoons

But I knew immediately that I could never tell my roommates about the raccoon again.

And for a long time, I didn't. The raccoon kept coming by, though, and every time he made contact, it was with a little less trepidation. Eventually, to my delight, he would come sit with me on the porch as I sipped a beer or read a book. Maybe one day, I thought, I could walk it down the street on a leash.

Raccoons are very smart. Not only do they have opposable thumbs that allow them to manipulate things, they have legitimate problem-solving skills. But eventually, my raccoon did something I didn't know had ever been recorded in such a creature—he got comfortable enough to play pranks.

I'll never forget the time I went into my cottage to use the bathroom and heard a ruckus on the porch. I looked up to see a tiny, furry face and a set of paws pressed against the window. When I went outside, the beer I had been drinking was nowhere to be found. It was only about a week later that I realized it had been dragged under the porch.

The raccoon had either developed a taste for cheap beer, or was fucking with me. Which was it? My skills as a raccoon whisperer only extended so far, so I had no way of asking him. But one two weeks after that, I looked up one day to the tree across from my porch to see five sets of glowing eyes looking back at me.

My raccoon, it seemed, was not quite a baby. And it had multiplied.

Soon it became apparent that the raccoons had founded a not-so-adorable colony under my cottage and were spreading garbage all over the Locker Room lawn and porches—all because I was stupid enough to give them a place to stay rather than shoot them dead.

Still, I was terrified to say something to my roommates. Even though I was by now afraid of the raccoons, I didn't really want them to get shot. Instead, I woke up early in the morning every single day to clean up their trash and conceal their presence.

Eventually, I moved away, which was the end of the story as far as I was concerned until today—when, in a fit of curiosity, I texted my former roommate to find out what happened. Apparently, after I left the raccoons started breaking into the Locker Room to eat food and cause general mayhem. "It left paw prints in the flour it spilled," he told me. "We heard the screen door opening and closing and went back there to find we had been invaded."

Little baby paw prints.

He sent me a photo of the mess, as well as the one at the top of this post, which appears to show what happened to my beloved raccoon. I was afraid to ask, but I did. The answer is still a little unclear. He probably knows I couldn't handle the truth.

"They became thoroughly scared of us to stop living above your room and leave our garbage alone," he wrote me, and left it at that.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

A young Perry Farrell at Swezey's first Desolation Center in the desert, Mojave Exodus. Photo by Mariska Leyssius

Maybe you were one of the hundred thousand people watching Drake at Coachella out by Joshua Tree this year, or A$AP Rocky at Lollapalooza in Chicago. Or maybe you've just finished dragging your whole family into the middle of the desert for Burning Man. What you probably don't know is that before Rocky, before Drake, before the original Man burned on a beach in 1986, there was a guy named Stuart Swezey leading bands like Sonic Youth and the Minutemen into the California desert to put on a string of illicit bacchanals called Desolation Center—drug-addled parties for LA punks that would influence today's music festival culture and then disappear as quickly as they came.

I met Stuart Swezey in the spring of 2015 at a trendy coffee shop in Los Angeles's Silverlake neighborhood—an area almost unrecognizable from the Silverlake where he hosted his first punk shows three decades ago. Swezey is now a clean-cut 50-year-old, but back in the late 1970s, he was just another broke LA kid, listening to Rodney on the ROQ, attending underground punk shows, and stuffing LPs for Dangerhouse Records to make a few bucks. Although Swezey wasn't a musician, he ingratiated himself inside the Los Angeles punk scene, making friends while the hardcore scene sprouted up around him.

The punks and the police butted heads from the beginning. "It was just threatening—I think the imagery was threatening, the anarchic nature of it," Swezey says. When punk bands managed to book a club gig, it wasn't rare for the cops to break it up, billy clubs raised.

"They didn't like this radical new movement in their backyard," he continues, "and they were going to use force to suppress it."

In an effort to avoid clashes with the authorities, Swezey came up with the Desolation Center—nomadic DIY shows he hosted in warehouses, lofts, and rehearsal spaces around Silverlake, where the cops wouldn't hassle them. Those first small shows soon transformed into something larger—a looser, more insane Happening that would lead the 20-year-old Swezey and a crew of punk legends out across the California desert, to isolated lake beds, and into the San Pedro Harbor, blazing a trail for the modern festivals we know today.

Stuart Swezey today. Photo courtesy of Stuart Swezey

The idea to take Desolation Center into the Mojave desert came during a road trip through Mexico in 1982. "We were listening to all this experimental punk—people like Wire, Savage Republic, Minutemen," Swezey says. "That's when it just clicked to me: This is where I want to see this kind of music."

When Swezey finished the trip and showed up back in LA, he immediately started setting the plan in motion. He reached out to Savage Republic to see if they would be interested in trekking out to the desert for a show. Guitarist Bruce Licher loved the idea, and even offered a locale: Soggy Dry Lake, a lakebed out by Joshua Tree.

Swezey also asked Mike Watt and D. Boon of the San Pedro punk group the Minutemen if they'd like to join in. Swezey had been a fan of the band's "full-throttle minimalism" since their 1981 album The Punch Line, and did the band's first interview in a zine called Non-Plus.

"I thought it was totally in line with what the movement was doing," Minutemen bassist Mike Watt tells me, over the phone. "The desert would add a whole 'nother dimension to the trip! It was beautiful." With the Minutemen and Savage Republic on board and a location figured out, the first real Desolation Center show was becoming a reality.

Swezey printed 250 handmade, cardboard tickets and, calling the desert pilgrimage the "Mojave Exodus," and scattered the tickets around LA at different record stores. Selling them all for $12.50 a pop, Swezey used the profit to rent three school buses, a PA system, and one small generator. He then reached out to his friend Mariska Leyssius—drummer for the punk band Psi Com—to provide some much-needed organization to the DIY festival.

Kids aboard the bus to the Mojave Exodus in Soggy Dry Lake. Photo by Mariska Leyssius

"I made up this little waiver in case anyone got bitten by a scorpion or a snake, we weren't responsible—whatever that would do," Leyssius remembers, laughing.

When kids piled onto the bus, ready to start the trek out on the Mojave Exodus, Leyssius acted as bus monitor: "Keep your drugs and liquor below the line of the window!"

After a bumpy, sweaty, three-hour drive, the rented school buses finally reached the lakebed. There was no stage—Savage Republic and the Minutemen set up their gear right on the sand and played out to the crowd. It was dusty, hot, but no one cared. They knew they were a part of something special.

D. Boon and the Minutemen performing at the Mojave Exodus. Photo by Mariska Leyssius

"D. Boon once said, 'Punk is whatever we made it to be,'" Watt remembers. "I still go by that."

After the successful first show, Swezey quit his job and spent time traveling through West Berlin. At the time, the city was a haven for artists and musicians, and Swezey loved every minute of it. "You could stay in a squat, go see music, it was just Disneyland for alternative culture," he says.

While he was out there, he ran into Sonic Youth, who had just released their debut album, Confusion Is Sex, and Einstürzende Neubauten—an industrial group famous for playing scrap metal and heavy machinery. He wasn't sure the next time he'd be back in the States, but offered to throw both bands a show in the desert if they were ever in Los Angeles.

A few months later, Swezey found himself home in LA and, soon after, his phone rang. It was Einstürzende Neubauten. The band told him they would be in town the next week and had one day free and asked if he wanted to do that desert show. Even though Swezey had no idea how to pull everything together so quickly, he didn't think twice. Using the German word for Exodus, Swezey would call the second Desolation Center show the "Mojave Auszug."

Fans out at the Mojave Exodus. Photo by Mariska Leyssius

Einstürzende Neubauten brought along experimental performance art group Survival Research Lab (SRL), and Boyd Rice—an edgy musician and artist from the Bay Area punk scene. Rice and SRL's bizarre, avant-garde take on punk paired nicely with Neubauten and the desert setting. The second Desolation Center show would be a must-see event.

The group decided they'd take this new pilgrimage near the town of Mecca, California. Seven buses full of people trekked 150 miles until they reached a closed road off of Highway 10. It was "this really beautiful winding road through these prehistoric rocks; it looked like dinosaurs were going to come out at any point," Swezey remembers.

For the opening act, Rice laid down on a bed of nails with a block of concrete on his chest, surrounded by contact mics. One of the members of Einstürzende Neubauten took swings at the concrete with a huge sledgehammer.

"Boyd [Rice] was totally playing it low-key. He was like, 'Yeah, it's an old carnival trick I'm going to do,'" Swezey says. "But there was no real trick. He was lying on a bed of nails, and he's got a big rock on his chest and someone's breaking it with a sledgehammer. But the cool thing was it was also made into a sound art piece. And it sounded really cool."

Survival Research Lab's Gatling gun. Photo by Matt Heckert

After Rice's performance, SRL took the stage—or patch of sand, since they had no stage. Unable to transport their signature robots from San Francisco, the band created a show that incorporated the surroundings. They filled five old refrigerators, found while camping the night before, with explosives. Then they shot them with a homemade twelve-barrel Gatling gun. Afterwards, SRL rigged a boulder on top of the mountain behind the stage with dynamite, with the hope that the explosives would dislodge it and send it rolling down the hill.

At some point earlier in their performance, a young pre-Jane's Addiction Perry Farrell had wandered up the hill, unaware of the impeding explosion. "We saw him up there and everyone was trying to wave him down and he thought we were just being friendly and waving and he kept waving back," Mariska Leyssius says. "And, well, he didn't get blown up."

The explosion electrified the crowd, many of whom were on acid, but the boulder stayed perched atop the mountain and Perry Farrell stayed in one piece. It was the only hiccup in a shockingly seamless event. There were hundreds of acid-fried kids, watching artists play with power tools and explosives, but it still felt safer than a night at an LA club.

SLR's explosion at Mojave Auszug. Photo by Matt Heckert

The Minutemen's Mike Watt was one of the tripping punks, and for him, the combination of LSD and Einstürzende Neubauten was an otherworldy experience.

"I remember the bass player was playing a one-string bass, and he threw it off and he grabbed this thing you use to level the pavement and he fucking pounded that bass right into the fucking lakebed," he says. "Blew my fucking mind. He also had this gigantic truck string that he was using for a bass string. That was a trippy gig."

Watt never took acid again, after that night—probably because no other trip could top Mojave Auszug.

There were hundreds of acid-fried punks watching artists play with power tools and explosives, but it still felt safer than a night at an LA club.

If the desert performance art, the explosives, the music, and the drugs sound familiar, it's because Mojave Auszug was the spark, or at least some kindling, that helped start another desert-dwelling festival: Burning Man. John Law, co-founder of Burning Man, told me Swezey's work had a big influence on him and many of the early festival collaborators. He explained that those early SLR performances were a huge inspiration for the desert festival—specifically the fire and machine art.

The crowd at Mojave Exodus. Photo by Mariska Leyssius

After Mojave Auszug, Swezey's otherworldly desert shows became mythic among the LA punks. He knew he had to do something next, and that it had to be completely different.

"I was always trying to think at that time, How can we use the LA environment, where I'm from, but in the uncliché way that's not Hollywood or the beach? " Swezey remembers.

Driving home from backyard barbecues at D. Boon's home in San Pedro—a blue-collar town in South Los Angeles—Swezey always loved the way the cranes looked in the water. He decided the next Desolation Center event should be on a boat in the San Pedro Harbor.

Boon and Watt were thrilled. The San Pedro cops hit their punk scene especially hard, and the Minutemen would get shut down after a song or two every time they tried to play a gig. They couldn't believe that their friend from LA was going to plan a show in Pedro. "It was like adding another guy to the band. Bass, drums, guitar, and Stuart—gig inventor," Watt said, laughing.

Swezey decided to call the show "Joy at Sea," as a nod to the Minutemen LP More Joy. The Minutemen called up Arizona cowpunk weirdos the Meat Puppets, and got them to sign onto the show, too.

As for the venue, Swezey managed to charter a whale-watching boat on the cheap, and with help from Mariska Leyssius's band Psi Com, built a makeshift stage out of wooden planks the morning of the show. With the venue complete, the group set sail. But when D. Boon and the Minutemen took the stage, things got a little rocky.

Fans setting sail at Joy at Sea. Photo by Ann Summa

"D. Boon, in his nature, was not there to be still," Watt tells me. "When he played, he wanted to dance. And there was some consequence."

The boat bucked and rocked and threatened to capsize as Boon tossed his body around the stage, but it stayed afloat.

"Like King Ishmael said, 'We lived to tell the tale.'"

As they pulled back into the harbor, a Coast Guard ship hassled the punks because they were flying a Minutemen flag instead of Old Glory. "It was really like this ship of fools going around," Swezey says. I ask him if the Coast Guard thought the spiky-haired, pierced kids were pirates. "Well, technically, we were pirates," he says.

Swezey and Leyssius both laugh looking back: They can't quite explain why they didn't worry more about getting busted by the cops, someone falling from the boat, or the stage collapsing. By taking the movement away from the LAPD and the restrictive clubs, Desolation Center provided punk a place where it could thrive.

"Stuart's a guy who never played in a band, but he liked making it happen," Watt says. "You were going to be all wild-ass about making your band and your haircut and your songs and your style, why not do it with venues? There was something about the aesthetic of that environment that he found—it wasn't the fucking same old, same old."

D. Boon and Mike Watt performing at Joy at Sea. Photo by Ann Summa

Right before Christmas 1984, Swezey received an unexpected phone call from Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth. She said she and Thurston Moore would be in LA visiting her family for the holidays and asked if he wanted to do that desert show they'd talked about in Berlin a couple years back.

At the time, no one had seen Sonic Youth on the west coast, so Swezey jumped at the opportunity. The band struck him as a perfect fit for the third Mojave desert show. "There was some kind of dark Americana thing that they were really fascinated with," he says. "The sweeping scope of what they were doing that felt like it could exist in this desert setting and make perfect sense."

With Sonic Youth on the bill, it was easy to talk the Meat Puppets, Psi Com, and Redd Kross—one of the original South Bay Hardcore bands—into playing, too.

Psi Com opened the show back in the Mojave, now fronted by a young Perry Farrell. "Psi Com in its first incarnation was very shoegazer—My Bloody Valentine, kind of—but this was a little more hard rock," Swezey says. "I could see [Farrell] had this charisma and people really seemed to respond to it."

The Meat Puppets went on next and asked for the spotlights to be turned off so they could play just in the light from the full moon. Swezey learned later that someone was handing out psychedelics and everyone in the crowd was tripping.

"I remember there was a guy who just grabbed the microphone, and was shouting, 'We're in the desert! We're in the desert!'" Swezey says. "It was spooky as hell."

Finally, Sonic Youth took the stage. The LA punks didn't know what to make of them. They were doing completely different things from the LA scene, like tuning their guitars with screwdrivers. "I remember somebody at SST saying, 'Why are you booking this Loft Rock? Why are the Meat Puppets opening for this Loft Rock band?'" Swezey says. "After that gig, they were signed to SST."

After Sonic Youth's set, everyone packed into their cars and drove back out all over California. This was Swezey's fourth Desolation Center event in less than two years, and at the time, everyone assumed they'd go on forever.

In December of 1985, D. Boon was killed in a van accident in the Arizona desert.

The weekend of the crash, Swezey threw a Desolation Center benefit show for the Foundation for Art Resources in Downtown LA. Sonic Youth, Swans, and Saccharine Trust all played great sets, but it wasn't the same. "It was the first Swans show on the west coast," Swezey says. "But that was the weekend D. Boon died. I was just done."

In some ways, the magic of the shows is that they never had a chance to become diluted by money or time.

Watt and Swezey both remember Boon as a larger-than-life presence, but also as a loyal friend. Swezey recently showed Watt some old footage from the first desert event. "Seeing D. Boon dance, it seemed like he wanted to jump right out of the fucking screen," Watt tells me about that footage. "It's still hard to believe, after all these years, that something could fucking kill him."

The benefit show was the last of Swezey's Desolation Center events. "I started to feel like things had changed," he says. "For me it didn't have that element of adventure." Instead, he started Amok Books, an underground publishing house, with Leyssius, where he published gonzo journalist John Gilmore's memoir Laid Bare, among hundreds of other titles. He moved on, and the punk scene moved on, too.

Swezey could have made a fortune by making the Desolation Center shows into a yearly festival, but the same spontaneity and disregard for the bottom-line that helped make his shows a countercultural success, were also what kept them from turning into a cash cow. The Desolation Center shows managed to avoid the pivotal moment when festivals for the counterculture shift and become mainstream, inevitably altering their feel and purpose. In some ways, the magic of the shows is that they never had a chance to become diluted by money or time: they were raw, they were real, and, most importantly, they were completely original.

Savage Republic playing at the Mojave Exodus. Photo by Mariska Leyssius

Swezey's influence can still be seen today. Perry Farrell linked up with Dave Navarro in 1985 and made it big in Jane's Addiction. He eventually started Lollapalooza in 1991 and credits the Desolation Center shows as inspiration. Rick Van Santen and Paul Tollett's company Goldenvoice promoted the Minutemen, Einstürzende Neubauten, and Farrell's bands back in the 1980s in LA and, in 1999, they launched a desert music festival of their own: Coachella.

In 2015, Swezey began filming interviews with players from his Desolation Center shows for an upcoming documentary, which he plans to crowd source and release in the fall of 2016. Mike Watt stresses that this documentary will not be "sentimentalism." Instead, he says, it will be "evidence that you can fucking make things happen."

For Watt, the magic of Swezey's vision—taking punk rock to the desert and the sea—encompasses punk's anarchist core. "Part of the scene was, hey, let's blow some minds. Sometimes, it's with bass and guitars, sometimes it's with words, sometimes it's with clothes, and sometimes it's with venues," he says. "Let's turn people onto stuff that proves to them that they're alive."

Follow Joseph Bien-Kahn on Twitter.

Still courtesy TIFF

Brussels is often thought of as a quintessential capital city: organized, unassuming, stately, and sleepy as all hell. But that's not the Brussels of 27-year-old Belgian-based Moroccan filmmakers Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah's new movie Black, which is set in the inner city neighborhoods and centers on gang violence and alienation among poor black and Moroccan communities. The film is essentially a Romeo and Juliet love story, but shot with the streetwise and unflinching sensibilities of Larry Clark's Kids or Hector Babanco's Pixote. It uses blazing visuals to convey the seemingly limitless possibility of violence in the inner city.

As a second full-length feature for the directorial team (their debut was 2014's Image), the film bears some of the cliches of young filmmakers grappling with big topics: the violence is occasionally over-stylized and parts of the plot feel a bit rushed, and while most of the characters on both side of the racial divide are complex and well drawn, the black gangsters are particularly vicious.

But their commitment to the authenticity of the neighborhoods and the story set therein—the film is based on Dirk Bracke's youth-oriented novel of the same name, which is apparently a controversial favorite in Belgium—comes through in the characters and locations. (The entire film was cast off the streets, and shot in the city's marginalized neighborhoods.) Indeed, even though Black begins with its focus on the petty, fairly unlikeable Moroccan gang and its proverbial Romeo, Marwan (Aboubakr Bensaihi), the real story becomes the tragic journey of Juliet stand-in Mavella's (Martha Canga Antonio) relationship with the terrifyingly powerful, and ultra-violent, Black Bronx gang—a crew with a penchant for gang rape and neighborhood intimidation.

The all-around bleakness of the film aside, the filmmakers came across as a pair of enthusiastic and considerate dudes when VICE met up with them for their first ever North American interview.

VICE: How did you two get into filmmaking?
Bilall Fallah: On the first day of school, which was all only, like, artistic white people, he was the only Moroccan. So I asked him, "Are you Moroccan? And he said, "Yeah." So we formed a gang together, and made movies together. It came naturally: Every time I made a movie, he was on my set, and every time he made a movie, I was on set. It was like our minds were connected, sharing the same vision.

And these were student films?
Adil El Arbi: Yeah, in film school. We didn't even pass first year because everybody thought our films sucked.

Fallah: We both flunked. And they were fucking racist.

El Arbi: But the kind of movies we made were actually quite commercial. We were inspired by movies by [Martin] Scorsese and Spike Lee and whole bunch of directors. While the movies [the instructors] wanted to see were very artsy movies that you would see at festivals. It was a few years before they had some kind of respect for us.

It's kind of the opposite here where people who try to make art films are told they should be more commercial. So, you did one other full length, and anything else?
El Arbi: Every year in film school you have to make a short movie, and every short movie we made was in the same universe that we use in our long features. So the last short movie we made won some prizes, and one of those was a budget for a new short movie. But with that we said, "Fuck short movies; let's make a long feature." It was our first movie, Image, which was about a Moroccan gangster and a journalist in a neighborhood in Brussels. And then the second movie is Black. And we hope we can make a shitload of other movies.

So obviously you guys are familiar with the scene you're portraying in the film. Can you give us a little background on that side of Brussels. I mean, I was there like 10 years ago, and saw a very different side of the city.
El Arbi: We read this book [Black] in school, as you read a lot of stuff that's aimed at teenagers. I wanted to read it because it was about black gangs in Brussels. There are about 35 gangs in the city that are active, more or less, and we know this kind of world, because we know lots of black people and Moroccan people in this immigrant community. It's our world. And we felt connected to the characters.

Fallah: There's also a universal thing about Romeo and Juliet, but we still wanted to keep it raw.

El Arbi: It was interesting when you read the book, you understand why the gangsters go into it, and get inside their heads.

There's the socio-economic aspect, and the racism between the two gangs in the film, but you don't really see the view outside of that in the movie. What's the immigrant experience like?
El Arbi: In Brussels, when you're Moroccan or you're black, you have a hard time finding a normal job. Even though Brussels is very rich, the population of Brussels is very poor. You have one million people coming in there to work every day, but the people who live there are very very poor. There's Moroccans, and blacks, and people from Eastern Europe, and for anyone with a foreign sounding name, they have a problem finding a job. So they don't belong to the society. And a lot of those young people, they see their big brothers or older friends who don't get a job, and so they are thinking, why should I try? So they get into some criminal activity, in a group where they feel like, I am accepted and I have an identity—I am thought of as Black Bronx, that's who I am. And that's clear because I'm not part of society. A lot of those people just want to belong somewhere, and they feel like there's no real future for them. They feel always like an immigrant, even if they are born here or their parents are born here.

And in the film, there's even alienation within those groups. Once the main characters fall in love and they try to escape the violence, they're alienated from those groups that they belong to. Well, how did you choose to focus on this one specific story?
El Arbi: Most of the criminal activity that happened around 2008-2009, right when that book [Black] came out, was in the African community. It was the African gangs fighting for the same turf. But we wanted to explore some of the smaller gangs that act criminal or aren't as dangerous as the ones in the African neighborhoods. They act really different. Sometimes you have wars between neighborhoods—it's not always wars between African gangs and Moroccan gangs. It'll be two Moroccan gangs against each other, one from the north of Brussels against one from the south of Brussels. But we thought it would be interesting to show those two kinds of gangs, because the main characters are very similar [even though they're from different gangs]. And that's the beauty of the story.

By focusing on these two characters and their worlds, there's not a lot of the rest of Brussels. There are not a lot of white people in the film.
El Arbi: Just the cops. The racist cops.

What was the thinking behind setting it up that way?
El Arbi: What you see in the movie is the real neighborhoods in Brussels, and the world that they live in. So you can see it's really difficult to have a good future in that kind of environment. So it happens in the underground in the metro subway station, and in their neighborhoods.

Fallah: And there isn't a lot of contact with white Flemish people, it's really an entirely different world.

El Arbi: So for the movie, we had to stay there. And that's why the movie is much more about the relationship between Marwan and Mavella, and even more than about gangs—like, there are 35 different gangs, but you don't see all of them. It's just centered around those two characters,

And in so doing, I understand that the film is one of the first Flemish films to feature this racial makeup.
Fallah: All the Flemish films are full of white people. You never have Moroccans or black people.

El Arbi: If you come from another country and watch Flemish television, you think Belgium is all white. And all the famous people in Belgium are white. Even though Brussels and Antwerp and Ghent are multicultural. So that's one of the things that's going to be a shock and controversial in Flanders—it's something new. When you see a Moroccan person in a Flemish movie, they're usually a drug dealer or a terrorist. So we chose to make a movie full of blacks and Moroccans, and also show the good and bad side of both groups.

And is this how you ended up using non-professional actors?
Fallah: Since all the television shows are full of white actors, we weren't going to find them there. So we did street casting to find people who matched the characters. We had 400 auditions and saw them all, and did like four months to find those guys. We chose 16 of them, who we knew were talented, like diamonds. And then we like professionalized them by doing two months of rehearsing.

El Arbi: We worked with them to do a lot of improvisation. Obviously there's a screenplay, but we wanted to give them a lot of freedom because we wanted to capture that documentary style of acting. And we wanted to have that chemistry between the actors. They all knew a lot about gangs, even though they never said they were part of any gangs—they were always talking about, "Yeah, a friend of mine, he did this and this and this." And then one of the actors got arrested while we were shooting.

What's the story there?
El Arbi: We were just shooting, and then he got arrested, and then a few hours later he was free. And he never really told us what it was about. But he also talked about his father, who was known in the neighborhood with the gangs, so we assumed it was something like that.

Fallah: But most of the actors really played a role. But they know the world and they know the language of the street. And that was really important to us, to be as authentic as possible and to have it almost as documentary acting. And I think we did that.

What was that like for them to have this opportunity to make a movie.
El Arbi: When we did the casting, most of them didn't believe we were really film directors. We had to show them our first movie to prove that we weren't bullshitters. Because we're on the street asking girls who are like 16-years-old: "Hey, do you want to play in a movie?" [Laughs].

Fallah: But after a while we had an office in downtown Brussels, and a lot of people walking by. And one guy who played the most important role of the gang leader, he was on his way to work and he passed by. We noticed he had a face like the character, so we asked him if he wanted to come in for casting.

El Arbi: He was the only one I was scared of, because everyone [auditioning for that role] was yelling, and he was really calm. Everybody thought maybe he'd killed somebody. But the two main characters, Marwan and Mavella—she'd read the book and was a fan of the book and found her own way to the casting. And as soon as she read [for the part] it was like a bomb of emotions and we knew it was going to be her.

What about the street lingo and the dialects—do you think any of that gets lost in the subtitles?
Fallah: We showed the movie through the French speaking channel and they didn't have any problem understanding it. Though, even for us there were little words and little jokes that we didn't understand.

El Arbi: We showed it to a famous Belgian artist, Stromae, and he was there with his black family and friends, and they were laughing their asses off. They understood all those sentences—so the actors were really thinking about their lines. But it's the images that really tell the story.

What was it like shooting the film?
Both: It was war.

El Arbi: We told the actors that if we want to make this movie it's like going into war. One-hundred percent, you have to give yourself, heart, and mind. And in some of those neighborhoods, there was some violence, like threatening to stab one of the white people on the crew.

Fallah: I got a bottle smashed on my head.

El Arbi: But we reached out to them. We went to the neighborhoods months before we went to shoot, to get the trust of the people there. We wanted to be authentic in the actors and in the locations. We weren't going to shoot in the part of Brussels where nothing happens, and we wanted to be on the streets that are described in the book.

Fallah: We wouldn't tell people it was a film about gangsters, we'd tell them it was a love story.

One last question... how do you think this is going to be received in Belgium and in Europe?
El Arbi: Very interesting. The book was really hard.

The book already had a reputation?
El Arbi: Yeah, it was really popular. So when we shot the movie, we would shoot the hardest version possible and then tone it down a little. But the first version that we showed the producer and the distributors, they were like, keep it that way: keep it hard, keep it rough, you don't need to tone it down. So it's pretty much the version we have now. I think the good thing is that it will not go unnoticed. And that is a good thing for young directors.

Black plays at Toronto International Film Festival on Friday, September 11, 9 PM; Sunday, September 13, 10 PM; and Saturday, September 19, 3 PM.

Follow Chris Bilton on Twitter.