Photos by Amy Lombard. Wardrobe Courtesy of New York Vintage

Editor's note: Don't smoke any of this at home, folks—or anywhere else for that matter. Leave this stupidity to the professionals.

Disclaimer: New York's sexiest drug princess would only let me watch her smoke weird shit if she could approve the final article. Below is the text approved by New York's sexiest drug princess.

“I have enough paraphernalia to smoke anything in Manhattan.”

I’m sitting on a black couch in a bourgey apartment in Greenwich Village watching CrackDoubt, a cam girl I met at the Outback Steakhouse, smoke weird objects to see if she can get high on life. For the photos, CrackDoubt alternates between a few black couture dresses as Corinthian columns stand firm against the living-room walls and white curtains billow throughout the perimeter of the room. The apartment looks more like the set of a post–Tommy Mottola Mariah Carey music video than the place where a self-proclaimed “drug princess” might smoke objects like powdered caffeine and cash money.  

The apartment’s tenant, a net artist from the art collective Art404, sits on the window sill, smoking a cigarette and staring at the Empire State Building. He encourages Amy and me to “never date in 3-D.” CrackDoubt agrees. “If you’re not on a cam site, [it costs] $2.99 a minute, my dude,” she says. “Sex work made me realize how valuable my time is.”

CrackDoubt flaunts her sex work but is touchy about her current and past drug habits. Although she has smoked crack once or twice and a crackhead recently stalked her in Grand Central Station, tweeting at her to ask whether she had any crack, she despises the terms “crackhead” and “drug addict.” Lest she be lumped in with the stigmas that these terms bring to mind, she asks me to call her a “drug princess.” “Drug duchess” and “drug mistress” are also acceptable. “I’m a heroine—with an e,” she says. “I’m a New York City drug fairy tale!”

CrackDoubt tells me that she started using drugs when she was 18. From age 20 to 25, she dealt with a heavy cocaine problem. “Cocaine brings out the ugliest side of people,” she says. She also tells me that she is now sober; however, when I point out that she tweets regularly about substances, she admits she has a unique definition of sobriety: “I’m far from clean, but I don’t wake up with withdrawls.” She worries about being labeled a drug addict because of her “fans” on Twitter who may think she glamorizes drug use. I’m not sure who these fans are (CrackDoubt has 3,324 Twitter followers), but one fan recently told her that she wasn’t really living her life if she didn’t die this year. (CrackDoubt is 27.)

CrackDoubt’s life seems to revolve around the internet, where she met the net artist. “He put me on his ‘artist Twitter list,’ which is a great honor, because what have I created?” she says. She also met her “stylist,” Lil Snow Crash, online. Lil Snow Crash is a homosexual with the voice of a banshee who eats gummy bears throughout the night. He wears LeBron James–branded baggy shorts and an oversize white T-shirt. Before CrackDoubt starts smoking weird objects, she and her friends pour orange juice and champagne into glass flutes and make a toast “to the internet!”

As she puts on her earrings, she says, “I just took my Adderall, so I can focus now.” It’s smoking time.

CrackDoubt is perched on the windowsill above a black couch, asking Amy how she should pose as she smokes artificial sweetener out of a bowl. Like a waitress pouring champage, she pours the sweetener into a bowl. “I wish I would have brought my birth control so I could have smoked it,” she purrs. She lifts up the bowl. “I’m on Diet Coke,” she purrs. “YAAAAAAS!” Lil Snow Crash screams. “David LaChapelle!” She lights the bowl and inhales.

“My voice sounds funny,” she says. “I feel like I’m on helium.”

“Would you do it again?” I ask.

“I wouldn’t rule it out.”

CrackDoubt asks if she could smoke my Sarah Lawrence College diploma (market value approximately $200,000) as a metaphor for how drugs burned away her education. CrackDoubt studied women’s history at Douglass Residential College at Rutgers and says drugs made her stray from her interests, which she eventually rediscovered in the “private sector” when she started working as a marketer at a gay-erotica publishing company. None of this quite makes sense, of course, but what does these days? 

To smoke my diploma, she tears a strip of it off and puts it in a water pipe. The moment she lights up, the apartment starts to smell like a campfire. “Your diploma smells like s'mores,” she says after she inhales. “I feel very wholesome about it, but I don’t feel more educated.”

“We’re all glamorous,” Lil Snow Crash interrupts.

“My brand is glamorous,” she says as she inhales the smoke from the burning diploma.

Putting his nickname to literal use, Lil Snow Crash pours powdered caffeine on his iPad for CrackDoubt. Using her long nails, CrackDoubt forms lines of caffeine and then scoops them into her vaporizer.

The second she starts vaping the caffeine, the apartment once again fills with a weird smell—this one less identifiable.

“[It] smells like... crack,” Lil Snow Crash says.

“I feel a little woozy,” CrackDoubt says. “I’m definitely inhaling chemicals.”

The side effects remind me of the stench that permeates the bodies and clothing of huffers. Miraculously, CrackDoubt tells me that she has never huffed so much as a Whip-It before. When she worked at Friendly’s, one of her co-workers snorted Whip-Its at work. One day he sucked one down and passed out on the ground. He woke up 30 seconds later, and by that point Friendly’s had scared CrackDoubt straight.

Ever the literary conceptualist, CrackDoubt wants to smoke her old credit card to symbolize how her drug use, at one point, literally burned through all of her finances. Standing below a glow-in-the-dark sign that said “IRL,” she brings her credit card to her mouth, lights a match, sets her card on fire, and inhales.

Instantly, the credit card’s fumes expand throughout the room. They fill everyone’s nostrils and mouth, making us all cough. For safety purposes, I back away from CrackDoubt and her burning credit card, as Amy continues shooting photos, like a war photographer.

“It tastes like burning plastic, noxious chemicals,” CrackDoubt says. “It tastes like something I wouldn’t ever want to inhale.”

“It tastes like the kind of shit they use to kill baby seals,” Lil Snow Crash says.

“It tastes like Hiroshima!” CrackDoubt screams.

Dressed like a couture Virgin Mary wearing a latex dress, CrackDoubt deepthroats kale. “I would watch myself fuck because I look so good,” she says. She then stuffs her bowl with kale and lights up. “It tastes like green juice,” she says. “I feel buzzed. [When I smoked] crack, I felt worse.”

Like many people suffering from addiction, CrackDoubt thinks about Lindsay Lohan—a lot. Drug users love to both demonize Lohan as a failure and look up to her as an iconic living symbol of addiction in America, so CrackDoubt logically wants to smoke a DVD copy of a Lohan movie—in this case the 2003 classic Disney film Freaky Friday—to see if she could literally get high on Lohan.

“It’s important to know Lindsay was [allegedly] sober during [the shooting of Freaky Friday], but we love Lindsay because she’s a real addict with real addict problems—even if Oprah was her counselor,” CrackDoubt says. (Like many people who have suffered from addiction, CrackDoubt refers to Lohan by her first name.)

At one point during the night, Amy asks CrackDoubt, “How are you gonna smoke a DVD?”

“I have my way,” she says.

Wearing a latex dress Lohan would love to wear to the Oscars, Crackdoubt balances the DVD on her bowl. She lights the bowl, and the DVD topples to the ground. This happens over and over again until CrackDoubt gives up on her dream of smoking Lohan.

“There’s no way to smoke this, which tells you about Lindsay being sober during this movie,” she says.

Along with their love of all things Lohan, drug users also love burning all their cash on drugs. In true drug-lovin’ form, CrackDoubt puts on the net artist’s Google Glass, rolls a dollar bill, brings it to her lips, lights the dollar on fire, and then starts smoking the money. “It tastes less chemical [than the diploma], but they also say $1 bills are the dirtiest things on earth,” she says. “That was a $1 bill. If I smoked $100 bills, it’d be more like my addiction.”

This isn’t CrackDoubt’s first time smoking the Bible. One time when she waited for drugs in a hotel room in New Jersey, she tore a page from the Bible to roll a joint. At the net artist’s apartment, she does the same thing. Standing against a gaudy bronze-colored mirror, she smokes a joint that was laced with the words of Christ. She says, “I’m really high off the Bible, because there’s weed in it.” Finally, CrackDoubt is high.

After she finishes smoking the Bible, she rates the objects in order of how great they are as drugs.

1.) Bible
2.) Money (“Because I felt the most powerful as I smoked it.”)
3.) Kale (“Kale was health goth.”)
4.) Diploma
5.) Caffeine
6.) Sugar (“Sugar tasted better [than caffeine], but it’s below it because [artificial sweetener] is evil. I don’t fuck with [artificial sweetener].”)
7.) Credit card
8.) Freaky Friday DVD (Disqualified for being unsmokable. Sorry, Lindsay.)

Rereading CrackDoubt’s ratings in my notebook, I remember something she told me when we first met to discuss her plan to smoke weird objects: “Smoking this stuff is just as retarded as smoking crack.”

Follow Mitchell Sunderland and Amy Lombard on Twitter. 

Illustration by Nick Gazin

He is a good guy, much to his detriment. Women, after all, don’t want good guys. This is due, of course, to the inherent lack of goodness they possess. They are single-minded, status obsessed, and materialistic. They want men with fancy cars and big dicks—men who don’t understand them the way our man can, the way he would, if only they’d look his way. They don’t look his way, however, because they’re too busy vainly looking at themselves in mirrored surfaces or at the big dicks of their inferior boyfriends.

They don’t want him, so why does he want them? The answer is simple: he wants what he deserves. And he deserves them. Because he is a good guy—again, much to his detriment. I mean, do you know how many goddamned times he’s been put in the friend zone? Do you have any concept of how emasculating it is to comfort a woman you know could be one in a series of the loves of your life as she cries over another man? For the sheer psychic anguish of this emasculation, he at least deserves a handjob. But he doesn’t get a handjob. He gets nothing. And he’s tired of it.

He is, indeed, tired; tired of being persecuted for the fact that he was born into a world of privilege, one he cannot change, because, Jesus Fucking Christ, he’s only one man, and what can one man do? Nothing, especially when he’s constantly surrounded by harpies incessantly yammering that he’s the problem. A man can’t concentrate in the midst of all this yammering. And anyway, he’s not the problem! He’s the solution, for fuck’s sake! Why won’t anyone listen to him? Is it because they’re scared of the truth? That’s probably it. Fucking cowards. Sheeple. Wake the fuck up, he thinks to himself, shaking his head as he hate-reads a Jezebel article.

Yeah, he has a fedora, but who gives a shit? Why are people always making fun of it? His head just looks good in hats. I mean, if it didn’t, he wouldn’t wear hats, but it does, so he does. The same goes for his chin beard. Some faces just look better with hair on them. Whenever he shaves, he looks like a little boy. But with a chin beard, he looks like the man that he is; the man no one could argue he is not.

He doesn’t have a lot of followers on Twitter, but that isn’t why he tweets. He doesn’t tweet for attention. OK, maybe he does tweet for attention, but not personal attention. His identity doesn’t matter—that’s why his handle is just a string of random letters and numbers, why his avatar is an illustration. He’s altruistic enough to understand his personal insignificance. He tweets to bring attention to the cause.

He tweets to stand up for what is right, what is true. He tweets the things he’s tired of men like him being told they cannot say. Which is that [insert woman’s name here] is a cunt who needs to shut the fuck up, immediately. He tweets this directly at the cunt in question, because it is imperative for her to know she is a cunt. Really, he’s doing her a service. No one else is willing to tell it like it is.

He types, all day, into the endless void that is the internet. It is a void not unlike the void that exists between the thighs of his objects of desire, those unattainable cunts he constantly tries to outwit, outsmart, capture, crush.

The cunts of these cunts—they are the holy grails of his bitterness and resentment. Were he to win one, he would immediately fill it with high-octane, over-caffeinated energy drinks, fuel he’d use to post more blog entries about how, actually, just as many women commit domestic violence as men but the media refuses to acknowledge it and how rape culture is a myth perpetrated by the unrapable (i.e. fat chicks) and how, not only does something called the Glass Cellar fucking exist, it’s even worse than the Glass Ceiling, and how custody discrimination is making an entire generation of helpless children pawns in a game they’re too innocent to realize they’re playing, suffering under the dreadful rule of their selfish mothers, and so on, and so on. These blog entries are invariably accompanied by stock photos of smiling, non-threatening men and women interacting with each other in a pleasant, respectful manner. They do not sync up to the content they are being partnered with.

When he is not creating his own content, he is sharing the content of others, or discussing content others have shared. He and his brethren commune on Reddit, commiserating about the struggle on message boards with names like The Red Pill (a "discussion of sexual strategy in a culture increasingly lacking a positive identity for men") and The Pussy Pass (which "document(s) women getting off lightly due to their vaginal impairment").

He has, indeed, taken the Red Pill; while his embrace of dime store philosophy has been liberating, it’s also served to make him upset, upset enough to type and type and type until his wrists hurt. His eyes are open now, and cannot be shut. He has entered the truest form of existence. He sees all, knows all. It is a tremendous burden, holding such knowledge and power. Sometimes, in his darkest hours, he wishes his eyes never opened. Those feelings dissipate, however, when he types about important things, valid things, with his fellow Redditers. They are the only ones who understand him.

It makes sense that he’d take the Red Pill. The Matrix, of course, is his favorite movie. The stark realities that film presented, the way in which it perfectly illuminated the "illusion of ignorance" that most people inhabit—Ayn Rand herself couldn’t have written it better. Ayn Rand was a woman, sure, but she also hated women, and boy could she write, so he still loves her. It sucks that she wasn’t also hot, but you can’t win ‘em all.

He will, without a tinge of irony, mansplain feminism to a biological female. Feminism is equality, he says, which is something he desperately wants. He’s tired of women running the show. He’s tired of being vilified for his sex. He’s tired of being misunderstood. He’s tired, period.

He will go on to say that women have no reason to be scared when they walk alone at night. If they are, they’re being irrational. And anyway, if they do end up getting raped, there’s nothing they can do about it. Rape happens all the time in the animal kingdom, and we’re animals. It’s natural. When men rape, which is something they do far less than you think they do, they do it solely because of their animalistic urges, which makes rape inevitable, inescapable. It is a necessary fact of life, like childbirth.

He has something to say about what he’s reading right now. And, by God, he’s going to fucking say it, because I don't have the right to tell him otherwise.

Follow Megan Koester on Twitter.

“Whenever I think of [inventor of the computer] Alan Turing I think about the Apple logo,” began John Zerzan. “The logo is an apple with a bite out of it. Of course, Turing supposedly smeared cyanide on an apple and bit into it after being persecuted by the government for being gay. A bite from an apple is also associated with our expulsion from the Garden of Eden. I don’t think that’s quite the message they’re trying to convey, but there it is.”

I had arranged an interview with arguably the world’s most prominent anti-technology philosopher via email. The interview was to be conducted via Skype. At the appointed time, Zerzan’s voice leapt across the continent—from Eugene, Oregon, to New York City in the fraction of a second. He was smiling when his face flashed onto the monitor. I smiled back and looked into his eyes—before catching myself. The irony of Skype, of course, is that in order to actually make eye contact with someone, you have to ignore their eyes and look into the camera instead.

VICE: You advocate for all of civilization to abandon technology and return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. How do you feel about the Skype call that we’re having right now?
John Zerzan: I was on the Art Bell show years ago and he kept saying that to be consistent with my philosophy, I should live in a cave. I said, “Yeah, you’re right, but then this conversation wouldn’t be possible.” You have to try to connect with people. You have to be part of the conversation in society or else you’re not serious.

So, is that the only reason that you don’t go live in the wilderness?
Well, I guess so, although I would have to say that, like most people, I’m pretty damned domesticated. I enjoy when I’m out there, but I’m not as equipped as some people.

Have you had periods where you have lived off the grid?
Not really, though I’ve gone to the mountains for a few days at a time.

And when you went there, did you get a sense of what your life in the city is missing?
Sure, you unplug and connect with nature. It’s one thing to write about it, but you need to be out there in it too. Were not going to have a transition [to a hunter-gatherer existence] until we learn how to do without technology and civilization. There are practical things that need to be tackled.

How do you think you would fare during the transition with your skill set?
You know, I’m 70. I lift weights, but as far as actually having primitive skills I’m pretty deficient. If [civilization] crashed overnight we’d all be in trouble. We’re so dependent on technology for everything—even the simplest things.

Though that dependence and interconnectivity would seem to make a collapse more likely, right? There would be a domino effect.
I think so. They say that if one satellite fails then they’ll all start falling. But, that doesn’t mean that people wouldn’t go ahead and try and put everything right back up again.

How can you convince people to give up technology?
It won’t happen unless people get tired of more and more mediation. If you’re going to be content to be a zombie staring at your little screen, of course nothing will happen. I’m hopeful that people are going to find that pretty dull.

So, when did you have your epiphany about all of this?
I didn’t have one epiphany. I began to see that there is an intentionality to technology. It isn’t just some neutral thing. The Industrial Revolution wasn’t just about economics. As Foucault says, it was more about imposing discipline. It started to dawn on me, maybe technology has always been that way. People are not yet thinking too much about it, but Hollywood is thinking about it. Look at Her. Look at Transcendence. These are amazing movies that just put it right on the table. You want more technology? You want to be absolutely dehumanized and humiliated? This is what it looks like.

Is there any way that technological advancement might turn out OK?
No. I don’t think so. The trans-humanists say that if we just have more technology, we’ll have a quantum leap and everything will be OK. We will solve all the problems. We will live forever. Well how is that working out so far? We’re seeing the collapse of the global environment. We have these mass shootings. “We’re all connected,” they say, but we’ve never been more disconnected from each other in history.

So, you want to be connected and the trans-humanists want to be connected too. Is it possible that you’re both striving for the same idea of utopia?
Maybe, but what these guys are really saying is that the brain is a computer. Well, the brain is not a computer. It’s nothing like a computer. That’s just basically stupid. It’s not a machine. We’re not machines. They have no idea what consciousness is. Nobody does.

I think they make that claim because they see the brain as being an entirely physical entity, just like a computer. Do you believe that there is a non-physical or a spiritual component that’s impossible to replicate?
So far, all they’ve managed to do is make a machine that can beat a human at chess. That’s just faster calculation. How is that intelligence? And, furthermore, how is that consciousness? I remember being in Turkey giving a talk and this young woman said, “You know, I think this green anarchy movement is at base a spiritual movement.” Wow. Maybe we’ve been groping towards that all along.

So, there’s definitely idealization on the part of many trans-humanists, though [Unabomber] Theodore Kaczynski writes in his essay “The Truth About Primitive Life” that there is a lot of idealization of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle too. Do you have a response to that?
Well, one thing Ted got right is that it does no good to create an idealized and romantic version of prehistory. But I’ll tell you one other thing, and it’s the reason why we’re not on terms anymore: He was fiddling with the sources, and that is not forgivable in my opinion. He deliberately took things out of context in a way that is dishonest to put it mildly.

Can you give an example?
He wrote that gays were routinely suppressed by all these different primitive societies. He quoted the source he was using to say that gay sex was forbidden, but if you look at the whole quote, actually all sex was forbidden during a certain ritual that lasted a few days. In other words, that was a lie.

What was his motivation, do you think, for the misrepresentation?
Well he’s got a very narrow focus. If it’s not anti-technology, it’s fucked up. But, I think the question is deeper. It’s about civilization. It’s about domestication. We lived for 2,000,000 years without civilization and people got along very well.

And, according to your essays, you believe that one of the reasons they got along so well is because they didn’t have language, right? Are you advocating an abandonment of language as well?
I have to say this is the most speculative thing that I’ve written about. I’m not abandoning the argument, and I try to make a case for questioning symbolic activity even including language, but it’s much more clear in terms of time, and numbers, and art. What makes it so speculative is that no one knows when speech started. There’s no way to prove it.

You’ve written that language fractures a holistic world into isolated fragments. Do you have a sense for what life without speech would be like?
I think it would be just a more direct form of communication. I found it stunning that Freud, the arch-rationalist, said that he thought that humans were telepathic originally. He didn’t think that was such a marvelous thing. I would say that sounds pretty great. You don’t even have to have symbolic mediation, you can just communicate without symbols.

The idea of universal telepathy almost sounds like the trans-humanist concept of the singularity. Everything would be directly transferred between participants without symbolism.
Yeah, I guess you could call it that - the original singularity.

Do you think we can ever give up speech?
Who knows. So many poets have said that the deepest most intense stuff is never put into words.

You talked about time becoming symbolic. Have you ever experienced time in a non-symbolic way?
In my own life I’ve always had this acute sense of time. I don’t know why. I remember working in the fields picking strawberries as a kid. We would start working at 6 AM and there was a steam whistle that blew at noon. Well, I could always tell within seconds when that whistle was going to blow. It was uncanny and I took great pride in it. Another way to look at it is that I was so colonized by time, so ruled by it. Time has become a material thing. I think you could even say that our sense of time-consciousness is pretty much the best way to measure alienation.

What do you think about the violent anti-technology groups that have arisen to take the place of Ted Kaczynski? There’s the Mexican group Individuals Tending Towards the Savage, for example…
There is another one in Mexico called Obsidian Point. It’s interesting that the obsidian point is sharper than surgical steel. It makes you think about the solutions that people had outside of the technological system.

And ITS?
The ITS group is real slavish to Ted Kaczynski. I think it’s a little unfortunate. They even put out a slur or two on me. Why are they taking a little shot at Zerzan? It’s because I caught Ted cheating and they know that. Violent groups like ITS have already killed two people. So, yeah, they’re for real.

Do you think their methods will prove successful?
I doubt it. One of the things that turns me off a lot is that the ITS group sends bombs just like Ted. When they injured some postal employee, they said, “Oh well, that’s just the way it goes. This is war and there will be casualties—collateral damage.”

How do you feel about anarcho-primitivist groups like ITS using technology to accomplish their aims? It reminds me of that old communist idea—that the state is necessary at first and then it’s supposed to become unnecessary and wither away. Of course, it never does wither away. It only gets stronger.
That’s an interesting way to put it. Well, I just feel like we’re trapped in these contradictions period. If you want to call it hypocrisy, OK. I think about this a lot and I know there are people who feel that I have gone over to the dark side.

So, if civilization does collapse, what do you think the re-wilding process will look like?
That’s the number one question. How are we going to live? Were so de-skilled, how do we re-skill? Even something as far back as making stone tools, knowing what plants are edible. I mean, how anxious will you be to pull down civilization if you don’t know how to live without it? So, we have to start getting those skills.

And, maybe it’s not just learning long-forgotten skills, but also learning to forget. Will we forget what stars are, for example? In the past, people would look up and they wouldn’t know what they were, and it wasn’t so much an absence of knowledge, but a presence of mystery.
Right, why do people need to know those things? What’s the instrumentality? I would contend that it’s not ignorance. It’s actually the opposite of ignorance. The hunter-gatherer people could see a bent blade of grass and tell you eight things about what it meant. Is that not science?

The lack of information also allows the individual to project themselves into that absence. There’s a creativity to giving one’s own personal meaning to things rather than having the meaning imposed from without.
That really hits the nail on the head. Here’s a real quick little story. Some of us were gathering up in Olympia at an anarchist workshop and we overheard these people say, “Man these primitivists are crazier than we thought. One of them was saying that the earth is flat.” What [the primitivist had] really said, was that if you live in band society of 60 people, it doesn’t matter if the earth is round or flat. We look at this marvelous photograph of the earth taken from the moon. Here we are on this fragile little globe, but what did it take to get that picture? What kind of massive industrialization project did it take in order to have that one lovely picture?

The price was just too high?
Right. I have this friend in Detroit who always used to say, “You want to keep all of this nice technology? Great. So, do you want to go down in the mines and get the metal for it? Is there anybody who wants to be in a smelter?” I wouldn’t do it if somebody put a gun to my head. So, who’s going to do it? Are the trans-humanists going to do it? You have this wage slavery of millions of people who are risking their lives to make it possible for them to have their crazy trans-humanist fantasies.

How do you determine what technology is acceptable and what isn’t?
I think one very general way to look at it is division of labor. If you have a tool that anybody can make, that’s great. You’re in contact with it in a very sensual way. But, tools that require a hierarchy of coordination and specialization create a kind of distancing. That’s the kind of technology to avoid.

One thing I wonder about—and Stephen Hawking has brought this up—is that life on Earth will eventually be destroyed by either a meteorite or finally the sun burning out. He has suggested that our only hope of survival is to colonize outer space…
The sun will burn out in billions of years, but I don’t really think about billions of years very much myself. That’s just so infinitely remote. Things are so pressing right now, let’s work on that. Should we just jump on a rocket and leave the world behind as a smoking, toxic ruin? “We destroyed this planet, now on to the next.” What kind of answer is that?

Roc’s new book, And, was released recently. You can find more information on his website.

In the age of the internet, amazing music has never been more accessible. Today, you can stream full unreleased albums by Aphex Twin. You can watch live performances and interviews from unimpeachable artists like Sonic Youth or Chuck Berry or Lou Reed. So much great music is right there for the taking and can serve as totally respectable reference points for your would-be band to be inspired by. Xombie, however, has chosen the road less traveled, and arguably more shitty. They are following in the footsteps of 90s rap-metal bands like Linkin Park and Limp Bizkit.

“[Our sound is] like Rage Against the Machine—but thrashier,” the guitarist Roy Galvan said to me, giving himself a complement.

Galvan, vocalist Atom Crews, guitarist Robert “Fish” Fishkin bassist Cadillac Mike Martabano and drummer Eric Castillo are critically suicidal. They perform in a genre of music that is universally derided, right up there with white dudes in dreadlocks. But for them, nu-metal is not a guilty pleasure, it's just pleasure. 

As the bastions of bad taste and vulgarities, we had to share this video with you. Because, it's endearing and inspiring that Xombie is committed to creating music that will probably get them crapped on by even the most forgiving rock fans. We respect that. Plus, as if just being a hip-hop metal band wasn’t laughable enough, they somehow managed to get Kimbo Slice in their latest video. So there.

If you too, have an unwavering love for the most embarrassing era in rock, you’ll be pleased to hear that this “Rock Bottom” video is only the beginning for Xombie. The very ballsy band will release their third album, Capitol X, on July 29th. If you like it, we promise not to judge you, but beware, someone else will.

Where do hip-hop and metal music meet?
Rob Fishkin: It’s a tough question because when people think of rap and metal together they think of cheesy 90s bands. That’s a huge stigma and you don’t want to be lumped into it.

Atom Crews: For me, it’s the vocals. You’re taking two different worlds and putting them together. Any rapper can rap over a beat, even if it’s thrash-y. What you do with it is what makes it special.They’ve brought out a completely different side of me. I grew up on hip-hop, so I don’t like to be compared to Fred Durst. When I was 14, it was great. But now when I hear it, it’s corny, cheesy hip-hop.

Have you been rapping for a long time?
Atom: Like 15 years. I grew up on hip-hop. Eminem’s Marshall Mathers LP is one of my classics. I did a lot of battle rapping and I know I can hold my own my own with other rappers. 

Part of the band came together on Craigslist. What did that first ad say?
Rob: I had been looking for a band in New York for years. I moved up here to play music, but I couldn’t find a band. I tried out for shitty bands and it was just boring. I put a post on Craigslist and immediately Roy wrote back this ridiculous email in all caps. It was like, “I THINK YOU AND ME…” I was like, this guy’s weird, but I decided to send him some of my old band stuff.

Roy Galvan: Yeah and then I said, "Do you want to come by and jam out?" He came, we jammed, and it was like—damn.

Any advice for meeting people on Craigslist after that?
Roy: I always ask to meet at Starbucks, but I stand across the street. When they say “I’m here” I try to look who it is to make sure it’s not a weirdo or he’s going to rob me. If he looks approachable, I’ll go. If not, I’ll just disappear.

Atom: Don’t take anything personally. People will just flake out and disappear. You’ve got to watch your ass.

Did you write this song when you hit rock bottom?
Rob: We came back from tour and we were just pieces of shit. We didn’t have jobs, money, we lived in New York City. It’s the most unforgiving place. When you don’t have money people treat you differently.

Atom: We quit our jobs at Scholastic. We had been on tour for three months. We were really roughing it—we don’t have a label, any money, or anyone supporting us. We were sleeping in a Walmart parking lot in a fucking van.

You set up an entire tour by yourselves?
Roy: We got lucky with the Kickstarter campaign that raised almost $11,000.  I was surprised that many people supported us, but basically they made us tour. Without that we would’ve barely made it to Maryland.

Atom: I came back to a telemarketing job for $10 an hour. I wrote this song about a lot of hard shit. I had rented out my apartment, but we came back a little bit early, so I was staying with my girl, band mates, anywhere I could for a solid month—it sucked. I have three herniated discs on my back that I’ve been dealing with from 12 years ago and then a month before we went on tour my back flared up really bad and I lost sensation in my right foot. I still haven’t gotten it all back and it’s been two years.

Rob: We had to stop on tour so he could lay down and shit like that.

Atom: I would literally lay on the side of the road on my stomach because I couldn’t sit in the van too long. We were sleeping in the van. It was a shitty situation.

But now you have a video with Kimbo Slice. What’s he like?
Rob: I picked up Kimbo Slice from the hotel. When I pulled up, I texted him to come down. I was in a Subaru and a little bit later this huge white limo pulled up behind me. Kimbo and his brother came down—and they’re literally larger than life. They came out of the hotel and looked at this white limo like, alright, alright. I yell out of the Subaru, “Hey Kimbo!” and pull the seat all the way back. It was super cool. I’ve seen backyard fights of him knocking a guy’s eye out, but he’s really nice.

Atom: The nicest guy. He would never even go out of his way to hurt a fly. But when he grew up, he had to learn how to fight because it was a bad neighborhood.

Rob: Super professional. He put in a long day for us. Our main actor was our size and Kimbo is this monster! We’re like, Hope he doesn’t kill you.

Atom: Kimbo wasn’t going 100 percent, but he was going 30 and that’s still 100 percent of a regular person.

Are you into fighting?
Roy: I like boxing. I like seeing people kick each other’s ass. It’s pretty awesome.

Do you fight at all?
Atom: I used to. It’s part of the reason my back is fucked up.

How about moshing at your shows?
Atom: Someone fell on me in the mosh pit. I’ve been moshing for years, but my biggest fear is falling and someone falling on me. Most people are pretty good, people try to be safe in the mosh pit, so if you fall someone will pick you up. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. It was concrete floor—wet and slippery— and I was wearing Chucks so I slipped. Before I even had a moment to get my bearings it was like, boom! Everything was disoriented and my eye looked like it got punched by Kimbo Slice.

Do girls ever come to your shows?
Atom: We had a girl come up on the stage, dance, and pull her pants down. She was this big tall sexy girl and she had these tight leather pants on. She came up in the middle of a breakdown and started dancing. She dropped low, got up and pulled her pants down. There’s one video on the internet of it.

Roy: That was awesome.

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Part-street style, part-point-and-shoot, “Just Me and Allah” is a stylish portrait series capturing queer Canadian Muslims. The brainchild of Toronto fashion photographer Samra Habib, the project started on Tumblr but grew into a multi-gallery art show that spans across Toronto for World Pride this month.

Inspired by the thriving queer Jewish community, Habib wondered why Muslims couldn't do the same.

It also got her thinking about how queer Muslims are repped in pop culture—notably in film. “A lot of the documentaries dealt with the often painful and guilt-ridden experiences of growing up queer and Muslim,” said Habib, who combined her love of imagery with storytelling and color to create "a meaningful dialogue around Islam, sexuality and gender issues,” which is more lighthearted than loaded.

The series is surprisingly casual and off-the-cuff. So iconic is the shot of Dali Sadaf, who hails from Tunisia, a student living in Montreal who is working on a book about a personal—and political—revolution.  

There is a super intense shot of Samira Mohyeddin, an Iranian restaurant owner who was trained as a Shakespearean actor but also works as a journalist, sprawled across a table in a black suit (there’s something so Frank Sinatra about it). 

And there’s a thoughtful shot, too, of Tanzanian human rights activist and lawyer El Farouk Khaki praying. As the co-founder the Unity Mosque for LGBTQ Muslims, Habib says he's one of the most influential figures “in the Muslim Queer community in Canada.”

Just because they’re photographed, doesn’t mean they’re religious. “While some pray five times a day, others are more secular and just celebrate the big holidays and approach it spiritually,” said Habib.

But how do queer Muslims deal with a religion that accepts homosexuality as a sin? Experiences vary. Queer Muslims in Toronto have created a utopia, basically, carving out places to celebrate Islam. Take Habib who prays at the Unity Mosque.

“Women, trans men and women often lead the prayers, which is almost unheard of,” she said. “A lot of my queer Muslim friends organize support groups for young queer Muslims who've just come out.” Granted, that isn’t the case for a lot of other countries where the consequences of coming out could mean jeopardizing your life.

The show is in three locations—while the Parliament Street Library is home to a Muslim population, the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives is a key hotspot for WorldPride. Videofag is a staple in the art scene pegged in the neighbourhood of Kensington Market, drawing droves from the city’s art scene.

After launching this show, Habib hopes that queer Muslims will feel comfortable posing in front of the lens. “I hope that it helps change perceptions of Muslims worldwide, especially in a climate where there's so much Islamophobia,” she said. “I want queer Muslims around the world who live in countries where laws prohibit them from being who they are to see the project, read and watch the interviews and feel legitimized.”

“Just Me and Allah” opens at Videofag Gallery from July 10 and has been open at the Parliament Street Library since June 1. A panel with El-Farouk Khaki and others is held at the CLGA on July 2.


@nadjasayej
 

The town of Altar, Sonora, is the last stop for thousands of migrants who plan to illegally cross the border that separates Mexico and the United States in search of a better life. Here, the economy revolves around migration. Along its streets we can find everything from special slippers to avoid detection by motion sensors installed in the Arizona desert, camouflage clothing to avoid being spotted by Border Patrol agents, backpacks, gloves, and even contraceptives for the women—as it is estimated that 80 percent of them will be raped during their journey.

VICE news visited the Sasabe desert, between Sonora and Arizona, which registers temperatures of up to 120 degrees during the day and drops below 30 degrees at night. In this hellhole, the migrants may run into Father Prisciliano Peraza, a cowboy who, apart from delivering mass, also travels through the desert in his pickup truck, dropping off supplies to those attempting to cross the border—to help them avoid meeting their death during the attempt.

Photo by Matt Desouza

If you're not in Colorado or Washington, and you’ve ever spent more than $100 on weed at once, you've probably taken a relaxing vacation away from criminality in Amsterdam. That’s because smoking a joint legally in a beautiful European city, surrounded by both erudite Dutchmen and shit-drunk Scottish stag parties, is generally much more preferable to hot-boxing your friend's car in a parking lot, slamming the music off and ducking behind the seats every time another car drives by.

But where are other Europeans supposed to go to snort, smoke or ingest in peace? Coke-heads used to have that Bolivian jail where you could buy fishscale direct from the prisoners, but that’s now banished to backpacker lore, ruined by swaths of international media attention and a warden who realized that presiding over a state-funded gak factory probably wouldn’t look great on his resume.

In 2013, the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) conducted a study of 42 European cities, analyzing local waste-water (sewage, essentially) to determine which drug was most widely used in each area. Some of the results were as you’d expect, but there were a few in there that stuck out a little, and those are the ones we’ve laid out below in our guide to Europe’s secret drug capitals.

ANTWERP, BELGIUM

Photo via Jean-Pol Grandmont

Shockingly, Antwerp—a city full of diamond traders and fashion students—is also full of cocaine. In fact, Europe's coke capital is so keen on the stuff that nefarious pigeon fanciers have started doping their racing birds with performance-enhancing gak.  

One potential reason behind the Belgian capital's fondness for blow is that almost 25 percent of the cocaine shipped to Europe from South America makes its way through the country, and a large chunk of that through the port of Antwerp. Conveniently—and kind of unbelievably—only two percent of the containers passing through the port each year are actually screened, meaning not a lot gets seized.

And lucky for the city's residents, that bountiful supply translates into low, low prices; at an average of $68 a gram, it kind of makes sense that it's so widely used. 
 

LAZARAT, ALBANIA

Cannabis growing all over the hills of Lazarat. Photo by Axel Kronholm

The bucolic town of Lazarat is slightly different from many other pastoral Albanian towns, in that its green pastures are mostly made up of cannabis plants, which produce around 900 tons of bud every year. Families can survive off a harvest for a whole year—and growing really is a family business, which is probably why it's not a good idea to fuck with the kush farmers of Lazarat.  

A couple of weeks ago, for example, 800 police surrounded the town. Upon realizing they were boxed-in, residents decided to base their response on the archetypal Michael Bay drug dealer—by grabbing some RPGs and machine guns, and blasting the overwhelmed cops off their turf. Thousands of plants were destroyed, but in the end the police retreated. 
 

DRESDEN, GERMANY

Photo via Jiuguang Wang

According to the EMCDDA study, Dresden is huge into crystal meth. Weirdly, they're also most into hitting the pipe on a Thursday, when the consumption level spikes drastically compared to the rest of the week.

Being so close to the Czech border helps the drug trade along nicely, but agents still bust between 200 to 300 drug kitchens in the region every year. Of course, a child could make meth (if they knew where to buy ephedrine and had profoundly apathetic parents), so it's still widely available—to the point where some dealers have introduced a loyalty system, handing out coupons to frequent customers so they don't switch to another supplier.
 

MIDDLESBROUGH, ENGLAND

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

The Yorkshire town of Middlesbrough, once known for fucking smashing it in the iron and steel game, now has the highest rate of serious opioid use in Europe. Named the "worst place to live in Britain" by revered cultural commentators Kirstie Allsopp and Phil Spencer, the town also has the UK's highest estimated number of opiate and/or crack users (one in 40 adults), and intravenous drug use is three times more than the national estimate.

In case that wasn't depressing enough, it's not only class A drugs that Middlesbrough has a taste for; it's also the worst area in the country for alcohol-related hospital admissions. 
 

NOVI SAD, SERBIA

Photo via Flickr user Ivan Aleksic

Bizarrely, considering you can literally buy it over the counter there, Amsterdam is not the leading consumer of cannabis in Europe. According to EMCDDA, that prize goes to Novi Sad, Serbia's second largest city, with the Dutch capital coming in second and Paris taking third.

Records show that, during the 15th and 16th century, there was industrial-level hemp production in the province of Vojvodina, to which Novi Sad belongs. Amsterdam didn't get its first coffee shop until the 1970s, so Serbia's stoners clearly have heritage on their side.

FRANKFURT, GERMANY

(Photo via Wikimedia Commons)

In 2008, there were 928 drug offenses registered for every 100,000 Frankfurt residents, and the city is still Germany's drug capital. That either means police don't spend nearly as much time pissing about with menial stop and searches as they do elsewhere, or Germans just aren't that into drugs. Mind you, a glance at any Berliner's jaw past 11:00 PM is a pretty effective way to shut down that latter argument.

Frankfurt's international airport and other high-speed transport links—namely the railway and autobahn—makes it a handy hub for smugglers. But it does seem that drug runners are passing through rather than sticking around; since an epidemic of drug-related deaths in the 1990s—and after measures named the "Frankfurt Way" were introduced to tackle it—the amount of drug fatalities has dropped massively.
 

GLASGOW, SCOTLAND

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Glasgow isn't all just Buckie and heroin; cannabis raids are common there, too. In fact, thanks to expat Triad gangsters founding a bunch of weed farms, Scotland now exports more bud than it imports—increasingly making the country one of Europe's largest exporters of hash and marijuana.  
 

RASQUERA, SPAIN

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

The little Catalonian town of Rasquera is only home to about 1,000 people, but—like much of Spain—is in a horrendous amount of debt. After the town called a debt crisis meeting, its council officials voted to lease seven hectares of public farmland to a bunch of stoners so they could grow some cannabis “for therapeutic usage and to pimp.” Pimping—in this case—means "getting baked." 

The mayor of the city claims that harvesting and smoking weed for private use isn't prohibited in Spain. Which is kind of true, but not really in the way he wants it to be; while it's fine to grow and smoke in the privacy of your own home, that's only because the reach of the state's drug policy is limited to public space. Unfortunately, all that farmland isn't inside anyone's home, and is very much public space.

Regardless, his hope is to raise around $1.7 million out of the leased land—and good luck to him.

A few years ago, I briefly lived in Stockholm. My time there was punctuated by constant coffee breaks—fika, as they’re called in Swedish—because it’s so fucking dark all the time that you can’t stay awake without drowning yourself in black coffee. Swedes love their coffeemakers as much as they love pickled fish and IKEA and electronic music. They practically bathe in coffee; in fact, Sweden is the world’s third biggest coffee consumer per capita.

Then I heard about Katja Wulff, a Swedidsh blogger who repurposed her precious coffee maker into an all-purpose cooking machine. She still makes coffee in it, allegedly, but she’s also cooked pizza, fish soup, birthday cake, and something she calls "testicle tacos" using, exclusively, her coffee maker. Her recipes are compiled on the Swedish blog Kaffekokarkokboken (basically, "coffeemaker cookbook") and, more recently, on its English counterpart Coffee Machine Cuisine. Both blogs are flooded with photos, taken by Wulff's boyfriend Dan Sörenson, that prove just how weird the culinary arts can be. I spoke with Wulff about how the obsession all started, what she’s cooking on her new YouTube cooking show, and how to fry balls in the same pot you brew coffee.

Wulff's concoction of lamb, chicken, and pig hearts, chopped up to be cooked in her coffee maker. All photos by Dan Sörensen.

VICE: So, where did this idea come from?
Katja Wulff: Back in 2009, I lived in a dorm and I shared a kitchen with lots of other students. I did not like to cook in that kitchen, because I'm not a very social person and the thought of hanging out with the other people sometimes creeped me out. They were all nice people, so that was all on me. And the other thing is that I've never liked to cook, didn't know how to. There was this one day that I was extremely unsocial and tired—er, hungover—and I did not want to go to the kitchen. I thought about preparing my noodles in warm water from the sink but realized quickly that it must be much smarter to cook the noodles in my coffee maker. And it worked great! I was so proud of myself and started to think about what more I could cook with it. Soon my little experiment escalated and I never cooked in that kitchen again. I even got away from the mandatory cleaning week that each student got since I never spent any time there.

Wait, you don’t like to cook?
Nope.

And yet, you write a cooking blog? It seems like the project is more about art than food.
That's absolutely right. I think that Coffee Machine Cuisine is more of a creative or twisted humor or blog rather than a food blog. If you're looking for great recipes, then read another blog. If you want to have a good laugh, I hope you'll think Coffee Machine Cuisine is fun. It’s the same with the cookbook [Kaffekokarkokboken, published in 2011]. I want people to read the book from the first page to the last. You don't do that with cookbooks, but this isn't a cookbook. The blog and book aren’t about cooking great and tasty food—although I try all of the time. It's about creativity and encouraging people to do whatever they like to do.

Zappa, Wulff's hairless cat, sniffs at something brewing in the coffee maker.

Have you ever made something absolutely disgusting in your coffeemaker?
Yes. I think most people would agree that my cat food birthday cake for Gucci [one of Wulff’s three cats] was very disgusting. I almost puked numerous of times by the smell of it. But taste is very individual, and many people are super disgusted by some recipes that I think are great, both because I cook it with my coffee maker and because I love to use weird ingredients like testicles, tails, feet, and liver. I mean if there's a whole head looking out from the coffeemaker carafe, I reckon it's a much more fun and creative recipe. The pictures that Dan takes are just as important as the rest. But I don't only cook weird recipes. I also cook normal stuff like pizza, pasta bolognese, chicken curry...

Katja Wulff, preparing to cook noodles in her coffee maker

Right, you recently wrote about making pizza in your coffee maker. To your credit, it looks amazing. But the recipe says it took three hours to make. Do you ever feel like cooking with your coffee maker instead of a stove is, you know, a waste of time?
Thanks! It took three hours because the proofing—is that the correct word?—of the dough. In my cooking show I used a pre-proofed dough and it only took an hour. But I get your point. It does take a lot of time, but a lot of hobbies do, right? I don't get people that dance on their spare time. Like, ugh, I think that's weird, but I do respect it. Or knitting? Now that’s time consuming. Scrapbooking... Do people even do that anymore?

You were recently invited to join six other Swedish chefs for a YouTube series called Food Club. How's that going?

The other people are famous, like great food profiles and chefs. Olympic food winners. And then it's me, and I don't even like cooking. Ha! It's a bit déjà vu for me, because Kaffekokarkokboken won Swedish Food Blog of the Year back in 2010, and I was like: WTF? But I do think it should win every year now. I'm the black sheep, but I love it.

What's the best thing you've ever made?
Testicle tacos! I love the name of it, the texture of the balls, and what it looks like. And also, it tastes great. This is a typical recipe that people are absolutely disgusted by, but if they dare to taste it they think it tastes good. I also think if you eat meat, eat as much as possible of the dead animal. It's stupid to say, "Ugh, I don't like that" or whatever if you haven't even tried it.

On her YouTube channel, Wulff demonstrates how to make testicle tacos.

I noticed that in addition to maintaining Kaffekokarkokboken, you've started a new English-only blog, Coffee Machine Cuisine. What was your reason for starting that?
It started to get lots of attention abroad and Google Translate sucks. My English isn't always the best, but much better than Google Translate.

Cats seem to play a big role in your blog. In fact, you were once described on a local television show as "Coffee Maker Chef/Crazy Cat Lady." Tell me about that.
I'm a true crazy cat lady and we’ve got three cats: Gucci, Iggy and Zappa. Gucci is kind of famous for starting the whole cats wearing tights trend with our blog Meowtfit of the Day.

Right! Your blog where you dress your cat up in tights.
Yeah. Gucci won cat of the year in Sweden and we even got a catograph stamp. People sometimes write to us and would like me to send a signed copy of the book to them. Signed with the catograph, that is. Some of them don't even care if me and Dan sign it. I can talk all day and all night about my cats, but I think I will stop here if you don't want to know more.

Squid pokes out of Wulff's coffee maker.

When I lived in Sweden, and I vividly remember how much coffee Swedes drink. Did that play a role in your decision to cook with a coffee maker?
Actually, I never liked coffee. I drink it because I'm tired. For a Swede I'm not a big consumer of coffee at all. I only had a coffee maker in that room because of the death of Nonne, my grandma [from whom Wulff inherited the machine] and partly because I was a student and needed coffee sometimes.

And you have another coffeemaker to actually make coffee in, right?
Nope. I cook all of my food with the same coffee maker that we—mostly Dan, he’s a big coffee consumer—make coffee in. We just wash it between the different stuff we cook in it. I mean, if you fry bacon one day with a frying pan, the next day when you prepare pancakes they hopefully wont taste like bacon, right? Exactly.

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Last Wednesday evening, I found myself in the courtyard of Acheiropoeitos Church in Thessaloniki, the second-largest city in Greece, waiting for a vigil against the city's upcoming gay pride parade to start. Three frowning young men dressed in black had stood at the entrance, turning away whomever they thought didn't fit in with the crowd—so as you can imagine I felt rather honored to have been let in.

The church started to fill up around 9PM. The crowd was mostly made up of middle-aged ladies in skirt-suits and various monastic figures in beards, but also families, including young children. 22 Christian organizations and 12 religious blocs had signed the call for this vigil “against the sinners."

A brochure bearing a title that exclaimed we have been walking "towards a Communion of Sodom," was distributed in the courtyard. The accompanying text described Gay Pride as "an open carnival whose participants are monsters—i.e. 'people' who are neither men nor women." The latest issue of a newspaper called Christian Spark was also passed around.

We slowly made our way in. Acheiropoeitos is a uniquely preserved early Christian basilica, whose interior has remained intact since its construction sometime in the 5th century AD. I thought it was ironic that this UNESCO listed heritage building was now housing an exorcism against "the gays."

The Bishop of Thessaloniki, Anthimos, arrived around 10PM. People ran to kiss his hand as he made his way to the Sanctuary, where he'd stay for about an hour. At 11:30 PM he came out, stood on the pulpit and proceeded to talk for 23 minutes; surprisingly, this time around he didn't compare homosexuals to dogs. He said, instead, that every man is a carrier of sin but what differentiates "the good" from "the bad" is asking God for forgiveness. At this point, it started to rain heavily and Bishop Anthimos acknowledged that "even the sky was roused."

He went on to note that he could have easily gathered 150 priests for the sermon, but chose not to because those working in the Thessaloniki Cathedral were being "tested by young women running in the street half-naked—as it happens every summer."

Shortly after that, Anthimos and his entourage left the church and the summer rain abated. A few days later, on June 21, 6,000 people marched for Thessaloniki Pride. When the event first took place in 2012, there were only 400 of them.

The author with James "Gypsy Boy" McCrory

“Bare-knuckle” is a phrase that seems to run deep in the collective imagination of the British Isles. Those two words manage to evoke an ever-present but elusive underworld of vests, caravans, lurchers, bald heads, broken noses, gold bracelets, bales of hay and dodgy pubs. It's the world of Charles Bronson—before he started smearing his naked body in butter and attacking prison guards. It's a world that can't abide weakness, a world that believes punching people with gloves on just isn’t as fun.

As such, we seem to be both sickened and enamoured by bare-knuckle boxing. You’ve only got to look at the True Crime section on Amazon, or Snatch, or Bronson, or the comments on traveller fight videos to understand that there's an innate fascination out there with the world of BKB. Big-time boxers have title belts, "Sports Personality of the Year" awards, TV dance show appearances and tabloid coke busts, but the murky, mythical, quasi-legal world of bare knuckle seems to hold a more illicit intrigue. And that’s why we wanted to make a film about it.

Bare Knuckle, which is coming soon to VICE.com, isn’t a film about fighting per se, but instead a film about a subculture—one whose history dates back centuries, but hasn't yet penetrated the mainstream.

It seems odd that bare knuckle, the oldest combat sport of them all, is generally regarded as just something that happens exclusively in Guy Ritchie films and on gypsy sites. Bare knuckle is somehow still beyond the pale, even by today’s standards—even in the post-MMA era, when mano-a-mano, bone-on-bone violence could be repackaged as a multi-billion dollar composite of NASCAR, wrestling and ceremonial gang beatings.

But look a bit harder and you’ll see that there's a thriving, fast-growing scene in the United Kingdom, which many people hope will prove to be as popular as the UFC in years to come.

Andy Topliffe (on the left) and Sean Rowlands

Andy Topliffe is an ex-fighter who was left with a bitter taste of the BKB underworld in his mouth after seeing a young Polish fighter left for dead in a field. He's also arguably the biggest player in the game right now.

His promotions company, "B-Bad," has been rapidly gathering attention for a while now; the video views are racking up, the papers are starting to take notice and he's got a band of obsessive fans and a stable of fighters from around the country, all ready to knock the shit out of each other in the grand tradition of Britain’s most feared pastime.

The name of Andy’s game, however, is legitimacy. The fights might take place between bales of hay and people might get their faces smashed in, but there are medics, corner men, security and sometimes even curious police officers overseeing proceedings. The bulk of the audience look like they’d be ready to step into the ring themselves (or at least offer somebody a pony to take a dive in the fourth), but Andy stresses that he does everything he can to make sure there’s no gambling, diving, gangsterism or skulduggery of any kind at his events. That said, he concedes that there will always be certain elements of this whenever the phrase bare knuckle comes up.

One punter's B-Bad tattoo

This ambiguity is typical of bare knuckle itself, which seems to exist in a hinterland of loopholes, side-steps and crossed hearts. From what I understand, it’s not quite sanctioned, not quite “a thing." There are no proper guidelines for everyone to go by, but as long as nobody is pressing charges against each other and there’s no illegality on the side, then it’s all above board.

However, it’s not just in a legal sense that bare knuckle is surprisingly legitimate. As hard as it might be to believe, given its rep, BKB is actually somewhat safer than the regular Queensberry Rules style (and MMA, too). The science behind this misconception is simple: people get knocked out when a punch rattles their cranial fluid around, causing a blackout. A right hook to the chin is so effective, not because of the power, but because of the way it causes maximum rattling.

While people do get knocked out in bare knuckle (frequently), it's safer because of the lack of gloves—ironically, the part that tends to attract the most criticism from people who don't really understand the sport. Because boxers use gloves, which are much heavier and have a much larger surface area, traditional boxing actually has a higher risk of causing more serious internal damage to your opponent. Fists bared, the surface area is smaller and hands are more likely to break, so fighters will either give up earlier, or else feel compelled to pull their punches a little more.

For the violence fetishists out there, the upside of all this is that bare knuckle is more likely to cause surface wounds, meaning a lot more blood. Essentially, it looks more gruesome, when in actual fact it’s far less likely to cause the lethal internal injuries that can show up in boxing, both in the long and short term.

A couple of fighters hanging out in their pub

Despite the argument that it’s a safer and more entertaining sport than its legitimate cousin, BKB's superstars continue to languish in the kind of niche, fan-boy obscurity usually reserved for Babestation models and forgotten 80s pop stars. They have notorious nicknames, but they travel on coaches and drink pints at the bar after the match.

And while boxers are some of the highest paid sportsmen on Earth, bare knuckle boxers can be expected to take home as little as $425 for a win and $70 or so for a loss. There are no professionals in the scene, and most of the fighters make a living from a variety of blue- or white-collar jobs. Many have previous convictions and most come from rough backgrounds. Frequently, fighters are well into their forties.

James "Gypsy Boy" McCrory

James "Gypsy Boy" McCrory is the undoubted star of the British BKB scene. A charismatic young fighter with a touch of the Sébastien Chabal about him, he’s racked up over 200 fights in his time and has beaten some of the best—including Dave Radford, a plasterer and BKB OG who once went the distance with the Panamanian professional boxer Roberto Durán. 

We visited James at his home in Newcastle in the days leading up to his historic fight against Jason "The Machine Gun" Young, the first UK vs US fight in over 150 years. He’d had to put on a lot of weight to fight Jason, achieving this by drinking an inordinate amount of Guinness—presumably not a move that would impress the diehards at Team GB.

Seth Jones after a fight

At 32—an age by which many boxers would have retired—James is a relative youngster in the scene. Perhaps it’s a strength of mind thing, or the fact that the bare-knuckle scene seems to be something that people stumble into rather than strive to join—or maybe my generation is just a bit wimpy—but the scene is full of grey steel. In Colwyn Bay, North Wales, we saw ex-drug-smuggler-turned-trainee-solicitor Seth Jones fight a man 20 years younger than himself.

"The Leicester Bulldog"

“The Leicester Bulldog” (AKA Tony) was another veteran fighter we met on our travels. Standing in his garden—his oil-stained vest covering the largest chest I’ve ever seen on a man—he revealed an unlikely sideline: making trendy barbecues out of gas canisters and flipping them on eBay.

Decca "The Machine" Hedgie, a juggernaut of a man—and such an intimidating fighter that he once made his scheduled opponent vomit and pull out of a fight just by looking at him—might seem like he caused a bit of bovver at the Battle of Hastings, but in fact he’s a 20-something family man who once had trials for Newcastle United.

But that’s not to say there aren’t any youngsters, as proved by Ross Chittock, AKA Youngblood, AKA MC Andrenalin, AKA a laborer and rapper from Abingdon in Oxfordshire. A loveable rogue with a diamond smile and a fitted cap, he had the easy charm of a man who’d steal your girlfriend and buy you a pint afterwards.

James Lambert, AKA "Mr Happy"

We also met one character with a very different story to tell of the scene. James Lambert was a bare-knuckle fighter, unlicensed boxer and bouncer for years, who was undefeated until he turned his back not just on fighting, but on aggression of any kind—reinventing himself as “Mr Happy," a lifestyle and fitness coach. A punching bag hangs in his garage, but James refuses to even make a fist, let alone show us what he can do with it. He preaches peace, but it’s easy to see flashes of his past in the way he carries himself. He moves suddenly, glares with wide eyes and occasionally reverts to the kind of language he would have used in his previous life.

He reminds me of recovering alcoholics I've met who can’t even have a glass of wine at a restaurant—trying to beat his demons but perhaps also longing for them—and provided a sobering counterpoint to much of the bravado and swagger we came across.

Aaron Gaughan (on the left) squaring up against Seth Jones

During the shoot, I hardened to the constant violence. At first, the fights were astonishing and stomach-churning. As a boxing fan you’re used to fights being stopped when the blood starts pouring, and you’re used to people throwing in the towel and referees halting the fight. But with bare knuckle, the constant feeling is: 'I can’t believe this is still going on.' You can’t help but assume somebody is going to get very badly hurt, but within minutes of a fight ending, the guys are all drinking with each other. They press their cold pints against bruises you can see growing as the night goes on.

I learned a lot in my journey through the world of bare knuckle. At one point, I began to wonder if perhaps everyone has a right to exercise the talents they’ve been blessed with, including ordinary guys like this who happen to have been blessed with a talent that many would find repugnant. The guys I met worked jobs that seemed to offer little in the way of a future—jobs that just paid the bills. Because their real skills lie in something that’s so underground, bare knuckle for them can only remain a hobby, an earner on the side and a small shot at glory in a life that probably isn’t the one they dreamed of living.

Because of that, I began to see a softer side to the world of bare knuckle. Put aside what actually happens in the sport and you realize that they’re as much hobbyists as they are fighters. The fanatical fan base, the everyman stars—it reminded me of lower-division football or heavy metal, a macho pastime set in an almost bygone world.

Decca "The Machine" Hedgie (on the left) fighting "The Leicester Bulldog"

Whatever you think of violence in society—and the impact that organized combat has on it—it’s impossible to deny the romance and the heartening camaraderie of the bare-knuckle scene. It’s as if people who were always destined to exist on society's margins have found a sense of place by sticking together and cultivating this subculture of their own. And also—as pure spectacle—it’s pretty fucking exciting.

Bare Knuckle isn’t just a film about fighting; it’s a film about a subsection of the British male. These are guys who hate their jobs and have a hard time fitting in, but through this blood sport they've found a kind of peace. Even if, on the surface, it might not look that way.

@thugclive

For me, summer means time to watch movies and read books. Since we talked about books last week, here are some movies to watch between the blockbusters full of explosions, men in tights, and aliens on the big screens. It’s hard to choose, so I just put down the ones I’ve watched lately. Much love.

The Missouri Breaks

Arthur Penn's strange Western starring two giants—Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando. Watch Brando in his strange yet effective turn as a bounty hunter. Jack is great, but the role is a strange amalgam of villain and lover, so it’s hard to tell where our sympathies should lie—with wild, horny Jack or smooth, kooky Marlon. Nicholson's costume in this movie inspired Michael Fassbender's slave driver in 12 Years a Slave.

Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father

This is a sad tale about good people and murder. The protagonist decides to make a movie about his friend after the friend is found shot dead in a parking lot, so that his unborn son might know who his father was. As the filming progresses, this bleak (but heartwarming) tale gets even bleaker. Gripping and strangely life-affirming.

Dogtown and Z-Boys

Simply the coolest look at the history of skateboarding, made expertly by one of the sport’s creators, Stacy Peralta. Sean Penn narrates and takes us back to the old days of the Southern California coast when the rules of the game were being written by a group of teenagers.

A Face in the Crowd

Budd Schulberg and Elia Kazan, the writer and director behind On the Waterfront, teamed up again to make this engaging and still relevant portrait of a man’s rise to the top of Hollywood and how talent in one area can naturally segue into others, like politics. It is a scathing indictment as well as a beautifully crafted work of art.

Mean Streets

Young Scorsese at his best. Any young male actor will know this movie like any young pop singer knows Thriller and Bad. It's still thrilling to see Scorsese and De Niro mix it up for the first time. De Niro as Johnny Boy gives a spunky, wise-guy performance with a kind of manic energy that is hard to find in any of his other intense heavies. Johnny Boy is a lovable meathead at the beginning, almost like Sean Penn’s Spicoli. With this film, Scorsese shows how a young talent with little money can turn material from his life in Little Italy into a mini epic of a bygone New York.

Taxi Driver

You can’t get enough of Scorsese and De Niro—especially their collaborations. Tarantino said that most people find this movie funny now, and that if you listened to an audience’s reactions without seeing what they were watching, you might think it is a comedy. I think this comes from our overfamiliarity with De Niro’s indelible Travis Bickle. Bickle is a psychopath for all of us, because he believes so hard. No matter if it’s love, political extremism, or the protection of a little girl—he wants something to change. For some reason, I always think of the tracking shot of the pimps in the diner—one in a black suit, one in a white suit. And of the Alka-Seltzer.

Red River

Criterion has released a version of Red River with new interviews with director Howard Hawks's protégé, Peter Bogdanovich, as well as some other film and western specialists. Here is John Wayne at his best. Here, his black heart isn’t motivated by a racist need to exterminate and avenge as it is in The Searchers. It is simply the product of exigencies of life on the trail—of being soldier, rancher, judge, and executioner all in one. Opposite him is Monty Clift at his most beautiful, before the crash. Not my favorite Clift performance, but it is nice to see him in a less extroverted role than in A Place in the Sun and From Here to Eternity. The mysterious energy is still there, but we can see that there is also a bit of a dude underneath, and it makes us like him in a different way. He doesn’t quite sink into the Western atmosphere like Wayne or Walter Brennan, but he doesn’t need to—he’s supposed to be a bit special, to stand out a bit from his companions, to have a little aura about him.

The Postman Always Rings Twice

Watch the Nicholson and Rafelson version. Shot by Sven Nykvist and adapted by David Mamet from the James M. Cain novel, this is a harsh and sexy take on the murder-prone lovers. Jessica Lange—following her turn in King Kong—exudes sex like a force of nature, and Jack imbues his usual caddishness with a touching level of earnestness. All the aforementioned talent notwithstanding, it’s a treat to be taken in such a well-constructed time machine back to the outskirts of Depression-era Los Angeles.

Blue Velvet

“Daddy wants to fuuuuuuuuuuuck.” Dennis Hopper’s Oscar-nominated comeback performance in this Lynch classic is worth the price of the download alone. Hopper had been all but banished from Hollywood after decades of being the self-indulgent madman artist living out fantasies of drugs, girls, and guns in his Taos, New Mexico, compound. Blue Velvet brought Hopper back for the third chapter of his career, clean off drugs but still able to channel the madness of his early life into his roles. The movie had a huge influence on David Foster Wallace, who said that watching it was a kind of epiphany while going to writing school in Arizona.

All photos Oren Ziv; Israeli soldiers arrest a Palestinian youth during clashes in the West Bank city of Hebron

On Thursday June 12, three teenage Israeli settlers aged between 16 and 19 were kidnapped while hiking through the West Bank in Palestine. Naftali Frankel, Eyal Yifrah, and Gilad Shaer were reported missing after being last seen hiking between Jewish settlements in the Hebron area in the West Bank late on Thursday evening.

Since the kidnappings, Israel has detained over 400 Palestinians, including the speaker and several elected members of the Palestinian Legislative Council in ongoing raids across the West Bank. Of that number, 282 are allied to Hamas, the Israeli army says.

Israeli security forces also killed five Palestinians. Many are describing the actions of the Israeli army as "collective punishment." The initial phase of the operation was described by Haaretz as "more a general strike against Hamas." After two weeks, the Israeli government is finally starting to lower the public's expectations of actually finding the missing teenagers. "As time passes, concern for their lives grows,” Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Benny Gantz told reporters near Hebron on Tuesday.

Jewish students pray for two of their friends that were reported missing on Thursday night.

Israeli political figures, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have accused Hamas of being responsible for the kidnappings. The Israeli government have presented no evidence to support these claims yet, but say that they have "unequivocal proof" that they will make it public soon. Hamas have denied involvement and dismissed the accusation as “stupid.”

One of the Palestinian victims in the crack down, 19-year-old Ahmed Sabbaren, was shot in the chest and killed as Israeli soldiers stormed the al-Jalazoun refugee camp north of Ramallah. I spoke to a B’Tselem spokesperson, Sarit Michaeli, who told me more about what happened. “During an Israeli military raid on al-Jalazoun refugee camp, youths confronted the army with stones and clashes ensued," he said. "The army responded by shooting the youth in the chest with a live round. It's quite common for IDF incursions into Palestinian communities to lead to confrontations between youths and the army, that are one of the major causes of death and injury in the West Bank."

Israeli soldiers tie up a Palestinian youth in the West Bank town of Halhul

This escalation of tensions follows Hamas' recent signing of a reconciliation agreement to end a seven-year division with the Palestinian Authority and the formation of a new unity government. Many political commentators have claimed that the Israeli government are using the kidnapping as political cover to remove Hamas’ political leadership in the West Bank and drive a wedge between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas in advance of the upcoming Palestinian elections.

Writing for the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot, military and strategic analyst Alex Fishman said the kidnapping had created a "one-time operational opportunity" which Israel would use "to castrate" Hamas and suppress its "strongholds in Palestinian Authority territory to the greatest extent possible."

Right wing Israelis burn the Palestinian flag and shout racist slogans, during an anti-Palestinian protest at the Gush Etzion junction, next to the Palestinian town of Bethlehem

The disappearance of the teenagers has certainly created the political space for a crackdown within Israel. Anger has been spreading. A Hebrew Facebook page entitled “Until the boys are back, every hour we shoot a terrorist” has nearly 20,000 likes with dozens of photos and comments inciting racial hatred and calling for the collective punishment of Palestinian civilians.

Israeli soldiers searching a Palestinian in Hebron

With the recent growth of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement and the collapse of US-led peace initiative, Israeli commentators are talking about the cost of indefinite occupation.

The author and prominent Jewish studies academic Marc H. Ellis summed it up well in an opinion piece for Mondoweiss." In occupation, the innocent suffer," he wrote. "Can it only be Palestinians who suffer? There is a cost to occupation. Even the powerful have to pay a price. Jews have to pay a price—when they’re occupiers. Missing Jews are a terrible to price to pay. But, then, Israeli jails are filled with 'missing' Palestinians. So return the missing—on all sides. Including the land and ethics and service to one’s own people. When all the missing are returned then we could begin again. A fresh start, honouring all the missing, which, in justice, would be returned.”

But the return of the three teenagers is looking increasingly unlikely as time goes on.

Hamas spokesperson Sami Abu Zuhri demanded the Palestinian unity government take responsibility and protect Palestinians from Israeli aggression, "The Intifada is the greatest event in the history of the Palestinian people, and it renews itself every time there is an escalation in Israel's aggression," he warned. "Resistance through every channel is the legitimate right of the Palestinian people."

The cost on both sides of the conflict could be set to rise.

Follow Oz Katerji on Twitter.

In June 2013, the first-ever amputee soccer match between Holland and Belgium took place in Antwerp. The game was supposed to be friendly, but it turned out to be the exact opposite after one player tripped the other by grabbing his only leg. As you can see in the video above, the clash quickly turned into a 20-man brawl with players and fans throwing fists, feet, and crutches around.

The video quickly spread around the internet, but that's about as far as our collective interest went. It's been a year and no media organization seems to have expressed any interest in amp soccer since, so I caught up with Michael Jacobs, the Belgian team's coach, to learn the ins and outs of playing soccer while missing a limb.

VICE: You still have both your legs. How did you become the coach of a one-legged team?
Michael Jacobs: I used to play soccer in Belgium but failed to make it to the Premier League—although I did play in the First Division. I had to quit when I was 25, as I had already gone through seven knee surgeries. So I became a coach for youth soccer teams, which I enjoyed. Two years ago, I started the amp soccer squad thinking I could use all the experience I got as a coach for kids.

All photos courtesy of Amp soccer Belgium.

Why a team for amputees, though?
I work at a technical orthopedic center—we develop prosthetics and removable shoe inserts. A colleague of mine once traveled for work to Warsaw, where he saw the Polish amp soccer team play. So we started toying with the idea of starting our own team in Belgium.

A whole national team of one-legged players doesn't sound easy to put together.
It was indeed very hard to find players, as well as sponsors and a place to play.

How come?
It has to grow, you know? You have to show everyone that soccer for people with a disability is glorious. The people who ended up making my team didn't have an interest in sports before. But we offer them a chance to actually make a difference by being part of a national squad. My players have really bloomed into a group of like-minded people in the past couple of years.

So what has happened to your team since that unfortunate incident last year?
We joined an international tournament in Ireland—it was like a small European Championship with six teams. It was the perfect opportunity to test ourselves and see how we measure against other amputee teams like the Polish, the English, the Germans, and the Dutch.

How did it go?
We won third place in the playoffs against the Dutch with 1-0!

You sound proud.
Yes! After that, we wanted more, so we played another friendly match against the Dutch (again) for the opening of the Disability Games, a global tournament for disabled people. It’s like the Paralympics, but it’s smaller and everyone can participate.

Is there anything else you’d like your team to accomplish?
We’d love to go to the World Championships in Mexico this year. No qualifications are necessary for that tournament—you just have to sign up—but we’ll have to see if we can afford it. There are 25 national amp soccer teams in the world, but only a few can actually afford to go to Mexico.

Overall, you and your team seem to do just fine.
Yes, we do!

NYPD officers gathered outside Grand Central Station on May Day last year. Photo via Flickr user Timothy Krause

The expensive consequences of New York City’s heavy-handed approach to policing protest have been on display lately. In December, the city finally settled most of the lawsuits stemming from its mass arrest of protesters during the 2004 Republican National Convention. Earlier this month, falsely arrested Occupy Wall Street protesters announced the largest settlement yet between participants and the powers that be, with the city poised to shell out nearly $600,000 in damages. NYC already paid $350,000 last year to settle a suit over its destruction of media equipment and Occupy’s library during the 2011 eviction of Zuccotti Park, $82,500 this past December to settle an Occupier’s suit claiming that police beat him up across the span of three arrests, and $50,000 the month before to settle a suit by people arrested on suspicion that they might later attend a protest.

Another settlement reached this year, and unreported until now, came in the case of Zachary Kamel, a 27-year-old from Massachusetts who was arrested two and a half years ago during an Occupy protest. Video evidence later showed that the sworn police accounts intended to justify his arrest weren’t true, making Kamel only the most recent in a long list of New York defendants who have found themselves in jeopardy because of dubious testimony provided by cops.

On January 3, 2012, Occupy Wall Street protesters planned a day of actions to call attention to President Obama’s annual signing of the National Defense Authorization Act, which enshrined in law the practice of indefinite military incarceration without trial.

After marching into the New York City offices of US Senators Chuck Schumer and Kristin Gillibrand, about 100 activists concluded their protest with an action inside Manhattan’s Grand Central Station at rush hour. The Metropolitan Transit Authority Police, whose jurisdiction includes Grand Central, weren’t exactly thrilled at the prospect of a disruptive protest erupting in the middle of the station. Lauren DiGioia, a blue-haired occupier whose role in the action was to shout out an explanation to passers-by of what was going on, got arrested and hauled downstairs to the MTA precinct office.

Protesters followed DiGioia and the police downstairs. At a landing, the stairway split, turning left and right. Some protesters followed DiGioia and the police down the left-hand stairwell, but a line of police quickly blocked it off with their bodies. The protesters eventually found their way downstairs anyway. Kamel, upset at having seen DiGioia—who he was dating at the time—arrested and hauled off, mic-checked his feelings. “Is this the America you want to live in?” he shouted, the protesters around him echoing his words. “Where you express your first amendment and they throw you out the door in cuffs?”

The question was hardly out of his mouth when Omeeta Lakeram, an MTA Police lieutenant, grabbed Kamel from behind. “I’m getting arrested,” he narrated, still in the sing-song cadence of the People’s mic, as MTA officers dragged him by his neck into an area they had blocked off from the public.

“I basically went limp,” Kamel says. “I got taken over there by four or five officers. One of them was a K-9 officer, and as he put his hands on me, his German Shepherd, which was on a leash, lunged at my groin.” Kamel turned his leg inward to protect himself, and the dog bit into his thigh, ripping his jeans.

“I had two canine puncture wounds in my thigh, and a scratch running down it,” he says. “They pushed me up against the wall and I said, ‘What the fuck, your dog just bit me!’”

Kamel was taken to the MTA precinct offices in Grand Central, where EMTs decided he needed treatment for the dog bite. Around 10 pm, he was taken to Bellevue Hospital. “They basically put a Band-Aid on me,” Kamel says. “I didn’t think it was sufficient.” After getting bandaged, Kamel was returned to the Grand Central precinct before being transferred to Central Booking downtown, where he sat in a cell in The Tombs for 19 hours awaiting arraignment. Finally, he was charged with obstruction of governmental administration in the second degree, as well as resisting arrest.

The basis for the charges against Kamel was an accusatory instrument—essentially, a statement of facts—sworn to by his arresting officer, one Josef Perez, a former Marine and Maryland State Trooper who’d been an MTA police officer since 2001. In the document, Perez asserted that he “observed defendant attempt to walk down a stairwell inside of Grand Central Station that had been closed by several members of the New York City Police Department,” and that he “repeatedly told defendant that said stairwell was closed and that defendant charged” towards the officers, “in an effort to walk down said stairwell while stating in sub [sic] and substance: I'M ALLOWED TO WALK HERE. YOU POLICE ARE ABUSING YOUR POWER.” The statement also said Kamel resisted arrest by kicking his legs and flailing his arms to avoid being handcuffed.

As it turned out, video footage shot during the Grand Central protest told a completely different story. For one thing, despite what the arrest documents suggested, Kamel didn’t charge through the police line on the stairway landing. Instead, one video reveals that, finding his way blocked by police, he promptly turned around and descended the unblocked right-hand stairwell. In another video taken downstairs (see below), during Kamel’s arrest, he doesn’t kick his legs or flail his arms, and shows no signs of resisting arrest. Also clearly shown in this video: the German Shepherd, straining on its leash, sinks its teeth into Kamel’s leg as the officer in charge of it shoves him against the wall.

In November 2012, when Kamel’s lawyers showed the video evidence to the assistant district attorney handling his case, the prosecutor dropped the charges immediately, motioning for a dismissal. The case was built on police testimony that was clearly false. But though Perez's untrue statement had forced Kamel to endure months of anxiety and trial preparation, and sent prosecutors most of the way towards trying him, the officer suffered no consequence for his actions.

Kamel’s case involved the MTA police, but there are plenty of examples of criminal cases against former Occupy participants unraveling when video evidence surfaces showing that NYPD officers haven’t told the truth about the circumstances of their arrest.

In the very first Occupy protest case to go to trial, back in May 2012, Alexander Arbuckle, a student arrested while documenting a march, was shown by photographic and video evidence not to have been blocking traffic—despite the sworn testimony of his arresting officer. Two days later, the second Occupy protest trial ended the same way, as the story told in arrest documents unraveled in court. In another case, an occupier named Peter Dutro was arrested and charged with blocking the sidewalk on the basis of a sworn police statement. But as video camera footage and employee testimony from Amalgamated Bank later proved, Dutro had actually been conducting business inside the bank when police officers barged in to arrest him. Last March, in the first Occupy case to go before a jury, protester Michael Premo was found not guilty after video shot by a Democracy Now cameraman showed that, far from tackling cops, as police witnesses swore he had, he was actually tackled himself.

As in Kamel’s case, none of the officers who swore to these false versions of events were charged with perjury or, for that matter, suffered any consequences of any kind.

Legal observers have speculated that the profusion of livestreamers, video cameras, and smartphones in protests like the now-defunct Occupy Wall Street created a new and unusual situation for police generally accustomed to being able to assert their own versions of reality. But most New Yorkers’ interactions with police don't have to do with political protests, and there aren't so many cameras around. One way to address would be to follow the suggestion of Judge Shira Scheindlin, who,  in her landmark ruling on the NYPD's stop-and-frisk policy, ordered the Department to look into putting body cameras on officers to record their interactions with the public. Other departments are already doing that, and many believe rolling cameras could check officers' temptation to lie. Cameras may not be enough to make a difference, though. When uproar over the out-of-control Albuquerque Police Department began to mount, officers there were made to wear lapel cameras. The result was less than transformative: In staggering numbers, officers conveniently failed to turn their cameras on, rendering the hi-tech solution useless. There are ways to hold police officers accountable for producing video, but clearly technology alone isn't the solution. With cameras or without, police culture has to change if the problem of testilying is to be addressed.

Back in 1994, the problem of police telling lies was bad enough that the Mollen Commission, convened to investigate NYPD corruption, called police perjury and falsification of records “probably the most common form of police corruption facing the criminal justice system.” In some parts of the department, the commission found, false testimony was so common “that it has spawned its own word: ‘testilying.’”

In the 20 years since the Molton Commission report, “testilying certainly hasn’t gone away,” says Jeffrey Fagan, a Columbia Law professor who specializes in police accountability. Theoretically, integrity bureaus inside NYC district attorney’s offices are supposed to investigate police misconduct. The problem, according to Fagan, is that there is little incentive for DAs to come down on lying cops. “Prosecutors can’t make a case without police officers, so they’re caught in a bind. They’re not about to challenge police officers over perjury too frequently.”

Occasionally, NYPD officers are charged with perjury. Recent cases include William Eiseman, Michael Carsey, Adolph Osbeck and Bobby Hadid. But exceptions like these are rare, and hardly enough to counterbalance a system that effectively encourages police to lie.

An important part of this system are pre-formatted arrest affidavits like the UF-250 form used to justify stop-and-frisks, in which officers can check off boxes like “furtive movements” or “suspicious bulge” to justify their actions. “That’s basically an invitation to lie,” Fagan says. “Once you create a kind of a system that reduces the burden on the police officer to articulate certain circumstances, they’re going to prevail.”

Faced with a lengthy trial in which it will be simply be their word against that of a police officer, “defendants have every incentive in the world to say, ‘What a pain in the ass,’ take a plea, and walk away,” Fagan says. “So there’s no pushback on police not to do these kinds of things.”

In 2008, police framed two Queens brothers, Maximo and Jose Colon, for selling cocaine. When the Colons sued, Federal Judge Jack Weinstein rejected the city’s argument that there was no evidence that testilying was a widespread and condoned city policy.

“Informal inquiry by the court and among the judges of this court, as well as knowledge of cases in other federal and state courts, has revealed anecdotal evidence of repeated, widespread falsification by arresting officers of the New York City Police Department,” Weinstein ruled. “There is some evidence of an attitude among officers that is sufficiently widespread to constitute a custom or policy by the city approving illegal conduct.”

But even with a federal judge citing evidence that testilying has become routine, it’s not clear where change might come from. On top of the civil rights issue, the millions of dollars hemorrhaged every year settling suits by victims of police misconduct provide a financial argument for reform. "The city resources, the taxpayer dollars that go to compensating people who have been the victims of police misconduct could be better spent strengthening protections against that misconduct,” says attorney Rebecca Heinegg, who represented Kamel in his suit. Yet prosecutors have both practical and political reasons to think twice before declaring war on police dishonesty. Honest police officers who object to a culture of lies need look no further than the saga of Adrian Schoolcraft, who was extra-legally abducted after recording tapes of NYPD shenanigans, for a sobering cautionary tale. The Civilian Complaint Review Board, charged with investigating police misconduct, has been reluctant to consider the question of false testimony part of its purview.

“We have yet to find an effective avenue to get at this problem,” concedes Sam Cohen, a lawyer who specializes in civil rights cases against the NYPD. There’s a chance, he says, that the new NYPD inspector general who just took office last month might address it. Alternatively, if enough cases of testilying can be identified, it could lead to the appointment of a federal monitor.

“That’s pretty far out and speculative," Cohen says. “But something will need to change the value proposition for the police on this. Unless something makes it less attractive to them to sometimes fudge their allegations, we’re not going to change anything.”

Zachary Kamel, for one, considers himself lucky that there was footage available to exonerate him. “If there hadn’t been video evidence of the arrest, not only would I have probably never have been able to file a civil suit, but I might have been in jail,” he says. In settling his suit against the MTA Police, Kamel was awarded $32,500. After legal fees and his lawyers' cut, he came out with just under $20,000. But he says the victory feels hollow.

“I got my check, I went home, and I thought, ‘Wow, I don’t feel like this is resolved at all,” Kamel says. “I don’t feel like this is a win for me or for anyone. The police don’t get in trouble. They’re not liable for their actions. Nothing changed. I know lots of people who think the police always tell the truth—how do you get people who think that way to see it’s not true? How do you change the system?”

Nick Pinto is a freelance writer living in New York. Follow him on Twitter.