I liked being an usher. We used to stay in the auditorium for the duration of each film, sitting at the back soaking up the films with one eye on the audience, apologizing when the rats ran over their feet, and ensuring that they didn’t talk or smoke or wank (I only caught one man doing the latter, and he vacated the premises quickly and quietly. He didn’t mean any harm, but he was disturbing the lady next to him, so he had to go). We found syringes on the carpet under the seats, had to clean up bird shit from the outside poster frames, and consistently argued with the Chinatown restaurant staff who consistently blocked our fire exits with bin-liners full of stinking, rotting food.

It was worth it all just to see hundreds of brilliant films. One of them was Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man. I’d never seen anything like it, and still haven’t. Set in the dying days of the Old West, it’s so dreamy and surreal that when you watch it you feel like you’re melting. It’s proper escapism, and not the 2012 apocalypse fetish, who-cares-how-shit-the-film-is brand of escapism, but in the sense that it envelopes you in its universe entirely.

Johnny Depp comes to town for an accountancy job, sleeps with the wrong woman, inadvertently gets her killed, and spends the rest of the film on the run, protected by a Native American while a trio of bounty hunters trail him. It’s a beautiful film, one of those rare instances where every aspect is perfect. The best supporting cast ever includes Robert Mitchum (in his last role), John Hurt, Gabriel Byrne, Crispin Glover, Alfred Molina, Iggy Pop (in drag), Billy Bob Thornton, Michael Wincott, and a cannibalistic Lance Henriksen. And Neil Young’s stark electric guitar score is amazing, and as much responsible for the film’s atmosphere as the visuals. In short, Dead Man sounds as good as it looks.

A Jarmusch season of sorts (it also includes films that have inspired him, from Buster Keaton to Wim Wenders), begins this Friday at London’s ICA, and runs up to Christmas. I never really got to grips with 1984’s Stranger Than Paradise, which kicks things off on Friday, but its 1986 follow-up, Down By Law, is great, with Tom Waits, John Lurie and Roberto Benigni as three bickering misfit losers who find themselves locked up together and escape into Louisiana swampland. I can’t vouch for Jarmusch’s latest, The Limits of Control, which I haven’t seen, but it’s really all about Dead Man. They’re showing it three times. Go and see it big.
ALEX GODFREY

seriously, y r u doing this trashy, sluty kind content for your art? what’s up with u? this is a real question, not a critical appraisal. tell me what you’re feeling that makes u want to use your talent this way…..is it money-making? R U sad and angry?
ok, i get why u hate L.A. but r u pissed off at women….?

Sincerely,
NICHOLAS GAZIN

Vice responds: Dear Nick’s Aunt, Why do you write like Prince?

Vice respond: We did put you in the post, you loon. You’re in the top-right corner of that big column at the beginning. Right next to Gillian Wilson. We’ll still put up your drawings, but only because we like them (and the general anti-LA sentiment being expressed), not because we are Forgetful Fridas or Fernandos.

Vice responds: We think you’re either talking about this or that DO we can’t find where the old modern-primitive guy inflated his scrotum for a protest. Ha, actually he’s the first thing that comes up when you google “scrotal inflation.”

Anyways, it’s possible that I’ve just slept with the only three girls in the world who crave satchel, but I prefer to believe that there is a burgeoning sexual underground of ball-hungry ladies laying just beneath the surface of acceptable sex-stuff and ready to blow up across america with heterosexual testes-oriented porn and strip clubs and balls-only strap-ons and vibrating statues of Atlas and tiny, desk-mounted speedbags. No clue when it started but my theory is that they learned it from the fags.

Giant Robot has been putting on these shows for the last three years where they get a whole bunch of comics-makers and illustrators to doodle on Post-It notes and they rule. Because the prescribed medium is so teensy and adhesive, they just stick them all over the walls until the entire store is like one huge book of gag panels that you can pull off and say “I buy this.” You could consider this as an extended critique on the commodification of fine art in the age of mechanical and digital reproduction and the primacy of images if you are A FUCKING LOSER, but all we know is we’s gonna see us some stickies all drawn on by some of the finest drawers of our age.

Drawers like…

Gillian Wilson, Nick Gazin, Marc Johns, Jeffrey Brown, Ray Sohn, and Travis Lampe…

Lisa Hanawalt, Apak!, and Allison Cole…

Matt Furie, Connie Wong, and Zack Soto…

Luke Ramsey, Aiyana Udesen, and “Skinner”…

and the comics world’s eternally-crusading moralist, Johnny Ryan.

Post-it 4 starts this Saturday at some time. Click here for Deez Tails.

Girls Names are a jangly two-piece from Belfast in thrall to C86, Beat Happening and the Sound of Young Scotland. I met singer Cathal once in Belfast when I was driving Times New Viking around on tour and he took us to a club that was playing horrible dubstep really fucking loud. It’s a testament to his good nature and pretty little face that we still managed to have fun.

Vice: What inspired you to form Girls Names?
Cathal: Girls Names was a bit of an accident really. I’ve never played in a band until now and when I started to get to know Neil last year I joked that we should start a Beat Happening cover band called Hot Chocolate Boys. We never got round to it and instead formed Girls Names after our friend Mark asked us to support a Wavves gig he was promoting back in February. We had two weeks to get a set together and Neil had to learn to play some drums – it was a mess.

Is there a good scene in Belfast for a band like yours?
We’re totally unique in Belfast, which is cool. Because of this we’ve been lucky enough to cut our teeth with some great touring bands like Sic Alps, Lovvers, Times New Viking, Wavves and Desolation Wilderness. And bizarrely we just did a show with Joe Lally from Fugazi. Some people in Belfast don’t get us and others do. The fact that there’s just two of us confuses people, although one night after playing, this guy came up to me and said we sounded like “the Fall meets some 50s scuzzy shit”. I thought that was cool.
We’re both from outside of town originally; Neil’s from nearby Bangor and I’m from a village called Camlough near the border. Kids escape their shitty small towns and Belfast’s all you really have here, but it’s cool now. The Menagerie on University Street is pivotal to it all; it’s the best hangout in town and books the best shows and club nights.

What are your your favourite girls’ names?
Um… Hannah, Rebekah, Claire, Kim, Cara… we could have been called Sandy and Denny though.

Your sound is clearly influenced by cult indie-pop bands like Orange Juice, the Pastels, Black Tambourine, etc. What draws you to the music of those bands?
It’s perfect pop music: three-minute songs, catchy hooks and melodies, but bittersweet lyrics about being young, sad, feeling inadequate and lusting after someone, all without taking itself too seriously. “Throw Aggi Off the Bridge” still blows my mind everytime I listen to it!

Can you recommend some other new bands from Ireland?
Yeah for sure. In Belfast: Not Squares, Kicks Blue, JL Seagull, No Tmrwws, Slomatics. And in Dublin: Cap Pas Cap and No Monster Club. I don’t know much else, I tend to listen to old 80s indie or music from outside of Ireland, and these days we just listen to Felt on loop.

Girls Names have released a very limited tape on Cass/Flick, which is sold out. Something else will be out soon and the track below may well be on it.

Girls Names, “Graveyard”

JOEL WRIGHT

The last thing I remember is saying goodbye to an adorable bike courier and extra-checking both ways before crossing the street to start home.  A weird fog that is usually reserved for small and haunted coastal towns had come in. Or I guess, “set in.” In any case, I got on my bike and pushed off from the curb, and I couldn’t have made it more than five feet forward before headlights ripped out of the fog to my right at a speed of 80km/h, as I would later read in the police report. The rest comes in hazy, messy blotches.

This much I have learned: If you are going to get yourself run over, do it outside of a bar that has just let out. Not only will a million cell phones simultaneously dial 911 but everyone is filled with such bravado (beer) that they will charge the scene, surround and hold the car and driver in question and haul you out from underneath. That and sometimes when faced with something I assume (unconscious) is so loud and brutal and jarring, people will rally.

My whole head was wrapped Bret Michael-style and I came to in the hospital waiting room. My friend Ameera, who had seen me being hauled out from under the car and accompanied me in my first ever ambulance trip, called my brother and tried to keep me entertained. This was not hard as I had been reduced to a blabbering mess of incoherence. She probably could’ve left me in front of a vending machine and I would have thought I had finally made it to Xanadu. Concussions allow one a state usually attainable only after a lifetime of disciplined meditation.

My brother showed up, then my ex-boyfriend, then the cops. A lot of my statements did not match up to witness accounts or standard English and it was finally decided that I needed a cat scan. I was helped into last season’s all-over print gown and for the first time saw the enormous road rash covering my stomach and the amount of blood that had collected on the inside of my jeans, where my knees had been reduced to shreds. When the CT technician came to get me I was being force-fed Hawaiian doughnuts and chocolate milk, and had spilled a bottle of water all over my lower half.

There are some parts of this whole thing I wish my concussion swallowed up, like me asking the technician to guess how my brain would look on a scale of “one” to “fucked.” Or calling doctors by celebrity their look-a-like: “I don’t want Shia LaBeouf, give me the fat Peter Sarsgaard!” An old Jamaican nurse was brought in to cut me down to size, which apparently only required calling me “cheeky.”

They put me back in my bed where I was witness to a man projectile vomiting all over the ER screaming, “I’m crazy! I’M CRAZY!” and another guy who got beaten up so badly he was going to lose an eye. That’s when I realized I was small potatoes in this patch.

My forehead was frozen with a needle made for elephants and my entire face was covered in towels. An attending physician came in to start my stitches, observed by my doctor (LaBeouf) and talked about me as if I wasn’t attached to the sutures he was threading through the flayed flaps of forehead, “Her brain had some swelling, a bit of a bleed.” “Real surprise there wasn’t permanent damage.” “The gash looked like it might heal okay but there could be potential for plastics.”

“Is that your boss?” I asked when the doctor left.

“Yes.”

“He’s kind of a dick.”

LaBeouf laughed, we were cool.

I have been in sweatpants at my parents for the past five days and fear there may be no going back. Both my eyes have swollen shut and run a similar array of colors to tropical birds or tropical skittles. The stitches come out soon and my nose has swollen up Balboa style. It is hard to find a point on my body not sore to the touch. I can’t bend my knees. We are waiting on lawyers, insurance, and a police lieutenant named Barry White. I have watched every Civil War biopic known to man. I get too nauseous to eat. Showers are a thing of the past. On the plus side, sleeping is simultaneously both very difficult and easy.

The one, maybe only, great thing something like this can do for you is present an entire universe of support you never knew you had. People will offer themselves and their condolences to the point where it becomes overwhelming to thank them for their concern and also a little embarrassing. It’s like you’re the crippled pope in some sort of Bunuel fantasy. So, thanks everybody, really, but I am getting an armoured ATV and a Rottweiler to ride shotgun.

KATIE HEINDL

Today, raging Swedish neo-nazis, nationalists, and your basic right-wingers will get together, as they do every year on November 30, to commemorate the death of 16th-century warrior king Charles XII. The way they do it is they march around a little, shout “Keep Sweden Swedish” at other Swedes, and, of course, have their asses handed to them by the local anarchists, commies, and your basic anti-racists.

November 30 has been a national holiday in Sweden since 1853 but it wasn’t until the late 60s that its celebrators decided to start saying “no jews or negros allowed.” The racist aspect culminated in the 80s when neo-nazi skins joined in and, as a reaction to that, opposing anti-fascist organizations put together November 30 counter-demonstrations, generally outnumbering the skins by the thousands. By the mid-90s, the fight had become so entrenched in Swedish youth culture that some joker decided to make a feature-length adaptation of Romeo and Juliet based around it, where Romeo is a sizzling young nazi-skin and Juliet is a sizzling young immigrant chick.

Recently, though, the demonstration has been kind of a major yawn. Last year the racist side numbered in the low 30s, which I guess is great news for progress and all, but definitely did not make for a satisfying beat-down. It’s been stated plenty o’times that the November 30 battle was going the way of the pennyfarthing or the Klan, but this year, what with the recession and Obama making everybody all pissed-off and fighty, analysts are projecting that the brawl will be completely “off the chain.” I guess we’ll find out tonight.

Oh, and if you happen to be in Stockholm and feel like punching a nazi, you’ll find them on and around Riddarholmen (and most likely marching towards the Charles XII statue in Kungsträdgården). Otherwise, the anti-fascists will demonstrate against racism on Odenplan and march towards Hötorget and my bet is that it’ll all clinch in Kunsträdgården at about 8 PM. See you there!

I’m sure by now you’ve heard all about how Carnage UK is going up and down our country, taking our otherwise well-behaved, cerebral university students and turning them into a feral mass of cheap drink-swigging, Policemen’s hat-stealing, suicide-committing, poppy-pissing monsters. Just in case you don’t know, the basic premise is this: you buy a t-shirt for £10, which gets you free entry into a bunch of pubs and nightclubs, most of which have cheap drink deals. The Sun is OUTRAGED.

The t-shirt has a list of tasks you’re meant to tick off over the course of the night.

I don’t mean to split hairs, but, in terms of innuendo, isn’t a “NAUGHTY NURSE CHECK UP” and a “DOCTOR/NURSE CONSULTATION” more or less the same thing?

Last Thursday, I decided to go along on a Carnage pub crawl in Oxford to see what all the fuss is about. I should probably warn you that things get pretty heavy, pretty fast. So if you’re sensitive or boring, it’s probably best you don’t scroll down to read the rest of this.

The evening had a fancy dress theme of “doctors and nurses”. Most of the girls seemed to have interpreted that as “fishnets and hot pants”. I’m not sure where nurses wear that. It’s definitely not in London though. The last time I was in hospital, the nurses were wearing Crocs and bandanas with SpongeBob on them.

This was the first guy I met. I asked him if he’d been able to tick off any of the things from the t-shirt task list and he told me that he’d already snogged TWO girls. When I asked him what was the most INSANE thing he’d seen all night, he told me that a friend of his had drawn a penis on his shirt in marker, and the police had made him scribble it out. NUTS!!

See that guy in the background leaning out of the kebab van? He’s yelling at these two for not paying for their kebab. BONKERS!!!

I found this guy asleep in the doorway of an LK Bennett with people taking pictures of him on their camera phones. Unfortunately he woke up before I could get one. I asked him if he was having a good night and he told me “I can’t find my friends. I think I was sick.” MENTAL!!

There were free buses taking people from venue to venue. With it being a Carnage UK event, any kind of formal queuing rules went straight out of the window. WILD!!

These girls were walking between venues in the rain without coats OR umbrellas! WHAT WOULD THEIR MOTHERS THINK!??!?

Unfortunately, I forgot to bring (read: don’t own) a student ID, so I wasn’t allowed into the final venue. I did loiter outside for a while taking pictures of people in the smoking area though. If those guys on the right are anything to go by, I’d imagine it was pretty epic.

So with that, I went back home to sleep. But not before I saw one last bit of bedlam. This guy was getting into a cab, BUT HE WASN’T WEARING A SHIRT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

JAMIE TAETE

In 1981, I went to Majorca with my parents. One night, there was a fancy-dress contest for the kids in the hotel, and my mum spent an hour or two making what might be the worst Darth Vader costume any child has ever been made to wear: basically she wrapped me in a load of black paper and fashioned a light saber out of silver foil. My dad told me to parade around the room, sticking the light saber in people’s faces. I didn’t win.

Me as Vader

The same year, three elementary school kids from Mississippi saw Raiders of the Lost Ark and were so taken by it they decided to make their own version of it, word for word, shot for shot, by themselves. Chris Strompolos cast himself as Indiana Jones, got his friend Eric to direct, and some weird kid named Jayson was put in charge of the effects. This was before the age of home video, so they went back to the cinema to see the film again, recorded the audio with a tape recorder, took notes, then went home and began storyboarding and pre-production. Filming on Betamax in their moms’ basements and back yards, they padded out the cast with neighborhood kids, made a boulder out of fibreglass, pulled a burnt-out car from a swamp, hassled a farmer for permission to shoot on his dirt farm (for the desert scenes), and harassed a naval base captain for three years to let them shoot on his submarine.

They did everything for real, including all the stunts and effects. Eric got plaster cast seared to his face, suffocated, and lost his eyelashes and an eyebrow. For the Nazi monkey who does the Sieg Heil in the film, they cast a dog and lifted his paw up with fishing wire. They finished the film seven years later, by which time they’d stumbled through adolescence and told each other to get fucked. Then they made up again and everybody (including you) found out about their wunderproject. Hostel director Eli Roth got his hands on a copy, organized a screening, and people loved it. Spielberg heard about it, invited the kids to his place, and they hung out. Ghost World creator Dan Clowes wrote a screenplay all about it, to be made into its own film, produced by uber-producer Scott Rudin. Now these geek legends travel the world showing their remake at one-off screenings; if you ever get a chance to go to one, do it (for instance if you’re in Ohio this week, where it’s showing from Thursday to Sunday.

I had a chat with Chris Strompolos about his painstaking remake.

Vice: It was you who came up with the idea for the remake, right?
Chris: Yeah, I was obsessed with Star Wars; I had the figures and ships, Yoda soap, Luke Skywalker underwear – called Underoos. You could buy all the different characters. Chewbacca Underoos.

I don’t know if they made their way over to England.
Maybe not. Anyway, I was particularly focussed on Han Solo – I loved Harrison Ford. And when Raiders came out, in 1981 when I was 10, it absolutely completely split my brain in half, and changed me. After the screening I wanted nothing more than to 1) Be Indiana Jones, and 2) Make movies. It was like an axe had come down into my forehead. I was called to it. So I bought the comic and started crafting my own script.

How much had you thought this plan through? You were only 10.
Oh, I hadn’t thought it through at all. One of the beautiful things about being a child is that you don’t know that you can’t do something, you don’t have that limited perspective. You don’t see the obstacles before you. So no, not much. I was just consumed with the fantasy. I called Eric up and said, “I’m remaking Raiders, do you wanna help?”, and he said, “Sure.” I’d bought the comic and cast myself as Indiana Jones, and we started from there. I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

How come Jayson managed to get all those effects done, how did he know what he was doing?
Jayson was eccentric, he was creative. At 11 years old he was the first militaristic vegetarian I’d ever met. He was into shamanism, he was into puppetry, he was into American Indian medicine bags, he was into weird, weird shit, and on top of that he was into special effects. So he set up in the garage in the back of his mum’s house and it was like his laboratory. Whenever we needed an effect he’d ask for a couple of days and would experiment and read books and go to the library and do things in the garage. And then he’d come back with explosives and melting heads.

One of the most exciting and endearing things about the film is the realism in it: your screen kiss was your first real-life kiss; you really did set yourselves on fire; and that really is you getting dragged from the truck. It’s a blast to see you going through all this stuff, and in that sense you even have an edge over the original.
Yeah, and I wasn’t quite aware of that energy until we started screening it. I just knew that on the day of shooting we had to do something and we were too reticent to let any other neighbourhood kids do any stunts – we did the dangerous stuff because we didn’t wanna get in trouble if somebody else got hurt. So yeah, we were doing it by ourselves for the first time, and that’s the charm, that’s what’s captivating, there’s this fresh innocence on our faces. And people at screenings who know the original are sitting back with folded arms going, “OK, they pulled that off, how are they gonna do the next scene… my God, they actually lit the room on fire!” And you see this building energy in the cinema, and by halfway through the audience are completely locked in and rooting for us, and by the final credits people are cheering. The first time that happened, there were tears in my eyes. I had no idea what we had before that.

You’ve done amazingly well to keep the film off the internet.
It hasn’t been easy, trust me, it’s been a battle. I’m sure there are rogue copies of it on torrents, it’s almost impossible nowadays. But we’ve worked very hard to keep it off, we keep copies under wraps, we never give out press copies. It’s worked to our benefit because it maintains a sense of mystery about it, and in a day and age where you can get anything you want, whenever you want it and download it onto your watch, the old-school notion of being inaccessible adds to the joy when you finally get to see it.

What’s the best thing this experience has done for you?
Well, it’s allowed me to revisit and re-examine that window of my life in such a different way. When you’re a kid growing up, you go through all the pain and aggravation of yourself, your parents, social things, figuring it all out, and I certainly had a unique experience of growing up inside the walls of Raiders. But I think for many years there were many aspects of myself and my personality and my love of Raiders, and the fact that we did that movie for so long, that actually I was embarrassed about. I think there was a subconscious part of me that was enshrouded in a little bit of shame; I got married and my wife didn’t even know that I was an Indiana Jones fan. She had no idea that I had ever done this movie; I kept it tucked away, locked in a box, away from everybody, and never displayed my Indiana Jones stuff. Now, with people getting so much joy and inspiration from watching it, it’s so great and it puts that chapter of my life into context in a more positive way. And not to mention all the positive work we’ve done – we’ve raised thousands of dollars for charity and education, we’ve lectured on film education to teenagers, we’ve turned kids on to movies and given them the confidence and notion that they can go out and do it for themselves.

ALEX GODFREY